Why Marijuana Should Remain Illegal

[Mark_Smith]

Truth be told, I was being light hearted about this whole thing. Before you got here, there had been several threads about alcohol use and the use of a hymn in a Guiness commercial. The issue was thoroughly discussed. Then one day a marijuana thread starts…I just fired off a light hearted “if you support alcohol use you can’t deny limited marijuana use” post. Nothing really happened. Then you come along and act all defensive and get your dander up about it. I wasn’t thread jacking…but I really have nothing to say about legalization of marijuana at this time. Never intended to. Let’s move on.

Maybe you need a sip of wine to calm down?

Maybe you ought to join me, Mark. Seriously. Now you may have thought you were “light-hearted” in your comment above, but there was a not very subtle mockery in it. When I called you on it, you made your situation worse by arguing that the criterion for responsible use of a substance was a need for it—I again called you on your argument, which easily reduces to absurdity.

You complained that it was ridiculous—I agreed, because I was using your logic. Now, you want to disengage really because you are getting the worst of the debate—well, fair enough, but if you were really “only kidding”, let’s have a bit of seriousness and agree to some basic points.

1. The sins of gluttony and sloth are far more prevalent, and deadly, in most fundamental and evangelical churches than the sin of drunkenness (to include getting stoned with illegal drugs).

2, The Bible commends to us the responsible (non-drunken) use of wine, but condemns drunkenness. The Bible describes drunkenness as not feeling pain, foolish behavior, and waking up with a hangover (Proverbs 23:29-35), which corresponds to a blood alcohol percentage in excess of about 0.1%, about 4-5 drinks for an adult male.

3. The ills of alcohol are almost entirely attributable not to one glass of wine or beer with dinner, but rather with binge drinking—4 drinks or more in an hour. (CDC data)

4. Hence the Bible and the CDC agree; the enjoyment of a glass or two of wine or beer can be responsible.

5. Hence the recycled WCTU/Carrie Nation arguments are in Biblical and scientific error.

6. Since the hard abstentionist position does not follow from either the Bible or science, teaching the hard abstentionist position as Biblical and scientific exposes the Gospel to ridicule.

7. The argument over whether marijuana ought to be proscribed in church should be predicated on intoxication (one puff probably doesn’t do it) and offense to the Gospel.

8. The argument over whether marijuana ought to be banned legally ought to be predicated on harms (harm/user really) exceeding the harm/user of legal substances, balanced with the harms of enforcement of a ban.

Well, Mark, do we have it? I do not take offense that others do not partake in God’s good gift of wine, but I do grieve for a church where too many are recycling Billy Sunday and Carrie Nation rhetoric on the topic under the mistaken notion that what they said on the topic was a sound, Biblical exegesis.

Quite frankly, I’m not playing your little game.

Bert, there are a dozen good sources for abstinence in alcohol use. I am not going to rewrite that info here.

There is PLENTY more I could say but I don’t see it as fruitful at this time because frankly I am a little PO‘d at you at this time. I think it is time to end this. Good day.

Mark, it’s not a little game. It’s called “the logical conclusions of your arguments”, and if you don’t like the conclusions, stop making the arguments.

I agree that there are reasons many should not drink at all. A person who is an alcoholic might know that he won’t be able to stop if he starts. The children of alcoholics might see the family tendencies and decide not to risk it. Others may take a look at the benefits and risks of alcohol consumption and decide that any benefits for heart disease are overshadowed by other risks in their case. Others may simply decide it’s a taste they don’t desire to acquire, and yet others may decide that the opportunities for imbibing are (e.g. “Swedish Bikini Team”) so tightly intertwined with fornication and revelry that they can’t support that business. I won’t go into most bars and many liquor stores for that very reason.

That said, these are not Biblical reasons for all Christians to abstain. Nor are your comments, and nor are Mr. Brumbelow’s. They simply take the harms acknowledged by all and posit that because of those harms, we ought not interact with a given commodity at all.

And so I challenge you to apply the same logic that you apply to wine (or dope) and apply them to bacon, fried foods, fast food, chocolate, coffee, tea, automobiles, bicycles, and the like, and then contemplate a world where we banned everything where somebody might plausibly get hurt. Rush Limbaugh does a great job spoofing this tendency in his “Keep Our Own Kids Safe” (spell it out) spoofs.

Since you obviously don’t know when to graciously shut up.

1- I am not fat, nor are most of the church members of the church I attend. We don’t gorge ourselves.

