Monday, October 15, 2012

Natural Law, Unnatural Law, and Unnatural Lawyers



         Before you start pontificating about natural law and its alleged lessons, you’d better consider all the ways that nature is now unnatural.  You’d better know the difference between nature as created and nature as cursed.  You must understand the difference between what nature is now and what nature ought to be, once was, and will be again.
         All any natural law advocate has ever seen is unnatural or sub-natural nature.  Further, the natural lawyers need to understand that they themselves are unnatural, that they universally are fallen, wicked, sinful, and rebellious.  They are unnatural and wicked creatures reasoning on the basis of unnatural nature in order to tell us about real natural law, as if, despite all their incapacities and habitual immoralities, natural lawyers were objective, disinterested, and reliable on the point.
         I’m not convinced.
         The natural law crowd does not know and therefore cannot articulate the difference between natural nature and unnatural nature, whether in themselves or in the world at large.  Those differences are perhaps unimaginable.  Those differences are something akin to the difference between ancient Eden and the Arabian desert.  Such differences are depicted in the eschatological image of the lion lying down with the lamb.   Shockingly, and to us quite unnaturally, the lamb will not be inside the lion when it happens.  That future version of nature and our contemporary version of it seem to operate quite differently.   The details of that difference we do not know.  Natural lawyers have never seen nature not under a curse, nature unburdened.  They have never seen themselves not under that debilitating and burdensome curse.  Apart from God telling them, they cannot know and do not know what real lessons real nature might teach, if any, and how those lessons differ from those supposedly taught now by a cursed nature and by the unnatural lawyers who fancy themselves able to speak for it.
         When unnatural lawyers explain the “laws” of unnatural nature, they do so in a tendentious and highly selective manner.  They do not tell you for your instruction and imitation that nature is vicious, that it is “red in tooth and claw,” that its law is normally to kill in order to live.  They do not tell you that nature is doomed, that it is winding down to a cold, motionless, amorphous mass at a low temperature, that in the end all stories reduce to precisely nothing.  That is, they do not tell you that natural law is murderous and nihilistic.  Rather, they want to use nature to teach the things that they want it to teach, not what it actually does teach, if it teaches anything all.
         In nature as it is, the law is either to kill or be killed, even though the natural lawyers will not teach you to live in that brutal fashion, and would be appalled if you seriously undertook to do so.
         Indeed, even if living things in nature escape being killed, they still die.  In other words, selfish predation and both individual and cosmic nihilism are the order of the day, even if the unnatural lawyers don’t recommend that you live accordingly.  Unnatural lawyers publicly trumpet natural law while ignoring or rejecting much of it.  They often alter it to fit their own agenda.  With regard to the real laws of contemporary nature, they are what they despise others being with regard to positive law:  They are legal and judicial activists.  They push their own truncated agenda onto the law and subjugate the agenda of nature’s current constitution to it.  The so-called natural law advocates are unnatural, indeed anti-natural, if by “natural” we mean “nature as it ought to be and used to be,” and not “nature as it is.”
         If unnatural nature as it now is “teaches” anything, it “teaches” serial marriage and abandonment, not simply monogamy.  It “teaches” us to devour our young, not just to nurture them.
         If you want to know real right and real wrong -- and you should -- then you need to go to God’s Word, not to the current workings of a cursed and therefore unnatural natural order or to the self-aggrandizing and twisted mental gymnastics of unnatural lawyers.    

8 comments:

David L. Russell said...

Mike, does Romans Chapter One address natural law?

Dr. Michael Bauman said...

Dave, In my view, it does, and I think it says what I say -- though of course that's debatable. The NT says that the world groans under the curse and that we fallen human beings do things contrary to nature (both as it is and as it ought to be).

Dr. Michael Bauman said...

Dave, For clarity's sake, when I say Rom 1 talks about it, I mean it does so by implication more than it does directly.

David L. Russell said...

Mike, thanks for the response. I was thinking about the following verses from Romans 1 which speak of nature directly.

26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions: for their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due. (American Revised Standard)

These verses seem fairly direct, as opposed to indirect, do they not?

Dr. Michael Bauman said...

I see your point, Dave. They are direct.

As I read them at the moment, and apply them to our current situation, they refer to the perverse assertions one often hears that homosexuality is natural, that some folks are born that way. I disagree. But even if so, even if it is natural to some, that would be no justification, because what is natural now is not what is truly natural.

David L. Russell said...

I see your point. I always follow the dots with these kinds of issues, and reason this way:

male reproductive organs = instruments that deliver reproductive, genetic material that has the potential of propagating life once in union with an egg produced by a female ovary.

rectum = The last six to eight inches of the colon that stores bacterial and disease-filled waste material until it leaves the body through the anus. It is a waste, death-filled delivery system......... aka, the poop shoot.

Sorry to be so crude, but I am sick and tired of pro-gay plastic bananas in our society attempting to normalize this behavior.

True natural law will always win. sperm + egg = life; male organ in male rectum = death. You tell me what makes more sense according to nature.


Dr. Michael Bauman said...

Dave,
You're right: true natural law does win. I agree. And while nature is under a curse and is not what it once was, I have no indication that in its original condition the anus was intended to function as a sex organ any more than was, say, the ear or the armpit. That some folks have become intent on using things in that way is no obvious indication of the natural order.

David L. Russell said...

Well put Michael. Now we can put an END to this part of the conversation.