Skip to main content

Richard Hammar on Same-Sex Marriage Rulings

In order to avoid overreactions from church leaders and members about the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage rulings, Richard Hammar gave brief points about what church leaders need to know about the rulings at www.ag.org/pdfs/DOMA_rulings.pdf. I think that pastors and teachers in churches should read his brief points first, before they carelessly say anything about the rulings in the pulpit. Some pastors have a tendency to exaggerate the implications of the events in the world of politics, in order to scare church members about the destructive impact of secularization on traditional values. Exaggerated claims due to ignorance can breed false beliefs. False beliefs can be breeding grounds for all sorts of irrationalities.       

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Politicization of the Pulpit

After the death of Jerry Falwell and the declining popularity of Pat Robertson, surprisingly the legacy of the evangelical right persists in politically conservative media (like Fox News) and conservative evangelical churches (like some Southern Baptist and Assemblies of God churches). Equipped with sensationalistic jesters and political preachers, bearers of such legacy can pester the current administration. No wonder Obama and his advisers are launching an attack on Fox News, the main source of information for the evangelical right. Since the presidential campaign season for the 2008 election, I heard numerous anti-Obama sermons in a large congregation with a devoutly Republican pastor. A devoutly Republican pastor is one who cleverly subsumes the Christian message under the Republican agendas. Many conservative evangelical churches have devoutly Republican pastors, who regularly politicize the pulpit by unnecessarily turning congregants against Obama. In a subtle way, this is danger...

Illegalization of Abortion

Here’s my argument for why I think that the illegalization of abortion is philosophically problematic: (P1) x is a human just in case x has a genetic code that is distinctively human. (P2) A fetus, at some point in the fetal development, acquires a genetic code that is distinctively human. (P3) So, at a certain point in the fetal development, a fetus becomes a bona fide human. (P4) From a legal standpoint, the right to life of a human is protected by the law. (P5) There is no characterization of a human that can objectively identify its instantiations other than the mere possession of a distinctively human genetic code. (P6) So, a fetus, at a certain point in the fetal development, has the right to life that is protected by the law. (P7) However, Judith Jarvis Thomson presents an argument that persuasively proves that the fact that the fetus has the right to life does not necessarily entail that it has the right to use the mother’s body. (C) Therefore, even if a fetus has the right to ...