homosexuality is confusion

Excellent post, although I did need a dictionary, by Doug Wilson:

Comes now word that Germany has (perfectly legal) barnyard brothels, where pimps get to rent out the livestock for sexual purposes.

We are not surprised to find that Scripture prohibits this kind of thing. Adam searched for a helper suitable to him among the animals, and there were none. God established His image in male and female together (Gen. 1:27), and thus we see that a particular set of perversions (such as homosexuality and bestiality) are attempts to strike at this image of God. God inhabits eternity, and sinful man cannot reach Him, as much as he would like to. But he thinks he can reach the image of God that He established down here — and so these perversions are actually sexual iconoclasm.

When the images are graven images and hence unlawful (Ex. 20:4), iconoclasm can certainly be a good and godly thing (2 Kings 23:24). But when the images and icons were fashioned by God Himself from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7) from the rib of the man (Gen. 2:21-22), and after that, fashioned by God in the womb of every mother (Ps. 139:15-16), to attack that image is impudence and rebellion.

So it is bad then. But what kind of bad?

“Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion” (Lev. 18:23).

The Old Testament, famously, abominates a number of things. But the sin of bestiality here is not just described as an abomination. It is described as confusion. One other sin is decribed that way — the sin of having sex with your daughter-in-law (Lev. 20:12).

It is tebel, confusion. It is sinful, of course, and an abomination, of course. But it is also confusion. It is dislocated and out of joint. It is a muddled monstrosity. It is demented.

So in what might appear to be a lurch, I would like to lay the responsibilty at the feet of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. When this sort of thing happens to a nation, and that nation’s politicians, statesmen, leaders, poets, seers, editorialists, song-writers, bloggers, and magazine publishers don’t feel they have any basis for coming back and saying, “No, of course not,” when they don’t think they have any place to stand in order to say, “Thou shalt not,” it is time to look upstream and blame their philosophers.

Hume pretended to an utter skepticism, and Kant pretended to have fixed that problem, but without actual reference to the unknowable “noumenal” realm, things as they actually are, but which is forever closed off to us. The Almighty God had somehow abandoned us to live inside our own heads (an unhealthy place to be, however phenomenal it feels). We have just now begun to realize just how far our leaky little boat of intellectual sophistication has drifted. He who says A must say B, but more than this, he who cannot say A must eventually say B, whether he wants to or not.

I will go out on a limb. Unless we get back to Thomas Reid’s common sense realism, or something very much like it, taking care to ensure that our philosophy is grounded explicitly on God’s revelation to us in Christ, we will continue to be hosed. Speaking of iconoclasm, all the statues of the big boys need to go over — Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the lot. Why? It is confusion.

All our difficulties arise from the fact that we don’t believe we have any authoritative basis for saying this, and not that. We have let all the boundaries go blurry in our sham pretence of epistemic humilty — and at the end of the process we are forced to act like we don’t know the difference between a woman and a heifer.

You might object and say that I am acting like everyone in Germany is going to these places. No, not at all. But I am saying that a tiny handful is doing this, and that the rest of the civilized world has nothing whatever to say to them. We are speechless. Schrodinger’s cat has our tongue. Please, no angry comments saying that I don’t understand quantum theory. It is a metaphor.

Relativism is not just a thought experiment any more. The internal core of the West is almost completely rotted out. I would say to the solons of dithering relativism that it is time for them to have the courage of their convictions, but that would be oxymoronic, wouldn’t it?