The book I’m reading by Ed Feser, The Last Superstition, attacks secularists for having abandoned the brilliant philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who, through reason, arrived at some pretty solid and basic truths, such as the fact God must exist, He can only be One, He created all there is and also maintains it, and there are absolute truths we can know because He made us. It’s great because I believe God’s Word teaches these things. But hey, if some famous philosophers did too, and you can prove God’s truth with their reasoning, I’m all in!
But in the midst of all this truth, Feser talks about how morality is also derived from Aristotle’s philosophy (and that again, is just another evidence for why God’s ways are right), and how sexuality only makes sense in the context of marriage between one man and one woman, for practical reasons, psychological reasons, reasons having to do with raising children, children’s psychological makeup, the stability of marriage and family and thus, the broader society. What I really liked today was that Feser even quoted Freud about morality and sexuality (and he’s not exactly a resource that conservative Christians would generally refer to, mind you!) I just had to share this quote with you, which Feser referred to to show why in the Western world for centuries, it was understood that homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and even contraception, abortion, so-called same sex “marriage” were morally wrong and dangerous. Check this quote out: “It is the characteristic common to all the perversions that in them reproduction as an aim is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse – if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently.” (quoted by John F. Kippley in Sex and the Marriage Covenant, and requoted in The Last Superstition, by Ed Feser, Kindle version, page 179) I just find that so ironic and amusing, that both Aristotle and Freud actually end up saying what most people have just known by common sense for millennia, Christian certainly know from the Scriptures, but our modern society, which is just as lost as a ball in high weeds, has completely lost sight of, and finds offensive and outrageous! The world’s gone mad! Feser goes on to say, further on, that secularists today mock traditional morality and consider conservatives to be “crazies.” He adds, “It might be, as secularists claim, what most religious people have believed about religion and sexual morality for most of human history was wrong; but it might be the case instead – and indeed it is the case, given the arguments we’ve been examining – that what they believed was right, and that the current state of secular opinion on these matters is evidence not of progress but of steep decline and extreme decadence.” (page 180). Yep, sounds about right – what the so-called “progressives” think is not really progressive at all, but a sign of the ignorance and moral depravity of our times. But as for me and my house, we’re content with God and His ways and wisdom, and we will continue to serve Him and believe what He says!