I have awakened early this morning triggered, I suppose, by a FB post a long time friend posted yesterday in which he has been developing a manifesto of his life as a Southern Baptist. I find that worthy of people that have time on their hands and a will to put to words on a screen what their heart is saying to them. The last thing I read before going to bed was a post in this manifesto on use of alcohol using well chosen words to, in essence, justify the use of liquor and wine for Christians while exempting the "sons and daughters" (of which I am one) of family alcoholics due to the propensity for they themselves to go down that same pathway. As I rolled around my bed last night and into three or four dream-driven naps, each of the episodes of dreams took me back to far too many awful memories and events affected by said alcohol. As I have stated many, many times, I HATE ALCOHOL.
So in getting up early on this still dark and very cold morning in NE Ohio, I went back and reread my friend's post and then my post pushing back against the baseline post along with others that commented to the base post and I realized I was apparently the only dissenter to the rationalization that alcohol is okay for Christians. I felt the ember warm all over again in my reread thus me devoting my weekly blog to this topic.
Many of you reading this perhaps do not care or you have a fervency of rightness or wrongness on the subject. Or, like too many, you just simply do not care. I do wish I could, at times, lapse into that neutral world and simply ignore some horrific facts of alcohol in our society. Many had much worse childhoods than I no doubt and I certainly am not intending to play the violins of my life shrouded and crowded by that elixir from Satan himself in my personal opinion. I believe liquor in a home or a church is like grabbing a timber rattler by the tail for recreation. You may get by with it for a while, find excitement in the grabbing, exhilarate at the snake's reaction but in the end, the snake usually wins that deathly game. I am not immature nor am I stupid enough to believe that today, 2014, that the same snake and its gamers sit in church pews, classrooms, employers and employees, parents, children, students, soldiers, pulpits, choir, police, firemen, husbands, wives, politicians, inmates, etc, across our world.
In my prison work I give the inmates the opportunity to write on a prayer request furnished to them a request they wish prayer for. In the many thousands I have read and prayed for, I would easily say 80% speak to praying for deliverance from the addiction of drugs but more specifically from alcoholism. My assessment, it is the most dangerous, easily accessible viper in our world. More traffic deaths are alcohol related than any other cause. Most crimes are alcohol fueled. Divorce, incest, aberrant societal behaviors are all in the spectrum of what alcohol can do to a person's brain once it is pickled. Soldiers in combat, many of whom I know well, have committed admittedly to atrocities in the combat theater when seeing their fellow soldiers maimed or killed and they go on an alcohol induced killing venture. These are not rumors; these are facts of our world. Plenty of statistics reside to substantiate my strong distaste of alcohol and its effect on families, churches, leaders and worst of all, children.
I fail to see how nor why a Christian can find any space to justify use of such a devastating poison to Man and society. It for me is the adage about putting lipstick on a pig; it is still a pig. Many of you will think I am just old or too slanted or whatever you wish to think it your decision, not mine. But I KNOW what I have seen, experienced, see weekly, read, see in the news and as I said on the FB post to which I speak to at the beginning, fail to understand why the political forces in American have blatantly chosen to seemingly ignore this addictive poison while choosing to attack tobacco a few decades ago is beyond me. Alcohol, guns, marijuana, and the list goes on of our rationalization or cognitive dissonance reduction that this is fine, we have the right, it is our decision to potentially wreck and destroy others by decisions of choice with more than ample evidence of the horrific results to our citizenry is simply baffling to me still.
I will close with what many of you have read from me before for it applies; Right is Right and Wrong is Wrong and there is no amount of Wrong that will ever make a Wrong, Right. I hate ALCOHOL in any form. I am supposed to hate the alcohol and not the alcoholic I have been told but as my readers, you should know that is a most difficult hurtle for me for the emotional scars still run very deep in me and my family. When will we wake up? So you can know my position, there IS NO PLACE in church pews, pulpits, choirs, Christians for the poison of alcohol. This, for me, states an ABSOLUTE which are becoming less and less viewable and enforceable in our society meaning fewer and fewer boundaries.
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