A reductio on an article that ran in a Reformed Denominational magazine. As originally published it found the word “homosexuality,” or “gay” wherever you find the word Necrophilia in my reductio.
by Name withheld
February 21, 2014 — I am a Christian. I was born and raised in a Reformed Church and educated in its schools from kindergarten through college. I am also a Necrophiliac. These two characteristics define my life more than anything else: more than my education, career, marital status, or the number of children I may have.
As a Necrophiliac Christian, I am an oxymoron to many.
I do not easily embrace myself as a necrophiliac man. I’ve only come to do that after many years of wrestling with the Scriptures, with God, with myself. I sought counsel from pastors and Christian therapists, tried ex-necrophiliacs for Jesus ministries and every reparative therapy program I could find. I begged God to change me and in despair attempted suicide. I studied every angle of the questions “How do I become ‘not necrophiliac’?” and “What must I do to love alive people?” In my study of Scripture, I wrestled with the passages interpreted to condemn Necrophiliac behavior, with creation order, the nature of sin, and the process of sanctification. And I prayed. My sexual orientation did not change.
Like every other Necrophiliac person in my Reformed denomination, I am mindful of my church’s understanding of Necrophilia. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is a cliché implying that I am sin personified. Tony Campolo has observed that Jesus says the opposite: “Love the sinner and hate your own sin. And after you get rid of the sin in your own life, then you can begin talking about the sin in your brother or sister’s life.” Obviously therefore it is wrong for any sinner to denounce necrophilia as aberrant. I wish the Church would learn that. After all, the Church is full of sinners just like me. Our sins may vary but since we are all sinners no one should be allowed to denounce another person’s “sin.” (Unless of course we are denouncing the sinners who denounce other people’s sins or when we are denouncing Necro-phobia.)
Meanwhile, where have all the necrophiliac sons and daughters of your church gone? Many—I dare say most—have left your churches and your hometowns. Their church home became unsafe when they—like me—learned the pastor’s response to people like us.
It may surprise you that there is a deep spiritual longing within my necrophiliac friends, a longing and a struggle to reconcile “Jesus loves me, this I know” with an attribute that many in the church consider an abomination. My friends grew up loving God—that has not changed. But as a result of being rejected, many have given up on the church, and, tragically, on God.
The culture has is sure to change. Necrophiliac marriage is sure to become legal in Canada and in some states. The U.S. Supreme Court will one day surely strike down any laws forbidding necrophilia. The Boy Scouts of America one day will have special merit badges for sharing a sleeping bag with the dead. I foresee the day when celebrities, athletes, and business leaders will “come out.”
The church seems unprepared to respond to these situations legally and with moral authority. How do congregations pick up the pieces of shattered families after the failure of mixed-orientation marriages of necrophiliac people who enter into a heterosexual marriage, believing that it would make them acceptable to God and the church? How do they welcome necrophiliac couples who attend services or who wish to be married in the church?
My understanding of the Scriptures has changed dramatically over the years. If “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, I was going insane seeking “freedom” from being a necrophiliac. Jesus confronted me with the words “I have come to give life and life abundant” (John 10:10). These words trumped “abomination theology.”
Coming out has not been easy—for me or for my family. But it has brought life.
Isn’t it time for the church to welcome back its necrophiliac sons and daughters, along with their spouses and children? Isn’t it time to encourage everyone to know the love of God for each and every one of his children?
There actually exist Hindu ascetics who take the flesh-despising hyper-spiritual ideology to its logical conclusion. Spirit is everything and body just a contemptible prison to these Eastern Gnostics, and they demonstrate it with their necrophiliacal rituals.
One might call it “the Ed Gein school of piety”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aghori
“The Aghori are known to engage in post-mortem rituals. They often dwell in charnel grounds, have been witnessed smearing cremation ashes on their bodies, and have been known to use bones from human corpses for crafting skull bowls (which Shiva and other Hindu deities are often iconically depicted holding or using) and jewelry.
…
Aghoris are devotees of Shiva manifested as Bhairava,[5] are monists who seek moksha from the cycle of reincarnation or saṃsāra. This freedom is a realization of the self’s identity with the absolute. Because of this monistic doctrine, the Aghoris maintain that all opposites are ultimately illusory. The purpose of embracing pollution and degradation through various customs is the realization of non-duality (advaita) through transcending social taboos, attaining what is essentially an altered state of consciousness and perceiving the illusory nature of all conventional categories.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapalika
“Unlike the respectable Brahmin householder of the Shaiva Siddhanta, the Kāpālika ascetic imitated his ferocious deity, and covered himself in the ashes from the cremation ground, and propitated his gods with the impure substances of blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids from intercourse unconstrained by caste restrictions.[1] The Kāpālikas thus flaunted impurity rules and went against Vedic injunctions.[1]
…
Dyczkowski (1988: p. 26) relates how Kṛṣṇa Miśra casts the character of a kapalika in his play, the Prabodhacandrodaya and quotes verbatim a source that renders the creed of this character into English thus:
“My charming ornaments are made from garlands of human skulls.” says the Kāpālika, “I dwell in the cremation ground and eat my food from a human skull. I view the world alternately as separate from God (Īśvara) and one with Him, through the eyes that are made clear with the ointment of yoga… We (Kāpālikas) offer oblations of human flesh mixed with brains, entrails and marrow. We break our fast by drinking liquor (surā) from the skull of a Brahmin. At that time the god Mahābhairava should be worshipped with offerings of awe-inspiring human sacrifices from whose severed throats blood flows in currents.[4]”
Ed Gein school of piety.
