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below on same sex couples.
When the phrase "I just want my friends to be happy" becomes the compass heading then the question is "Are there any limits?"
What if sex with 10 year old children makes them happy?
If there are limits, then what are the limits to be and who sets them?
This is not a XN nation and never has been -- though the influence of Biblical XY has had influence here as in no modern nation. And bible believing people still make up a valuable minority. Here is the best expression of thought from a Biblical point of view on this false goal of happiness that I know of.
Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some "disinterested," because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the "lord of terrible aspect," is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.
He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not.
No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.
We "have all we want" is a terrible saying when "all" does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, "God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full-there's nowhere for Him to put it."
C. S. Lewis -- The Problem of Pain
To move away from God is to move away from who we are made to be and to move away from all that will, ultimately, bring happiness at the deepest part of life.
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