What has been for millennia a self-evident truth has become within a year or so unthinkable prejudice. The principled experts of the twentieth century, Ringo Starr and Bruce Springsteen, have quickly jumped into the moral crusade of ethical outrage, amazed that the state of North Carolina would refuse to allow grown men to use the ladies’ restrooms.
An employee of a Catholic university (Loyola Marymount) committed cultural blasphemy by stating that there are only two genders (a view entirely compatible with Catholicism). The university, however, has suspended her and is currently investigating her for a “hate crime.”
It gets more manifestly insane. Students at my alma mater, Cardiff University, and in other UK schools, are demanding the installation of women’s sanitary bins in male toilets “for men who menstruate.” This is logical lunacy. The inevitable demand for urinals in women’s restrooms will surely follow. This demand actually affirms the opposite of what these progressives claim, forcing them to admit that women pretending to be men still need sanitary bins, because they menstruate, and men don’t. Human sexuality is defined by an objective biological binary trait—either “XY” or “XX” chromosomes. But by using the term “gender” to mean not one’s biological sex but one’s sense of being male or female, moral outrage can find full expression. Laws that can put you in jail are no longer based on objective biology but on subjective, changeable feelings.
What is the deep motivation for this bizarre state of affairs?
This “faith” in feelings, which disregards biological objectivity, is both mental insanity and spiritual rebellion. While we’ve never needed bathroom humor, presently we do need some serious bathroom theology!
Clear-headed theology reveals what is happening in our Left-leaning, progressive world. We are witnessing the reappearance of an old heresy, Gnosticism. The Gnostics rejected the flesh and embraced the spirit. For them, the physical, created world was an evil thing, made by Satan. They believed the spirit revealed the true “god within,” as do many today, in search of their “higher selves.” Interestingly, the ancient Gnostics also rejected creational sexuality and sought the higher form of “androgyny,” the experience of being both male and female—which is the same rejection of the male/female gender binary that we observe today.
Here are a few examples:
- Oberlin College, founded by two Presbyterian ministers, is now committed to “finding a space that…defies the binary in our society…that you were assigned.”
- all five of Scotland’s main political parties have pledged to push for a “non-binary gender legal recognition…in all areas of life.”
- the goal of yoga, according to a serious practitioner, is to create “… direct awareness of the unity of everything, to break through the usual false binaries within which we tend to live.”
One of the “false binaries” that Hindu thinking eliminates is that between the Creator and the creature, serving a deeply religious goal. This suppression exhibits, as we say at truthXchange, the conflict between the only two worldviews, Oneism and Twoism. We now observe a growing worldview by which people, especially young people, are taught to reject differences and distinctions.
Recently a deliberately set-up video showed US college students so brainwashed that they refused to counter the outlandish claims of a 5”9’ white man to be a 6”4’ Asian woman! Their insane response was: “How can I judge what is true for you?”
Clearly, the rejection of any objective binary is not limited to sexuality. It is also a new theory of education. One education expert said:
One of the key strategies to unsettle and trouble entrenched ways of [children’s] thinking is to blur all kinds of boundaries—the clean categorical identity boundaries that support binary thinking as well as the boundaries between academic fields. This is why I think it is so useful to deploy a binary-busting, Queer perspective across a range of disciplinary contexts.
The seeds of Eastern mysticism sown in the West a generation ago are bearing copious fruit. The legendary Buddhist spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, influential among UN leaders, declared: “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.
Separateness is not an illusion, in two senses. In a positive sense, we are separate (distinct) from the Creator as his creatures, made in his image, males different from females. In a negative sense, we are separated from God by our sin. In the cross of his Son, Jesus, we can know forgiveness and personal reconciliation with the Creator and, through this, rediscover the sanity of the objective distinctions God placed in the creation for our good and his glory.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3567616/Students-call-sanitary-bins-placed-male-toilets-transgender-men-periods.html
http://www.oberlin.edu/stupub/ocreview/archives/2001.04.13/news/article02.htm
http://reverbpress.com/world/scotland-just-took-unprecedented-step-forward-lgbt-rights/
http://religiondispatches.org/the-surprisingly-short-history-of-popular-yoga/
Thanks Peter for your level-headed response. I had never caught the connection between the modern gender controversy and ancient Gnosticism, but there really is a lot of overlap. Interesting observation.
I have a more practical question for you. As I see it, most of the removing of gender distinctions is literal insanity, or, as you put it, contrary to a millennia of self-evident truth. My question is, as a pastor, should I refer to these issues in ways like that? Should I ever use phrases like “common sense” or “obvious” when addressing it, because although I believe that to be true, it would likely alienate those who don’t see what I see as common sense. So is it good to point out the lunacy of it all or is that counter-productive if I want to make actual headway in pastoring people of all stripes?
I keep wondering why there isn’t an outcry against men’s & women’s prisons. If there is no difference shouldn’t we just put all of them in the same facility?
Thanks for your thoughts, and for revealing that this has far-reaching implications. In a somewhat similar way, as long ago as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that democractic peoples will naturally fall into pantheism, because it appeals to the sense of ‘oneness’ or clearing away of boundaries. Whereas aristocracy recognizes and approves of boundaries and classes, democracies have an inner urge to put everyone in the same group – sometimes for good, and sometimes – as we see now – for ill.
This kind of thinking is perversion, moral insanity, delusion, and cultural mass hysteria.It is also a reflection of post-modernism: the lack of deference, distinctiveness and decorum, and of respect for truth, tradition or boundaries. I also had not known the connection with gnosticism and it would seem post-modernism is a kind of gnosticism.
The world around us is going stark raving mad. Complete confusion. Going to have to have another mountain of paperwork and legislation to justify it.
All this has me thinking: how then shall we live? I mean, the Western world once had Christian principles in the background that kept the reins on behavior. That’s gone now. We’re living in a society of people that fit Paul’s description of depravity in Romans 1. And they REFUSE to even listen to reason anymore. It’s like living in an LGBTQRS zombie apocalypse. So, my question is, are we to allow the madmen to harm us (put us in danger in bathrooms, abuse our children, arrest us for hate speech in church, and prevent us from earning an income)? How much should we fight and retaliate? It’s not just for our own safety and well-being, but for all people who are harmed by these insane acts of government. Should we retreat and form fortified communities?
Are there medical conditions where sexuality is genuinely unclear?
I live in Cardiff and lead a walking for health group having been ill myself. Recently, a man attended dressed most unconvincingly as a woman.The other walkers refused to walk with him but I was obliged to walk with him and we talked about his life. At a recent walk leaders meeting I was put under pressure, which was particularly ironic as I do this voluntarily without pay. The Walks Co-ordinator said that there could be implications as the Council could be taken to task by the press!