Monday, March 21, 2022

The Alcohol And Drug Double Standard: An Unbiblical Inconsistency

It is hardly surprising to many people to find that a handful of passages in the Bible do directly condemn drunkenness, and some have realized that this is not a prohibition of alcohol itself.  Many parts of the Bible, like John 2's renowned story of Jesus turning water into wine, make it clear that drinking alcohol is objectively nonsinful according to Christian morality, though not even these examples are needed to demonstrate this.  One only needs to see that alcohol is not condemned directly or by logical extension of some other thing and that adding to God's moral commands is itself a sin (Deuteronomy 4:2).  What of drugs, non-alcoholic substances that either grow naturally (such as marijuana) or that are created by combining distinct ingredients?


If one is inherently sinful, so is the other; if one can be used without succumbing to intoxication, then the other can be used in the same way given that there is nothing automatically overpowering about it.  Many people, Christians and non-Christians, accept alcohol use as being neutral or even somewhat positive until it is used as an attempted escape from very serious problems that are not being confronted or until someone gets intoxicated and harms themselves, others, or property.  Perhaps this is because alcohol is not an illegal substance and can be more openly seen as people drink it without expressing irrational motivations for doing so amd without it being mishandled and leading to something like assault or death.

As soon as any kind of drug is substituted for alcohol, some of the same people who rightly distinguish between the general use of alcohol and alcoholism suddenly despise recreational drug use and reveal their biases against drugs.  This double standard for alcohol and drug use is not found in the Bible even though some Christians act as if the Bible permits alcohol, but not intentional intoxication from alcohol, while prohibiting the use of drugs in a non-medical context.  The Bible does prohibit getting purposefully drunk, which could impair someone's alignment with reason and lead to them carrying out sinful acts they would otherwise not commit.  Apart from these potential impacts of drunkenness, it is unlikely that intoxication would even be condemned.

That the same general mind-altering nature of alcohol is shared with drugs like marijuana means that the Bible does not even have to mention drugs specifically in order for it to permit basic drug use and condemn drug intoxication by purely logical extension of what it says about alcohol.  The anti-legalism of Deuteronomy 4:2, which forbids adding to God's commands, and the logical equivalence of substance and alcohol use mean that Christian morality--the actual moral obligations and condemnations in the Bible itself, not the cultural or personal preferences lesser Christians cling to--does not exclude using certain drugs for pleasant experiences that have nothing to with a medical context.

It is contra-Biblical to condemn alcohol use itself for the sake of preventing drunkeness, and the same is true of objecting to some drugs based on how they might be used (the slippery slope fallacy at the heart of most cases of legalism) or based on the more immediately catastrophic effects of separate drugs.  The inconsistencies in the stances so many Christians claim to have with regards to alcohol and drugs do not reflect Mosaic Law or the later prophetic and New Testament elaborations on Christian morality that do not ever even conflict with the obligations revealed in Mosaic Law.  What they do reflect is asinine personal failure to look to reason or a tendency to gravitate towards popular hypocrisies of the surrounding culture.

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