Category Maybe It’s Just Me, But…

General ramblings of an easily amused mind.

Abortion Should Not be a Partisan Issue

Ed

My pastor shared this message via email this morning and I’d like to share it with you. Too many Christians (including Lutherans) see the abortion issue as a political issue, but they’re wrong. Abortion ends an innocent human life. That’s it, period. No one in this nation, be he Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, Republican, Democrat, Conservative, etc., should support state sanctioned murder due to a person’s size, stage of development, location, or degree of dependency. I’ve written about this before (click here), but it never hurts to read what someone else is saying.

Abortion should not be a partisan issue.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ JESUS,

When pastors talk about politics, they tend to lose sight of their calling: to preach JESUS Christ and Him crucified for the redemption of the world. But in the matter of abortion, we are not dealing with the usual political matters such as health insurance costs, taxation rates, gun control, or foreign policy.

Abortion is, quite simply, the taking of a human life. To oppose abortion is not to side with a political party: it is to take your stand with the right of every human being to live. Thus among my favorite signs at the annual March for Life are the ones from Secularists for Life, Atheists for Life, Feminists for Life, and Democrats for Life. These groups demonstrate that whatever disagreements we have about other issues pertaining to religion or the governance of our country, we all stand together under the declaration that every human being has a fundamental right to life.

While a poll of Immanuel would likely reveal more members of one major party than another, I know that we have people of all political stripes in our congregation. And I am not interested, as your pastor, in addressing your politics. My calling is to watch out for your souls – and to speak out for the helpless and defenseless, which the unborn certainly are.

I like to think that if I weren’t a Christian, I would still be pro-life. For while the Word of God informs me that God loves and values every human being, it is a simple matter of science that from the moment of conception a human life has come into being, and human beings have what the 1776 Declaration of Independence affirms as “unalienable Rights.” Among the Founders who agreed to that statement were Christians to be sure, but also Deists. The pro-life position is not a Christian issue or a Republican issue but a civil rights issue – I believe the civil rights issue of our time.

As Christians, however, we have one more thing to offer: the God who gives life also grants forgiveness. Forgiveness to those complicit in abortion, forgiveness for our failure to care for those in need, forgiveness for all the times we have done what was convenient instead of what was right.

And flowing from that forgiveness to us, we Christians will live lives of forgiveness and mercy toward others, people in desperate and hopeless situations. Stand with us for life. Join us for the March for Life. Help us, by your offerings, to help pregnant women in need. Help us, by your offerings, to help abused women find shelter. These are today’s “widows and orphans in affliction” which “religion that is pure and undefiled” (James 1:27) desires to help.

Finally, pray. Pray for an end to abortion. Pray for an end to evil and violence in the world. Pray for those wounded and hurting after abortion. Kyrie, eleison!

Your unworthy undershepherd,
Pastor Esget

Well said, Pastor.

Va. is one step closer to regulating abortion clinics

Ed

Va. is one step closer to regulating abortion clinics to protect women’s health. http://ow.ly/gvBbv

Clackamas Town Center and Sandy Hook Elementary School Shootings

Ed 1 Comment

Much has been said and written regarding the two public shootings last week in Oregon and Connecticut (and please don’t forget the shooting in Colorado earlier this year), with pundits of all stripes claiming to know the reason why these things have happened. The reasons are varied and come from all sides: removing school prayer; violent video games; ease of buying guns and rifles; desensitization due to prevalence of abortion in America; and on it goes.

But I believe all of these reasons are just symptoms of a deeper problem. One research paper I just finished writing is about how social media is serving as a replacement for living in relationships with each other and with God  (yes, I see the irony as I use social media to share this information).

In short, God created humans to be in relationship with each other and to be in relationship with Him. When we are in a right relationship with God, then we experience shalom (God’s peace). Because of sin, we live in broken relationships between each other–and with God–thereby missing out on the shalom that God has promised us. Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the price for our sin and to heal our relationship with God, but sin still remains in us while we live on this earth. Indeed, we continue to seek other ways to fill the void of the missing shalom in our lives with all sorts of temporal things, from the seemingly innocuous (like food or video games) to the illegal and immoral (like drugs or sexual promiscuity).

