Learning The Virtues

"Let us begin [the practice of] virtue, as we have opportunity: let us portion out the virtues to ourselves, as laborers do their husbandry; in this month let us master evil-speaking, injuriousness, unjust anger; and let us lay down a law for ourselves, and say, To-day let us set this right. Again, in this month let us school ourselves in forbearance, and in another, in some other virtue: And when we have got into the habit of this virtue let us go to another, just as in the things we learn at school, guarding what is already gained, and acquiring others." (John Chrysostom, Homilies On Hebrews, 24:9)

When everyone did what was right in his own eyes

"Applying the Christian Ethic to Specific Issues" (James Anderson)

The two deaths of Ravi

"Apologetics After the Two Deaths of Ravi Zacharias" (Doug Groothuis)

Making sense of the Ravi Zacharias scandal

I've read and seen several Christians reflecting on the Ravi scandal. I think the person who gets closest to what I'd want to say is David Wood. It's a long video, but Wood makes several insightful observations and as is often the case Wood is keen in his psychological analyses.

The Akedah

Regarding God testing Abraham's faith by telling Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering in Genesis 22:

I think there's dramatic irony in Gen 22. The events of the story turn out to be the opposite of what one would have expected at the climax of the narrative.

My understanding is human sacrifice to various gods occurred among many ancient Neareastern cultures. An ancient Neareasterner (like Abraham) might not unreasonably expect Yahweh to be like these other gods too.

Yet Gen 22 has a twist ending. The twist ending of the story is that Yahweh isn't like other gods.

Quite the contrary. Yahweh doesn't demand Abraham sacrifice Isaac. Rather Yahweh "provides" a ram caught in a thicket by its horns for Abraham to sacrifice. As such, Abraham learns Yahweh is the God who "provides", not a god who takes. Yahweh is the God who unilaterally blesses his followers, not a god who requires things in a quid pro quo fashion from his followers. Yahweh is the merciful God, not a god who must always exact his pound of flesh. Yahweh blessed Abraham because Abraham trusted Yahweh, not because Abraham literally killed and sacrificed his son Isaac in exchange for blessings like a pagan god might wish. These are the kinds of lessons Yahweh imparted to Abraham - and to us.

So this was a happy reversal of fortunes from Abraham and Isaac's perspective. They didn't have to do what they thought they had to do.

What's more, this happy reversal of fortunes in turn points to the One who reversed their fortunes - namely, Yahweh. Such that Abraham and Isaac, along with the audience, are led to ask: what kind of God is this, this Yahweh? Yahweh is not like heathen gods. Instead Yahweh is the God of promise, provision, blessing, grace.

How To Argue Against Same-Sex Marriage

It's still important to argue against it, though few people are doing it. See here for an overview of some of the relevant arguments. And here's a post where I discussed how I expected the issue to develop after the Supreme Court's 2015 decision, given the nature of the American people. Much of what I said there is still applicable. But we've now had several more years of political developments, and the large majority of Republicans and Christians have shown themselves unwilling to discuss the subject much, if at all. Life consists of more than politics, though, and how people view marriage is important in non-political contexts, not just political ones. Changes outside of politics can, and often do, lead to political changes. But the arguments for a Christian view of marriage ought to be made, even if we don't get the political changes we want.

See here for some comments I made about the significance of holidays like Valentine's Day in this context.

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-lockdown-is-no-longer-morally.html

The trolley problem and the pandemic

A trolley driver must choose between turning a trolley so that it runs over an innocent man attached to a track and allowing the trolley to run over and kill five innocent people. Foot, claimed that it was wrong to kill in the first case, but not wrong in the second.  

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/#DistDist

There's a sense in which this parallels debates over what policy we should pursue in the face of the pandemic. There are different possible combinations:

Policy A causes the death of more innocents

Policy B fails to prevent the death of more innocents

Policy C causes the death of fewer innocents

Policy D fails to prevent the death of fewer innocents

So when we morally assess competing policies in regard to the pandemic, we have to decide what our priorities are. How do we balance the these four factors? 

