Man Buns: How Do I Tell When Someone Is Being Obtuse About Man Buns?

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Warning, the following message may be offensive to some audiences. These audiences may include, but are not limited to, professing Christians who never read their

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Bible, sissies, sodomites, men with man buns, those who approve of men with man buns, man bun enablers, white knights for men with man buns, homemakers who have finished

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Netflix but don't know how to meal plan, and people who refer to their pets as fur babies. Viewer discretion is advised. People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio.

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The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject

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Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

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The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty

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God is hanging over our heads. They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed, and they will perish.

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God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended, and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the

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Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us. Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come, in that final day, their house will stand.

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Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

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Listen and enjoy this installment of Iron Sharpening Iron, as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions.

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Here's Pastor Tim. On this episode of Iron Sharpening Iron, we will be answering the question, How do

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I tell when someone is being obtuse about man buns? Now Merriam -Webster defines obtuse as someone who is not able to think clearly or understand what is obvious or simple.

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One of the things that we've been trying to say as it relates to our discussion of man buns is that when

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Paul gives this instruction in 1 Corinthians 11, that men should have short hair and that women should have long hair, he has not given to us some sort of incomprehensible riddle that you need a

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PhD in astrophysics to figure out what he's talking about. He's appealing to words that have obvious meaning, and these are the kind of words that really, it doesn't take a whole lot of common sense to figure out exactly what he's talking about.

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We have a basic moral intuition that should help us to understand what he's saying.

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Now it might get fuzzy somewhere around the line, somewhere around the point where short hair transitions into long hair.

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There might be a fuzzy middle ground there, but these are not meant to be incomprehensible riddles. 95 % of obedience to these things should be obvious and straightforward, just like is the case with any other command of scripture.

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So when the Bible tells us that Christians are those who do not forsake the assembly of their saints together, there's a type of person who doesn't want to bear a moral obligation to attend church on a regular basis, and that kind of person is going to appeal to hard cases in order to try to remove the principle.

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And so I've had plenty of conversations with church members along those lines who are basically trying to act like not forsaking the assembly of the saints is some kind of incomprehensible riddle that no one can understand.

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And to give them license to go to neglect the assembly of the saints for months at a time because of sports or something like that.

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These things are not overly complicated. When you read something like that, Christians are those who do not neglect the assembling together of themselves, as is the habit of some, 95 % of the application should be pretty straightforward.

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You should be reading a passage like that and coming away thinking 95 % of the time, if not more, when the doors of the church are open,

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I should be there. Obviously, if you get sick, you break a leg, or somehow you get in a car wreck on the way to church, there's obviously situations where God is not going to, you're not going to be guilty of sin for missing, but probably a reasonable person would look at that and say,

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Hey, 95 % of the time I need to be there in order to be faithful. This is not rocket science. But then the same thing is true of every single command in scripture.

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I gave the example last time of me saying to my kids, Don't yell in the house.

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If my kids, and they haven't done this, but if my kids were to look at me and pretend like I'm just saying something that's absolutely unintelligible by saying,

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Please don't yell in the house. By appealing to some sort of vague transition point between talking really loud and yelling and trying to get me to define the exact decibel level where talking loud transitions into yelling,

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I would just say that they're being obtuse. And the person who basically doesn't know what the Bible is saying when it instructs

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Christians to go to church, that kind of person is being obtuse as it relates to that kind of discussion. These things are not really that difficult to understand as far as that goes.

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95 % of the application for any command in the Bible is going to be fairly straightforward. Everyone knows what we're talking about.

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If you were to do a poll, every single person who's existed in the world, and you were basically to give them a sound bite of Mike Ditka's coaching or Bobby Knight's coaching or something like that, they would be able to identify it as yelling.

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It really is not that hard. If you were to give them a sound bite of Ben Carson talking, no one would think that Ben Carson is yelling.

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We know what these words mean. We know what a whisper is. We know what talking softly is.

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It may get a little confusing at the point where a whisper transitions into talking softly. Whatever, but we know what these words mean.

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They're not incomprehensible riddles. We know when talking softly transitions into talking normal in general.

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We know that when talking normal transitions, we know the difference between talking normal, talking loud.

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We know the difference between talking loud and yelling. Now at the line, it can get fuzzy around a very narrow percent there, but 95 % of the application is straightforward, as is the case with the difference between long hair and short hair.

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These are not meant to be confusing things. They're just meant to be words that have plain meaning that we should all be able to understand.

