Centuries ago, when I went to the University of Wyoming, there were no tables for people advocating things in the Student Union. The Union was smaller than, and frankly we mostly just passed through it on the way to somewhere else. The bookstore was in the Union, but it was actually diagonally across from the enormous book store that is now in the Union. Current students would be shocked to see how small the union was.
On rare occasions something might happen in the union, but it would actually have to be held somewhere else in one of the various rooms in the building. I recall going to an international students bake sale there, for instance. And I saw the film Risky Business with a girlfriend in the ballroom once, so they obviously showed movies there on occasion.
But mostly we just passed through it on the way from the lower campus to the upper campus.
Now the much expanded union has tables in it, and various organizations will set up a display. The times I've been in there, and I still get down to UW on occasion, it's been student organizations of one kind or another. Most people seem to pass through ignoring them, which is predictable.
Apparently, however, groups from outside the university are allowed to set up there as well.
I frankly don't know what I think about it, but I don't think I like it in general. This post, however, isn't really about that, but about one person whose been maintaining a booth there.
That person is the minister of a certain protestant church in Laramie. I know where the church is, as I once had a friend who lived near there. Oddly enough, it's not a church that I've ever posted a photo of at our Churches of the West blog.
This has hit the press as the minister put up, amongst other things, a large at a booth he maintains in the Student Union which stated:
God created male and female
"_________________" is a Man.
Now, obviously, the "________________" had the name of a student on it.
So, apparently, the minister sought to point out that a student who apparently is in some aspect of the current "transgender" spectrum, for lack of a better way to put it, is a man, as he was born male.
Which brings us to this. Rev. Schmidt (okay, I named him) is correct, "___________" is in fact a man. And, yes, God created us male and female.
And this is just about the worst way to go about arguing in opposition to the transgender trend there is. Schmidt is hurting himself, his cause, science, and Christianity in general.
Regarding science and Christianity, I'll note right away that Rev. Schmidt's table makes it clear that he's from that non-Apostolic branch of Christianity which is oddly opposed to science to start with. Apostolic Christians endorse science, and take the position that science and Faith can always be reconciled, and science serves to illuminate the grandeur of God's creation. We don't oppose, for example, the theory (and at this point it's a theory in name only, it's actually a fact) of evolution. Schmidt does, based on one of the books on his table.
Schmidt's table was adorned with books taking on all sorts of things in the photos, including taking on Anthony Fauci and, as noted, evolution. I'm pretty sure, based on that, that Schmidt would be one of the protestants who regard Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which make up the overwhelming number of Christians on Earth, in horror or at least disdain.
I'll get back to that in a moment, but I mention it here as having a booth in a hall that tells people that something is contrary to a religious tenant works fine if you are engaging in a debate with fellow Christians. So, for example, if this Reformed Baptists minister seeks to take on American Episcopalians, that argument makes sense, although it certainly could be done in a more articulate fashion. But if you are engaging the public at large, and not knowing who your audience is, that argument is going to fall flat and with quite a few, actually push them away from Christianity, to the extent that objecting to the reality of the fossil record and feeling that Anthony Fauci is a bad guy isn't already achieving that.
So all it really serves to do is to make a guy who is tainting Christianity feel like he's advancing it when he's not.
Which takes us to St. Paul.
Chances are that Rev. Schmidt like St. Paul and thinks St. Paul would be in his corner here. St. Paul was a tough guy, and he had a lot to say about improper sexual conduct, including homosexuality and men dressing like women. St. Paul makes people today squirm and they avoid him. One lesbian minister here in Casper actually dismissed St. Paul entirely on these matters in a radio interview, saying "well that's just St. Paul's opinion".
That's not the way that Paul presented it. No, not at all.
But consider this:
Paul’s Speech at the Areopagus.
Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said:
“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.
He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, “We should like to hear you on this some other time.”
And so Paul left them.
But some did join him, and became believers. Among them were Dionysius, a member of the Court of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
Ch. 17, Acts of the Apostles.
