Atheists hold that the whole Universe is as it is by pure chance, fluke born out of random chaos, despite the fact that all of nature obeys laws, as sure as 'night follows day' and as sure as seasons come and seasons go. No scientist on Earth would deny that all of nature obeys laws. Without the laws of physics having been discovered or discerned, scientists would not be able to conduct such experiments as those now taking place at CERN.
To hold a view that God created all things is deemed by atheists to be irrrational, largely based on the account given in Genesis. So, let us consider the account of Creation given in Genesis.
Having created all that is, in perfect harmony and order, according to His will, God's first utterance to human beings is a law. How interesting that while scientists universally agree that the Universe obeys laws which are objective, the laws that humans abide by are deemed to have no moral dimension. Anyone would have thought that in order to achieve 'progress', traditional morality had to be dispensed with entirely. Genesis gives an account of God Who 'spoke' all things into being. Creation, seen in this light is a communication of God, who, for His own reasons desires to create. In so doing, He exercises His freedom as Almighty God. He creates through speech. Through 'the Word'. To the first man, God issues a law:
'Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.'
The first word from God to man is a commandment - a law. Indeed, there is only one law. Eat whatever you wish but not this. With the law comes too a consequence to the breaking of it. The consequence is death. If the first man obeys God's law, he will live forever. If he man disobeys this law, he will die. Talk about pressure!
This law concerns what Adam and Eve may do and what they may not do, but God from the outset leaves to both creatures the exercising of their free will. Of their own free will, they disobey their Creator and communion with God is broken. They hide and know shame, whereas before they were innocent.
Where one law sufficed, the effects of this sin ripple out to the couple and to their progeny. It is not long before a murder takes place. Where just one law was necessary - to obey God's commandment - there later on come 10 Commandments given to Moses. We call this the Law of Moses. These commandments - laws - are those that God desires the people of Israel to live by - again of their own free will - in order to please their Creator. All the time, however, is a sense of expectation that God will intervene in some dramatic manner in order to save His people. This theme runs from Genesis to Daniel. There is always the expectation and hope of a Messiah.
Throughout the story of the people of Israel, God sends prophets to tell the people of the need for repentance and to obey God and make known to the people God's faithful promise to send someone who will teach and redeem Israel and bring light to the Gentiles. The people Israel, as people of everywhere, fail to meet even the ten commandments that God has given to them. God then sends the Eternal Word, Jesus Christ, in defiance not just of human perceptions of God, but of natural law. God becomes Man.
God only gave one law to Adam and Eve. Jesus only gave one law to the human race, but with two dimensions. One: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, all thy strength and understanding. This is a repetition of the 'old' law. The second dimension to the law is to 'love your neighbour as yourself.' Yet the law is one, since in loving God ('who you do not see'), one is loving your neighbour ('who you do see'). The broken communion between Adam and Eve with God, as we see, is also a broken communion with each other.
As God, Jesus in His Ministry was also able to have power over nature's laws and to suspend them. These we call His miracles, such as the feeding of the 5,000, walking on water, calming the storm, raising the dead to life, healing lepers and making the blind see, deaf hear. What does Jesus also do? Jesus forgives sin. What is sin? Sin is any thought, word, action or omission that is contrary to the Will of God. Sin is disobedience to God. Sin is the breaking of the law - 'love God and love your neighbour'.
So, a recap:
1. All of nature and the cosmos obeys laws and there is order within the Universe.
2. God is the lawgiver to the Universe Who, having provided the cosmos with both 'law' and 'order' gives law to mankind. All of creation is spoken into being and abides by itself as willed by God to obey His laws. God speaks to man and gives to man something the rest of the Universe does not have, since man is made in God's image and likeness. What God gives to man is freedom to exercise choice. Man can choose to obey his Creator, or not. In creating man, God did not create a spider that weaves a web at God's command, or a sun that burns, makes night day and heats frost at His command. What God gave to man is to be free to choose Him, or not.
3. Man rejects God's laws. Instead of keeping God's relatively simple laws, man fashions his own.
4. Man even rejects God's existence - not because God is not evident in the goodness of his Creation, or those laws that are discernible to all with reason - but because man is hiding in a state of rebellion against his Creator.
5. Mankind, the more distant it becomes from God, is more and more fixated on human laws, when, in fact, he would have been better off with the commandments God gave him. Mankind even takes a law, like 'do not kill' and enacts in legislation such as abortion and euthanasia. 'Only corrupt governments make many laws.'
6. Man's answer to those laws he deems to be necessary for the preservation of the existing order is punishment. This is a reflection, however imperfect, of God's treatment of man in the Garden of Eden. In not choosing God, man chose death. It is not as if God did not warn him. Similarly, 'law' and 'order', unless presided over by Governments who utterly reject what is right, is geared towards the good of society. If a man murders another man in cold blood, he can expect punishment. He can expect prison.
7. Jesus, the Perfect God, Perfect Man, is accused of breaking religious law - accused of blasphemy. He is condemned to death an Innocent Man. He is the lamb of God who will take away the sins of the World. By His death and resurrection, communion with God will be restored. Law itself mattered not to Jesus, since He was and is God. What mattered to Jesus was not law at all but the substance of that law - Love of God - the first principle and first law that governs and sustains all things. All other creatures serve God and praise Him. Only man can choose to do either both or neither.
