# articles

title: I Am Not a Freak
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/i-am-not-a-freak
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The same thing that made the Elephant Man a human being makes a fetus a human being.</em></p>

<p>Justice Stanley Mosk wrote the dissenting opinion in the recent court decision about fetal murder talking about the unborn child being roughly the size of a peanut whose appearance remains less than human and then talked about different aspects of its growth. As a matter of fact, in the <em>LA Times</em> today one letter from Douglas Campbell in Culver City says “Justice Mosk in his lengthy and graphic dissent to the California Supreme Court decision concerning fetal murder tried to described the ugly, non-humanity of the fetus in order to buttress his position that a post-embryonic fetus is not a person. I think he utterly failed when he used the words creature, head, eye, nostril, feet, tails, hands, in this description. Perhaps his point would have been better made if he meticulously avoided any mention of fetal anatomy and its relationship to adult human anatomy and again, perhaps not.”&nbsp;I guess that Mr. Campbell’s point was that even in trying to describe how the unborn child was not human, he had to use all these terms from human anatomy to disqualify the child from humanity.</p>

<p>I was watching TV last week (which I very, very rarely do) and there it was, this grotesque looking human being staring at me through the tube, as it were. I was affixed on this image because it was so incredible. It was a man whose face was entirely normal on one the left side, but split right down the middle of his face from his forehead down to his chin, on the other side of his face it was completely grotesque. What had happened, I don’t know, but it’s like all of his skin began to grow and then sag so that half of his face was two or three times the size it was meant to be, all swollen and sagging down. His eyelid was completely closed over, his nostril was hanging, the right side of his face was completely distorted. He could only talk with difficulty out of the left side of his mouth. He’s an older man now and he was talking about his life.</p>

<p>It turns out that this was a TV show was entitled “I Am Not A Freak.” It reminded me of the movie “The Elephant Man,” which is really worth seeing. It must have been fifteen years ago that this film came out. It is really a compelling and touching film. There is one scene where this grotesquely deformed human being is being chased in the subway for no reason. The veil he wore to cover his face was torn away. Somebody saw him and screamed, so he ran, and others saw him and screamed. Everybody thought that this “animal”&nbsp;must have done something. The crowds were chasing him and trying to kill him, and finally he was cornered in a stairwell in the subway. He just yelled and screamed in his defense to all of those crowding in on him to destroy him, “I am not a freak! I’m a human being!”&nbsp;That was one of the most poignant scenes in the entire movie. I get choked up just thinking about it, it was so touching.</p>

<p>Well, anyway, this was the point of this show as they delved into the lives of these human beings, these wonderful individuals who had grotesque deformities. Some were giants. Some were small—Tom Thumb, the smallest man in the world. Some were incredibly obese. These were all the famous people from the freak shows. Ching and Chang, the first Siamese twins, who, by the way, between them probably fathered about a dozen or more children. Both of them were married. They lived three days in one house and three days with the other family, going back and forth. It’s amazing. They lived right next door, which I guess was convenient. They showed bearded ladies and the incredible mule woman whose face was so distorted she looked like an animal. By the way, the mule woman turned down many marriage proposals until she finally married. Virtually all of these so-called bearded ladies were married as well.</p>

<p>They had an individual whose body was cut off at the waist. I don’t know it happened. Because the bottom half of his body was kind of cut flush, if you will, he could just kind of stand on his waist. He used his hands to walk around, and it looked like an optical illusion. It looked like they were doing something with mirrors, because here’s a man coming through the floor, as it were, and then when he moves, he just shuffles his hands and he moves around with great agility and dexterity. As a matter of fact, part of the conversation was about all these different things this man did. He went sky-diving, swimming, snorkeling and it didn’t slow him down. His mother was telling about it. As a matter of fact, he was an adopted child. His mother adopted him like that. She made the point that he was among the most well adjusted and happiest of her children. And the rest of her children were, pardon the term, “normal,” physically normal, no problems.</p>

<p>He went to mechanic school and as the narrative continued they showed him working on a car. There he was, his belt line down on the concrete, grabbing a few tools, stuffing them in his belt. And then there was kind of a step stool, and he put his hand on the step stool and effortlessly, like water flowing uphill, just lifted himself up onto the stool, reached up under the fender of the car, pulled himself with the other hand, again effortlessly, and he floated up onto the top of the engine where he settled himself in and began working on the car. I mean it was incredible.</p>

<p>You could not watch this and listen to the tales of these individuals without being touched by their deep and profound humanity. Behind the visible, external, physical distortion, behind this twisted body, in every single case there was a wonderful human being. Now when I say wonderful, I don’t mean necessarily that they were always the nicest people to be around. These people had their moments, too. The point I’m making is that they were human beings and that’s wonderful. Scripture says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” It’s not just referring to our bodies. It’s us. Ourselves which dwell within the body. And that is valuable.</p>

<p>Now all of this has ramifications for what it means to be human. I would love to get a video tape of this show to use in my ethics class. I already have them watching the film “The Elephant Man”&nbsp;because I think it really helps to communicate a very, very important truth.</p>

