Posted on 02/06/2018 5:06:31 AM PST by Kaslin
Last week, I ran a column urging pastors to do more than simply tell their congregants to be bold in their faith. I also urged pastors to be specific by taking a stand themselves on specific issues. The example I gave was defending the unborn. In the process, I suggested that pastors needed to teach congregants how to defend the unborn from a scientific and philosophical perspective. This provoked several angry emails from Christian readers who insisted that we need to defend the unborn solely from scripture. I write today in response to those misguided critics.
My pro-life Christian critics understand why human life has value. The fact that we are made in the image of God makes us all valuable from the point of conception. There is simply no need to explain this to someone who is truly seeing the world through the lens of a Christian worldview. But Christians sometimes need help understanding how pro-abortion choice advocates view the world. I can help to do that because I work with such people daily.
Put simply, the pro-abortion choice advocate is usually a secularist who believes that human beings are the ones charged with assigning value to other humans. In other words, they think our rights come from man rather than God. This position creates a necessary tension with one of the secularist’s other professed values. Christians need to know what those values are before they engage important issues with these secular opponents.
To be sure, the secularist professes allegiance to a number of different values. But two of them are of specific relevance to the debate over abortion. One is the commitment to science as a means of advancing the human condition. The other is the outcome of human equality as the ultimate goal or end of advancing the human condition. In a nutshell, the secularist wants to use science to advance mankind, but only if we are equally situated after all is said and done.
The secularist’s professed love of science provides pro-lifers with a rare opportunity to destroy the opposition on their own playing field by appealing to scientific consensus. It is true that scientists are in disagreement about a number of things. The existence and extent of global warming provides a salient example. But there is no lack of scientific consensus on the issue of when life begins. You simply cannot find a credible embryology textbook that disputes the fact that life begins at conception. Yet somehow the Bible thumping pro-life fundamentalist insists on avoiding the strongest argument against abortion in the eyes of the very people he seeks to influence. He would rather re-read his Bible than take the time to look at an embryology textbook. This is the height of arrogance and intellectual laziness.
The importance of emphasizing science becomes obvious when we recognize that the vast majority of pro-abortion choice arguments are question begging. In other words, they simply assume what they are trying to prove – namely, that the unborn is not human. For example, when they say abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” they assume abortion does not kill a living human being. Otherwise, they would not casually assert that it should be “safe” or “legal.” Similarly, when they argue that we should not force women to bring “unwanted children” into the world they are implicitly proposing abortion as a means of reducing child abuse. But abortion only reduces child abuse if you assume that the entity aborted is not a human child.
By relying upon science, the pro-lifer forces the pro-abortion choice advocate to either admit that abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being or abandon his sworn allegiance to science. Ultimately, he must do the former. Thus, he is forced to find a philosophical reason for allowing abortion despite the fact that science tells us it kills a developing human being. These philosophical justifications are dangerous to the pro-abortion choice advocate because they pose a threat to his stated value of human equality as the end of advancing the human condition.
Of course, every pro-lifer has heard these philosophical justifications. But few take the time to stop and think about their implications. I recall the example of the feminist who told me she was insulted by my suggestion that a “mere fetus” had the same value as she did - even when it was “as small as a raisin.” But by suggesting that the value of life varies with body size she was undermining her case for feminism. Clearly, women are smaller than men on average. Therefore, her argument that smaller humans are less valuable translates into a case for male superiority.
Another obvious example is the argument that the unborn are less valuable due to the fact that they are less developed. This offensive logic could be used to argue that killing a college graduate should be punished more severely than killing an illiterate. Or that killing the illiterate should be punished more severely than killing someone with Down syndrome. Such brazen arguments cannot be squared with the secularist’s commitment to social equality.
Finally, those who posit dependency as a factor reducing the value of human life run into similar problems. Those who view the unborn as “parasites” toy with a dangerous idea. If accepted, others might use this mindset to purge the welfare rolls through the means of mass murder. Such a position cannot be squared with the secularist’s commitment to socioeconomic or racial equality.
In the end, the pro-abortion choice advocate must decide whether he will choose science or remain committed to anti-science fundamentalism. Next, he must choose between a philosophical commitment to abortion and a philosophical commitment to human equality. But he cannot have both.
