Debuting in 2004, Debbie Downer was the creation of Paula Pell, a two-decade veteran writer on “Saturday Night Live” and a key force behind some of the show’s most enduring sketches, including Ms. Downer. Evolving from the character’s immense popularity, the name Debbie Downer eventually became an established slang referring to a negative person who has the tendency to bring down the mood of everyone around them.
To secular eyes, the Bible is archaic, a holdover from a time of peasant farmers and scientific illiteracy. Some atheists in fact claim that these are “legal requirements” to govern our actions, reducing the Law to a set of do’s and don’ts.
Do God’s Laws spoil our fun?
As I was driving the girls to dance lessons one Saturday, I took the opportunity to ask my daughters what they thought about rules governing good behaviour:
“Girls, when daddy gives you rules to follow, do you think I’m spoiling your fun?”
Yes!
“Why do you think that?”
Because it means that there are things we want to do but cannot!
“Do you remember what happened that time when you had too much candy?”
[Replying with some shame] We became very sick.
“You see, when daddy gives you rules, it is because I have the experience to know that too much of a good thing can spoil what was designed to be enjoyable. I knew you would get sick eating too much candy, I gave you rules so that you could keep enjoying candy for a long time.”
The world is designed to be enjoyed
God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good – Genesis 1:31
Perhaps the lightning-rod issue that best reflects how secular society views Christian virtue as mere “stuffiness” or as uptight fun-hating wet blankets is how the Bible governs sexual behaviour: outside of sacramental marriage, it is a sin.
While it is a polarising viewpoint for non-believers, the reality is that a recent 2020 psychological study affirms that while Tinder users showed more positive attitudes towards consensual nonmonogamy and greater sociosexuality than nonusers, they also expressed increased dissatisfaction with their sex life.
In my perspective, the main issue is that ‘consensual nonmonogamy” reduces something like an amazing gift of sex to a mere physical necessity, this in turn reduces us from image bearers and reflections of the Lord to mere animals. In short, you cannot reduce a gift to mere biological necessity and expect to still feel satisfied.
“We long for happiness, but we’re made for joy.”
Father Mike Schmitz
As the word itself implies, happiness is associated with happenings, happenstance, luck, and fortune. If circumstances are favourable, you are happy; if not, then you’re unhappy. One of the greatest misunderstandings of our time is the belief that we are supposed to be happy all the time and so we have a rabbit race for sex or to a lesser degree, like immature children, we think that in order to be happy, we need all the candy we can consume.
God isn’t some Divine Debbie Downer, He made us for joy, and He knows the very things that we might chase and in the process, hurt ourselves. He gave us those rules so that we might have life and have it in the full.
Main Image: David Henry, Pexels
