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This Month's Scripture Verse:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
2 Timothy 3:1-5

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Friday, June 15, 2018

Why Does The Masterpiece Cake Case Make Christians Look Bad?

James Coffin, a member of the Christian clergy, tried to answer the question posed in the title of this article (click here for his article). And though his article posed an excellent observation, he zeroes in on the wrong set of factors to support his observation.

For Coffin focused on in his article was the usual religious rules and judgmentalism that is rightly attributed to religiously conservative Christians. That is what Coffin lamented over his past self in how he would treat and view others. And though judgmentalism should never have a place in Christianity, the following of some religious rules is necessary to living out the Christian faith.

So while Coffin makes a sincere effort to show why the Masterpiece Cake case can't help the Christian cause regardless of the what the judges find, I believe Coffin misses the main reasons here.

To show why the Masterpiece Cake case hurts the credibility of religiously conservative Christians, we must first cite, and then modify, an old religious saying that said the following: 'One is too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.' We start with that statement, but we have to modify it because it does not tell us why the Masterpiece Cake case hurts the Christian cause. The necessary modification of the old saying is stated below.

One is too inwardly directed to have any outward awareness.

The problem with the refusal by Masterpiece's owner, Jack Phillips, to custom design a wedding cake for  same-sex wedding is more about the owner's concern with whether his artistic talents are being used to help celebrate what he thinks is sin than how his decision affects others. In other words, the real problem for Christians doesn't have to do with anything else than with our lack of awareness for how others experience our decisions. For how others experience our decisions to not to provide goods and services in a business setting for the LGBT community as we would the heterosexual community is that of being picked on and discriminated against. And in a Post Modern world, those who are being discriminated against are not the only ones to perceive the apparent injustices that are going on. For Post Modernism has made us aware and sensitive to marginalization of certain groups as well vigilant against against other groups.

Thus, those who attempt to marginalize others and/or seize some degree of control over society have already set off the alarms in many people's minds. And those alarms cause our current Post Modern generations to throw out the baby outwith the bathwater. For, according to Post Modernism, if a premise can be misused to abuse others, the premise must be false. So if the belief that homosexuality is contrary to the Scriptures causes some Christians to try to marginalize the LGBT community, then, according to Post Modernism, the premise must be false. Such is an unfortunate conclusion.
 
Now because these Christians who are attempting to remarginalize the LGBT community are too preoccupied with the public stand they are taking and preserving their own purity, they fail to notice how others are reacting to them. But not only that, many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians lack any awareness of how those in the LGBT community have suffered from past marginalization. And why do these Christians lack awareness of how some have suffered and how others perceive them? It is because these Christians are too preoccupied with proving themselves to themselves.

The overt inward directedness displayed by many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians disables them from seeing life as how others see it. That is because the stronger one's inward directedness, the weaker one's vision of the world becomes. And the weaker one's vision of the world becomes, the less they can understand about how the world is responding.



 

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