ON SHELLFISH AND HOMOSEXUALITY

An Answer To Jim's Letter To Dr. Laura

by Preston McNutt

Dear Mr. Jim the agnostic.

You will surely agree with my assessment of you as agnostic and not atheist, won't you? I mean, it's obvious you have a keen intellect with a profound sense of logical thought. Many people, having no more logical sense than that of a breakfast biscuit would never have been able to travel this far down the path of reason. But you, with your prodigious powers of reason, you would have long ago deduced that for one to accept the world view of atheism, one would by definition have to be able to be everywhere in the universe at all times and know all things about everything all the time, past, present and future. Of course, that's impossible, because if that were true, if one could be and do all those things, then LO AND BEHOLD, that person would be God, thereby destroying his own argument! So, being the incredible logician you are, you would have already accepted the premise that the best you can be is agnostic, not knowing for sure if there is or is not a God, and not atheist, knowing for sure that there is no God, because if you knew that for sure, well, you would be God! And Jim, I think you and I both know, YOU ARE NOT GOD!

Your treatment of God's laws notwithstanding, I and others like me are compelled by conscience and by divine mandate to offer an answer to those who question the faith and the hope we have within us. So, while I don't think you deserve pearls, I'm going to cast a few in the event that some of those who may be influenced by your ill-advised satire will see the illogic of your sarcastic repartee. The questions you ask are designed (watch for this word later) to create doubt which then foments thoughts in most people' minds that drift like plankton in murky water, logic tossed from one wave crest to another, never connecting enough synapses sequentially to form logical conclusions.

ON SHELLFISH

Let's talk about shellfish and the concept of clean versus unclean animals. But first, let us reason together on the subject of what it is we who you love to mock believe about those archaic laws you also take so lightly. You seem to be an intelligent fellow. I hope you are an honest and reasonable one as well.

Everything in the universe has a function. Even staunch evolutionists such as yourself use terms like architecture and design, although it escapes me how one can even entertain concepts like that without considering the obvious need for an architect and a designer. But that's for you to struggle with, I suppose. My point is that even in the rarified air of intellectual materialists the shadow of a Creator encroaches on their discussion of how all the complexities of the material universe just happened by chance.

Here's your pearl. Pay attention. Torah, the law, had a part in creation in the beginning.

The common tendency of most people is to view the Bible, particularly the Torah, as the writings of men using the inadequate tool of language to describe their thoughts and feelings about God and their relationship with Him in a cultural historical context. In other words, they simply wrote of their view of God based on their own comprehension of Him with their limited and finite reasoning ability. While individual personalities and societal norms certainly were in evidence as the writers penned the books of what we call scripture, that is a far too limited view of the God-breathed inspiration of those words. There is a much deeper and more mystical truth to the nature of God speaking the world into existence.

Man in his quest to understand the nature of the world he lives in searches for meaning to life, for the reasons we exist. Creationists do it. Evolutionists do it too. Those who accept a Creationist world view look to the Bible for foundational answers to those questions. How we think about reality and our paradigm of how we relate to the world around us are shaped by our acceptance of the Bible as instructions from a loving Father who is intent on His creation living in health and harmony. In shaping a world view, many read in Torah that shellfish are on the list of prohibited meats for human consumption. We see reality and read in Torah a description of that reality and think Torah is simply an accurate description of reality as it appears. And we think then that Torah was written to describe reality after the fact. That's backward. Reality is what it is because Torah made it that way. Remember this phrase. We'll revisit it on the topic of homosexuality.

That's not a difficult concept to those of us who accept what the Bible says when we read "And God said ... ". We understand that He spoke creation into existence. Everything in it is a result of God saying something. Torah is God's Word. Therefore, everything that exists is what it is because God's Word made it that way. The word for thing or matter in Hebrew is dabar, the same word for word,. There are not two words to describe those two ideas because one is the result or creation of the other. Word and thing are interrelated. A thing is what it is because it was created that way by a word. So when we read in Torah that shellfish or pigs or octopus are unclean, it is because they were made that way. They have a purpose, a design that a designer had in mind when He DESIGNED them! They function to serve as the earth's vacuum cleaners, to clean up the crud and nastiness that develops in everyday life on earth to keep it clean for the rest of us to live in. Remember the adage "You are what you eat."? If that's true, is it any wonder name-calling has such a prominent part of our language from earliest childhood? Calling each other pig or shrimp is not being offensive.

Modern science now understands the dangers to the human body of eating certain animals the Bible declared unclean 3500 years ago. Meat from the animals described in Leviticus 11 does not benefit us. It is not properly digested by the human body, therefore it is not considered food. Unclean meat clogs arteries, damages the blood and weakens the immune system. Besides, the meat of those animals is loaded with micro-organisms found in the stuff that they eat, which in turn get passed along to you and me if we eat the animals that eat that junk. For something to be food, the body must recognize it as food. The protein molecules that make up unclean meat coagulates the blood in the digestive process. It poisons the blood. Researchers are finding an alarming increase in cases of pork tapeworms and other parasitic infestations arising from eating things the Bible says are not food. It's not a case of good food and bad food based on our own tastes. It's a matter of clean and unclean based on what's good for us.

