I am Kenyan, a country in Africa. Tim is assuming there is a homogeneity in African culture and that "Africans" (whatever he means by that) would applaud that story. In Kenya, we had a post election Violence in 2007-08 that resulted in tribal wars. The stories that came from that time are horrendous and no one who was sexually assaulted during that period would say that consent is a western sensibility or that refusing to marry your rapist is a western sensibility. Tim is a rape apologist and he should know that.
I can take any book on spiritual values and insights and still find the answers, excuses, justify, defend what apologists use from the bible. Some people are so easily coerced into believing the status quo or dogma. They're afraid to look at reason to get at the truth.
I'm assuming Tim is male, of course. Let's hear from women in his culture. There are countless testimonies given to UN investigators during war crimes tribunals and truth and reconciliation commission proceedings that demonstrate that Tim's argument is patently false.
Frankly, on this one I think that Tim was right and Randal is wrong. What Randal doesn't seem to understand is that modern Western society is different in that it puts all the emphasis on individual freedom and individual rights. So, according to his modern Western thinking, in order for a sexual relationship to be legitimate, it has to be consensual. What he overlooks is that in many human societies, both past an present, you had arranged marriages, in some cases involving complex negotiations between the families involved. So it wasn't a mere matter of being swept off your feet by some sexy charmer, and then getting divorced five years later the way we do it in modern Western society. So is this moral relativism? Sort of yes and no. The Bible does lay down certain moral principles involving sex and marriage, basically underscoring the sanctity of the marriage relationship itself. But it recognizes that how one enters into a marriage may vary from culture to culture. What is the norm for Canada may not be the norm for Nigeria. But there is no biblical principle that states that the relationship must be consensual, and so Tim is right: Randal is imposing his modern Canadian values on the Bible and judging God according to Canadian law.
So under your view God allows different ethics depending on the culture. That's moral relativism (which was Randal's point). Either love, consent, and freedom are objectively good aspects of marriage that God favors and encourages regardless of the culture (Randal's view), or what God favors and cares about is relative to a given culture at a given time (which you're advocating for). The question is what's more important to you: a consistent view of God as a moral agent, or a perfectly consistent view of scripture? I'd gladly sacrifice the latter for the former.
This is precisely why the morality of secular humanism is superior to that of Christianity. And this is not a purely Western thing. Go read all the UN documents on human rights.
@@Isaac_L.. Dt. 24:1-4 lays out a procedure for divorce. But when Jesus was asked about this said that "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." (Matt. 19:8: NKJV). In other words, the Old Testament law, to an extent, accommodated ancient social custom. But Jesus instead went back to the original creation account in Genesis which indicates that marriage is supposed to be a permanent, binding union between a man and a woman (vv. 4-6). Based on the modern Western values espoused by Randal, however, we now have no-fault divorce. So do we go by the teachings of Christ or modern US and Canadian law?
_"But it recognizes that how one enters into a marriage may vary from culture to culture."_ This is nonsense. The Bible simply "recognizes" marriage as society defined it at the time the various authors wrote about it -- in a tribal Iron Age culture and the Romano-Greek world of the first century C.E. By your logic, it's also perfectly moral and fine for women to be considered property to be passed from father to husband with absolutely no rights to determine her own future before or within her marriage because that's how culture defined the role of women for the vast majority of history. So you can chain your wives to the kitchen stove, Christian men, and rejoice, for the Bible says it is moral and just!!!! 🤡🤡
@@kjaime7030 "Secular humanism" is a contradiction of terms. According to Christian teaching, we were created by God in HIs image and told to have dominion over nature. That's what makes us "human." According to secular thought, however, we evolved from lower forms of life and are essentially animals. And where to rights come from? The US Declaration of Independence states that all humans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." which modern secular Americans no longer believe. But where do rights come from, and what makes them "unalienable"?