<p>This is where I’m going with this: Being human is not a “look-like”&nbsp;kind of thing. A human being isn’t someone who has a particular shape of a face, who is a particular size, who weighs a certain amount, who has particular appendages, who is capable of doing particular things. A human being isn’t defined by their capability of accomplishing different tasks. There is something else there that defines a human being.</p>

<p>JP Moreland is fond of telling the story of talking with his daughter when she was in school learning about the Declaration of Independence. They were discussing the phrase where it says “all men are created equal.” He simply asked her, “How is it that all men are equal?”&nbsp;She faltered for a moment before she said, “Well, they all have belly buttons.”&nbsp;Well, that wouldn’t work because some people don’t have a belly button. Actually, my sister doesn’t have a belly button. Some people don’t have a belly button but that doesn’t mean that they’re not a human being. Or if you have two belly buttons, then maybe you’re twice the man that others are. I don’t know. So, as he questioned her, he got to the point that when you really examine it, what is there that’s the same about human beings? There is nothing that is physically the same about human beings. Absolutely nothing. What is spoken of there in the Declaration of Independence is the intuitive notion that there is an invisible quality of human nature that has a special value and that is what makes us all equal. We share in our humanity which is valuable, and this is why we ought not be oppressed by the government. That was the political point in that case.</p>

<p>My point here is when Judge Mosk dissents in this recent California Supreme Court decision about fetal murder on the basis of the form or appearance of the unborn child itself, he makes a serious mistake. He argues that it’s a tiny creature that is less than human because it has a bulbous head which is bent sharply downward. Its eye sockets are widely spaced. Its pug-like nostrils open forward. Now are we to presume that people whose bodies are contorted are not human beings? Are we to presume that people with pug noses or wide spaced eyes are not human beings? Or if they’re small and defenseless they’re not human beings? No, this is not an issue of arbitrary definition. We don’t just make up definitions as to what it means to be human because some look human and some don’t.</p>

<p>A human being is a very particular kind of thing. It’s some individual thing that is alive, and all beings are classified. There are plant-type beings and non-plant-type beings. There are reptile-type beings, and mammal-type beings, and bird-type beings. And among the mammals there are ape-type beings, and there are dog-type beings, and then there are human-type beings. All of these beings can be identified by looking at some very basic things. The basic body parts don’t make them human, but they help to identify them as human. One of those would be cellular structure, for example. Or their pace of development. Or what their parents were. All things reproduce after their own kind.</p>

<p>The simple answer to what many people make to be a very complex question is that the offspring of two human beings is another human being. The unborn child is a separate being. It is born of two human beings, therefore it must be a human being. In fact, a closer analysis shows it to be the case. Now once it becomes a human being at the point of conception, it becomes a separate being. It is a human being for the rest of its existence. That’s as simple as it can be and there’s nothing hard about that. The only thing that changes is the outside appearance. It continues to change from the point of conception all the way until the time of death, not just up until the time of birth. It continues to change. And that’s why it’s a serious mistake to define humanness based on some outward appearance. The minute you do that, not only have you made an error—because human beings are more than just , and not merely limited by their appearance—but you begin to define out of meaningful existence all sorts of human beings that just don’t look like your definition—all sorts of human beings who don’t have all the same parts that you have, all sorts of human beings that can’t do what you can do.</p>

<p>And the time may come when you may lose a part or two yourself along the way, and then by that standard you cease being human yourself, and then what? Then your life is on the block as well. And that ought not be, because a human being is not defined by his or her parts. They are defined by something else that is not influenced or changed by the external body parts. It is something inside. It is the nature that has made it a human being and that stays the same, essentially what it is, from the conception until it dies. Beings don’t change from one kind to another. You don’t slowly change from one being into another. It isn’t the kind of thing beings are. That’s a philosophic notion. But it’s helpful to know that because then you won’t make foolish mistakes like this. Even if you don’t do the philosophy it strikes me as patently obvious that a human being is no less human because his arms are missing, or his legs are gone, or his fingers are webbed, or his nose is pug, or his features seem grotesque, because inside there is still a human being that is fearfully and wonderfully made.</p>

<p>One of the things that I was thinking about as I was watching this film and saw all of these strange, severely deformed, distorted, even grotesque in many cases, human beings was “what a tragedy.” I’m sure a lot of other people who were watching the show thought the same thing. Now it’s natural to think that and I don’t fault anyone for having that feeling, but it suggests a couple things to me.</p>

<p>The first thing that occurred to me when I thought “what a tragedy”&nbsp;is that that response is a patent admission that we were designed to be something different, at least physically. It’s a tragedy because something is missing that ought to be there and that’s why it’s tragic. Where do we get this “ought to be there”&nbsp;business? If we are merely the products of mindless chance, molecules clashing in the universe, matter in motion, if there is no design, if it’s simply the blind watchmaker, natural selection doing its job without any concern for any order, design, purpose, value, anything like that, then why is it tragic when nature happens to spit out a human being that just looks different? It’s not tragic at all, it seems to me. The fact that we recoil is not just an aesthetic thing. In other words, we don’t recoil because what we see is ugly. We’re recoiling, I think, for a different reason. We’re saying it’s not just ugly, but something is wrong here. It ought to be different, and the minute we say something like that we are smuggling in metaphysical baggage that implicates a designer. To put it very clearly, we are saying is that God meant for this to be different here and what we see is not fulfilling God’s design, and therefore it’s tragic. Now if naturalism is true, if there is no God, if it’s just cause and effect, and if it’s just evolution, then it makes no sense to say that something is wrong here. It makes no sense to say that things ought to be different.</p>