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95 % of the application should be straightforward unless you adopt a multicultural lens, which basically prohibits you from criticizing cultures like Japanese culture or Native American culture.

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If you don't adopt that lens, then basically you can just say that God's not trying to confuse us and we generally know what we're talking about when we're using adjectives like short and long.

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Now if you want to know, the purpose of this podcast today is going to be how do you tell when someone's being obtuse about man buns, who is pretending to be the kind of person who is not able to think clearly or understand what is obvious and simple.

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If you want to identify that kind of person, here's a simple test to figure out whether you're dealing with someone who is engaging in this discussion in good faith or you're dealing with the kind of person who is just trying to make the passage unclear so that it doesn't have any moral binding on anyone.

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Here's a simple test to figure it out. So because short and long are adjectives that actually have meaning, what that means is that short and long have meaning that is to be found in relation to each other.

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So one of the things that, if you're the kind of person who's just saying that it's just hopelessly unclear, no one knows the difference between short and long, all right, fine, let me just grant you, let me grant for the sake of this argument that it's just really, really, really hard to figure out the difference between short and long.

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Fine, fine, let me grant for the sake of argument that this is not just intuitive and obvious, as I'm saying it is, that it's just really, really hard.

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Fine, fair enough. Okay, here's the problem, though. These are words that have meaning in relationship to each other.

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So what people are trying to do in this discussion is that they're trying to basically say that, you know, under some conceivable definition of long, a woman could have hair down to her chin, and under some conceivable definition of short, a man could have hair down to his shoulders, or longer.

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So the problem with this kind of thing is that you actually have to pick a side. So if you're going to be the kind of person who says that under some conceivable definition of long, a woman could have chin -length hair, that that could constitute long, if you're going to look at, you know, all the ladies out there who have chin -length hair and say that can be considered long hair, well, what you need to do at that point is say, well, if that is my definition of long that I'm trying to sanctify, or trying to argue is permissible, what that means then is for a man to have short hair, it's going to have to be significantly shorter than the chin.

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So the Bible is saying, is doing a contrast. Men need to have short hair. Women need to have long hair. Okay, there's some subjectivity to it.

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Let's give these ladies with chin -length hair the benefit of the doubt and say that that could be conceivably considered long.

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Fine, fair enough. All right, for the sake of argument, I'll go there with you. That's really long.

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But if that's long, then that means that men's hair must be significantly shorter than that.

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So what you'll have to do then is if you want to defend the women with chin -length hair, then what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to basically throw under the bus any man that doesn't have hair that's significantly shorter than the chin.

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Now, on the other hand, if you want to say that men who have shoulder -length hair can be considered short under a certain definition, then one of the things that you're going to have to do then, if you're going to argue for that, that men who have hair down to the shoulder is considered short, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to look at women and you're going to have to say essentially women.

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In order for your hair to be long, and we're going to follow what the Bible is saying right here, it has to be significantly longer than the shoulders in order to count as long.

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So what you have to do is you have to pick a side. You're going to have to pick which group are you willing to offend in this way.

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Now, what most people are trying to do is most people are trying to refuse to defend anyone.

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They're basically saying, hey, I know some ladies who have hair down to their chin and I don't want to offend them, and I know some men who have hair down to their shoulders and I don't want to offend them.

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And what I would look at you and I would say is if you're at the same time and in the same instance arguing that a woman who has chin length hair that could be considered long, while a man who has hair down to his shoulders that could be considered short, what you're doing is you're being obtuse.

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You're basically taking the meaning of these plain words long and short and turning them into Plato that functionally has no meaning.

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You're playing a postmodern game where you're essentially saying that meaning is relative and that there is no fixed absolute truth whatsoever.

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And I would say that if you're engaging in a conversation with a person who's playing that game, we do need to call them on it.

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We need to say, hey, pick a position. So, you know, if you're going to say, you can't just destroy the meaning of words in that kind of way and argue for two contradictory things at the same time in the same way.

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Pick a side as far as that goes. Or explain another way that we should understand the passage that, you know, explain why is it that even though Paul is grounding this argument in nature that somehow this is culturally relative or whatever else, do the work on that end.

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But what you can't do is you can't play both sides of the fence as it relates to the meaning of words and then basically rebuke anyone who is trying to put forward some sort of more plain meaning of the passage itself.

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This has been another installment of Iron Sharpening Iron. As always, if you would like to have your question included in one of these midweek episodes, email us at biblebashedpodcast at gmail .com.

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Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Gab. Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.