Written by Colin J. Smothers |
Monday, February 19, 2024
What is to be done about moral vertigo? The book of Jeremiah records the words of the Lord to a wayward Israel suffering from a kind of moral vertigo: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16). What are the ancient paths? These are the roads that have been trod before and stood the test of time, because they are the ones that lead to and from God’s revelation.

The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that around 15 percent of airplane crashes are caused by vertigo, which is a false sensation that can lead to disorientation related to fluid in your inner ear. In order to guard against this, one exercise pilots go through early on in their training is induced vertigo. My dad is a professional pilot and an Air Force Top Gun who flew the F-15 Eagle. Growing up around aviation, I was inspired to go for my pilot’s license and I experienced this training firsthand.
For this training exercise, you put on a visor that limits your range of vision so that you can only see what’s inside the cockpit. Under this arrangement, you must rely solely on your instruments and not what you can see outside, which simulates nighttime and low-visibility flying. With the visor on, you close your eyes and your instructor puts the airplane in a slow bank, descent, or climb and holds it there for several minutes. This is when vertigo sets in. Your inner ear adjusts to the current flying conditions and the trajectory begins to feel normal—it actually feels like you’re flying straight and level. After a while, the instructor tells you to open your eyes and check your instruments. Herein lies the danger.
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Written by Colin J. Smothers |
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Here is the same message The Nation seems to have just discovered on one of their sociological safaris to the American Heartland. Christians think sex belongs in marriage and that all life, even unborn life, should be protected and celebrated. News at eleven. For students of history, this is as surprising as it is new. Regarding chastity, Jesus himself taught that God’s design in the beginning—“he who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4)—defines what is both permissible and advisable regarding human sexuality: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5; cf. Genesis 1:27; 2:24).

In C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress, John the protagonist finds himself in Eschropolis (“Ugly City” in Greek), where the boys look like girls and the girls look like boys, and everyone acts obscenely in their avantgarde rejection of puritanism. Scandalized by what he encounters, John objects, only to be shouted down by one of the residents: “We have got over humanitarianism!” “And prudery!” shouts another. Funny, these impulses. Two peas in a pod.
In his allegory, Lewis exposes modern progressive morality, which is in such ugly disarray that progressives regularly call good evil and evil good and cannot fathom moral principles when they encounter them. Instead, they convulse in protest.
I thought of Lewis’s passage recently when I came across this article from The Nation, a leftist groupthink organization that shared the following deep thought on social media: “The church in heartland America promotes a harsh sexual morality. But it sends a mixed message: Premarital sex is sinful, but teens who have babies are revered as mothers.”
Where to begin? For starters, upholding chastity and revering motherhood are hardly unique to the church in the American Midwest. In actual fact, these tenets of Christian sexual morality are as old as Christianity itself.
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