<p>But there’s another thing that I thought about when I heard this comment in my mind, this statement ringing in my mind which I’m sure was coming to the lips of many watching this TV show. Why is it a tragedy? Here is this man who is cut off at the waist and he walks on his hands. Why is it tragic that he has no legs? I thought for a minute, what if everybody in the world had no legs and everybody in the world had to walk on their hands? It seems to me that there would be a lot of fine things we could with our lives. And beyond that, it seems to me that they still are valuable people not just because they are productive. They still are human beings and it seems to me that their value has not changed at all. So it strikes me that when someone says this it’s a tragedy, not only are they acknowledging the design factor, and bearing testimony that God created bodies in a particular way that is normal and there is a “shouldness”&nbsp;about that and therefore a tragedy when a child is born without all the regular parts, but it also seems to communicate a value which says that the essential stuff of being human is not the body but in the body.</p>

<p>Once again we are back to this other issue. I think that the tragedy to a great degree is kind of how we look at it because if everyone in the world had no legs, we wouldn’t consider it tragic. Or let me put it a little differently to you. Let’s just say that all human beings were born with wings. Everybody could fly as well as walk, just like the pictures of angels. And then there was a child born with no wings, how would the rest of humanity look upon that? In other words, if a child was born just as we are now they would say what a tragedy. What a grotesque deformation. No wings. Yet. in fact, that child growing into an adult would be able to do everything that we can now do and we don’t consider it tragic right now that we haven’t got wings, do we?</p>

<p>So the point I’m making about this notion of tragedy is that when we talk about people who are missing body parts, to a great degree that is a value statement which is tied into a false understanding of what is ultimately important. The fact is, even people without certain appendages, not only are valuable in themselves, as human beings, but have tremendous capabilities of doing meaningful things, and we do them a disservice when we suggest that they are tragic individuals just because their bodies are different and don’t have the capabilities that other people’s bodies have.</p>

<p>To make the application back to the abortion issue, we do a terrible disservice when we presume that this child’s life is not worthy of being lived because we know through amniocentesis or through sonogram that it’s going to be born with something less than the body parts we deem most efficient or preferable, and so we decide to kill it.</p>

<p>Do you know what the suicide rate is among handicapped people? Zero. That’s it. Zero. These people don’t kill themselves, these that are born with congenital defects. They want to live. Why? Because there is more to life than just body parts. They know that. We should too.</p>
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title: Henry Blackaby’s Experiencing God: A Critique
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/16/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/henry-blackaby-s-experiencing-god-a-critique
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Extensive review of Experiencing God</em></p>

<p><strong>January/February, 1999</strong></p>

<p>The keynote speaker’s list of spiritual qualifications was not lengthy. There were no references to his academic letters, theological acumen, skill at biblical living, or personal holiness.</p>

<p>Instead, he was simply introduced as “a man who hears from God.”&nbsp;It was the ultimate sign of spiritual competency. The implication for the audience was clear: He listens to God; they should listen to him.</p>

<p>It is hard to think of anything that has captured the imagination of Christians recently as aggressively as the idea of hearing the voice of God. The notion is, to many, so obviously Christian, so undoubtedly Biblical, that its truth is beyond question.</p>

<p>To challenge it is akin to spiritual treason.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> For many, such an intimacy is central to personal relationship with the Almighty, the core of vibrant Christianity. Without it genuine closeness to the Savior is not possible.</p>

<p>It is not surprising, then, that a book promising to lead the believer into such intimacy would be a best-seller. The book is simply entitled <em>Experiencing God</em>, by Henry Blackaby and Claude King. It’s subtitled, “How to Live the Full Adventure of Knowing and Doing the Will of God.”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<p>Christian Book Distributors, offering the largest selection of Christian products in the world, featured it prominently on page two of its Christmas sale catalog. It is available in hardcover, softcover, and audio cassette. There are companion books: <em>Experiencing God Day by Day: The Devotional and Journal</em>, and the <em>Experiencing God Workbook</em>, adult and teen editions. There is even an <em>Experiencing God Bible</em>.</p>

<h2>Experiencing God</h2>

<p>This book is about experiencing God by doing His will. The two notions are inextricably connected, the central focus of the book. Everything else is written to serve these ideas.</p>

<p>The back jacket of <em>Experiencing God</em> characterizes the content this way. The “fullness of life lived in fellowship with the loving, personal God”&nbsp;entails learning to “hear and obey His voice.”&nbsp;This involves the truth that “God reveals Himself to each one of us in special and exceptional ways”&nbsp;that are “unique”&nbsp;to each individual.</p>

<p>The backbone of Blackaby’s instruction is his “Seven Realities of Experiencing God.”&nbsp;The list is introduced in Chapter 6 and can be found on page 50. They are:</p>