Now, that's interesting. Paul entered a new area, full of non-believers who had never even heard of Christ, and what did he say:
“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
Well, he didn't do what Rev. Schmidt is doing. He didn't go in and insult the unbelievers and assume they knew the entirety of the Christian message and point fingers at individuals ones of them, a la John Calvin. No, he engaged them on common ground.
Here the common ground is science. But chances are that Rev. Schmidt can't engage there.
The science of transgenderism is that its not supported by the science. A person's gender is actually present in the DNA of every single cell of their body. Humans, like all mammals, are male and female, and nothing else, right down to every single cell in your body. Surgery and drugs aside, that remains the case. It cannot be changed.
And hence our great grandmother and grandfather to the nth degree, the Morganucodon again. Yes, male and female we were created, but not 4,000 years ago, but millions of years ago. As we noted when we brought our cute little dinosaur egg eating progenitor up before:
The way it really works, of course, with mammals, which we are, is described here in Wikipedia:
Anyhow, we've noted this story, and this science, before:
So there's the reality of it, which can be brought up in a scientific way to students who, at the end of the day, are just that. Scientifically, the gender is baked in the cake and beyond actual changability. All the genetic behavior that goes along with that is baked in too. Therefore, the current transgender trend and story, which is largely confined to adolescent females who are in the ADHD scale, and who are white and from affluent families, is a sociology and psychological trend, not a biological one. A person need not bring up God at all in this discussion.
Indeed, the evidence there is distressing in the extreme. As noted, transgenderism is most female, not male. It's mostly white, not black or Hispanic. It's mostly in well-to-do sections of society, and it exhibits itself mostly amongst those female adolescents who have ADHD or something on "the spectrum". It's appeared suddenly in White Europeans and European Americans as once one member of a clique claims it, it tends to rapidly spread in that clique. Most of the members of the demographic cohort, moreover, have tended to have been exposed to a fair amount of pornography
And hence the most logical explanation of its spread. It's spreading in a wealthy European culture. Starting in the 1960s, we started to jettison the culture itself, leaving it without moorings, as we became wealthier. Pornographers, including Hugh Hefner, were prosecuted for their actions as late as the 1970s, but that's now stopped completely, save below the age line of 18. We've steeped children in it, and earlier this past week, a news story broke of a school official somewhere exposing grade school children to implements of what would have been regarded as deviant behaviors not long ago. Indeed, the recent series on Playboy magazine revealed that when the young women working for Playboy clubs were exposed to the same behavior as part of after work gatherings, they were traumatized, so rare and so disgusting was it regarded as being.
In short, what the young females in the category are doing, psychologically, is fleeing from the role of female in regard to sex. They're not seeking to really change gender, they're seeking to opt out of what they think is the universal adult norm. They don't want to engage in endless sex as an object, they don't want things shoved up their butt, and the like.
Who can blame them?
This doesn't cover all of this, of course, and it doesn't explain sexual dysmorphia as to males, . . exactly. But what it does do is this. Scientifically, transgenderism isn't a thing. So what we're seeing is something else that's not of biological origin.
And not once did we have to mention religion in order to engage in that discussion, now, did we?
Of course, what we did have to do is to reference evolution and biology, and in doing that we're referencing a genetic evolution that's 210,000,000 years old, long before our species, which is at least 250,000 years old, and probably twice that old, came about. And that isn't going to be something a fellow who probably thinks the world is 5,000 years old and that evolution is some conspiracy by scientists is going to be keen on. So instead, he's taken to the campus and is reading from the Bible.
St. Paul, in his letters, wrote a lot about Christian conduct and what barred a person from the doors of Heaven. But he was writing to Christians when he did. Going into Areopagus, he complimented them on their religious faith, non Christians and even non Jews that they were.
You students, I see that in every respect you are very scientific.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your buildings, I even discovered an some dedicated to biology.
Of course, you have to grasp that you aren't speaking to your own audience in the first place. And you can't reject vast tracks of reality in order to proclaim other aspects of it either, and be convincing. And in an era in which resources are so freely available, you might have to go back and take a look at what those early Christians were doing, including St. Paul, a Bishop in the Catholic Church.
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