2- My argument is more akin to Paul’s with meat offered to idols. I know there is nothing to the meat, but others have a problem with it. For their sake I put aside my liberty and don’t consume it. So, with alcohol, I don’t think about how nice it would be to have a beer with my supper, or wine with my steak. I think about the spouse who is abused by an alcoholic husband. What would she think if she visited my church and then saw me buying a six pack later at the grocery store? It is in that sense that I don’t think there is such a thing as “responsible” drinking. EVEN IF YOU DRINK RESPONSIBLY you set a poor testimony for others.

3- Had you gone back and read my previous thread arguments you would know that.

4- This is Sharper Iron, not Fox News. I couldn’t care less about what the government bans or allows. Here I talk about the church. We have our hands full with that.

5- With that I am done.

Mark, if you’re going to accuse me of not knowing how to graciously shut up, I’d have to suggest that making a comment you pledged not to make is not the best way to demonstrate that you do, no?

But to your more substantive comments, I never accused you of being fat, but the simple statistics are that 2/3 of Americans are overweight and about a full third are obese, and I’ve never seen a church in this country that didn’t have a fair number of overweight people. If you are correct, your church would be a remarkable exception. So likelihood is that a significant portion of your church would be told by their doctors to lose some pounds. Or maybe you yourself.

And your comment about the alcoholic spouse? Well, let’s adapt the argument. When i am thinking about wearing jeans, I do not think about how comfortable a pair of Levis or Wranglers might be, but rather how the woman abused by a husband who wears jeans might feel if she saw me buying a pair at Wal-Mart. In other words, your argument is strict guilt by association—I could substitute “eats”, “drinks”, “drives a car”, or any number of other things and have the same fallacious argument.

Fact of the matter is that abusive husbands don’t become abusive husbands because they had a beer. They are abusive because they are sinners who do not acknowledge God’s authority in the area of marriage. The liquor is just a “truth serum” that reduces their inhibitions, and it’s well past time for the church to start bringing the Gospel to bear and point to the sin, rather than the truth serum.

is not the alcohol, but the abuse thereof. If a lady who has an alcoholic husband sees me buying a six pack at the grocery store and knows that I am a Christian and has an issue with that, I would expect that she should confront me or ask me about it and we can have a discussion, rather than go around judging other people for things without knowing their motives. We have a word in English for this. It’s called prejudice. Frankly, I’m more worried about the testimony that prejudice gives before unbelievers than alcohol. And I don’t know any of my unbelieving friends or co-workers who would judge a person as an alcoholic for buying liquor.

Part of the issue is that we live in a society where people refuse to accept the consequences of their own actions and shift the blame to others in order to justify their sin. This is why we have people blaming forks for making them fat, blaming soft drinks for illness, cigarettes for lung cancer, guns for murder, and alcohol for alcoholism. On the surface, these things seem to make sense, but the truth is that alcohol does not make a person a drunk. It’s a person who abuses alcohol that becomes drunk. And yet your argument rests on exactly this premise. You are saying that the abuse of a thing is the same as its proper use. The fact is that anything and everything can be abused, whether it be stone, or the Sabbath, or food and drink. Even the stars in the sky can be abused. The Christian response should not be to prohibit the proper use of a thing because of its abuse, but to encourage the proper use.

To address my point further why the “popular” MacArthur is confused about even minor issues when dealing with the topic of alcohol prohibition: He conflates self-control with total abstinence.

But sober-minded self-control and maturity are virtues commanded and commended by Scripture; these are not manmade rules or legalistic standards. As a matter of fact, one of the main qualifications for both deacons and elders in the church is that they cannot be given to much wine. In other words, they are to be known for their sobriety, not for their consumption of beer.

Which is it Johnnie: self control or total abstinence? A clear and distinct difference between being given over to drinking and not touching a drop is made throughout scripture. The Nazarite vow was mostly a temporary fast where one abstained from enjoyments for spiritual purposes. Only a few Isaelites were life-long Nazarites (Samuel, John the Baptizer).