<p>1. God is always at work around you.</p>

<p>2. God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.</p>

<p>3. God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.</p>

<p>4. God speaks by the Holy spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His ways.</p>

<p>5. God’s invitation for you to work with Him always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith in action.</p>

<p>6. You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.</p>

<p>7. You come to know God by experience as you obey Him and He accomplishes His work through you.</p>

<p>The remainder of the book details these elements and gives Blackaby’s<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> Biblical justification for each one.</p>

<p>There is so much good in <em>Experiencing God</em>, both in intent and content, that it is painful to take exception with it. In fact, at first glance it is hard to imagine anything amiss.</p>

<p>Our loving relationship with God is central to everything Blackaby writes. Of first importance, we should nurture the love relationship with God for which we were created (30, 79). “He wants you to experience an intimate love relationship with Him that is real and personal”&nbsp;(1), a relationship in which “God always takes the initiative” (85).</p>

<p>The emphasis on selfless surrender is very Biblical. “We must come to a denial of self and return to God-centeredness”&nbsp;(100). “To live a God-centered life, you must focus your life on God’s purposes, not your own plans”&nbsp;(103). The prayers of surrender at the end of each chapter are, for the most part, priceless as tender calls to submission.</p>

<p>Blackaby encourages us to develop a servant’s attitude. This calls for humility and obedience to Christ (39). As servants, we should be moldable and available for the Master’s use (41). He invites us to carefully evaluate our relationship with God to make sure it is real, personal, and practical, as God intends (95).</p>

<p>Blackaby takes the will of God seriously. God does not give us options (22-23). We are never to question His will (48). We are to obey even when it doesn’t make sense (23), because His will is always best (24-25).</p>

<p>On this topic, one of his most helpful guidelines is to watch where God is at work and join Him (Chapter 6). “Once you know where He is working, you can adjust your life to join Him”&nbsp;(72). There is a particularly fruitful illustration of this on pages 124-126.</p>

<p>There is so much to praise. As someone once said, however, the devil is in the details. The key to my concern about all of these good teachings is the way Blackaby applies them. These fine directives are pressed into service of another notion, one that is not Biblical.</p>

<h2>The Assignment</h2>

<p>The concept of divine “assignment”&nbsp;is central to everything Blackaby has written. He mentions it more than 100 times. This is what he means by “God’s will”&nbsp;and by God “speaking.”</p>

<p>“We do not find God’s will is revealed,”&nbsp;Blackaby instructs us (p. x). Such direction, according to Blackaby, is given in small steps on a short term basis. God does not give the whole blueprint. Instead of demanding the big picture, we should follow God’s leadership “one day at a time”&nbsp;(33, 34, 36) to “be right in the middle of God’s will for your life”&nbsp;(36).</p>

<p>“Your task is to wait until the Master gives you instructions”&nbsp;(141). This is the critical fourth step in the “Seven Realities of Experiencing God.”&nbsp;Blackaby sums it up simply as “God speaks”&nbsp;(52). The Christian receives an “assignment”&nbsp;from God that is special and unique to each individual, the specific will of God for his own life.</p>

<p>How does God speak to us? “God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit. He uses the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church (other believers). No one of these methods of God’s speaking is, by itself, a clear indicator of God’s directions. But when God says the same thing through each of these ways, you can have confidence to proceed”&nbsp;(56).</p>

<p>In this way God reveals His purposes, His assignment to us so we can then be involved in His work. “You cannot discover these truths about God on your own,”&nbsp;Blackaby writes. “Truth is revealed”&nbsp;(56).</p>

<p>Blackaby is intentionally vague on the manner of this communication. The method differs from person to person (135). In general, the goal of the Christian is to develop the ability to “sense”&nbsp;God’s “leading.”</p>

<p>Blackaby describes it this way: “I sensed God’s call...”&nbsp;(p. xiii); “I prayed and sensed that God wanted me to...”&nbsp;(p. xiv); “I began to sense a great urgency from God...”&nbsp;(p. xiv); “We decided that God had definitely led us...”&nbsp;(42); “We began to sense God leading us...”&nbsp;(69); “...the direction you sense God leading you...”&nbsp;(10); “...[he] felt led of God...”&nbsp;(111); “Our church sensed that God wanted us to...”&nbsp;(120); “One of our members felt led to...”&nbsp;(121); “Review what you sense God has been saying to you...”&nbsp;(143).</p>

<p>This skill is vital. “Oh, don’t let anyone intimidate you about hearing from God”&nbsp;(132), Blackaby warns. Instead, “Focus your attention on hearing God’s call to an assignment”&nbsp;(77). “The servant waits on his master for the assignment. So be patient and wait”&nbsp;(117).</p>

<p>A failure to receive such assignments is a failure in one’s love relationship with God (97). “Once you have an intimate love relationship with God, He will show you what He is doing”&nbsp;(69). “If the Christian does not know when God is speaking, he is in trouble at the heart of his Christian life!”&nbsp;(132, 137).</p>