Sacrificing cancer patients

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/20/thousands-of-cancer-patients-could-die-early-due-to-coronavirus-delays-study-finds

Ravi and the onus probandi

i) Some folks think Christians have a duty to denounce alleged ethical lapses by Rav Zacharias. Now  I do think lots of Christians are too quick to hand out the halos. But they could condition a eulogy. "Assuming he's not guilty…" And even if he's guilty of serious moral failings, while that rightly  tarnishes his reputation, it doesn't discredit the positive impact of his ministry. 

ii) But suppose I don't have an informed judgment regarding the allegations. Do I still have a burden of proof? It's not like I have a duty to have a considered option on the issue. Life is short. We make time-investment decisions. We prioritize. 

It isn't even possible to have an informed judgment about most propositions. Consider the countless number of things that happen around the globe in a single day. Or consider the infinite realm of mathematical truths. 

Or, to take a different kind of example, consider the sex lives of the Hollywood stars. Surely I have no duty to inform myself about that. Why waste my time on that? Why fill my mind with that? 

iii) A potential objection to what I said is that it parallels atheists who say that lacking belief in God carries no burden of proof. Or does it?

One problem with the comparison is the question of scope. The existence or nonexistence of God has implications for literally everything. Ravi's moral character isn't remotely analogous. Does every proposition, however trivial or ephemeral, bear a burden of proof? Or is there a threshold? God lies at one end of the continuum–the very end. 

A modest proposal

Rob Koons

A modest proposal. Every year, about 50,000 people die of the flu. Another 50,000 die from automobile accidents, and another 30,000 from workplace accidents. We could prevent many of these deaths by placing America in lockdown six months of every year (from now on). Almost all the flu deaths occur in the winter months, and so I propose a total lockdown from October through April every year. This will save something like 30,000 (flu) + 25,000 (reduced auto accidents) + 7500 (reduced workplace accidents), for a total of over 60,000 lives every year. It would cost a great deal less than $11 trillion a year. If you oppose my idea, you value economic gains over human lives. Shame on you!

https://www.facebook.com/robkoons/posts/10115447294948970

OT "slavery"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLcvJsTQrTg

If it saves just one life

Hovering in the background of church closures is the view that I have no right to put you at risk. Related to this is the ethical assumption that restrictions are justified "if they save just one life".

But as a matter of public policy and private behavior, no one actually operates with the principle that a restriction is justified or morally mandatory if it saves just one life. To begin with, that's hopelessly unrealistic. Life contains inevitable tradeoffs. Overprotective policies that save some lives do so at the expense of taking other lives. Policies have unintended consequences. There are no cost-free solutions. 

So what we're really dealing with is the sorites paradox or little-by-little arguments. There is no intrinsic cutoff. So it's a question of degree. How much risk is acceptable? How much is too much? How much is too little? There is no ideal answer. But we need to avoid certain extremes that lead to moral and practical paralysis of action.  

I double-dare ya!

@RandalRauser

Christians often defend the offering of Isaac in Genesis 22 by noting that God never intended for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Fair enough, but the text still presents a massive moral problem. Imagine, by analogy, that you order Smith to rape his own daughter or be executed.

You never intend for Smith to carry out the action. You only want to test him to see if he is willing. It turns out that he is, and you stop the act from occurring. No harm no foul? Not at all. 

We cannot begin to envision the unimaginable, destructive emotional impact on both Jones and his daughter as they carry the knowledge that he was preparing to rape her. Imagine the impact on Isaac of his father's willingness to sacrifice him.

https://twitter.com/RandalRauser/status/1253322385190580227

1. To the extent that this poses a dilemma, the dilemma is whether to be an atheist or a Christian. Apostate Randal Rauser constantly straddles the fence, attacking the Bible like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, while pretending to be a Christian. His position isn't consistently Christian or secular, but just a willful mishmash. 

2. It's revealing that Rauser is unable to attack the binding of Isaac directly. While there's nothing necessarily wrong with drawing analogies, it betrays a weakness of his position that he can't show what's wrong with the binding of Isaac on its own grounds, so he must swap it out for a supposedly comparable situation. But why should we shift focus on his bait-n-switch? It's just a diversionary tactic. The onus lies on him to show that that his comparison is relevantly analogous. Why take the bait? 

3. He got the names confused, but presumably Smith/Jones are the same individual (father) in the illustration.

4. In Gen 22, Isaac has no advance knowledge that he's the designated sacrificial victims. He only finds out at the very last minute. So there's no brooding emotional buildup or escalating psychological tension on his part. 

5. As as often been noted, Abraham is an old man while Isaac is a teenager. So Isaac voluntarily submits to the sacrifice even though it's within his ability to overpower his elderly father and flee the scene. He's a willing victim. 

