The Christian Vanguard

I'm on Catholic Match. I don't know why. I shouldn't be. I have no business being there. But I am. A part of me hates myself for it, another part just really wants to be successful. I guess I consider it a scraping of the barrel, because, you know, online dating. But, whatever, that's not what I want to talk about. So, I've had a few exchanges with one woman, and being the fool that I am, I didn't look through her profile because she initiated conversation. When I finally did, I saw that she had a child. That's a big NO for me. My friend told me to man up. So, I just want to sort of lay out my reservations here, and maybe we can extract some more general principles from them.  I'll be honest and say I haven't really given it much thought. I mean, I've given it some consideration, but I haven't applied thought to it. It just really rubs me the wrong way, and that was sufficient for me. So, what exactly bothers me about it? What does not b

Here is an argument I heard from Jerry Walls. I'll be putting it in my own words and I won't be directly quoting him.  Take any person that you love, like a child, spouse or parent. Would you die for that person? As Scripture says, there is no greater love than laying down your life for a friend. Suppose you say, Yes, you would die for your child. Now, would you die for the salvation of your child? Presumably, yes to that as well. Under Calvinism, God does not love everybody, and God loves only the elect, or at least, died for only the elect. Suppose now that while you love and would die for your child, your child happens not to be a member of the elect. It seems then that you love this person more than God loves this person. This is counter intuitive. 

Adam Omelianchuck has a paper in Vol. 13, No. 1 of Philosophia Christi that discusses the ontological subordination of men and women. He argues that men and women are not ontologically equal. The basis for this, he argues, is on the function of men and women. Being familiar with natural law, this is comfortable ground for me. The function of women is to be a helper, and the function for man is to be a leader. There is a difference in role, and there is a hierarchy of subordination, but what he seems to draw out is that this entails there is an ontological inequality between men and women.  He presents a Hierarchy's Less Valuable Function Principle, which states,  Necessarily, given the two functions, F1 serving as a means to and end and F2 having authority to direct the end, if any person having F1 is, in virtue of having F1, essentially subordinate to a person having F2, then F1 is a less valuable function than F2.   Now, men and women have these functions, but since wha

About a week ago, the topic of discussion for Philosophy club was animal rights. One member, whose name I cannot recall, gave a brief presentation on why animals have rights, and I got up, gave a brief explanation as to why they do not, and we all had a good discussion from there. This is just an outline of my talk, I deviated and gave some examples, and I took questions as I spoke. But this was requested by a friend, so, here it is. 

This is an outline for the book Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl . This outline was requested by a friend.

It used to be my biggest fear, up until recently, that my spouse (not that I'm married) would be unfaithful. I would wonder if I would be able to forgive them or be separated, or go to counseling, or whatever. There is a form of infidelity though that seems to be a degree worse than I previously imagined. I imagined that my spouse would be unfaithful for some typical reason. There is some more attractive guy she met, or she was didn't feel loved by me anymore, or maybe she just didn't love me anymore. But when I had a woman tell me that she would tell me about her attraction to another man, knowing I desired a relationship with her, not just to reject me, but to further hurt me, I imagined what that would look like if we were married. It would look like infidelity, which is intrinsically wrong, and wrong like these other types of infidelity that I previously mentioned, but infidelity so that I would be hurt. This seems much worse, but anyways, this has a strange consequenc

1st Corinthians 6:16 says that when we are united with a prostitute, we are one body with her. I'm not exactly sure what this means, or rather, what this assumes. So, we know that sex is a unitive act. However, when you use contraceptives, that unity isn't consummated. If you were to use contraceptives, are you not really united with the prostitute and hence not one body? I wonder if there were contraceptives in Paul's day for him to consider this. I don't know if there were or if there were not. Another thing that makes me wonder is the language of one body, which is used to communicate marriage. Is Paul saying that in sex with a prostitute (assume the union, contraceptives or not, is real) we are therefore married to that prostitute? That doesn't seem correct. Then one prostitute has multiple husbands, and so does anyone who is not faithful to their spouse. I dunno.