Excellent!
I try, occasionally, for the fun of it, to think about what I'm talking about. And for my bubbas and sissies here I thought about vanity and abortion. (I didn't say any of this in Church.)
And here's what came to the alleged mind: The Song of Mary, the Magnificat. The particular verse that floated up through the litter in my head was:
"He has scattered the proud in their conceit." Here's an older version:
"He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."
The Latin and Greek both say, pretty much, 'the minds of their hearts' but my Greek Lexicon (Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, for my fellow geeks) suggests that dianoia (διανοια) can have the sense of "disposition" (might we say "world view" or "prejudices"?) and can be used in a pejorative sense in the LXX and, it seems to say, in secular Greek as well from the time of Aeschylus. Me, I wouldn't know.
But it does get me to thinking about what kind of mind I used to have (and therefore Paul's urging that our minds be renewed), the kind of mind that could entertain calmly the idea of ending infant life in the name of "quality of life," (or some other, um, periphrastic prevarication - okay, I'm a little giddy here ...).
And all I can say is, Wow! Was I ever stupid!
I did say this: Not only do we have "Moses and the prophets," we have the testimony of our own hearts. What sound on earth can give greater happiness than the gentle cooing of a baby? In the normal course of events do we not rejoice at the news of a birth?
Is it not written on our hearts, and on the hearts of Pagans, that a child is of inestimable worth? Sure, in demonic perversion this perception led people to offer their own babies in sacrifice, but surely it was some deep sense of the incalculable worth of a baby.
And I believe this is true, that it was humans at war in themselves who exposed their young then and who kill them now.
We are at war with ourselves. From our first parents, each looking for someone else to blame for eating the forbidden fruit, we have been afraid to know ourselves too well, for fear, perhaps, of the horror we might find.
So we construct "the imagination of our hearts," a less-upsetting alternate reality. On this we base far, far too much. And because, being false, it is essentially rickety, we prop it up with little vanities.
Or not so little, such as the vain idea that we know so much about everything that we can set out to kill an innocent human without moral consequence.
We may tolerate and even smile at little vanities. But we should recognize how venomous they are when full grown