6. Unless Rauser is an open theist, the point of the ordeal is not for Yahweh to find out the limits of Abraham's faith. If anything, it's Abraham who learns something about Yahweh when Yahweh calls it off at the last minute. And it's ultimately for the benefit of the unseen reader. 

7. One problem with Rauser's comparison is his failure to appreciate stereotypical differences between male and female psychology. As a feminist, Rauser can't make allowance for the fact that in some crucial respects, male and female are wired differently. What is unbearably traumatic for a female may not be for a male. This issue crops up in debates over women in combat, where many women wash out because they can't cope with the inhuman stress. 

To take another example, consider a sleepover where the 5th-grade boys watch Aliens. The boys take it in stride:

https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/watching-aliens-for-the-first-time-again-with-a-bunch-of-kids

Imagine showing Aliens to a group of 5th-grade girls. Boys and girls naturally have a different psychological makeup for scary things. There are exceptions on both sides, but that's the norm. Many boys go out of their way to seek out scary things to see and do. They double-dare each other. 

The immorality of indefinite lockdowns

Under the guise of executive powers reserved for short-term disasters such as hurricanes, leaders across the West have done the previously unthinkable: they have forbidden entire segments of the population from working. Using a nonsensical distinction between essential and non-essential (as if providing for one’s family is ever non-essential) our entire workforce has been divided into three groups: 1.) The upper class with jobs that can be performed in their pajamas at home, 2.) Laborers lucky enough to still be able to go to work, and 3.) Those intentionally rendered unemployed.

Those who belong to that final group include...Waitresses, barbers, sales employees, janitors, those who provide child care and others who often live paycheck to paycheck. Also included are those who are small business owners...

https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2020/04/guest-op-ed-immorality-of-indefinite.html

COVID-19 and the Trolley Problem: You’re on the Tracks and the Government Is Controlling the Switch

https://stream.org/covid-19-and-the-trolley-problem-youre-on-the-tracks-and-the-government-is-controlling-the-switch/

Midianite virgins

@RandalRauser

King David didn't have an affair with Bathsheba. He raped her. There is no willing consent when the king orders that a civilian wife be brought into his presence.

True. Of course, that's a narrative description, not a divine command.

Numbers 31 describes God commanding that all Midianite men, boys, and nonvirgin women be killed. That's genocide.

i) In context, I assume this wasn't a campaign to eradicate the Midianites as a people-group from the face of the earth, but at most the Midianite adults who are captured at this particular locality. Indeed, the virgins were exempted and there are further historical references to the Midianites in the OT. As one OT scholar has noted (in private email):

ii) There is some ambiguity as to who the Midianites were, and it has been suggested that they might not have been so much a distinct ethnicity as people who could either be associated or intermingled with various peoples, such as the Moabites, Amalekites, etc. It may be that they should be regarded as a confederation of different peoples as opposed to a single ethnicity.

iii) It is particularly directed against the Midianites on account of their attempt to corrupt the Israelites, as recounted in Numbers 25. Notice the association with the Moabites in this episode. Indeed, we can might well understand that this was not a matter of “ethnics,” but a matter of “ethics.”

iv) Because the concern in Numbers 31 is particularly against those Midianites who were involved in the Midianite/Moabite incident in Numbers 25, we cannot say the action was directed against all Midianites.

v) As well, we have to take into account what is certainly to be understood as the hyperbolic character of both the language and the narrative. Indeed, after this account, there are still Midianites who have to be contended with, as evidenced by the books of Joshua, Judges, Kings, and Isaiah.

"but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." (v. 18) A terrified 13-year-old who saw her family killed doesn't consent. That's rape.

i) The statement in Num 31:18 is notably terse. Probably because it takes for granted the more detailed war bride context of Deut 21:10-14. In other words, they're not sex slaves. Rather, it was meant to be understood within the kind of framework envisioned in Deut 21:10-14.

ii) Likewise, isn't the tacit implication that Midianite virgins can be distinguished from Midianite wives because the virgins haven't reached sexual maturity, and so they're not yet eligible for marriage, but will be married off when they hit the age at which Jewish females usually got married?

iii) Is that an enviable situation for females to be in? Certainly not. But as I've mentioned before, these were warrior cultures. If the men are killed, the females are totally vulnerable. They can starve or turn to prostitution. Rauser fails to consider the plight of unattached females in the ancient Near East.