ROFLMAO
It seems that there is hardly any sin that fallen humans could not turn into a virtue in their own mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aghori#Symbols
“If an aghori uses a corpse as part of his ritual worship, the corpse upon which he meditates, it is a symbol of his own body, and the corpse-devouring ritual is a symbol of the transcendence of his lower self and a realization of the greater, all pervading Self that is universal consciousness.”
Sodomy also can be a sacred rite in many sects, past and present. (Like in the religion of those Canaanites whom God commanded Israelites to destroy.)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JH12Ak04.html
“Islam could not extirpate a pederastic culture including virtually all the leading poets of the high Middle Ages except by suppressing the Sufi cults. There were a number of reasons that both the Sunni and Shia mainstream persecuted Sufism, but a prominent one was the cited practice called “contemplation of the beardless” in which the dervish sought communion with the eternal by immersing himself in the beauty of adolescent boys.”
R.J. Rushdoony explained the Gnostic mentality that see-saws between hedonism and ascetism thus:
“The hippy, in his sexuality, expresses contempt for the body, either by treating sexual acts as of no account in casual promiscuity, or by a bored denial of sex. There is far more abstention from sex among hippies than is generally recognized. Either in abstention or in casual, unemotional promiscuity, it is a contempt of the flesh which is manifested.”
https://bible.org/article/rushdoony-neoplatonism-and-biblical-view-sex
I believe that only by being aware of grotesque stuff like this can we understand the repugnance that the early Protestant Reformers felt towards “monkery”:
http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-1-01.htm
“In early Buddhism, as in medieval Christian culture, the human body as such, but in particular the female body, was despised as a dirty and inferior thing, as something highly imperfect, that was only superficially beautiful and attractive. In order to meditate upon the transience of all being, the monks, in a widespread exercise, imagined a naked woman. This so-called “analytic meditation” began with a “perfect” and beautiful body, and transformed this step by step into an old, diseased, and dying one, to end the exercise by picturing a rotting and stinking corpse. The female body, as the absolute Other, was meditatively murdered and dismembered as a symbol of the despised world of the senses. Sexual fascination and the irritations of murderous violence are produced by such monastic practices. We return later to historical examples in which monks carried out the dismemberment of women’s bodies in reality.
There are startling examples in the literature which show how women self-destructively internalized this denigration of their own bodies. “The female novice should hate her impure body like a jail in which she is imprisoned, like a cesspool into which she has fallen”, demands an abbess of young nuns. (Faure, 1994, p. 29)”
C.S. Lewis pointed out in his “Screwtape Letters” how cunning devils can use the slighting of physical matters (starting with little things like the bodily position in prayer) as a way of tricking people to spiritual laziness:
http://pasx.5u.com/upload/Lewis,%20C%20S%20-%20The%20Screwtape%20Letters.html#4
“One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray “with moving lips and bended knees” but merely “composed his spirit to love” and indulged “a sense of supplication”. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
A person who truly learns to consider crudely physical matters as irrelevant, or something beneath a spiritual person, can soon indeed wonder what difference it really makes if one pokes a female vagina or male anus with his penis. An eisegesis of Galatians 3:28 can help people reach that conclusion: “there is neither male nor female…”
I would be quite hopeless concerning the state of modern Christians, observing the inane sentiments of that article, if I did not remind myself that sinful humans have always been able to turn just about any sin into a supposedly good thing. And especially so if they resort to the dark mysteries of Antinomianism – “continuing in sin, that grace may abound” (Romans 6:1) and “turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness” (Jude 1:4).
I believe this can give us a clue what kind of ideas those shady Gnostic cultists that 2 Peter 2 and Epistle of Jude so fiercely denounced were trying to smuggle into the young Christian church:
http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-1-04.htm
“As a tantric saying puts it, “What binds the fool, liberates the wise” (Dasgupta, 1974, p. 187), and another, more drastic passage emphasizes that, “the same deed for which a normal mortal would burn for a hundred million eons, through this same act an initiated yogi attains enlightenment” (Eliade, 1985, p. 272). According to this, every ritual is designed to catapult the initiate into a state beyond good and evil.
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The third — somewhat ad hoc, but nonetheless frequent — justification for the “transgressions” of the Vajrayana consists in the Bodhisattva vow of Mahayana Buddhism, which requires that one aid and assist every creature until it attains enlightenment. Amazingly, this pious purpose can render holy the most evil means. “If”, we can read in one of the tantras, “for the good of all living beings or on account of the Buddha’s teaching one should slay living beings, one is untouched by sin. … If for the good of living beings or from attachment for the Buddha’s interest, one seizes the wealth of others, one is not touched by sin”, and so forth (Snellgrove, 1987, vol. 1, p. 176).”
Posted a link to your blog on the Banner discussion thread. It was deleted. Can’t say I am surprised.
I get that a great deal Kirk. It’s called refusal to post rebuttals that can not be rebutted.