The Specific Gravity of Humanism

(Right Justified)

There is a specific gravity:

the weight of individuality

measured against, unilaterally,

all the sea of humanity.

A drop-in-the-bucket mentality

has the one who sees clearly

nothing of apparent reality,

but values his responsibility

above the high tide of unity.

Humanism, in its simplicity,

ignores inherent complexity,

and would take men out contextually

from his person he uses habitually,

and would fill his drop-mentality

with oceans of unified integrity!

Is it that we must circumspectly

walk within a world gravity,

whose weight we feel universally,

that imposes this quandary?

We answer from obscurity:

in the thinking light of creativity,

with the mind of our nativity,

in a way that seems rightly,

we conclude our human divinity.

New under the sun -man’s divinity!

“Ye are gods –but will die like men,” blasphemy.

In this New Age, there is, distinctively,

a complex and brilliant disparity,

against one Whole Man in His dignity

Who walked beneath His majesty!

Being Made Into His Image

Greek mythology spoke of Narcissus who spurned all the women who fawned after him (finding his beauty intoxicating), and who eventually was cursed to yearn only for an image of himself without any ability to embrace or enjoy or commingle with anyone outside his own frozen image of himself in his mind after he saw himself reflected in a pool of water he bent over one day to drink from.  He was forever cursed to only see the image of his desire every time he drank, forever thirsty for what beauty suggested, but never able to slake the incessant yearning that beauty evokes.  Thus, loosely interpreted, Narcissism has come to mean those too much enamored with themselves, those who look inward and backward at the creature rather than the Creator, and therefore those who can never satisfy their aesthetic needs (for only God can satisfy or quench our gigantic and incessant thirst for beauty).  And of course, there is Lucifer (Satan) which became a little too aware and smitten by his own beauty.  The fact that his beauty was a reflected beauty from being the covering cherubim over God’s glory I guess escaped him; pride has a way of making a dummy out of a genius.  Turned into himself, the limitations of his creature can only dead-end; his now self-absorbed (selfish) thinking keeps him trapped forever in a shell of pride, isolation, and delusion.

Now let’s go back to the Garden of Eden, and therein is Adam and Eve, made, indeed, in the image of God (imago Dei).  When they sinned and fell, immediately they noticed they were naked and ashamed, something only eyes averted backwards and inward, and not forward and outward could detect.  After conversion we are characterized as “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith” and again, “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (Hebrews 12:2, partial, emphasis mine; 2 Corinthians 3:18, emphasis mine, both verses New American Standard Bible).  Fixing our eyes and beholding suggest direction of view and viewpoint.  Just as Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt, so what we affix our eyes upon ultimately determines our fate.  The imago Dei every person is born with will always be inadequate for God’s purposes, regardless of how well one might still retain a semblance of the Creator who made him (simply because He has left off tending to that fading image).  Its beauty is a reflected and imprinted one which must eventually dead-end because it is no longer attached to the everlasting source of all animation; thus even when someone, unsaved, comes to up to us walking within the fullness of their original imago Dei, it is a shadow, an illusion, and ultimately outright rebellion and deceit expressed.  God has cursed all those who attempt to be all they can be within their first Adam-selves (simply because he has cursed everyone born of Adam, even those who fail to be all they can be within that progeny), and He has moved onto the progeny of those born-again of the second Adam and is now only blessing those being re-imaged by Jesus Christ.  A heathen who appears to walk godly is beside the point; if he is misguided or outright deceitful, perhaps only God can say, but he is clearly outside of God’s redemptive plan, and if that person does not OBEY and become saved, his filthy-rags-righteousness is as worthless as filthy rags are.    