Meanwhile, the pro-lifer must decide whether he will continue thumping his Bible or whether he will learn to master the arguments that exploit his opponent’s weaknesses.
God pronounced His creation ‘very good’ . . . Eden was a perfect garden [still was after the fall which is why Adam and Eve were put out and the entrance guarded by an angel to keep them from eating of the tree of life in their imperfect state).
Do you believe in the ‘rapture’ or the ‘millennium’ or do you reject these truths because the words are not found in Scripture?
You do not understand God’s relation to time and we have had this gbround betire. Have a nice day.
‘There is no “must abide” by logical arguement for any secularist as there is no higher arching logical authority to govern his or her pre biased thinking.
actually, there is no ‘must abide’ for anyone, if one wishes to not be governed, including those professing belief in some ‘higher arching authority’...
‘You do not understand God’s relation to time and we have had this gbround betire.’
ah yes, the God works in mysterious ways bromide...
Then your views come into conflict with the Judeo-Christian consensus world views of our constitutional founding fathers whether some of them considered themselves “deists” , Christian or otherwise.
We all know about Jefferson’s miracles “redacted” “Bible” but he still held out Jesus as the greatest moral teacher in history and he held out that Christian values were best that men should live by. 90 percent of the American public in the 1790’s held that view at the founding of the second constitution and Bill of Rights.
You choose to be conservative out of your own chosen biases to which I would certainly not judge as being “bad”. Since I hold to conservative values based on religious ideals and principles,including the belief in an overarching Living God I at least know why I believe why I believe...though in the realms of reason and logic, such concepts are tautologies that can not be argued true or false. So for me there are “must abides”!
The unconscious bias that many, who hold to a notion of the concept of reason as the founding basis of “known” truth, is that they must hold such religious tautologies as automatically false. Prove it the agnostic says! You prove it not, say the pious. We can be good people too, say the agnostics. You are only borrowing a concept of “good” from known sources that describe the laid down commands from the divine, say the pious. Thus a circular argument that has often fostered serpentine debates thru-out the millennia.
Yet here is what I believe the core founding reality of what brought our nation into being: Our Republic was conceived in the aspirations of a Spiritually liberated people and nurtured by the blood of patriots who longed for a free nation full of the potential to better one’s self, and given birth from a Socio-political womb awash in the waters of a strong Judeo-Christian moral consensus!
Agnostic conservatives are sojourners in our American experience; I don’t think they will steal from me or try to take my wife, nor will they prevent me from worship like agnostic progressives would!
My question for you both is why is the question important? There needs to be a stronger definition of the term “perfect” as well as honest exposition of the personal biases behind the question. What is a perfect human or what would have been a perfect human from God’s perspective? What would have been a perfect human according to your biases, dartuser? Or yours “Pilgrim”?
Search for the answers to those questions and you’ll know why God uses the term “good”* and not the term “perfect”*...(at least as has been translated from the Hebrew texts)*.
Not really an answer, but what did Adam ‘fall’ from? If there were no standard above what he had then the term is rather meaningless. In my mind I see ‘perfection’ and ‘innocence’ as pretty much the same thing.
At any rate, my point from the beginning of this thread was that everyone born into this world after that ‘fall’ are of the image and likeness of sinful man.
Jesus, being born ‘of the seed of woman’ is not tainted by the curse and sinless.
The sin of Adam and Eve was “chalesa” meaning “being wide of the Mark”. It comes from a term archers used in describing missing the target. “Fall” in this case simply means going from a state being innocent and free of unrighteousness and being in fellowship with God to a state of having a broken fellowship and being cursed by having defied the will of God. Hence, we “fell”(in terms of declining spiritual wholeness) from a state of blameless fellowship with God to a state of spiritual death and lack of fellowship with God.
Our humanity went “wide of God’s Mark” but Christ’s blood and grace can bring us back into the center and onto the course of “the race” as Paul described it!
This was the essence of “good” as man was described at the point of mankind’s creation. Ignorance concerning the knowledge of good and evil implied that growth into a larger consciousness of themselves and of the Father was yet to occur but the process was interrupted by Eve’s temptation and her succumbing to sin.
