The Christian duty to bear children
As Christians, we have an absolute duty, if married, to obey the biblical mandate to procreate, as given to both Adam and Eve and Noah and his family:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. (Genesis 1:28)
Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. (Genesis 9:1-3)
But how many children is too many? And is it immoral to use any kind of birth control? And is it immoral to overpopulate the earth?
Personhood in Jewish Tradition
One of the points at which I disgree with my fellow conservatives is on the "point of personhood" of an embryo. While the standard evangelical and Catholic point of view is that the embryo is a person with rights beginning at fertilization, I think we should legally define it at some later point, perhaps around 4-6 weeks into gestation. At that point, the fetus has a heartbeat and brainwaves, and should logically be protected by law.
As I have been reading some of Wm. Gallston’s works, I found an interesting 2004 essay he wrote entitled RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND THE LIMITS OF PUBLIC REASON. One of the things that he discusses is that Jewish tradition doesn’t give the fetus personhood until 40 days. I feel vindicated.
The Civil Rights Movements of Our Time
The whole immigration thing is all over the news. This got me to think about all of the groups fighting for what they consider "civil rights" – all compare their causes to that of black Americans, who are of course, sometimes insulted by the comparison. Nevertheless, the three civil rights areas today I want to discuss are the homosexual, pro-life, and immigrant movements. How are they similar to the black American civil rights movements, what rights are they looking for, and how do they differ? I’m not an expert on any of these, so wanted to open it up for discussion.
Another reason why abortion is a crime: Patrick Henry Hughes
This story is so amazing, I just had to share it. I know I sullied the inspiration of this by mentioning abortion, but I just have to say that such ‘handicapped’ children are murdered by their parents more often than not today. This Dad is a hero, and so is his boy.
The reality of abortion
A video describing a first-trimester abortion — produced by Priests for Life and published on YouTube, is getting a lot of deserved attention. They show how such an abortion is done with a model. I pray that more people will have their consciences awakened.
Outrage over abortion needs to increase
The first article below is very good – if the outrage over corruption at Planned Parenthood is amped up, perhaps we can get them defunded too. God knows abortion mills are more evil than what happens at ACORN – I mean, come on, covering up statutory rape?
We need to quit pumping tax dollars into organizations that kill in the name of health.
Perspective: Outrage over ACORN, but not abortion
The ACORN scandal shows that if Congress wants to act, it can.
ACORN-related documents requested of feds
Judicial
Watch has filed three Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking
documents related to the controversial community activist organization
ACORN.
America's pro-life, pro-abortion gap oh so slight
A recent poll indicates Americans are more pro-life than ever.
School cancels speech from conservative activist
Conservative
activist David Horowitz has been asked not to present a speech titled
"Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights" at St. Louis University.
Perspective: Wouldn't it be nice?
…if we had a president more interested in defending the honor of his country than in polishing his own global celebrity?
Is it time to ‘ACORN’ Planned Parenthood and get them defunded?
Conservatives have been trying to defund the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood for years (see Defund Planned Parenthood).
However, the success of the investigative reporting that got ACORN defunded may now be seen as an effective method of undercutting the feticide that our tax dollars pay for (at least here in the US). Gary Bauer, President of the conservative public policy group American Values has already suggested this.
Here's some investigative calling done at Planned Promiscuity. Is this enough to defund them? Probably not. But we can hope that more of the corruption that exists in Planned Parenthood, esp. covering up statutory rape, will soon come out. More vids after the jump.
Beautiful or Selfish? Bringing terminally ill fetuses to term
This video came to me in an email, and despite the comments of 'beautiful,' I actually have very mixed feelings about this. While I am against abortion in all cases, I make exception in the cases of the mother's life, or if the child is diagnosed with a truly incurable, terminal, and painful illness (see c-ral.org).
While I applaud the parents for making a courageous choice in bringing this Trisomy-13 (Patau syndrome) child to birth, when I see them agonizing over his labored breathing and many lapses into near-death, saying "just let go Thomas," I kept wondering, were you really doing this for him or for yourselves? Were you slavishly following a pro-life doctrine when perhaps true compassion would have, in this case, gone for the abortion?
Was giving yourselves a chance to love him really worth his suffering? The child may have received love for his five days here, but I just wonder if these parents considered the pain he would suffer as well. I guess that, if you could not really know the severity of the child's case, you would be justified in bringing the child to term.
The funeral singing almost seemed maudlin, like some crass pro-life political rally. I'm sure it was much more than that to the participants, and to many Christians, but I am no liberal, and this very sad situation still sort of struck me as something other than awesome. I know such an opinion will not be Christianly Correct.
Crazy Love Campaign and Catalyst Podcast focus on Adoption of Orphans
The Bible says that true spirituality involves caring for orphans and widows. But how much do we actually take this seriously?
James 1:27 (New International Version)
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
LongHollow Church, a multi-site church in Tennessee, has decided on a Crazy Love fund-raising campaign that aims to, among other things, raise $200K for a Haiti orphanage, and $10K to create means for helping people adopt orphans (doesn't that sound backwards? – Shouldn't they spend MORE money on the means to make them ex-orphans?).