I’ve commented previously on a book by Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (read about it here on Amazon.com) which explores, from a clinical psychologist’s point of view, the replacement of humans by machines in relationships and the subsequent entwinement of man and machine. Now, I’ve recently started reading Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel (read about it here) and some words in the introduction of the book made a lot of sense.

The Internet as technical innovation is the answer to our contemporary condition of hectic, disconnected, fragmented activity. A century of technological change has filled our busy days with near-simultaneous disparate experiences. Being online now allows us to organize these experiences, almost to unify them. (What is “compartmentalization” but a way to keep several “windows” open at the same time?) Despite our lamentations that e-mail is running and ruining our lives, we can keep up, in some type of manageable fashion, with the accelerated rhythms of clashing life spheres.

In the same way, the Internet’s social and psychological nature is the answer to a century of social and psychological change. During that time, the individual was gradually elevated above society. Satisfying our own desires has become more important than balancing our relationships with other people.

The age of Freud, the Existential Self, the Therapeutic Self, the Confessional Self, the Performing Self, the age of the memoir, the Me Generation, the Culture of Narcissism–life has become more mentalized, more inward, more directed toward the gratification of personal desire. The collapse of the family and the preponderance of people living alone are aspects of this trend; tragically, so is the shocking frequency of violence, even of mass murder, in public places. We live more in our own heads than any society has at any time, and for some people now the only reality that exists is the one inside their heads.

… The Internet magnifies these pathological patterns of behavior, but it didn’t create them.

It seems that we are now reaping what we have sown by creating a society where the “me” is more important than the “us.” Although we were created to live communally in relationship with God and with one another, we prize our “alone-ness.” This is even evident in the Church as Christians jump on the libertarian bandwagon, all the while ignoring the dichotomy of claiming that the individual has the right to decide what’s right for himself but forgetting that it is God who is sovereign over all and thus decides for us what is right and wrong (regardless of whether we heed His commands or not).

We’ll probably never know why James Holmes entered a movie theater and killed 12 people or why Adam Lanza entered an elementary school and killed 26 (including children), but I think it would be good for us to start understanding that the idea of being “alone together” has unintended consequences that are not acceptable. It’s time to come back and live together in relationships the way God intended.

Updated December 18, 2012 21:42 hrs.

Living Today Alone Together

Ed

This is the last part of my thoughts from reading Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle, a licensed clinical psychologist. Click here to read part 2.

One of my favorite all-time sci-fi books is Gateway by Frederik Pohl. This book was first published in 1976 and I first read it as a teenager in the 80’s. One of the more interesting concepts in this book was that the main character, Bob Broadhead, takes counsel from a computerized therapist, Sigfrid. I always thought that this was some fantastical dream springing out of the mind of a talented writer. In reality, he was just a good student of human nature and life now imitates art.

In Sherry Turkle’s book, she recounts an experiment she conducted at a nursing home. Turkle brought in several sociable robots, ones that can react and respond to your words and actions. In this case, it was a My Real Baby and she records the experiences of “Jonathan,” a seventy-four year old retired computer technician. After living at the nursing for two years, Jonathan feels isolated and cut-off from the other residents, mainly because he is not sociable and curt to others when they try to reach out to him.

But Jonathan warms up to My Real Baby after a few months and eventually “discusses his life and current problems–mostly loneliness–with the robot.” In fact, when questioned about this, Jonathan replies:

For things about my life that are very private, I would enjoy talking more to a computer … but things that aren’t strictly private, I would enjoy more talking to a person. … Because if the thing is very highly private and very personal, it might be embarrassing to talk about it to another person, and I might be afraid of being ridiculed for it … and it [My Real Baby] wouldn’t criticize me. … Or, let’s say that I wanted to blow off steam. … [I could] express with the computer emotions that I feel I could not express with another person, to a person.