Now it seems to me that we were originally designed to be extroverted, but the fall of mankind, being an implosion of our being, inverted our forces and redirected our vision inward.  Shyness and shame and backwards-thinking all seems to be our normal state of being today; we are all introverts.  And introversion, especially incessant introversion (which is what we all are because of this now disfiguring bent inward) tends to selfishness and self-absorbed consideration and morbid introspection.  We are narcissists, spawns of Satan, Lot’s wife; we have become the image we gaze at most.  Many preachers today say we need to know who we are in Christ, and yes, I will not deny that there is some truth in that thought, however, I think it is misguided advice for many because it is placing the cart in front of the horse.  What we really need to know is—not so much who we are in Christ—but, in fact, who Christ is.  Yes, there will be time enough to learn our position in relationship to Him in due time, but I would suggest that ALL the focus be on Him (then our relationship to Him will be a byproduct of that and will virtually take care of itself as we tend directly to Him).   We turn to stone, pillars of salt, inordinate lovers of self, or a perfect replica of Jesus Christ; it all depends on what we affix our gaze and attention upon.  Jesus restored mankind’s imago Dei, but only in the new creation progeny line, after a born-again experience can the residue of our old and broken imago Dei be displaced by the one healthy and perfect imago Dei resident within Christ—who then becomes resident in us—and thereby restores our imago Dei.

Answering the Homosexual Controversy

It was the great Einstein which wrote something like “us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one;" and the phrase “time is an illusion,” no doubt, is this same phrase distilled down to its simplest form.  Of course, the average user of time, constrained by it every day, knows nothing about time being anything but a real phenomenon.  When he or she is really late to work, he or she does not get paid for those minutes lost.  A similar and also very compelling lie, one which has taken hold of perhaps even a majority of opinion as of late, is the idea that a homosexual is born, not made.  Images of the brain and knowledge about how and where certain aspects of behavior reside within its circuitry have made a very compelling argument regarding its hardwired origin.  But just as the everlasting conundrum about which came first, the chicken or the egg, there is a fundamental dilemma here.  Did the brain circuitry develop unmolested into a brain which overtly demonstrates homosexual behavior, or did it develop beneath the surface in a metaphysical location first before it eventually manifested itself within the biology?  Is the cause or origin purely biological?

Just because science mocks what it cannot observe does not make unobservable things nonexistent; the very real Kingdom of God comes without observation and when its miraculous demonstration is made it is simply the metaphysics behind the physics—that was always there but was not discernable to human scrutiny—that manifests into our physical realm.  If total depravity is not true (and I do not think it is) it is surely more plausible than the idea that any scientific inquiry or human observation could be completely reliable; indeed, authors (Myers & Jeeves, 2003, p. 86) said essentially this when they mentioned some researchers calling “our human tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our judgments ‘cognitive conceit.’”  Without an outside revelation that points to Scripture as inerrant and humbly allowing God alone to interpret this inerrancy by the Holy Spirit, no argument could be made against such apparent contradictory evidence that sexual orientation is hard-wired, determinable and altogether intractable. 

I remember watching a program on television some years back about those two teenage boys that shot all those students at Colombine High School.  They showed an x-ray image of their brains, and both of their brains had what looked like potholes (deep indentations) right at the exact point where the emotion empathy is known to be produced within the human brain.  The commentator/psychologist did an excellent job of observation/presentation up until he made his last statement; he attempted to interpret—or find meaning I guess—in everything he had just been speaking about.  He said something like, “these kids did what they did because their brains were inclined or preprogrammed to do so; they could not help it!”

Now, once a conscience is seared, and it has manifested within the brain’s biology, sure, that person might be, indeed, without the ability to act outside its reprogrammed circuitry; however, this presupposes that a clear conscience with a free will to not be or do determinately evil things was once the condition of their brain.  It is a known fact that the Columbine shooters had systematically eroded their empathetic sensibilities by killing higher and higher life forms until it became normal and easy to destroy humans; they reprogrammed their own brains by overriding the voices of their consciences.  The seemingly irrefutable analysis that these boys were biologically predisposed to commit such atrocities is an insufficient and inadequate explanation.  Somewhere outside the biological marker lies a spiritual marker and everything that manifests in the natural realm has a spiritual origin.

