Oppose the Created Order, Suffer the Consequences

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked… nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

Psalm 1 divides people into two groups: those who humbly follow God’s law, and those who mock it and disobey it. When people think they can go against what God created, it’s like jumping off a height. They can choose the action, but not the consequences.

One in three youth who break the law identify as LGBTQ (MedicalExpress). In the beginning, God created humans male and female. He ordained marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Many people today, having jettisoned this common-sense principle that accords with science, feel they can “identify” as whatever they feel like at the moment. But they can’t choose the consequences. The authors of a study bend over backward to not cast homosexuals and transgenders in a bad light, but their findings shout for them:

Adolescents who identified as non-heterosexual are significantly over-represented among first-time offenders, according to a new study that examined sexual orientation, gender expression and mental health among adolescents who are involved in the justice system, but are not incarcerated.

The study also found that depression, self-harm, and drug and alcohol use were more prevalent among youth who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) or other sexual minorities, as compared with straight youth.

“It would be incorrect to conclude that sexual-minority status puts a youth at increased risk of offending,” said first author Matthew Hirschtritt, MD, MPH, of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “But if we compare court-involved sexual minority youth with court-involved straight youth, we see more severe psychological distress and a greater likelihood of child-welfare system involvement.”

Transgender individuals likely have higher risk for heart disease (Medical Xpress). In all scientific fairness, everyone is at some risk of heart disease. The issue is whether transgenders put themselves at higher risk by taking unnatural drugs to fight against their biological nature.

Transgender individuals may be at higher risk for myocardial infarction and death due to cardiovascular disease, according to several studies. This increased risk may be due to the hormone therapy that transgender patients take for masculinization or feminization.

On the Washington Watch radio program August 1, Tony Perkins talked with a pastor in Canada who warned that pastors and doctors can now go to prison for opposing the transgender movement, even when children are being administered hormones, contrary to the Hippocratic Oath, that can permanently harm their bodies and minds.

Fear of litigation is a key factor in decision to perform C-sections (Medical Xpress). Natural childbirth is very painful for a woman, but there are reasons it is to be preferred over surgery except in extreme cases. You can thank overactive lawyers—not nature—for putting women at risk with an unnatural option:

Fear of litigation and perceived safety concerns and are among the key factors influencing the decision to perform a caesarean section, according to a major international literature review conducted by researchers at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin.

The rising rate of caesarean sections (CS) worldwide, despite the considerable evidence that vaginal birth is safer and associated with fewer complications, is a growing concern among women and healthcare professionals.

The authors urge returning to nature:

Assistant Professor Dr. Deirdre Daly, the supervisor of the Ph.D. work, added: “It is really important to understand these factors because they influence individual clinicians’ attitudes towards the natural progress of labour and spontaneous birth, even when the woman and baby are well and have no risk factors. This then leads to the decision to intervene prematurely, often without medically justifiable reasons.”

Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies (PNAS). To the God-fearing person, pride is a sin to be avoided—arguably the worst of sins. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” warned Solomon (Proverbs 16:13). Today, though, pride is trendy! Cities even in the Bible land of Israel have pride parades, where rebels against God’s created order flaunt their rebellion to cheers of crowds, and no one dare criticize them. To Darwinians, pride is an evolutionary strategy. This paper by 16 social Darwinists, among them Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, who are working to destroy civilization with Darwinian ethics (7/23/17), make pride out to be a good thing (or at least an amoral development in evolved populations, including humans). They studied 10 small-scale societies in Africa, looking for evolutionary games that promote hubristic leaders to prominence. No word about any harm these leaders cause to their subjects. It’s all evolutionary games. Look at the cold calculus in their amoral, Darwinian just-so story:

Darwin and Marx believed that “laws of nature” favored the ruthless.