It’s interesting that people are so cautious of being hurt by other people that we would rather talk to a robot which offers nothing more than pre-programmed responses to certain input. Have we done such a poor job of Christ’s command to “love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34).

What does this have to do with life issues? Ultimately, life issues all revolve around how we view one another, care for one another, love one another. Do we teach our children that they were created by God for something better than a one-night stand or a hook-up or a “friend with benefits”? Do we reach out to the woman facing an unplanned pregnancy and tell her that she is loved through our words and, more importantly, our actions? Do we look at the person with a disability and treat them as if they were an inconvenience in our lives? Do we ignore the elderly by shuffling them off to nursing homes so we don’t have to care for them ourselves?

In the command to love one another as Christ has loved us (John 13:33-35), Christians are told to open themselves to relationship with each other, which can sometimes result in getting hurt by the other person. Turkle clearly makes the connection between the rise in being “connected” with others online with a desire to avoid being hurt which has clear implications to the Christian witness.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m trouble by the thought of artificial life replacing real, living people whether in relationships or for other purposes. Eve was created by God for Adam because no other creature satisfied his need for a relationship with a like being (Genesis 2:18-25). Is this desire to seek robotic or online avatar-based relationships evidence of a yet deeper corruption or rejection of God’s perfect design for all persons?

Pro-life Plank Denied by DNC Platform Committee

Ed

This is a follow-up to my previous post, It’s Not About Politics, It’s About Who You Are.

Well folks, it’s almost official (of course, it won’t be official until the final platform is adopted in convention). The platform committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has rejected any notion of supporting human life as a plank.

Democrats For Life of America (DFLA) proposed the following plank for inclusion of the party platform (as reported by LifeNews):

“We respect the conscience of each American and recognize that members of our Party have deeply held and sometimes differing positions on issues of personal conscience, like abortion and the death penalty. We recognize the diversity of views as a source of strength and we welcome into our ranks all Americans who may hold differing positions on these and other issues.

“However, we can find common ground. We believe that we can reduce the number of abortions because we are united in our support for policies that assist families who find themselves in crisis or unplanned pregnancies. We believe that women deserve to have a breadth of options available as they face pregnancy: including, among others, support and resources needed to handle the challenges of pregnancy, adoption, and parenthood; access to education, healthcare, childcare; and appropriate child support. We envision a new day without financial or societal barriers to bringing a planned or unplanned pregnancy to term.”

Some pro-abortion politicians have to stated that they want to reduce the number of abortions and that any abortion that occurs should be safe and legal. Well, that sounds like what DFLA’s proposed plank is saying but we don’t hear any pro-aborts supporting it. In fact, the plank didn’t say anything about overturning Roe v. Wade and making abortions illegal, yet the staunchly pro-abortion platform committee dismissed it out of hand.

In fact, something that should worry the radical pro-abortion forces in control of the DNC is the decreasing numbers of pro-life office holders. Since the population usually polls around a 50-50 split in terms of pro-life or pro-abortion, with one side taking the lead and then the other side reclaiming it, it should concern the DNC that pro-life Americans are abandoning the DNC.

According to DFLA, in 1978, the Democratic Party has seen the number of pro-life Democrats shrink over the years.

“In 1978, the Democratic Party, held a 292-seat majority in the U.S. House, with 125 pro-life Democrats. Increased partisanship over the pro-life issue—including the rejection of pro-life candidates within the Democratic Party—caused many of the pro-life Democratic districts to elect Republican candidates. In fact, the number of pro-choice Democrats in the House has essentially remained around 167.  It is the number of pro-life Democrats that decreased from 125 to only 17, leaving Democrats overall with only 184 Members,” it said.

As I have stated over and over again, it would be great if ALL political parties in the U.S. believed in and upheld the sanctity of human life. Then we could actually talk about the differences between the various parties. Until then, human life needs to be held as the first human right that needs to be defended; for without it, all other so-called “rights” are meaningless.

To find out more about Democrats For Life of America, click here.