The word clean is translated from the Hebrew word tahor. The ancient pictograph root of the word is the word for wall or contain, with the letter tet, which means to contain and the letter resh which is the picture of a man. Combined these mean contain man, hence a wall that contains one for his own protection. The rules governing what is clean to eat were given to protect man from his own appetites, not to keep him from enjoying a good meal.

Case in point: Pepperoni is made with the ground up lungs of pigs. The lungs of pigs carry a little microbe called a flu virus. A piping hot pepperoni pizza may suit your appetite just fine. But don't complain when that tenacious little flu bug decides to activate in your blood and invades your DNA. As for me and my house, I think we'll take God's word for it and stick with what He says is clean. I appreciate the fact that He likes me enough to protect me from my own appetites.

ON HOMOSEXUALITY

Remember when we talked about things being what they are because they were created to be that way? Let's apply that same thinking to the subject at hand.

Think about it. You and I look at something and we have a good idea what it is by what it does. We see a bird flapping its wings and recognize instinctively that the wings have a purpose, a design if you will. They function to give the bird flight. It would be ludicrous to see wings on a porpoise, because, well, we again recognize instinctively that porpoises don't need to fly in the water. Of course, modern evolutionists insist that's exactly what did happen in the miasmal pages of incalculable ages of history. Somehow, porpoises decided swimming in the air would be less restrictive than swimming in water and miraculously - metaphorically speaking, of course - grew wings to accommodate that longing. Yeah. Okay. And some of us still have gill slits showing, right?

We look at an organ of the human body and know what it is by what it does. The mouth is made to speak, to give voice to the higher level, the mind. You and I recognize instinctively that when someone says "I was thinking to myself", they're not really clarifying for us that they're not thinking to someone else . Well, some people might, but most of us know we have to use our voices to communicate with one another. So we know what it is for because of what it does. We know the same thing about other parts of the human body. We see the parts and we know what they're for by what they do. So we know a boy is a boy by - guess what? - by looking at the parts he's endowed with when he's born! It's not rocket algebra. A man is a man because he was made that way. A woman is a woman because she was made that way.

These things are not hard to figure out, except for those who already have their minds made up. If we are just animals, then what else should we expect but kids killing kids in our schools? Kids are having kids while they're still kids because we're teaching them that's what animals do. Monkeys mate with monkeyettes at will then fight or kill any other monkey that tries to usurp his authority. The alpha male lion mates with any lioness in his pride. Sometimes he then kills newborn cubs to keep them from growing and competing with him for dominance, while the mother watches helplessly from a distance. Why would a higher animal be any different? Our teenage alpha males mate with any girl that is willing to give up her honor to him, and when the fruit of that union is conceived, we allow them, even sanction the giving of those babies up to Molech on the altar of convenience called abortion. Why should we expect anything different from our children? Please don't give me a "we have a moral development" business. If survival of the fittest is what evolution is all about, then any one of us has every right to make sure we're at the top of the food chain. What makes your opinion more valid than mine? If you send your children to Caesar for an education, don't be surprised when they come home a Roman. Get my drift?

Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, political correctness is set on destroying the concept of the traditional family, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality. And the Jims of the world destroy logic by playing with words and feeding into the dearth of critical thinking that brought civilization to its greatest heights.

Volumes could be and have been written about the various issues surrounding the mental, psychological and physiological aspects of homosexuality. Having dealt first hand with a number of men and women over the years who struggle with their own sexual inclinations, I recognize it is not a subject without controversy. But in every case, and in all the studies and research available, the preponderance of data suggests homosexuality has its roots in the conscious decision making parts of the mind. In other words, one is not a homosexual because he or she has tendencies toward members of the same sex. A person is homosexual when he makes a conscious decision to act on that inclination. There are myriad reasons one may develop those tendencies, even from a very early age. Those factors may relate to the absence of a male figure in the home, or a demanding father figure who is emotionally detached and judgmental, who offers acceptance and love on the basis of performance that is never achieved, or any number of other things that lead to a person seeking acceptance from another member of the same sex. The reasons are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, whatever the reasons behind homosexual lifestyle, he or she was not made that way in the beginning. At conception and birth, a person is what he is, male or female, because he/she was made that way.

So, Mr. Jim. Before spending too much more time contriving sarcastic questions that in your mind are cleverly designed (there's that word again) to stump God, you might do well to consider seriously who you are, where you came from, why you are what you are, and more to the point, what is your reason for being? In the end you might find that you, like all of us, are much like an onion. You peel away the outer layer of cynicism and doubt to see what's underneath, and you find another layer. So you peel that one away, and lo and behold, you find nothing but another layer. And you peel another and another, seeking for answers about who you really are until finally you get to the very last layer, and you find ... nothing! You find that at the very core of your being there is nothing, and that everything that makes you you, is just layer after layer of experiences and environment and parental molding and societal influence. And if you think really really hard, you might realize that at the core of that nothing, there really is Someone Who was there in the beginning and He made you to be JUST WHO YOU ARE.

For your own sake Mr. Jim. Think really really hard.

Shalom,
Preston McNutt