Bill O’Reilly Bloviates Against Bible Thumpers
Bill O’Reilly stepped in it the other day when he called those in opposition to homosexual marriage and who use the Bible to make their case Bible Thumpers. This is typical of O’Reilly. Christians who oppose same-sex sex don’t just “thump the Bible.” Do Christians just “thump the Bible” when they argue that murder, rape, incest, stealing, and other crimes are also found in the Bible?
I suspect that O’Reilly would argue that everybody knows those behaviors are crimes. Everybody? How does anybody know? Where is it written other than in our nation’s law books? These “crimes” certainly can’t be observed in nature. Animals don’t commit crimes.
These laws are not written on our DNA, and even if they were, who or what says that they are crimes?
Here’s part of the exchange he had with Megyn Kelly on Fox News:
Megyn Kelly: What I’m saying is that when you ask — for example, I had an interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. What is it about calling a marriage — calling a gay union a marriage that offends you. How does it hurt a traditional, or a heterosexual marriage? And I didn’t hear anything articulated that was particularly persuasive. What people go back to —
Bill O’Reilly: … I agree with you a 100-percent. . . . The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals. That’s where the compelling argument is. “We’re Americans. We just want to be treated like everybody else. That’s a compelling argument. And to deny that, you’ve got to have a very strong argument on the other side. And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of anti-homosexual marriage advocates don’t know how to argue their case. The first question I would ask is: “Do you believe in moral absolutes?” If a person says no, I would then ask, “Then why are you supporting homosexual marriage as a moral issue if there are no moral absolutes? If a person says yes, I would then ask, “What is the basis of morality?”
The standard answers are social consensus, common sense, and more recently, shifting attitudes of public opinion. None of these are what could be called absolutist positions.
Homosexuals have hitched their wagon to the civil rights engine. Many Blacks resent it since civil rights is not a sex act.
Thomas Sowell writes that analogies that compare a ban on homosexual marriage to “interracial marriage are bogus. Race is not part of the definition of marriage. A ban on interracial marriage is a ban on the same actions otherwise permitted, because of the race of the particular people involved. It is a discrimination against people, not actions.”
Almost nobody asks the moral question. They’re afraid to, and yet there is no other way to argue for or against any behavior. People like Bill O’Reilly live off moral capital that has been stored up by people who for centuries have appealed to the Bible.
The Bible built America. This is not to say that everybody who sent to the Bible to make a moral argument was right. The same can be said for any appeal to authority. It’s true that slavery was supported by the Bible. And it’s also true that slavery was denounced by the Bible. Who was right? A study of the Bible will show that biblical slavery deals with payments of debt. The type of slavery practiced in England and the United States is specifically condemned. It carries the death penalty. Kidnapping is a crime punishable by death: “He who kidnaps a man, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall surely be put to death” (Ex. 21:16).
People disagree on what the Constitution says and means. Does this mean that the Constitution should no longer be appealed to as our nation’s civil authority?
Darwinism killed any possibility that there can be a fixed moral worldview. Even Natural Law has been logically decimated. How can there be a fixed Natural Law derived from nature when nature is evolving?
O’Reilly has one foot in his Roman Catholic upbringing and one foot firmly planted in the pragmatic worldview of secularism.
Where is the moral line now going to be drawn and why? Who says there is even a moral line to be drawn? Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC) said it this way: “Everything changes and nothing remains still . . . and . . . you cannot step twice into the same stream.”
It seems that no one is talking morality except the homosexuals and their supporters about how it’s immoral not to support people of the same sex who engage in a sexual relationship and call it marriage. Why marriage? Why not rule that marriage is a social construct rooted in religion and has a moral component to it that excluded homosexuality.
It makes no sense unless the goal is to reduce the Christian worldview to rubble. If that ever happens, moral anarchy will reign, and not even Bill O’Reilly will be able to hide from its consequences.