God is concerned with law in as much as it reflects His communion and relationship with mankind. The law that Jesus gives us - love God and neighbour - is simply the law of love. God is love. God loves man. God wants man to love Him in return in a communion of love. God is One. Yet within the One God are Three Persons in a communion of love, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Our Lord Jesus Christ makes man an active participant in the life of the Blessed Trinity through the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. Jesus comes not only to restore man to God's friendship but to raise lowly man to the heights of divinity - to enjoin mankind to the Blessed Trinity in the Heavenly Kingdom forever.
The law of love that God has given us in Jesus Christ is the one law that God wishes for His creatures to be obeyed and this law informs what should be the right conduct for all other thought, action and deed that we as His creatures perform. Is this reflected in the laws governing Great Britain today? No, it is not. It is not loving to harvest human embryos, made in the image and likeness of God and to industrially experiment on them. It is not loving to kill off sick and old people in hospitals because they are deemed to be expensive to keep alive. It is not loving to abort the unborn children in the womb. It is not loving to penalise and persecute those who believe in God and who strive to live according to His Holy Will in their working lives or to prosecute those who abide by conscience.
Man's glory is to obey, love, worship and glorify God by his own free will. Man's glory is communion with God. Man's glory is to give God glory as he hopes to for all eternity and what chaos ensues when he does not!
Let us, for example, observe what chaos exists in the World. Is it nature which is chaotic and lawless, or is it man? While natural disasters do take place on occasion, the primary source of chaos and lawlessness in the World is man. It is man that rejects communion with his Creator. It is man that rejects God's law of love. It is man that believes happiness can be attained without reference to the divine will. It is man that is selfish, self-centred and proud. It is God who is truly humble. Yet, in an age in which man discovers more about the laws that govern the Universe, the laws of physics, man is still yet to humble himself to the laws that apply fundamentally to him. What is this law? Love God and love your neighbour. Love is the law and God is love. How deeply ironic it is that man, so knowledgeable of the objective laws that govern the movement of planets and stars, of the cosmos and of the Earth itself, wants to know nothing of the universal and objective laws that apply to himself. The laws man is interested in are all outside of himself. These he confesses are objective. The laws that apply to him - the moral law - he deems to be relative to different ages, persons and cultures.
So here we are, in 2013, with a corrupt government making many laws. The new law that it wishes to propose concerns 'same-sex marriage'. It is being sold as being concerned with 'rights'. This is absurd. The 'right' to 'gay marriage' cannot be a 'right', since there is no 'right' to marry in the first place. Marriage, while overseen by the State in terms of registry, does not belong to the State, therefore the State has no place in re-defining it. The State does not grant to men and women - or heterosexual couples - the 'right' to marry each other. All the State does is register the marriages and issues a certificate of marriage. In marrying, a heterosexual couple have not exercised a 'right'. They have just got married. Not convinced by the argument?
Let us probe it further. Let us imagine that marriage is a 'right'. The first 'right' to marry - if it ever did exist or could be so called, did not originate from the State, but from the dawn of mankind as a human institution. No State created this 'right'. It is an institution which men freely enter into union with women and vice versa in order to be joined in order to begin a family and further the human race, which is born only of the fruit of the union of man and woman.
If the first 'right' to marriage did not originate from the State, then why is the new 'right' to marriage originating from the State. If the 'right' to marriage does not, in fact, exist, and if the State did not conceive of marriage, then why does the State feel justified in distributing this 'right' to homosexuals and lesbians?
This sleight of hand by Government is not just depopulation but the deception of its own population. They are creating a 'right' where no such 'right' exists in the first place. If there was never a 'right' to marry in the first place, then instead marriage is served a purpose for family and society, then what the Government is doing is not 'extending marriage rights', but is instead creating a new 'right' where none before existed.
If the Government is saying that the State is God then not only has Government, or personnel working within it, been corrupted by power, but it needs to be replaced, very quickly indeed. For, were the whole of the United Kingdom to be inhabited by atheists, that would still not entitle the Government to become a replacement for God, or to do anything that made it appear or act as Almighty God. Under Nazism and Communism, the twentieth century was an intensely bloody period in which the State tried to take over where it deemed God had left off and slaughtered millions upon millions of people.
The State continues to this through abortion across the World. A Government that feels justified in creating a law concerning a 'right' that never existed and becoming the dispenser of 'rights' to its people is not a Government that is concerned about law at all. It is a Government that is lawless and more criminal than its own prisoners. The proposed legislation is based upon a tissue of lies and deception from beginning to end.
A society that permits its Government to be its God is a society that neither learns from history nor cares for its future. Such a society has arisen, because the society has rejected God, His laws and has found in the gratification of their own personal desires, in Government, in technology, in the media, in narcissism and hedonism an unsuitable and untrustworthy replacement.
1 comment:
The state cannot create or confer rights - only recognise them. Conversely, the state cannot destroy or revoke rights, though its machinery can of course, be used to purport to refuse to recognise them, or to purport to confer rights. Human rights are inherent to the person and are independent of, and superior to the state, which is a construct of a particular society to facilitate and serve the good of man, boh the individual and society. The state's powers are necessarily delimited and subject to the Natural or Divine Law that determines the nature and the dignity of the human person. Man is rational and capable of knowing these truths; though particular individuals and societies may feign ignorance or fail to acknowledge them due to objective evil, with varing degrees of subjective responsibility causing profound injury and suffering.
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