In general, there are two classes of bargaining tactics organisms have available for influencing others’ choices. First, they can conditionally inflict costs—aggression; second, they can bestow (or withhold) benefits—altruism. The first causes individuals to be respected (or feared). The second causes individuals to be valued. Thus, it might be advantageous to put weight on another’s welfare, (i) because the individual is formidable and could inflict costs if not propitiated or (ii) because the individual’s actions or existence make positive fitness contributions to the valuer, which would be diminished or lost if assistance was not given. Here, we call these two components respect (for formidability) and valuation (for positive fitness contributions)—also referred to as dominance and prestige. Being respected and being favorably valued by others were resources, and selection on our ancestors would have shaped the human motivational system to cost-effectively promote access to both of those different types of resources.

This kind of thinking has nothing bad to say about dictators like Robert Mugabe who have destroyed their countries and reduced their citizens to poverty, or like the Kim family in North Korea who have starved millions and continue to commit Nazi-like tortures against dissidents. To Cosmides and Tooby’s gang, evil dictators, like any other evolved animals, are just playing evolutionary fitness strategy games that work for them. A question we’d love to ask them: should they respect Donald Trump because of his dominance and prestige?

Blessings to Those Who Align with the Created Order

Prayer makes families connected, unified and bonded with less relational tension (Medical Xpress). It goes without saying that the Bible often commends prayer, even commands prayer. From the very beginning, communicating with their Creator and learning from Him was Adam and Eve’s greatest delight. Secular Big Science these days often mocks or ignores “religious” exercise of any kind. Atheists mock at people who feel the need to talk to their “invisible sky daddy” instead of exercising pride in their own powers. Let them mock. They can’t deny the findings of a study published in the Journal of Family Psychology:

• Family prayer as a means for continuing family religious traditions
• Family prayer involves issues and concerns of individuals and the family
• Family prayer provides feelings of connectedness, unity and bonding
• Family prayer helps reduce relational tensions

The authors of the study list several specific examples of family members turning to righteousness and avoiding evil due to prayer, and experiencing more love, joy and happiness as a result.

Although the religious nature of prayer was directed toward God and worship, the content of family prayers served as a valuable interpersonal communication tool for family members. Prayers often included individual as well as family issues…

Many families found that regular prayer together eased relational tensions and facilitated better relationships. In resolving conflict, many participants also used prayer individually to center or restrain themselves, helping them calm down before interacting directly with family members to relieve tensions or reconcile.

So if Darwinian evolution produced beings who appear to have higher fitness by engaging in this behavior, maybe some evolutionary biologists would be wiser joining them on their knees, too. Let them first hear the warning of the Apostle James, though, that God will not hear selfish hypocrites (James 1:5-7).

The lifesaving power of gratitude (The Conversation). Richard Gunderman (Indiana University) is the latest of many extolling the mental health benefits of gratitude. In this case, though, he does not leave out God as a worthy recipient of our thanks. Taking the example of Robinson Crusoe, he quotes Defoe’s portrayal of the turning point when Crusoe realized that his trials had fallen on him for good:

“I gave humble and hearty thanks that God had been pleased to discover to me, even that it was possible I might be more happy in this solitary condition, than I should have been a liberty of society, and all the pleasures of the world… It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days.”

Of course, political correctness on a secular site like this demands that Gunderman not prefer any “faith traditions” over others, but he does acknowledge the “wisdom of religious and philosophical traditions that extend back thousands of years.”

The question we would like to ask Gunderman (if he espouses Darwinian evolution) is, to what mutation he would give thanks? “I thank thee, almighty Stuff Happens Law, that good stuff happened by chance upon me,” doesn’t seem to likely to procure the health benefits of gratitude.

Jesus said a tree is known by its fruits. The atheist critics who attack CEH are among the most bigoted, prideful, angry, hate-filled, mean-spirited, stuck-up, arrogant, bitter people we have ever encountered. And so we ask them, if in your view natural selection produced happy believers who follow God’s will—ones who pray, give thanks and live according to the law of the Lord—why are you attacking the fittest? That’s kind of stupid. Join them!