Weekend Insights – The First Stone and much more

Welcome back to Weekend Insights, your LCI “President’s Corner” of miscellaneous articles, events, books, vids, and whatever else I’m thinking about…

First off, this week we officially launched LCI’s new book Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions. Launch week Kindle price is $2.99 for now, but that price goes up soon, and the paperback is $11.99. It’s awesome, get it, end of story.

Doug and Kerry were recently on the Godarchy Podcast with Mike Maharrey to talk about Faith Seeking Freedom. Go listen and subscribe, Mike is super-cool.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found with more time at home this year that I’m branching out and learning some new things on the side of my regular work and reading. Coursera has been a pretty valuable resource here and there are currently a LOT of courses you can sign up for and get the “official certificate” of completion for free. Check out the details here.

Book I’m reading: It Is Not Lawful For Me To Fight by Jean-Michel Hornus. My bud Jamin Hubner turned me on to this book and it is essentially an even better version of J.C. Cadoux’s Early Christian Attitude to War. But unlike Cadoux’s book, which is in the public domain and can be freely downloaded at the OLL., Hornus’ book is either really expensive or tough to find at all.  Wipf & Stock reprinted it in 2009, but it carries a pretty high price. I’m fortunate I got an early edition on the cheap (even if it’s a beaten up library copy). Oh, and spoiler alert, early Christians were anti-violence. They’d be ashamed to see how modern Christians so easily take up arms for the state.

Classic article to revisit: The First Stone by Rene Girard. Trust me, this one will blow you away. I really should feature this as a reprinted article sometime, but for today just check it out elsewhere. You won’t regret it. Digest it slowly.

C.S. Lewis once coined a kind of logical fallacy “Bulverism” and he describes it in God In The Dock, which is a collection of Lewis’ essays on a wide variety of topics. This recent article has some interesting insights on the topic as well.

Math is fun, but making math errors is not fun. Avoid common probability errors like the plague. This will also help you to interpret statistics more readily. For science!

I had a couple of questions come in from a reader that are worth sharing…

What is the Christian libertarian position on whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children?

So here’s the deal… The huge problem here is that the government has taken up the power to determine what happens to children, period. We know that government does a terrible job of taking care of kids already, evidenced by the greater incidence of care problems and even child abuse in their wards than privately managed equivalents. In the absence of the government dealing with adoption in general, private organizations would step up and do even more, and they could set their own criteria for who should get to adopt the kids under their care. Therefore, if that org wouldn’t want to allow a gay couple to adopt, that would be their prerogative.

However, I think it is worth noting that under the current regime of statist control of children, I would still rather have a gay couple be able to adopt than allow for children to remain under that state control for any additional time. This seems obvious to me.

What is the Christian libertarian position on initiatives that promote LGBT ideas to children (for example, drag queen storyhours in kindergarten and etc.)?

The libertarian position, first of all, is that the government shouldn’t operate schools in the first place. But in general, I think our hope for any public schooling scenario is that ideological positions such as this are not under the rubric of what should be taught, period. I also don’t want the government taking upon itself the teaching of theology either. So as a “second best” position, eliminate as much of this as possible in any school.

Cheers, and have a great week!

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