Sex, Education and Religion

The recent bizarre behavior of space shuttle astronaut Lisa Nowak and the circus surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate that at least two of the three god’s of American culture—sex and education—are thoroughly jejune of worth. Neither “rocket science” level education, a la Nowak, nor sex-based adulation, a la Smith, were antidotes to stupidity and depravity.

Interestingly, the media has demonstrated in its coverage of both events its own utter bankruptcy—to say nothing of its growing useless. Their obsessed fixation with the stories of two people who had basically no influence on our society needs to be contrasted with the fact it barely flinched at a Muslim gunman from Bosnia who killed 5 people in a Utah mall. This act of terrorism was mostly ignored, and that is a significant reason why we will likely suffer another 9-11 type attack. Our culture is too deep in celebrating plastic people to notice that it is falling apart.

And on the religion front, Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette reports:

The Roman Catholic Womenpriests Community ordained eight priests and four deacons yesterday in a ceremony on a riverboat plying Pittsburgh's three rivers. But the Catholic Church in which the women claim a role says that by participating in the ceremony they have excommunicated themselves.

This is the fourth such group ordained worldwide since 2002, and the first in the U.S. Although a clear violation of Roman Catholic canon law, Patricia Fresen, a bishop in Roman Catholic Womenpriests, compared their movement to the anti-apartheid movement. "I am utterly convinced that our ordinations are totally valid," she said. "Although they break [canon] law, we believe we are breaking an unjust law. I come from South Africa. We learned from Nelson Mandela and others that if a law is unjust, it must be changed. ... If you cannot change it, you must break it.”

These folks are, of course, trying to make a point for feminism and political correctness. Such actions mean very little to Bible believers. The following comments by R. L. Dabney on why Paul excluded women from preaching are good enough for me:

"Not one of [the reasons Paul gives for forbidding women to preach] is personal, local, or temporary. Nor does he say that woman must not preach in public because he regards her as less pious, less zealous, less eloquent, less learned, less brave, or less intellectual, than man.

"In the advocates of woman's right to this function there is a continual tendency to a confusion of thought, as though the apostle, when he says that woman must not do what man does, meant to disparage her sex. This is a sheer mistake. His reasoning will be searched in vain for any disparagement of the qualities and virtues of that sex; and we may at this place properly disclaim all such intention also.

"Woman is excluded from this masculine task of public preaching by Paul, not because she is inferior to man, but simply because her Maker has ordained for her another work which is incompatible with this.

"So he might have pronounced, as nature does, that she shall not sing bass, not because he thought the bass chords the more beautiful—perhaps he thought the pure alto of the feminine throat far the sweeter—but because her very constitution fits her for the latter part in the concert of human existence, and therefore unfits her for the other, the coarser and less melodious part." [Taken from "The Public Preaching of Women," in Discussions: Evangelical and Theological, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1967 reprint), 2:109-110.]

Maranatha!

Arjay