The commands doesn't represent an ideal. Rather, they address a situation in which some things have already gone terribly wrong. So this is damage control. I've discussed the dilemma in more detail elsewhere:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/02/when-bible-rubs-us-wrong-way.html

iv) What does Rauser think it was like to be a woman in a heathen culture like the Midianites? They were much better off becoming Jewish wives.

For a modern comparison, consider the forcible taking of young Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram in 2014. They didn't consent either.

Which piggybacks on his dubious interpretation of Num 31:18.

Christians need an honest conversation about biblical atrocities.

Rauser needs to have an honest conversion about why he pretends to be a Christian when he repudiates biblical revelation. He suffers from a makeshift position that isn't consistently Christian or secular. He abodes fanatical confidence in his moral intuitions, even though the Bible writers don't share his intuitions. So what makes his intuitions true?

Rauser suffers from a Messiah complex. His self-appointed calling in life is to single-handedly redefine Christianity along progressive lines. That's doomed to fail. It will never replace biblical Christianity. And his alternative is just a hodgepodge of secular humanism with some residual Christian motifs and paranormal anecdotes.

Is the desire to sin sinful?

This raises some interesting issues:

http://spirited-tech.com/COG/2020/04/07/impeccability-and-temptation/

1. One issue was whether Jesus was impeccable or merely sinless. My own position is that by virtue of the hypostatic union, he was impeccable because the divine nature exerts control over the human nature. In that respect, it isn't possible for Jesus to succumb to sinful temptation.

2. However, the post is raising a different, albeit related issue. Not whether it was possible for Jesus to give into sinful temptation, but to feel sinful temptation. 

3. I'd add that we don't have to answer the question directly. We can address the question at a more generic level. As a general or universal principle, is it necessarily sinful to desire sin? The question in reference to Jesus will answer itself depending on the general principle. So we can bypass the specific application to Jesus and focus on the question of whether, in principle, it's intrinsically sinful to desire sin?

4. I'll explore that momentarily, but before doing so draw two distinctions unique to Jesus:

Whether or not it's always sinful to desire sin, certain desires are intrinsically sinful. For instance, sexual desire for prepubescent children is intrinsically sinful. You must already be morally twisted to have that kind of desire.  There has to be a prior moral derangement for some things to be desirable. So I'd say Jesus can't desire intrinsically sinful things. That doesn't follow from the stronger principle of impeccability but the weaker principle of sinlessness.

5. In addition, there are second-order desires where committing sin engenders a desire to sin that contingent on committing sin. For instance, there's a subculture of faux vampirism where people drink each other's blood. To my knowledge, humans have no natural appetite for human blood. But if you experiment, I suppose that could become an acquired taste. I don't know that for a fact. I haven't studied the issue. But it will suffice as a hypothetical illustration. 

For the same reason as (4), Jesus can't have a second-order desire to sin. That doesn't follow from the stronger principle of impeccability but the weaker principle of sinlessness.

6. Back to the main issue. It may seem like a tautology or truism or self-evident that it's necessarily sinful to desire sin. Perhaps. But I think the plausibility of that intuition relies on keeping it on an abstract plane. When, however, we consider concrete examples, it may lose plausibility. What we find intuitively compelling or plausible is often dependent on paradigm-examples; it may break down in the face of counterexamples. It's not that the examples are necessarily wrong. The fallacy is overgeneralizing from certain kinds of examples. 

7. Let's begin with a cliche example. A normal man sees a beautiful woman. That automatically triggers sexual desire. Indeed, it may trigger sexual arousal.

Since premarital and extramarital sex are sinful, it might seem self-evident that his desire is sinful. Sexual desire is shorthand for desiring to have sexual relations. 

Yet it's hard to see how that can be true. If straight men didn't have a sexual desire for women, they'd lack a sufficient motivation to get married. So you might say the illicit desire is a necessary condition to incentivize the licit outlet of marriage. You must have sexual desire when you're still single to want marriage.

It also seems implausible to think that kind of sexual desire is a result of the Fall. But I won't argue the point. 

BTW, I'm not suggesting sex is the only motivation for marriage. But realistically, and in most cases, it's a sine qua non. 