<p>Virtually everything commendable about Blackaby’s book is meant to serve this end. Certainly we should obey God’s Word. But Blackaby means obey the assignment. In <em>Experiencing God</em>, practically every example of obedience is an anecdote about a personal assignment, not an application of the commands of Scripture.</p>

<p>Certainly we should seek God’s will, not ours. Our lives should be God-centered, not self-centered. But Blackaby means we should only pursue those plans God tells us to pursue the assignment.</p>

<p>Blackaby exhorts us to be faithful to the Word, to surrender, have faith, trust, and follow Christ even when we don’t understand all speaking of the assignment. Regardless of the chaos, the price, the difficulty, and the hardship it brings, we must follow our assignment, our personal, private revelation from God.</p>

<p>My question is simple. <em>According to the Bible</em>, does experiencing God’s work in our lives depend on receiving personalized assignments from Him? Does intimacy with God depend on our ability to “sense”&nbsp;His “leading”?&nbsp;Is this taught in Scripture? Is it modeled by the apostles or the early church?</p>

<p>There is only one way to answer these questions. Blackaby properly notes that “Scripture will be your source of authority for faith and practice. You cannot depend on human traditions, your experience, or the experience of others to be accurate authorities on God’s will and ways”&nbsp;(6). I will hold Mr. Blackaby’s own teaching to that standard.</p>

<h2>The Imitation of Christ?</h2>

<p>“When I want to learn how to know and do the will of God,”&nbsp;Blackaby writes, “I always look to Jesus. I can find no better model than Him”&nbsp;(65). His comment refers to the quote from John 5:17, 19-20, at the beginning of Chapter Six:</p>

<p>My Father has been working until now, and I have been working...Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself; but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He himself does.</p>

<p>The principal question is this: Is Jesus our model in everything? The correct answer is no because Jesus was not only the perfect man and humble servant, but also the Messiah and incarnate Son of God. We imitate His human perfections, but not His prerogatives of divinity or messianic office.</p>

<p>What about in the passage in question? This is one of many examples where Blackaby, like other authors, patches together verses to make his point, often excluding relevant material from the context that changes the entire sense of the citation. His omission of verses 18, a portion of 19, and verses 21, 22, and 23 is unfortunate. Each is vital to our understanding and seriously qualifies the meaning of the passage, as this more complete citation of John 5:17-23 shows:</p>

<p>(17) But He answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.”</p>

<p>(18) For this cause therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father<em>, making Himself equal with God</em>.</p>

<p>(19) Jesus <em>therefore</em> answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. (20) For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and greater works than these will He show Him, that you may marvel. (21) For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes. (22) For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, (23) in order that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.</p>

<p>Note first of all verse 18, the overlooked verse. The Jews, understanding Jesus’&nbsp;comments to be a clear claim to deity, seek to kill Him. The word “therefore”&nbsp;in verse 19 indicates that what follows is meant to buttress this singular claim in verse 17.</p>

<p>Note also the three phrases in parallel construction: “For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all things...,” “For just as the Father raises the dead...,” and “For not even the Father judges anyone...”</p>

<p>These verses are a complete unit. If the Father showing Jesus “all things that He Himself is doing”&nbsp;is an example for us to model, then we are also to give life to whom we wish, judge the world on the Father’s behalf, and demand that all people honor us as they honor the Father.</p>

<p>Obviously, that is not Jesus’&nbsp;teaching here. In context, these verses have to do with the divinity of Christ. He is unique as the incarnate Son of God and therefore has unique obligations, unique abilities, and a unique relationship with the Father.</p>

<p>Verses 26-27 clear up any question on this score: “For just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself; and He gave Him authority to execute judgment, <em>because He is the Son of Man</em>.”<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup> The phrase “Son of Man”&nbsp;is a Messianic title from Daniel 7:13 that Jesus used often. As Messiah, Jesus has a singular role.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup></p>

<p>Because Jesus is unique, He never directs His disciples to follow His example in John 5:17-23. No subsequent writers Peter, John, Paul, Luke ever mention it. We are not to imitate those things pertaining to Jesus’&nbsp;divinity or His Messianic office.</p>

<p>This same principle applies to Jesus’&nbsp;comments in John 8:26, 28: “I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and the things which I heard from Him, these I speak to the world...When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.”</p>

<p>Remember, John 8 is one of the great passages on the deity of Christ. The Jews ask, “Who are you?”&nbsp;(v. 25). Jesus eventually answers: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I Am”&nbsp;(v. 56). Jesus is arguing that He is utterly unique. He is from above, not below, and not of this world (v. 23). He is the only Savior (v. 24). He lives in perfect obedience to the Father (v. 29). He is a free man, a son, not a slave (v. 35).</p>

<p>He has proceeded forth from the Father (v. 42). He is the great “I AM”&nbsp;(v. 58).</p>

<p>Note also that Jesus said the Jews were also “hearing”&nbsp;from their Father, Satan: “I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father”&nbsp;(v. 38). Are we to understand that the Jews were having conversations with Satan getting direct commands from him? Or did Jesus mean rather that they were doing his deeds (see v. 39)? I think the latter.</p>