Also, the Catalyst Podcast is focusing on adoption, trying to get American churches to really pursue adoption of orphans – they're pushing Orphans and the Church, a Rick Warren/Saddleback effort. Here's an interview with Kay Warren talking about it. She discusses how she became passionate about it as she was researching how to help HIV victims in Africa. Really interesting.
You can also check out Kay Warren's book Dangerous Surrender: What Happens When You Say Yes to God. You can also check out my interesting afterthought after the break.
The history of anti-abortion violence? Negligable
Political Math tried to find and visualize the amount of violence associated with the pro-life movement in America. I mean, these people are a menace, right? Give me a break. As PM remarks, a proper description of the Tiller murder would be this:
This incident has shattered an eight year lull in anti-abortion related
shootings, an activity that spiked to record levels in the 90’s.
Is memory a characteristic of personhood?
Obviously, in and of itself, being able to remember does not make on a person, as animals can remember. However, for most of those who believe that personhood is a separate idea than humanity, the idea of consciousness and mental abilities often play into their equations, for lack of a better word, for determining personhood.
Repeatedly, science has shown us the complexity of an unborn human. The more we study them, the more advanced we find them to be. A recent study found that fetuses at the 30 week mark had short term memory. Those at 34 weeks could retrieve remembered information four weeks later.
Knowing this, is there anyone who still wants to defend the legality and morality of partial-birth abortions on late term babies? The abortion debate will not be solved presently, but can we not move forward to eliminate those procedures which are the most brutal and focus on individuals which can remember and experience pain?
Part II: How Christianity changed the world – Life, Sex, Marriage & Status of Women
Dr. Alvin Schmidt was interviewed in a series on the excellent Lutheran podcast Issues Etc regarding his new book, How Christianity Changed the World. I am blogging through the interviews because I think their content are a great introduction to what appears to be a great book that re-revises history in an effort to fix the errors of modern anti-theists, as well as the dominance of anti-Catholic and anti-theist spin among the enlightenment historians.
Just imagine if all of these evils done away with PRIMARILY by Christianity were still prevalent. Oh sure, "Christianity is evil." Wake up from ignorance of history. The evils of the Catholic Church and such misrepresented events such as the Crusades and the Inquisition, while important, pale in comparison to the substantial, if not critical impact of Chrsitianity on the west. Advances which paganism, humanism, and atheism had naught to do with, except sometimes as OPPONENTS to such advances.
Here's the audio, and I have brought out some points below.
Who performs the majority of abortions in the US?
I had a (somewhat heated) discussion with a liberal friend of mine who, when I retorted that Planned Parenthood was bad because they were the leading abortion provider in the us, told me that I did not know what I was talking about, that Planned Parenthood does not do abortions, and that I should 'get my facts straight!'
Needless to say, her confidence in what she was saying made me go check it out. Turns out, she was partially right, but mostly wrong. Here's what I was surprised to find out.
Liberalism’s warped morality: condemn waterboarding, condone femicide?
One accusation that both conservatives and liberals make against one another is that their opponents' hierarchy of values is out of order, if not outright contradictory.
For instance – Conservatives, how can you say you are concerned for the poor if you want to cut social programs? Why do you get so bent out of shape about homosexuality when seemingly more pressing social issues are at hand?
Conservatives, of course, have responses to these challenges, but I am not sure that they convince their liberal detractors.
But in the case of abortion, it seems hard for us conservatives to understand how liberals fail to recognize the humanity of at least the late term fetus. In light of this, their outrage at using waterboarding, a non-lethal (though not kind) interrogation technique seems laughable.
Even worse, the liberal reluctance to define the humanity of the fetus is now leading us down the slippery slope towards infanticide.
Douthat: stem cell hypocrisy
Ross Douthat, of The Atlantic and soon to be of The New York Times, discusses the charge of hypocrisy at pro-lifers in the ESCR debate.
SaveCalifornia.com issues alert
One of the conservative PACs that send me emails is SaveCalifornia.com. Here's their latest, somewhat alarmist missive, which I wanted to share. And while their tone is a little over the edge, at what point do we get alarmed? Are we like the proverbial frog in the kettle, not seeing our rights erode gradually? Should we be alarmed that Christian bookstores are being forced to hire homosexuals, or that fertility clinics are being forced to service lesbian couples, or that doctors may be forced to do abortions against their consciences?
Maybe it is time to be alarmed and to fight.
Krauthammer: Obama’s ESCR speech was “morally unserious”
Charles Krauthammer ripped Obama for his speech and executive order completely removing the restrictions which Bush had placed on embryonic stem cell research. He called the whole ceremony, "morally unserious."
The audacity of abortion
One of the overriding and significant reasons why I think that Obama would be an awful president, beyond his lack of experience (forgivable, but risky) in foreign policy and everthing else, is his overwhelming support for abortion on demand. And many conservative writers are sounding the warning bell to moderates who think that Obama’s conservative rhetoric (e.g. regarding Israel) means he is a moderate.
When it comes to abortion, he supports choice death, even for children who survive an abortion procedure and are breathing on the table outside the womb. See articles below.
