Apologetics 101Sample

Living As You Please

Although it might sound broad-minded to argue that we should invite everyone to live as he or she pleases, the world does not change to fit our whims and desires. If Christianity is true, then it accurately describes the world as it actually is. Rejecting Christianity, then, is the same as rejecting reality itself. Inevitably, the real world crashes in, revealing the consequences of rejecting God’s rules and patterns.

For more than fifteen years, British physician and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple cared for the poorest of the poor in London’s slums. He observed in the process that the government’s attempts to show compassion to the poor actually worsened their situations. Drunkenness, promiscuity, gluttony, and abuse were common, along with all the health consequences you might expect from such lifestyles.

As Dalrymple tried to heal people’s wounds, he asked, “Why do you live like this?” Stunningly, he concluded that these vulnerable individuals had simply embraced—and practiced—the ideas about gender, sexual liberation, and meaning that were taught in theories at top universities and in the media.

In his book Life at the Bottom, Dalrymple turns his acerbic wit on twentieth-century intellectuals who “sought to free our sexual relations of all social, contractual, or moral obligations and meaning whatsoever, so that henceforth only raw sexual desire itself would count in our decision making.” Dalrymple shows that the results of adopting these ideas “both literally and wholesale” are horrifying.

“If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass…

Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence, serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale, and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible.”

After reading Dalrymple’s graphic portrayal of the consequences of creating our own moral standards, we need to reevaluate the wisdom of the world in light of the wisdom of God; we need to rediscover the differences between right and wrong, good and evil.