A few unsystematic thoughts on the Ashers' bakery verdict

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/christian-bakers-lose-pro-gay-marriage-cake-discrimination-rulin/

- What a travesty. We should be mourning before God for the
well-deserved judgments being poured out on our nation (Romans 1:18-32).

- It appears that now the government believes that it can compel speech.
People can be forced to say things that they belong to be wrong, immoral
or abhorrent. Christians can be forced to voice opinions that they
disagree with. The age of thoughtcrime is officially upon us.

- Notice how secular/sacred division stemming from the secular
"Enlightenment" has generated this absurd decision. The judge has held
that the viewpoint "homosexual relationships are moral" is not a
"religious view," but that the exact reverse viewpoint "homosexual
relationships are not moral" is a religious view. Even though one is the
exact negation of the other, and hence neither is more religious than
the other, the judge is presumably in thrall to secularism. So, if
Christianity says "X", then this is "religious" ... but if secular
humanism says "not X", that's not religious. Or perhaps, the preferred
opinions of the government are de facto just not religious, just because
they happen to have had enough members of parliament vote on them. Is
the government's viewpoint just "not religious" somehow automatically by
definition? In another context, this sort of way of thinking would be
called "blind prejudice".

- The question of whether the baker declined to print a slogan for
religious reasons or not would be moot in a free society. In a free
society, there is no such thing as government-compelled speech. The
state doesn't get to force citizens to repeat its slogans in free
societies, and citizens don't have to explain why they're not going to
repeat them. That is, rather, a feature of fascist states. The reason
why a citizen declines to repeat the government-preferred slogan is a
total irrelevance outside of that kind of setting. The very fact that
the judges think it's their business to pry into a citizen's thoughts,
to decide whether those thoughts provided an adequate reason to decline
to repeat particular speech, in itself shows how far we've fallen.

- And as such, what a travesty. May God, in judgment, remember mercy.

Thankful for Genesis 3

I'm so glad that the Bible contains Genesis 3. Otherwise, how to
understand life?

Life is so frustrating and disappointing. I am so frustrating and
disappointing. But at least, one of the frustrations isn't to be
continually perplexed about why life is so frustrating. The Bible
explains that very clearly. Our expectations are framed at the outset.

There will be, and now is, a Redeemer of this fallen world. But we will
live, until the appointed time when he perfects all things, in a fallen
world. I won't be, and life won't be, all that it could or should be.
And there's no need to bang one's head against a wall because of being
convinced that it ought to somehow be possible to live in the new
creation now, before Christ returns.

Genesis 3 frees Christians to live both with hope and realism in a world
in which thankfully there is the former, but which also requires the latter.