8. Let's consider cases where there's a psychological conflict between altruistic duty and self-preservation. Take a situation where your odds of survival are enhanced if you leave an ailing friend behind but diminished if you stay behind to care for him. Suppose on a camping trip he comes down with a contagious, life-threatening illness. He might die, and even if he survives, he will become incapacitated during the cycle of the disease. And he will certainly not survive if you abandon him when he's incapacitated. His only shot at survival is if you provide for his needs while he's unable to provide for himself.

But the more direct contact and prolonged contact you have with him, the greater the odds that he will infect you, so that you may die in the process. Hence, your altruistic duty is in tension with your instinctive fear of death. A part of you has a hardwired aversion to risking your own life to save his. You have an inclination to desert him. If it's sinful to desert him, is it sinful to desire to do so? 

Yet we could turn around. The fact that moral heroism may conflict with natural desire affords an opportunity or test to do the right thing when it's costly. If the sacrifice didn't cut against the grain, it would be morally cheap. So in situations like that, having a desire to sin seems to be an instrumental good. It draws forth a second-order virtue. 

So my provisional conclusion is that it's not inherently sinful to desire sin. Rather, that's context-dependent. And that in turn answers the question about Jesus. 

The pornographic church

1. In my observation, evangelical leaders who support the suspension of public worship during the pandemic use three arguments.

i) All things being equal, Christians have a duty to obey civil authorities. This prima facie civic duty can be overridden, but the pandemic is not one of the exceptions to the norm.

ii) It's permissible to temporarily suspend public worship to avoid gratuitous risk of infecting others with a life-threatening pathogen. 

iii) We're under obligation not to expose others to a life-threatening pathogen.

(ii)-(iii) are independent of (i). Some churches suspended public worship voluntarily.

2. One problem is that (ii) and (iii) are contradictory. (iii) is an argument from principle. It's intrinsically wrong to put others at gratuitous risk of contracting a potentially life-threatening pathogen. In this case, social events of a particular size. 

But if that's the argument, then the logic of the principle is open-ended. That demands an indefinite suspension of public worship. Christians are obligated to forgo church for the duration of the pandemic. The obligation is not that it's permissible to expose the public to the pathogen so long as you temporarily practice social distancing, then discontinue social distancing after a specified time regardless of whether the pandemic has subsided. 

So (iii) is an open-ended commitment that obviates (ii). The suspension of public worship will only be as temporary as the pandemic. 

3. Another complication is that if you subscribe to (i), then you ceded to civil authorities the determination of when it's safe to return to church. Civil authorities determine when it's no longer too risky.

4. A further complication is that if public worship remains in abeyance beyond a certain duration, churches will be permanently closed because they weren't taking in enough revenue to pay the overhead. 

5. So (ii) is based on luck. Maybe we'll get lucky and the pandemic will shortly subside. 

6. An additional problem is the precedent which (i) & (iii) establish. I'm no expert, but from what I've read, medical authorities have been warning for years that we may be on the bring of reentering the age of pandemics due to the increasing emergence of superbugs. Even if we develop a vaccine for COVID-19, it may evolve a resistant strain that outsmarts the vaccine. And there are other pathogens hovering in the wings. Other superbugs which may spawn pandemics.  

If pandemics become intermittent, have evangelical denominations acquiesced to a policy of the chronic, indefinite suspension of public worship for the duration of the pandemic du jour? To be determined by civil authorities? Maybe we'll get lucky. If not, what kind of paint thinner will they use to extricate themselves from the corner they painted themselves into?

7. On a related note, there's a striking parallel between virtual worship and virtual sex. Evangelicals condemn pornography and sexbots as an unacceptable substitute for real sex. Sex is supposed to be an essentially social dynamic between real people, face-to-face. A personal encounter. But that's what's missing in virtual worship, too.

Yet during the pandemic, evangelical critics of pornography and sexbots are using the electronic church as a substitute for public worship. This is justified on the grounds of minimizing the risk of disease transmission.

But why is risk-free worship obligatory while risk-free sex is prohibitory? Pornography and sexbots eliminate the risk of transmitting STDs, unplanned pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and the treacherous emotional entanglements of intimacy between real men and women. 

BTW, although I'm no expert, I don't think Christian marriage precludes the possibility of STDs. That's because many Christians are converts who had a sexual history before their conversion. So they can bring STDs into a marriage from a priori history of premarital sex and promiscuity. 

