God, Sex, and Insanity

I just finished Amy Carmichael’s book, Things as they are, Mission work in south India, where with excessive prudence, she describes the tragedies of child brides. This led me to this thought: What should be the proper age before someone may marry? And, what age gap is too significant to allow marriage? I decided to ask the Internet.

Unfortunately, the internet had no good answer.*
However, it led me to a fascinating website where one man raved about Society inhibiting mankind from fulfilling his natural desires, i.e., sexual desires. This man claimed he was emotionally and socially stunted by not being allowed to marry at, say, 14 or 15, that marrying early is God’s plan for mankind, and that by marrying and having sex earlier he could have concentrated on greater things (horrifically enough, preaching and mission work) and had an esteemed position in society earlier. No matter that Society was an inhibiting beast, he still wanted a position in it. By having great grandchildren born when he was around 50, he could have been a town elder or something of the sort.

Who knew that sex could do so much for people?

It bothered me that he kept implicating God’s name to support his claims, especially as his claims to morality crumbled:

On a rant about homosexuality being very, very wrong, he said it might be okay if the two persons involved really loved each other.

While addressing child-bridehood, he reasserted that it was good for persons to marry young, and suggested that if girls married at 7 years old, they could have around five years of good sex before they had to worry about having children.

On addressing rape, he said most rape cases happened when a woman wanted revenge, or secretly lusted after their rapist while feigning modesty by their protests. He said that the latter had happened to him on many occasions.

I stopped reading when he came to incest, though I looked him up later and found he was charged with several cases of molestation by his daughters, and dear gracious, his granddaughters.

This website being too absurd to keep to myself, I had Garrett read it as well. We came to different conclusions: he said the man was extremely depraved, and I said he was insane.

My argument for insanity follows:

Insanity is based in a misconception of reality. God is the ultimate reality, and the closer you follow Him, the truer your path. If you are a few degrees off, the farther you follow your own wiles, the farther you’ll be from Him. Obviously, if you choose a path directly contrary to Him, specifically atheism, you’ll be the farthest from Him. If you carry your path to its logical extreme, eventually you’ll cross the Edge of Passion and/or Insanity. Examples of truthful passion/insanity are the apostle Paul, Christian martyrs, and at the farthest extent, Christ Himself. On the opposite end, you’ll find the passionate atheists, my favorite example being Hitler. Hitler receives much abuse, even from atheists, when he should be their prime example of a “good” atheist who actually carried out his beliefs.

I admire people who carry out their beliefs to logical extremes, even if they are wrong. At least they escaped the circle of blankness that covers most of benign humanity.

Crossing the “edge of passion/insanity” occurs when something becomes more important to a person than any other thing. Meet your “god.”



Back to the sex guy. His god was sex, for though he claimed the real God as his reason for obsessing over sex, he readily put aside the Bible when it interfered with his sex-god.

If you look at Dante’s inferno, it’s filled with people who put something above all else. Some of these things are popular and admired, particularly “being true to one’s self” (key part of egoism) and “putting love above all else” (code phrase for lust. See The Notebook for an example, if you can stomach it).

I may concede that love, real love, is worth putting above all else, because God is love. Please don’t substitute trashy romance and call it love when I believe in Christ’s passion.

That’s all I can think for now. I’m going to curl up in my warm circle of ignorance and say goodnight.

*There were a few arguments about women not marrying too young as to neglect their education, with a better argument about not marrying before they are fully grown, having reached puberty and the proper dimensions for childbearing, and such.

I love you, I just don't like you (!?)

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer whom I think well,” says Elizabeth Bennett of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice.

1 John 2:9 says to abide in the light you must love your brother… does that mean you must like him? One of the reasons I rid myself of that swelling chronical of human ignorance, self-absorbance, and depravity (Facebook) was to like people better. I feel that the less I know of what people think about themselves, the more I may like them. I’ll tell you if this works.

Is like the natural step below love, or are these separate entities? Garrett and I talked about this, and decided that while the Bible commands that you love your enemies (Matthew 5:44), it never says you must like them. It is widely accepted that you can love someone without liking them, and I believe there are also cases where you can like someone and still hate them (yes, I’m female). Mothers also seem to love their children even when their babies haven’t developed enough individuality to be likable.

Of course, we humans underestimate the meaning of love, and that concept is generally acknowledged among Christian circles. I propose, though, that we also underestimate the meaning of liking someone. Doesn’t the word “like” imply an alikeness of thought or feeling, so that if someone is unlike you, though you may love them, you plainly don’t like them? Is it unchristian to dislike someone? I think not.

This post probably reveals that I don’t understand the concept of like or love well enough to talk about it, but at least I’m thinking.