The Christian Vanguard

I often hear this line. "Homosexual attraction itself isn't sinful, but acting upon it is." This is incorrect. It is sinful to act upon homosexual desires, but so is having those desires. For one, it would be strange to say that it isn't sinful to desire something, but it is sinful to satisfy those desires. If it isn't sinful to desire my wife, why would it be sinful to have my wife? It isn't. If it isn't sinful to desire donating goods, why would actually donating goods be sinful? If an act is sinful, then so must the desire for that act. Scripture is clear on this. Romans 1 reads,  Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator ... For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also...

In my previous post, I talked about a disagreement I had with a Coptic Orthodox fellow. The topic may seem a bit out of context if you don't know who they are and how they relate to the rest of Christendom. So I will talk a little bit about that here.  The Coptic people are essentially Egyptian people. It's like an ethnicity, from what I gather. Historically, they are associated with the Orthodox Church(es), though, the exact nature of this relationship is what distinguishes them. You might be tempted to think that because they call themselves Coptic Orthodox, that they are Orthodox in the same way someone might be Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox. But many other Orthodox people will insist that the Coptic Orthodox aren't really Orthodox, and or even properly Christian. This is because they deny one of the ecumenical councils, the Council of Chalcedon.  One of the defining pillars or standards of Orthodoxy are the ecumenical councils, that is, the councils that e...

I've had some exchanges with Coptic Orthodox folk, and though the discussions had can be very technical and abstract, sometimes what they claim can be easily shown to be false (or true). I had the opportunity to show that one claim made to me was clearly false. A Coptic sent me a picture of a footnote that reads, "Even miaphysite expressions of one nature in Christ, correctly used, were now declared orthodox, in Canon 8 of the Council of Constantinople of 553." Here is the screenshot in its entirety, so you may know that I'm not misquoting it, and so that you know that this is published out there somewhere.  So, being an interesting, and easily verifiable, claim, I looked up the Canons. Here is what Canon 8 declares.  If anyone uses the expression "of two natures," confessing that a union was made of the Godhead and of the humanity, or the expression "the one nature made flesh of God the Word," and shall not so understand those expressio...

Legal positivism is the view that whatever is posited as law is truly law. To help understand this, consider first the Nuremberg Trials, in which Nazi war criminals were prosecuted. The common defense for the Nazis was that they were obeying the law, and laws are supposed to be obeyed. So they obeyed them, and you can't blame them for doing what they were supposed to do. As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in his Letter From A Birmingham Jail, what they did was legal. That doesn't seem to be contested. So, if we wish to prosecute Nazis, on what grounds should we do it? Do we want to say that laws do not need to be obeyed? That seems like too much to say. I like it when everyone obeys the law and drives on the right side of the road. It keeps me, and everyone else, safe. So laws do need to be obeyed. Does Nazi law count as real law then? According to legal positivism, yes it does. Legal positivists will disagree on what is the mechanism for positing a law, whether it is the c...

A few days ago, I wrote about multiple streams of consciousness and split brains . I gave reasons to think it wasn't the same that there were multiple streams of consciousness, but further into my reading from Richard Swinburne, he presents this thought experiment which I thought was interesting, but he gets it from someone else. Suppose prior to your splitting of the brain, a mad scientist tells you that after your operation, in which he will put one half of our brain into one body and the other half into another body, he will torture one and set the other free with a million dollars. He then gives you the option of who to torture and who to let go. So the question here is, does it matter who you chose? If bundle theory is correct, then it wouldn't matter, because neither would be true. But that doesn't seem to be true. It does seem that it would matter who is tortured and who isn't, because you have a sense that you would be one of them, and you don't want to be...

We talked about the sacrament of Confirmation and the role of a sponsor. Three videos.