If the argument is that we have a duty not to risk infecting other people, why is virtual sex impermissible while virtual worship is permissible? Isn't a steady diet of electronic worship ecclesiastical pornography? There are exceptions, like the situation of shut-ins, but I'm not referring to special cases. 

7. Evangelicals need to develop a theology of risk. Humans constantly make risk-benefit assessments. As I recently noted:

i) Due to human mortality, men and women routinely assume calculated gratuitous risks. Playing many sports carries the risk of permanent injury, sometimes physical or mental incapacitation, or even death. Because they know that death is inevitable, they gamble the future on the present. 

ii) Having kids is risky. Your kid might die of cancer. Or your teenager might become a hopeless drug addict, die from an overdose or commit suicide? Or your child might be damned. Or your wife might have a miscarriage. Why take that risk if you don't have to?

iii) Childbearing used to be very hazardous for mothers. Many died in childbirth. Should wives before the advent of modern medical science refuse sex with their husband after child #3? 

iv) As I explained in my post on Jas 5:14-15, it was hazardous to elders to anoint the sick. Are the elders in Jas 5:14-15 foolish because they didn't practice social distancing? They exposed themselves to the sick through direct physical contact. They could infect the sick (in their already weakened condition) with their own diseases. And they could infect their families when they went back home after doing visitation ministry with the sick. 

iv) This is in part about freedom. Freedom to attend church or freedom to boycott church. The problem is when we create a society that revolves around hypochondriacs. 

The "religious exemption"

Atheists like Jeff Lowder and Richard Dawkins, as well as apostate Randal Rauser have been expressing outrage at a CNN report about "at least 14 states exempting religious gatherings from stay at home orders."

(Strictly speaking, Lowder simply retweeted someone else, but it's safe to say this reflects his own consternation.)

Dawkins said:

A church is an enclosed space where people right next to each other sing their lungs out into the air. A church is virus heaven: a focal point where people get infected, then go out & infect others

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1246350531297042433

There are several issues that need to be sorted out:

1. There's a distinctively American issue. The "religious exemption" is a Constitutional exemption: the free exercise clause in the first amendment. This isn't an exception that some mayors and governors are inventing for churches and synagogues. Rather, this is a case of mayors and governors defending a Constitutional right. The Bill of Rights contains a number of exemptions from the heavy-hand of gov't. It's no different than freedom of speech, assembly, the press, the right to bear arms, 4th and 5th amendment protections and civil liberties. 

2. Then there's the ethical issue. Dawkins' point seems to be that we have no right to endanger others. If that's his point, it's simplistic and needs to be qualified:

i) Church attendance is voluntary. It's not like parishioners attend at gunpoint. Insofar as attending church carries the risk of infection, parishioners mutually consent to the risk. And that's hardly unique to church.

Shopping at Lowe's, Home Depot, Target, Walmart, Fred Meyers, &c. carries the risk of contracting the virus, then spreading it to others. Yet shoppers assume that risk by mutual consent. 

ii) At the same time, they are putting others in the community at risk who did not consent to becoming infected by the shoppers because some of them didn't shop at Lowe's or Home Depot, &c. 

Yet critics of churchgoers presumably don't think it's wrong to expose others to potential infection because you went shopping at Home Depot but they didn't. Presumably, critics of the churchgoers accept a generalized risk where a shopper at Home Depot might infect a shopper at Target.

iii) Presumably, critics of churchgoers draw the line because they think drugstores, bulk stories, supermarkets, &c. provide "essential goods and services"–whereas public worship doesn't provide an essential good or service. So the risk is warranted or unwarranted depending on whether you classify the transaction as an essential good or service. 

Of course, that just means many critics have a secular view of Christianity. But that begs the question. Christians are hardly obligated to share the same view of Christianity as atheists. 

iv) Jeff Lowder lives in a state that legalized pot. As a rule, decriminalizing a product or behavior makes the usage or behavior more prevalent. Driving under the influence endangers the life and health of the other drivers, bikers, cyclists, and pedestrians. But how many critics of churchgoers are equally critical of legalizing pot? If the objection is that it's wrong to put others at risk, and if they were morally consistent, then they'd be opposed to legalizing weed. 

v) In addition, I've read that many pot shops have been exempted from lockdowns. Pot shops are treated as if they provide an essential good or service–unlike churches. Do critics of churchgoers regard pot shops as essential businesses? There's a lack of moral seriousness in the criticisms and comparisons. Lots of irrational, contradictory indignation.