Now, before this commentator/psychologist had finished speaking (actually exactly when he said his last words) God moved upon me by His Holy Spirit and flooded me with much revelation.  He reminded me about how “manifesting Christ in our mortal flesh” was nothing more than getting the mind of Christ formed habitually in the brain, to reprogram our thinking with Scripture and to scribe lines upon our brain to form habits of adherence.  As a man thinks, so he is; all action springs from that which has been contemplated and defined.

Homosexual orientation that seems to predate even their awakening to sexuality is grounded in the biology of sin inherent in the third and fourth generation of them that hate God; “I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments” (Deuteronomy 5: 9-10, partial, New American Standard Bible).  Their proclivity towards this sin, without having done either good or evil yet, is the transmitted biological strain of the sins of the father (some generational hate towards God).

There is no floor too deep, however, that can keep God’s arm from reaching down far enough to meet the lowest soul; we cannot allow ourselves to judge things too difficult for ourselves.  We see deformity in all shapes and sizes and are tempted to wonder about His justice (but we are not capable of judging it); we are altogether presumptuous to think we know better than God.  The ceiling, attainable by all, is as high as where His throne is; we can all aspire to bow at His feet in the same heights.  I have sins today that I still fight; homosexuality is sin just like many other things are—and to give into it—saying one cannot undo what one’s biology tells them to do is a lie (a good one, a compelling one, no doubt, but a lie nonetheless—just as we too are lies so long as sin grips us).  Even if total depravity wholly grips us it does not alter His unalterable condemnation of sin; either Christ can eradicate the most vile and entrenched of all sins or He cannot help any of us.  If I go to my grave still warring over certain sins, at least I will be warring; I must believe His word above my puny experience or my own faulty observational perspective.

Though it is obligatory upon every human creature to love and not judge with finite eyes of observation, biblical standards and grace and mercy must always trump political correctness; surely “diversity” is essentially an expression of a multifaceted Creator, and as such, we creatures ought to treat different creatures as we would like ourselves also to be treated.  But I do not want to be coddled into the bowels of hell; if I were to practice homosexuality—or any other sin for that matter—and I further exacerbate my sin by not acknowledging it as sin, woe is me: please, please save me!!!  Delusion of this magnitude is impossibly entrenched, unresolvable, and damning; of course, even the impossible is possible with God and therefore a glimmer of hope remains, but who in their right mind wants to test the measure of grace and mercy afforded us?  If I ever become as undone and gone as a conscience-less homosexual, there would be no greater kindness than to level railing rebukes against me from all fronts.

Though the word “diversity” ought to suggest something akin to its exact meaning, it is really a code word for accepting homosexuals and homosexual activities as normal and benign behavior.  Political correctness demands that alternative lifestyles be afforded all the rights and privileges of the majority population (which is heterosexual).  The biblical standard unequivocally condemns homosexuality and undeniably attributes many negative traits to those who practice such behavior (see especially Romans 1:28-31).  Of course, grace and mercy is perpetually extended to them—as it is to all sinners—but like as Jonah needed to see the inside of a fish’s belly before he declared: “Those that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy,” so many will also need to see the confining insides of their own graves before they will reorient themselves correctly to God and truth (Jonah 2:8).  The extent and nature of their demarcation from their intrinsic makeup is of such a magnitude as to require extreme measures to replace them back into their proper expression of humanity.   God was extremely harsh toward angels who left their proper abode, and I would suggest the homosexual is in greater danger than most—not just because their sin is more heinous than others—but because of this leaving-their-proper-abode factor; fulfilling one’s destiny and fully orbing all that God made us is paramount (and our sexuality and mate selection is a large part of this).  There is something more disfiguring and misshapen of God’s original design and intent within an expression of homosexual behavior than nearly any other expression of sin.