Further to show how John MacArthur is not a scholar, the word in English translations “sober” does not mean tee total. The word most often translated “sober” in the Greek means “sensible”, “reasonable”. No implied “tee total idea” attaches with this word.

http://www.gty.org/blog/B110809/beer-bohemianism-and-true-christian-lib…

A pastor really should know better, in my thinking at least, to make clear distinctions from the scriptures instead of “prooftexting”. Here is where “Dr.” MacArthur makes some critical mistakes by failing to read the text carefully enough in its setting:

But what Paul is saying is, “No man who is at all irresponsible with regard to those things which could potentiate drunkenness has any business being in spiritual leadership.” Now, let me elevate this thing a little bit more. In Leviticus, chapter 10, verse 9, it was instructed that Aaron and all the high priests stay away from any alcoholic beverages. In Proverbs, chapter 31, verses 4 and 5, we are told explicitly that alcoholic beverages were not for kings and not for princes or rulers. The point being this: anybody who’s a priest; anybody who is a king; anybody who is a ruler, is in a position where they are making very significant decisions that have implications for a wide range of people and they don’t want to be operating without full comprehension. http://www.biblebb.com/files/tonyqa/tc99-23.htm

Firstly, Aaron and his sons were not commanded “to stay away from alcoholic beverages”. They were not to drink wine before going into the Holy of Holies. This is the specific command and Jesus himself as our Great High Priest refused the gall (to deaden the senses at crucifixion) before accomplishing His task. So it is this distinction that Christ fulfilled that MacArthur misses.

Secondly, The kings in proverbs were functioning as judges. They were not to drink “on duty” while judging. It is clear that when the day was done they drank wine from Solomon’s account of his daily table (in Chronicles). The kings were legislators, executors, and judges over civil matters (the priests were judges in religious matters before Christ combined the the two offices according to Zechariah’s prophecy: “He shall be a priest on His throne”). So MacArthur in his two examples gets both wrong. He has failed to notice the nuances in the text. Hardly scholarly.

Earlier in this thread, Sean Fericks argued for the legalization of marijuana saying that, “Increased sales tax revenue for states when it is taken off the black (non-taxed) market.”

To which I replied, “Perhaps, but remember, there are always ways to avoid paying sales tax.”

An article today out of Denver says that tax revenues are $21 million below expectations of $33 million. It appears (if my math is correct) that taxes were only about 1/3 of what they were supposed to be.

Why is this? According to the article, “The problem is that buying pot is less expensive on the streets where people don’t have to pay taxes or fees.” In other words, the black market didn’t go away simply because it was legal.

Larry; or it could simply be that politicians trying to get a law passed overestimated how much would actually be purchased. We can all think of a number of places where politicians understate costs or overstate benefits, no?

Besides, it’s still twelve million dollars that they didn’t have before, but do have now. And an unspecified amount of money they’re not spending prosecuting and incarcerating those who use it. The question I’m interested in is not the total revenues, but rather whether they get a spike in usage that leads to adverse consequences.

Perhaps to all of those, but so what? The point is that at least part of what was said would happen didn’t happen. That’s all. Whether that’s good or bad can be judged on its own merits.

BTW, it seems to me that “it’s $12 mill they didn’t have before” is a rather weak argument. If the goal is money, there is a lot more we could legalize and tax, or just tax more, or whatever. I think we need a bit of a better argument than that.

Larry, agreed that if we legalize dope just for taxes, we’re idiots. And if we have the debate based on the promises of politicians, exactly the same.

That said, a reasonable estimate of tax revenues ought to be one of the factors in the cost/benefit analysis of marijuana bans, no? One other thing that’s interesting about Colorado’s legalization is that it does not seem to have affected usage rates. Illegal dopers just became legal dopers. So if this is correct—and I concede it needs more of a look—legalization does not appear to increase usage, and one would infer (again this needs to be proven) that the societal costs of marijuana use do not increase with legalization.

On the flip side, legalization drops arrests and incarceration for obvious reasons….and generates some tax revenue, if not at stated levels. So if the claims hold–-IF—one can support legalization even if one would (as I would) suggest church discipline for members using the weed without a medical reason.

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26291950.html

Acres of ancient trees are disappearing and illegal marijuana farms are popping up in their place. Streams and rivers are being sucked dry, diverted sometimes miles away through plastic pipes into tanks. Several species of fish, along with a rare breed of wild rodent, are on the verge of extinction.

All of this is happening now, all across California, but particularly in the North Coast and in our national parks in the San Joaquin Valley. All of this environmental destruction is occurring to grow marijuana and meet consumer demand.

…

Apathetic consumers seem unaffected by the environmental damage that weed causes. We buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chickens. Where’s the outrage about the environmental impact of marijuana?

Through the inaction of lawmakers, pot remains unregulated and spreads like weeds. Add to this the drought and speculation that California will soon join Washington and Oregon in making pot legal for recreational use, and our state has the makings of an ecological disaster on its hands.