Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Epley
It is simple facial hair in the 60's & 70's identiifed the hippies-free-love-drugs-anti-establishment. The ministry made a stand. Does it have the EXACT same identifications today? I don't think so. However why the change now? Is it being advocated by holiness minded men or men who are toying with other ideas? The men I have personally known who advocated beards one of the a close personal friend also abandoned other convictions and some of them were definitely Biblical. Fight for the pea patch the next thing will be the barn then the house.
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So what happens if some evil group arises who are almost universally clean-shaven. Do we reverse our "standard" on this issue and mandate that everyone must have a full beard in order to distinguish themselves?
There is a pretty sizable global group of people who are so overwhelmingly bald that they are referred to on almost every continent as "skinheads". I would wager that their baldness is a much more universal symbol than facial hair was for hippies. Their baldness is a much more significant break from the norm than facial hair is (in that a greater percentage of men all through history had facial hair than are completely bald). Do we need to make a similar stand on people being completely bald so people can distinguish them.
In my opinion, the issue of facial hair did not even apply to every subset of society in America. There are communities where facial hair was never anything more than a dignified thing. It honestly makes as much sense to me as going to rural America and saying that there should be a standard against wearing blue or red because at a certain place and time it symbolized allegiance to a street gang. Once again as ridiculous as that sounds, much more importance was placed by the street gang in their color than by the hippies in their facial hair.
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