<p>One final point. Even Jesus did not expect it was enough merely to claim to speak for God. Instead, He appealed to corroborating witnesses: John the Baptist, prophecy, miracles, and Scripture (e.g., John 5:30-39, 10:25, 37-38; 14:10-11).</p>

<p>I do not think Blackaby intentionally misconstrued this verse. It is just one of many examples of the reckless way he uses Scripture. Later in the Gospel of John we find another.</p>

<h2>“My Sheep Hear My Voice”</h2>

<p>The passage in John 10 where Jesus refers to His sheep hearing His voice is central to Blackaby’s view. It also frequently misapplied by others. It is important to know precisely what Jesus has in mind when He uses these terms.</p>

<p>John records four mentions by Jesus of His sheep hearing or knowing His voice (10:3, 4, 16, 27). Verse six is key to understanding this passage. Here John explicitly states that Jesus’&nbsp;remarks about hearing His voice are a figure of speech.</p>

<p>Jesus begins by talking about shepherds and sheep (10:1-6). Unlike the thief and robber, the legitimate shepherd enters by the door and calls His own by name. They then follow Him as He leads them out. Jesus’&nbsp;point is lost on those listening, though, so He explains the details of the illustration.</p>

<p>He is the door of the sheep (7). Those who pass through Him find salvation and abundant life (9-10). He is also the good shepherd who, unlike the hireling, lays down His life freely for His sheep (11-13, 15, 17-18). The shepherd and the sheep know each other (14). When His other sheep hear His voice, they also become part of His flock (16).</p>

<p>Once again, the Jews fail to completely understand (v. 19-21). What is the problem? Jesus’&nbsp;answer is crystal clear: “You do not believe because you are not of My sheep”&nbsp;(v. 26).<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup></p>

<p>Two key questions need to be answered from the text of John 10. First, what does it <em>mean</em> to hear Jesus’&nbsp;voice? Second, what <em>causes</em> us to hear His voice? Blackaby answers one way and Jesus answers another.</p>

<p>Blackaby seems to have a couple of things in mind when he mentions hearing God’s voice. Gaining insight or applying a command from Scripture is one kind of “hearing”&nbsp;(164-168). Getting a personal “assignment”&nbsp;from God through a leading or a calling is another (168-170).</p>

<p>This is not what Jesus has in mind here, though. It is critical at this point to remember John’s clarification. Jesus was using a figure of speech. The word “voice”&nbsp;cannot mean voice. A thing is never a metaphor of itself. It is a picture of&nbsp;<em>something else.</em> Jesus must be referring, in a figure, to something else that the phrase “hear my voice”&nbsp;represents. What is it?</p>

<p>In context, Jesus’&nbsp;meaning is unmistakable. He says, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me and I give eternal life to them”&nbsp;(v. 27-28). Note the sequence: They hear His voice. They follow Him. Then He gives them eternal life. Hearing Jesus’&nbsp;voice results in salvation, it is not the result of salvation.</p>

<p>What “voice”&nbsp;is it that draws us to Jesus and results in our salvation? Most likely it is the ineffable drawing by the Father through His Spirit of those who are His, a concept John has already introduced and developed in earlier chapters of his Gospel (5:25, 5:31-34, 5:37-38, 6:35-40, 6:44-45, 6:65, 8:18, 8:47). It is a figure of speech for the inner working of the Holy Spirit that leads to our salvation.</p>

<p>Remember, the Jews have no trouble actually hearing Jesus. They know what He’s saying. They hear His instructions just fine. Their problem is responding. The voice being referred to here is not the whispers of private direction given by God, but the effective call of the Holy Spirit bringing us to Christ.</p>

<p>Why don’t the Jews “hear”&nbsp;in the sense that Jesus means, that is, respond and believe? Jesus tells us plainly. They do not “hear”&nbsp;because God is not “speaking”&nbsp;to them. They are not among the sheep the Father has given to the Son. That is Jesus’&nbsp;unambiguous teaching.</p>

<p>Now the second question: What enables us to hear? Blackaby claims, “Knowing God’s voice comes from an intimate love relationship with God”&nbsp;(138), and again, “As you walk in an intimate love relationship with God, you will come to recognize His voice. You will know when God is speaking to you”&nbsp;(163).</p>

<p>But Jesus never suggests such a thing. Jesus says the Father is the cause, sovereignly enabling those sheep He has given to Jesus to hear and respond. This “hearing”&nbsp;is not for believers after salvation, but for non-believers prior to salvation. It is not dependent on the quality of our love relationship with God, as Blackaby claims, but on the Father’s choice.</p>

<p>There is another damaging consequence of Blackaby’s misreading of this text. According to Jesus’&nbsp;comments, hearing His voice is essential to salvation. Those who do not hear are not His. Rather they are outsiders, bereft of eternal life, lost.</p>

<p>There is an unavoidable consequence of blending the wording of John 10 with Blackaby’s definition of hearing Jesus’&nbsp;“voice.”&nbsp;Blackaby writes, “Those who do not have the relationship (’do not belong to God’) do not hear what God is saying (John 8:47)”&nbsp;(138). In the verse Blackaby quotes, Jesus is castigating the Jews for unbelief, calling them the sons of Satan (8:44). Blackaby places a tremendous burden on the believer who questions his spirituality and even his salvation if divine messages are not forthcoming.</p>

