Listening to Acts

Because who does not need a picture of a duck scratching?

I have been listening to Acts and came upon the following passage.

That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well. (Acts 15:29)

There are a number of similar passages in Acts as well. They all basically say the same thing.

When giving instructions to non-Jews on how to become Christians, in addition to baptizing them and telling them what Jesus said, they told them to do these four things:

1. abstain from meats offered to idols.

2. abatain from blood,

3. abstain from things strangled

4. abstain from fornication

Thinking about this, I find myself wondering how we got to where we are today.

If abstaining from fornication is so important that it is one of the four things they tell pagans they need to do in order to be Christians, how did all these supposedly civilized modern societies of Christians come to the point where they think fornication is perfectly fine and not even a sin?

I'm old enough that I recall when it was shocking if someone had sex and they weren't married.

In TV shows, people who did this used to get some kind of comeuppance; for instance, a young girl would find out she was pregnant.

Then, somewhere around the '90s I think, that just stopped. People stopped objecting to it. People stopped caring or thinking it was a bad thing.

When I was young, the standard I was given was that you should not have sex with someone…unless you loved them.

My mother felt that some friends of hers had married too quickly and ended up in a divorce—and that the cause of the hasty marriages had been that they wanted to have sex. Therefore, she concluded, it would be better to have sex with the person you thought you loved and find out maybe you were wrong and move on then to go into a bad marriage.

Also, she had not discovered that her husband had a volatile temper until after they were married. So she advocated living together before you got married, so you could actually get to know each other.

I went through many years of thinking that sleeping around before marriage was bad, but a little sex before marriage was probably good, and that living together was probably wise.

I was really shocked when I discovered that statistics suggests that living together does not lead to a good marriage in many situations, does not lead to more stable marriages does not lead to a better situation for the woman.

This living-together idea was undermined furher when I asked my mom, decades later, if, had she known about Dad's temper, she would have married him anyway? And she said, yes of course.

Because she loved him.

The problem, I think, is one of replacing family with business.

In business, there's nothing wrong with having a trial partnership. You can work with someone from a time and part ways. There's no moral sanctity to business. Even if you doing a really good job and and helpful business.

But a family is not a business.

A sacrament meant for bringing new human beings into the world cannot be properly understood by the model of two people getting together to try to accomplish a task.

Recently, a new study has come out that suggests that divorce is even more devastating, astonishingly more, to children than we thought.

People used to tittle at the idea of “staying together for the children,” but apparently, if you love your children, you might want to try to do that!

The damage to children when their family split is incalculable.

We've been playing down the damage to children, saying how flexible children are: Oh they can wear masks for 2 years Oh they can be thrown into daycare. Oh they can recover from a divorce.

Apparently, we've been fooling ourselves.

My mom used to talk about a study that was done over 40 years of the difference between children who went to daycare and children who did not. The children went into daycare showed initial improvements and were a little smarter and sharper in early school years.

But, she told me, that in later years, they were more rigid. In fact, as she began to describe the characteristics of the child who had gone to daycare and had not been with their family in their early years, it sounded exactly like the qualities identified as “Sowflakes” so often seen in college students nowdays that never used to be there.—rigidness of thinking, fear, unwillingness to try new things.

It's almost as if human beings have been designed to be raised by two parents in order to be mentally healthy and that disrupting this causes some kind of problem.

Who would have thought?

Maybe we should take a second look at whether or not we should be approving of the no-one-even-considers-it-a-sin-anymore of fornication.

Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body. (I Corinthians 6:13 from Now.)