Oct 1, 2015 | Explanatory Power
The Planned Parenthood videos (see a “Quick and Easy Guide” to them at the Federalist) have put the pro-abortion movement on the defensive unlike at any time in the sordid history of legal abortion in America. Of course many abortion defenders have just attacked the messenger, as if Planned Parenthood was not in fact selling baby body parts for a profit. All justified in the name of Science, don’t you know. But one of the most telling and sad responses is by a Lindy West who started something called #ShoutYourAbortion. What stood out to me in an article she penned for The Guardian announcing it was this intro:
Last week I realised that, even among my pro-choice friends, I never, ever talk about my abortion. We need to chip away at stigma, at lies, at the climate of shame.
So we are to believe that any shame a woman feels for killing her child is simply a stigma imposed from a society that doesn’t understand or accept her decision? And what lies? That having an abortion is killing a human being? That is simply an indisputable fact of science. At conception what comes to exist inside the mother is a unique individual completely distinct from the mother and the father with it’s own distinct genetic code. So it is indeed a human being. But according to the Supreme Court these last forty plus years, not a person and thus it’s life can be snuffed out for any and every reason up to birth. That is the law of the land.
Unfortunately for Ms. West, and fortunately for the human race, shame isn’t a matter of climate; you can’t just turn the thermostat down on shame. Nope, the human condition is filled with shame, and thank God for it. The first thing Adam and Eve did after their fall was to hide; they were afraid because they were naked. They had done something wrong by eating what God had told them not to eat, they had disobeyed and were now afraid. Judgment is like that. It doesn’t feel good to know we’ve done wrong and admit it. We prefer to hide. The hiding isn’t necessarily good, but feeling the shame for having done wrong certainly is. We admit there is such a thing as wrong, that God’s law exists, that we live in a moral universe where right and wrong are objectively real, as I argued recently in a post on natural law.
What could be more shameful, more worthy of shame, than a woman purposefully ending a life that grows within her. Here is the bottom line: If there is no God, there are then no objective moral values, no right and wrong that exist outside of our own personal preferences, and thus absolutely nothing inherently wrong with killing unborn babies. If there is a God, then the shame a woman feels for killing her unborn child is sadly deserved, and we don’t do her or anyone else a favor by pretending otherwise.
Sep 27, 2015 | Apologetics
Some time ago listening to an apologetics talk I heard something that was so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it just that way before. I probably had to some degree, but it never made as much sense in the context of evidence for God’s existence. The statement went something like this: you can no more break God’s moral laws than you can break his physical laws. If you tried to break the law of gravity by jumping out of a building with thoughts of flying, you would shortly surely splatter on the ground. God’s moral laws are just as unforgiving if not just as immediate. Take sex as a ubiquitous example in our culture. If you do it God’s way, man, woman, lifelong commitment in marriage, it is a very good thing, and there is no downside. If pleasure and romance and self-fulfillment are your gods, then misery awaits, whether that is a sexually transmitted disease, or broken hearts, or jealousy, lying, violence, or children growing up without a mother and a father, or killing the “product of conception.” (more…)
Sep 23, 2015 | Truth
There is a nice piece by Joel Miller at Theology Sticks about the essentially public nature of religion. As much as the secularists of our day might try to distort the First Amendment and keep Christians silent and docile, it will never happen. This is not just about the nature of the Christian faith either, as Miller points out, but about human nature and the nature of religion itself. Faith is never simply personal because all faith is a function of our view of the world, of all reality and our place in it.
Modern people want to turn religion into a merely subjective experience, something that doesn’t say anything about the real world; as long as it makes us happy, or whatever. Americans and Westerners in general are basically relativists who think what is true for one person doesn’t necessarily have to be true for another person. Of course this is patently absurd on the face of it, but logical consistency is not at the top of many people’s priority list. All the world’s religions make competing truth claims, and the law of contradiction says two contradictory claims cannot be true at the same time. Whatever these claims happen to be, and whatever religion it happens to be, even if it is atheistic religion, it will seek to influence society in some way, and that includes its politics. There is no neutral ground, and there is no naked public square, as the late Richard John Neuhaus once argued persuasively. Ironically, when people took truth claims seriously, tolerance as a virtue actually made sense. Today so called tolerance is an excuse for totalitarian leftist group think, the fruit of a relativism that is as absolutist as any religious fundamentalist.
Sep 7, 2015 | Culture, Parents and Family
The gay “marriage” ruling, the gift that keeps on giving. As one headline read: “‘Sister Wives’ family points to same-sex marriage cases in arguing against Utah polygamy ban.” Of course they would, and they would be perfectly logical to do so. In fact, the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling pretty much redefined marriage out of existence. Remember, when Justice Kennedy in the 1992 case that legalized sodomy said, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This sounds like more at the heart of what Christians call the fall that we read about in Genesis 3. Satan’s temptation to Adam and Eve was that what God provided wasn’t good enough. If only they would listen to him they would “be like God, knowing good and evil,” the perfect equal to Justice Kennedy’s hubris. (more…)
Sep 5, 2015 | Theology
David Brooks is one of the token kind-of-conservatives at the New York Times, and I enjoy reading him because it is interesting to read someone who is not a committed conservative philosophically, but has something of a conservative temperament. He is also from what I understand an agnostic or atheist, probably more of the former, so as a Christian it is also interesting to see where he goes with his almost conservative thoughts. In a piece last week titled, “When ISIS Rapists Win,” he asked a typically modern question filled with Enlightenment, progressive assumptions when confronted with the horrific evil of ISIS:
The ISIS atrocities have descended like distant nightmares upon the numbed conscience of the world. The first beheadings of Americans had the power to shock, but since then there has been a steady barrage of inhumanity: mass executions of Christians and others, throwing gay men from rooftops, the destruction of ancient archaeological treasures, the routine use of poison gas.
Eve the recent reports in The Times about the Islamic State’s highly structured rape program have produced shock but barely a ripple of action.
And yet something bigger is going on. It’s as if some secret wormhole into a different historical epoch has been discovered and the knowledge of centuries is being unlearned. . . .
This wasn’t supposed to happen in the 21st century. Western experts have stared the thing in the face, trying to figure out the cause and significance of the moral disaster we are witnessing. (more…)
The Planned Parenthood videos (see a “Quick and Easy Guide” to them at the Federalist) have put the pro-abortion movement on the defensive unlike at any time in the sordid history of legal abortion in America. Of course many abortion defenders have just attacked the messenger, as if Planned Parenthood was not in fact selling baby body parts for a profit. All justified in the name of Science, don’t you know. But one of the most telling and sad responses is by a Lindy West who started something called #ShoutYourAbortion. What stood out to me in an article she penned for The Guardian announcing it was this intro:
Recent Comments