<p>This is not Jesus’&nbsp;meaning. Blackaby’s understanding of hearing the voice of God is completely foreign to the text of John 8 and 10. To Jesus, hearing God is not a skill to be developed. It is not an advanced discipline opening the lines to personalized assignments from the Father. It is not a fruit of a deepening love relationship with God. It is a figure of speech.</p>

<p>Hearing Jesus’&nbsp;voice is not getting an assignment; it’s getting saved. It’s the result of the Father drawing the non-believer into Jesus’&nbsp;arms.</p>

<h2>“God Speaks”&nbsp;in Acts</h2>

<p>The life and teaching of Jesus do not support Blackaby’s ideas. What about the life of the early church?</p>

<p>In Acts we have a focused look at a relatively short period (30 years) of Bible history in which there are radical manifestations of supernatural activity. Acts offers a best-case scenario for providing an inductive argument for the view that Christians ought to be receiving assignments from God, private, subjective revelations of God “speaking”&nbsp;to them. What do we find?</p>

<p>I went through Acts verse by verse looking for concrete examples of the kind of assignments Blackaby describes in&nbsp;<em>Experiencing God</em>. I have listed below every time God gave a special directive of any sort.</p>

<p>An angel rescues the apostles from prison and tells them to preach the Gospel (5:19-20). Philip is sent to the Gaza road by an angel (8:26). Philip is directed to the Ethiopian eunuch by the Spirit (8:29). While traveling on the Damascus road, Saul hears the audible voice of Jesus directing him to Damascus (9:4-6). Ananias has a vision in which the Lord instructs him to visit Saul (9:10-16). Cornelius is instructed by an angel in a vision to send for Peter (10:3-6). Peter is instructed by the Spirit to visit Cornelius (10:19-20). Peter is ordered by an angel to follow him out of prison (12:7-8). Paul and Barnabas are sent out by the Holy Spirit on their first missionary journey (13:2). The Holy Spirit forbids Paul to speak the word in Asia (16:6-7). Paul is directed through a vision to Macedonia (16:9-10). Jesus appears to Paul in a vision and tells him to preach the Gospel in Corinth (18:9-10). Paul is told through prophecy not to enter Jerusalem (21:4). Jesus tells Paul in a vision to leave Jerusalem (22:18, 21).</p>

<p>What are the means of these revelations? How does God communicate these assignments? The majority (five) are communicated through visions. Three times an angel is the messenger. Four times the Spirit speaks. One is a prophecy. One other is the voice of Jesus.</p>

<p>There are five other examples of supernatural revelations that are predictive in nature, but do not dictate any direction, they give no assignments. In fact, in one case (Agabus’&nbsp;prophecy of imminent famine) the Christians determine <em>on their own</em> to send a contribution for the relief of the brethren in Judea. These examples can be found in Acts 11:27-30, 20:23, 21:11, 23:11, and 27:22-26.</p>

<p>At first glance this list seems formidable, but the initial impression is misleading. The events represent a very small amount of activity considering the 30 year time span and the aggressive spiritual activity of Acts. God’s specialized “assignments”&nbsp;to the leaders of the early church are limited to only 14 from the time of Pentecost.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup></p>

<p>Two are jailbreaks. Two are about Saul’s conversion. Two are about Cornelius’&nbsp;conversion. Two are about the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion. Two are about Paul’s stay in Jerusalem (“Don’t enter”&nbsp;and “Get out”). The remaining four are about Paul’s missionary journeys (the initial commission, direction away from Asia, direction to Macedonia, told to preach boldly in Corinth).</p>

<p>Notice a couple more significant facts. First, there is no mention in the entire Biblical record of the early church when God gave an assignment through some inner “sensing.”&nbsp;Completely absent from the text are phrases like, “I feel led...,”&nbsp;“I think God is telling me...,”&nbsp;“I feel God is calling me...,”&nbsp;“I believe it’s God’s will that...,”&nbsp;“I’ve received lots of confirmation...,”&nbsp;“I’m sensing the Lord’s direction...,”&nbsp;or “I have a peace about it...”</p>

<p>The kind of language Blackaby and others use to describe hearing God’s voice is completely absent from the biblical record. There is no record of knowledge of God’s will based on “sensing”&nbsp;or internal promptings—not a single one. The rare times God gave special directives, He communicated in clear, supernatural ways. More than half the time He used a vision or an angel.</p>

<p>This last is especially odd, given the contemporary references to “hearing the voice of God.”&nbsp;In many Christian circles if you said, “God spoke to me”&nbsp;it would not even raise an eyebrow. Announce you had a vision, though, and heads would turn. Admit angels were visiting and you may get a visit from the local “deliverance”&nbsp;ministry. Yet there are abundant biblical precedents for the last two and virtually none for the first.</p>

<p>Second, there is no evidence that any of these directives are sought. There is no indication of any Christians, including Apostles, “waiting”&nbsp;for God’s direction. In the New Testament we find no pleading with God or laboring in prayer for God to show them His will or give them His assignment.</p>

