Divine justice is non-negotiable.
Maybe you are aware of the big scandal involving a website known as “Ashley Madison.” The site is advertised as a means to engaging in adultery anonymously. There are plenty of such sites and services, but this one was reputed as bigger and better than most. Naturally, it was open to those who wanted any kind of casual romantic hook-ups, including gays. It was a thriving business that charged a substantial fee for membership.
A month ago some computer crackers hacked into this site and copied everything. The gambit was claiming some kind of moral outrage and demanding the business owner shut down. He refused. During the interim, various actors made several dumps of data alleged from this hacking. They were hoaxes, but typical of what you expect from the hacker community. In the past couple of days, the real deal appeared. The first was 9.7 GB, the second around 20GB. If the claims are accurate, the crackers have a lot more in their stash.
As you would expect, all sorts of people are entertained by this and have dug into the data dumps to analyze it. Of biggest interest so far is the email addresses attached to the exposed accounts on this site. People are dumb enough to use their work email for this site, including a large number of government offices, giant banking companies, etc. We note in passing the US military is checking into this because adultery is flatly illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And then there are all sorts of juicy personal details in these accounts because they are part of the process of setting up a profile to draw other interested parties.
We also learn that the vast majority of accounts are held by males, so it smacks of false advertising. Should it turn out that the supposed willing women were all professional prostitutes, they would be hard pressed to service that many clients under even the most hurried circumstances. A lot of men paid to profess fantasies unlikely to be fulfilled by the site. Immorality works that way.
Already more than one big name in Christian media has splashed out of this brouhaha. There will be more, I’m sure. What does our religion, Radix Fidem, say about all this? As is the nature of our faith, I can’t speak for you, but I’ll tell you what comes to my mind. (Hint: Anything I say about this religion is merely one expression of something that defies description.)
We’ve already discussed how bizarre it is living with our ancient faith in Western society, making us quite alien. There’s so very much wrong with the whole range of contemporary society that we look askance even at what most people assume are obvious moral considerations. In other words, Western sexual mores are already so messed up, we should hardly be surprised at anything like this. On the one hand, the Bible raises the bar far higher than most Western Christians admit. On the other hand, the same Western Christians seem to have no comprehension of mercy and repentance and how God heals our moral failures. Instead, we have this imaginary matrix of objective rules and guidelines that never quite fit the real needs of people striving to follow Christ.
Nothing within human capability can lock down sexual behavior. Such behavior always arises from a complex of factors no man can truly know. Complicating it further is that mass of social mythology and bogus moral pretension. Western morals are not a good reflection of what God revealed. This insanity seems to have no limit; even those who reject common Western morality tend to operate and speak entirely in terms of that same morality. Their attempts to establish a different moral climate are all mired in the same pit as nothing more than reactions to something none of them seem to escape. Everything we see and hear among Westerners is framed on the same bogus moral mythology. And this mythology presumes a fundamental absolutism that is utterly foreign to Scripture.
The moral mythology, regardless where it falls on the presumed spectrum between conservative and liberal, remains detached from reality itself. Divine moral justice operates and responds on multiple levels; that in itself is alien to Western thinking. The Bible assumes an intellectual background that recognizes anything we can put into words will always come up short of God’s moral character. At best, we can only post road signs for areas of truth to discover individually. Biblical Law is an invitation to explore what is truly in your best interest. Truth is living and not static; it responds to you individually. We should never be surprised when others don’t live according to our moral apprehensions. I can only teach what registers in my own consciousness.
The biggest problem is not what people call “sin” but what they assume we can do about it. Human sexuality is what it is, and if you want my moral counsel on that, I need to know more about your personal context. All my responses will be limited by what you can tell me. What is truly immoral in this scandal is the vast blindness to God’s moral standards for the virtual space we inhabit through the Internet.
There is some broad insanity about refusing to recognize that the virtual realm does not operate by the same moral rules as our physical realm. Anything you place in digital format is globally accessible, sooner or later. There is no such thing as privacy online. There is only some social pretense. The problem starts with self-deception and fakery in general. You can keep some stuff private in meat space because of the universal space-time limitations, but those do not apply to virtual space. Nothing is truly forgotten and nothing can be permanently hidden. While there is nothing wrong with taking certain measures to limit digital access, the expectation that it is somehow sacred approaches blasphemy. Divine justice will hammer you into dust if you operate under that false assumption.
Treat this scandal as yet another attempt at entertainment. It won’t teach you much about sexual morality, but it will speak volumes about digital morals. God is using various means to enforce His personal moral character, but His wrath always falls on sin.
