Deregulate marriage!

Posted by Allen Lewis

In 2005 the State of Texas Constitution was amended in an effort to ban gay marriage and same-sex civil unions. Article 1, Section 32 of the Texas Constitution reads:

Sec. 32.
(a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.
(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Former attorney, US Senate candidate and current candidate for Texas Attorney General Barbara Ann Radnofsky believes that subsection b may actually ban all marriage in Texas.

Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages.

She calls it a "massive mistake" and blames the current attorney general, Republican Greg Abbott, for allowing the language to become part of the Texas Constitution. Radnofsky called on Abbott to acknowledge the wording as an error and consider an apology. She also said that another constitutional amendment may be necessary to reverse the problem.

In my view, this would be glorious news for everybody that is truly concerned about the sanctity of marriage. The government has no moral right to regulate marriage. Citizens should not have to pay the state for a license granting the right to enter into any type of contract, marriage included. We should not have to ask the state's permission to get married. The government should not be involved in marriage in any way whatsoever.

The institution of marriage has been irreversibly harmed in this country, but it's not for the reasons commonly cited by many conservatives. The state has taken what should be a sacred contract between two people - something that has historically been sanctioned by a religious authority - and made it the domain of the government.

By placing marriage (or more succinctly, the right to marry) in the domain of the law, our government has served only to perpetuate the insulting notion that the state should regulate the most personal of choices in our lives. We should deregulate marriage immediately.

Who Made God?

Posted by Friar Rick.

Who Made God?

It is a question often asked by children but seldom asked by adults. It is a good question, nonetheless, for it presumes something which I would like to discuss in this post. What it presumes is known as causality or what you and I know intuitively as cause and effect.

How and why are questions we have been asking since we were old enough to speak. The very questions themselves demonstrate this intuitive knowledge of cause and effect within us. There is a reason for everything, and just as there is a reason for everything there is also a reason for everything that is . . . to be.

We know this both intuitively and by our experience. Every effect must have a sufficient cause. Things do not happen for no reason. Effects do not spontaneously come into being. There is a cause. How did this milk get on the table? It was spilled when a glass was knocked over. How did the glass get knocked over? It was knocked over by Jimmy's elbow when he was reaching for the mashed potatoes. How did the milk get in the glass? It was poured there by mom. Where did she get it? She got it from the gallon jug which was in the refrigerator. How did the jug get into the refrigerator? Dad brought it home from the store and put it there . . . and so on ad infinitum.

How long could we play that game? How far back does our chain of cause and effect go? That is the question at hand and the answer to that question is a valid, effective, and reasonable argument for the existence of God.

For the universe to exist there must be a sufficient cause outside of that universe to account for its existence.

Either that or you must confess that there is an infinite chain of cause and effect, that we could play our little game for eternity and never come to a first cause. But would that be logical? Theists contend that it is not and here is why.

I pose the question to those who might contend that there is no first cause, that our chain of cause and effect goes infinitely into the past. What caused that chain of events? Something did. An infinite series with no beginning involves a contradiction. It goes against the assumption that allows for the existence of the chain in the first place, to wit for every effect there is a cause.

We have a universe. That universe consists of matter and energy. It consists of space and it consists of time. What caused those?

While science cannot answer that, philosophy says that something must have caused them or they could not be.

And that is where it stands. Either you believe that matter is eternal, that it has always been, for it cannot have spontaneously generated, or you believe that there is an extramundane cause that brought it into being. The same for energy, time, space, and life, for none of those things can be explained as having been spontaneously generated without a cause.

An infinite chain of cause and effect is a logical absurdity. If a chain of three or four events cannot exist without a sufficient cause then no chain of events can exist without a sufficient cause, even if it is a chain of a million or a billion or a trillion events. As Charles Hodge put it,

"Nothing multiplied by infinity is nothing still. If we do not find the cause of our existence in ourselves, nor our parents in themselves, nor their progenitors in themselves, going back ad infinitum is only adding nothing to nothing. What the mind demands is a sufficient cause, and no approach to it is made by going back indefinitely from one effect to another. We are forced, therefore, by the laws of our rational nature, to assume the existence of a self-sufficient cause, i.e., a Being endued with power adequate to produce this ever-changing phenomenal world. In all ages thinking men have been forced to this conclusion. . . . The theistical argument is, that if everything in the world be contingent, this eternal and necessary Being must be an extramundane First Cause."

Which brings us back to our original question. Who made God? And the answer to that question is that no one did, for he is the uncaused First Cause. Without him nothing else in the universe makes sense. Without his existence, nothing else can exist. While everything in our universe is contingent, he is the Something standing outside that universe which is self-existent and contingent on nothing else.