Which leads back to the notion of “perfection”. Is a perfect human to be defined by certain characteristics and modalities of his material parts or does he also have to grow into it consciously, morally, and spiritually?(Adam’s inner man being renewed daily and gradually growing in knowledge of the Father, even though he may never have sinned?)
That’s why the notion of a “perfect” human is an almost unknowable and unarguable concept. Only God knows what he had in mind in terms of a perfected mankind; only he has the blue print. Are cats perfect now as they are or does God have in mind a notion of the “ultimate” cat?
If God had originally made man to have only a 70 year life span (like some “bladerunner type” replicant) who never sinned and had perfect knowledge of everything God was, who after 70 years, slept and then powdered instantly into dust...if that was God’s ultimate concept of what a human should be, could not such a man be considered “perfect” according to how God designed him,(him and others after “his kind”)...that is by the power of his word?
Yet by the above question can we even begin fathom the sense of the magnitude of our loss and fall. God said instead...”If you eat of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, you will surely die.” Adam and Eve ate of it and began to know death and lost the perfect knowledge of God and the wisdom previously available to them thru him. (We really don’t know how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden and we don’t know whether to count the age of Adam from when he was created or from when he left the garden or at least at what age he was when he left the garden.
God told Eve her pain in child birth would be multiplied...had she already experienced childbirth but then afterwards (from the “fruit” incident) experience such more painfully with Cain and then Able being the first of humans birthed in her accursed state? Cain did gain a wife after all (and yes I’m not afraid to tell scoffers it was one of his sisters!).
So a lot of unanswered questions, but I trust we’re not quite ready as spiritual people for the answers just yet. My internal sense is that the answers will someday blow our minds and will cause all to clap and cheer(as the OT says) when God destroys evil off of the Earth and Satan is chained up for a thousand years! The answers I suspect may cause many in our current state of development to despair or lose heart, or as Christ told the disciples “I have many things to tell you but you can’t bear them yet!”.
‘Agnostic conservatives are sojourners in our American experience’
do not think I came to this point easily; I did not...I was until this last year a traditionalist Catholic, the ‘smells and bells’ type that despised the modern church and its innovations...alas, the concept of ‘worship’ has become alien to me, as I reject such veneration that is enforced upon the pain of penalty, as religions are wont to profess, regardless of my personal love for my former rite...
‘nor will they prevent me from worship like agnostic progressives would!’
I would be a hypocrite of unimaginable proportion to demand the right for me to not worship, and then turn around and attempt to deny you the inverse of my own right...
The Sun and the wind were having an argument over which was more powerful. They pondered over a simple peasant who wore an over cloak over his clothing. The Wind stated “I know what will settle this argument. Which ever of us can cause the peasant to open or lose his over cloak will be the strongest.”
The Sun agreed and stated”An excellent suggestion and you may proceed to try first!”
So the wind gathered its powers and drew cold air into it self and began to blow upon the peasant who simply tightened his cloak around him. The wind, growing frustrated drew upon cloud and rain and blew ever more furiously upon the peasant which caused the peasant to draw his cloak ever more tightly about him. Tried as he might the wind was never able to get the cloak off of the peasant.
“Enough!” exclaimed the sun “and now it is my turn!” So the Sun brightened and the sky cleared. The air began to warm and the birds began to sing. The peasant walked on and soon he loosened his cloak. The sun continued to warm the air and the smell of the fresh grass and flowers were simply delightful. The peasant’s face began to flush and he opened his cloak completely. Just a little more warming and soon the peasant thru off the cloak, completely basking in the glow of a warm spring afternoon.
Said the Sun to the Wind...”You can never force a man with condescending cold brutality to perform what he will volunteer to do with an expression of warmth and honesty born of sincerity!”
”You can never force a man with condescending cold brutality to perform what he will volunteer to do with an expression of warmth and honesty born of sincerity!”
an interesting parable for a skillful homilist to deliver at Mass or service...but skillful homilists are at a premium...
I had remembered it and wrote actually in sympathy with your past struggles with faith.
With Kind Regards.....Michael Mathis RN
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