Your Body is You

Circuit Diagrams, Roman Ruins and Books
On a recent holiday in France, I spent many happy hours sight seeing, drawing circuit diagrams and reading.

2000 year old Pont du Gard

The ancient city of Nimes is home to the best preserved Roman arena in the world. It was supplied with water from an aqueduct whose most famous bridge is the Pont du Guard. A most stunning 2000 year old water bridge.

2000 year old Nimes Arena

My electric go-cart (for the kids, not for me - not yet) needed a complete overhaul electronically, so I redesigned the circuit. Nothing complex, but relaxing to the mind.

Books
Then there were the books... a biography of Billy Graham, a book about thermodynamics... and one in particular. It's been on my shelf for a while now, so time to read it. Written by an American Christian by the name of Nancy Pearcy, it is called "Love Thy Body."

Nancy tries to explain why our western society believes that we can kill babies in the womb and is willing to kill the aged, why it believes that you can choose your sexual and gender identity at will, and why it approves of homosexual behaviour.

She finds all these modern practices stem back to a false view of the person, of who we are - a false anthropology if you like big words.

Two-part People
Nancy explains how all of these modern practices and beliefs stem from a single source: a belief that there is a division between the body and the self. Modern culture has divided the body and the self into two different things. The body, since it is the product of evolutionary processes is just a bit of matter with no meaning - or value for that matter, since it has not been created by God.  The self, or mind, or whatever you want to call it, has nothing to do with the body (apart from being housed in the material brain) and can decide and choose whatever it wishes to do with the body. It is not really connected in any meaningful way to the body.

This of course is a weird belief - to say that we are two part people whose different parts are completely disconnected from each other. But it is the foundation of all the tragic,  false and enslaving beliefs and practises of our day.

Take abortion and euthanasia. If the body is the product of evolution, then the body has no value on its own. Until it has some imposed attributes - which we ourselves make up - then we can treat it like a scab or a wart or placenta or any other disposable biological matter.

Take gender. Why pay any attention to your meaningless and worthless body? You decide what gender you want (today).

Take sexual desires. What does your (disembodied self) want? Allow your feelings to dictate your sexual behaviour, don't allow your worthless and meaningless sexed-male-or-female-at-birth body influence that decision. Ignore the stunning - and scientific - fact that a man's body is designed for a woman's body and visa versa.

Love Thy Body
At root of all these tragic modern beliefs and practises is a very low view of the human body, which is the inevitable consequence of evolutionary theory. A very similar low view of the body reigned in the 1st century Graeco-Roman world - though for other reasons.

The Christian view is so wonderfully liberating. It treats the body with great seriousness as a creation of God - and a very good one at that. It also teaches that we can learn from our bodies, though they are fallen. Creation speaks. Since everything God made is imbibed with reason and purpose we can work out from the body what we are and how we are supposed to behave. Instead of imposing our fallen desires on our fearfully-made bodies, we should look at and listen to our bodies. What do they say about sex, gender and roles?

We ought to regard our minds and bodies as one entity which should not be divided from one another, should not be pitted against one another, though the fall of man has tried to divide the two.

Since bodily life unmistakably begins at conception, we should not abort an unborn child. Since life continues until we die, we should not take life. Since our sexed bodies tell us that men and women are different from one another, we should not seek to to confuse gender. And since those same bodies tell us that a woman's body is designed for a man's body in sexual union, we should follow the evidence, reject homosexual behaviour and advocate monogamous heterosexual marriage.

We need to direct our feelings in the path of the evidence of our bodies. We need to love our bodies more.

This is a wonderful book to read. It is so positive. It shows how much better, how much more scientific, how much more satisfying is the Christan worldview over the secular one.

It shows that when Jesus sets us free from the lies of our culture, we really become free indeed.