<p>But there is yet another serious problem.</p>

<h2>No Divine Assignment</h2>

<p>For balance we must also note other important decisions not directed by God. There are many examples in Acts when the disciples make decisions marking significant events in the life of the early church. They are the kind many would think require a word from the Lord. They entail decisions about the how, when, where, why, and who of ministry. Yet there is no evidence of any directive from God, and no indication the disciples even sought one. They simply weighed their options in light of circumstances and then chose a judicious course of action consistent with the prior general commands of the Lord.</p>

<p>Notable examples include Philip’s ministry in Samaria (8:5), resolving the complaint about the Hellenistic widows (6:1-6), and Barnabas and Saul establishing a teaching ministry for a year in Antioch (11:26). Elders are appointed in the new churches (14:23). The Jerusalem council resolves the problem of the Judaizers and the Galatian heresy (15:7-29). Paul embarks on his second and third missionary journeys (15:36, 18:23). Paul sets up shop as a tent maker and starts a ministry in Corinth (18:3). Paul establishes a discipleship training program for two years at the school of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9). Paul has a healing ministry on the island of Malta for three months (Acts 28:9-11).</p>

<p>According to Blackaby’s teaching, each one of these decisions is illicit because none was a special “assignment”&nbsp;from God. Rather, each was the result of a unilateral decision by the disciples using wisdom to respond to the circumstances confronting them.</p>

<p>And these are just the tip of the iceberg. <em>Altogether I found 70 such instances in the book of Acts alone, contrasted with the 14 occasions of specialized direction during that same time.</em><sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8">8</a></sup></p>

<p>Even more can be found in the epistles. Paul chastises the Corinthians for not working out their own legal differences (1 Cor. 6:3-6). He does not counsel them to seek a decision from God. Instead he asks, “Is there not among you <em>one wise man</em> who will be able to decide between his brethren?”</p>

<p>In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul gives the most thorough instruction to be found in the Bible on the issue of marriage. He details pros and cons of single life over married life. He solemnly notes the moral obligations of both. He then leaves the decision in the hands of the believer. There is no hint in this passage that a believer must “hear from the Lord”&nbsp;even on the weighty matter of choosing a spouse.</p>

<p>Peter gives explicit instruction about the use of spiritual gifts in ministry (1 Peter 4:10-11). He does not say to wait for one’s calling, nor does any other passage of Scripture, either explicitly or implicitly. Instead, given that each believer has a spiritual gift, Peter enjoins him to employ it in works of service as a good steward, doing all to God’s glory.</p>

<p>Blackaby is simply mistaken whenever he teaches that the Biblical directive or even the Biblical pattern is to receive such revelations from God. The exact opposite is the case: It is neither taught nor is the pattern modeled.</p>

<h2>Led by the Spirit?</h2>

<p>What, then, does the Scripture mean by being led by the Spirit? The simplest way to answer that question is to look up the verses using the term. The only two references in the Epistles to being led by the Spirit mean something specific. Paul does not use the term the same way Blackaby does.</p>

<p>The concept appears in Romans 8:12-14 (take special note of v. 9). Being led by the Spirit in this passage is not referring to individual guidance, but empowerment to live holy lives. The Holy Spirit works to convict of sin, “leading”&nbsp;a Christian into righteous living. In Paul’s words, “putting to death the deeds of the body.”</p>

<p>Paul has the same meaning in view in Galatians 5:16-26. Regarding the role of the Spirit in our lives, Paul writes, “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh...If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law.”&nbsp;The biblical meaning of being “led by the Spirit”&nbsp;has to do with righteous conduct and resisting sin, not getting assignments from God.</p>

<p>Does the Holy Spirit speak to our hearts? That depends entirely on what one means by the word “speak.”</p>

<p>The Scripture identifies different ways the Holy Spirit subjectively works in us. We could say God “speaks”&nbsp;when He comforts us, teaches us, convicts us, or leads us out of sin. There is an ineffable sense in which God communicates with us giving solace, wisdom, insight, and understanding (see below). Also, since He imparts spiritual gifts I do not deny the subjective element that is involved in their exercise.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9">9</a></sup> I prefer words like “teach,”&nbsp;“convict,”&nbsp;and “comfort”&nbsp;to describe these biblical functions because these are the biblical terms and are less confusing.</p>

<p>Note that none of these involve propositional revelation, which is what we normally mean by the word “speaking.”&nbsp;I would not say my spouse “speaks”&nbsp;to me when she hugs me, though I may infer from this that she loves me. When my wife speaks, there is propositional content. When she hugs, there is comfort. The two are entirely different.</p>

<p>There is nothing mysterious about this. Revelation for the Christian comes through objective sources like the Bible or prophetic utterance: God speaking. God can also be personally experienced in very profound, intimate, and emotionally powerful ways, but that is not the same as “hearing God’s voice,”&nbsp;as receiving revelation. No information is communicated directly.</p>

<p>We would do well, I think, to keep these concepts distinct, as the Scripture does. However, it is clear to me that Christians usually use the phrase “the Spirit speaks to us”&nbsp;in ways the Bible just does not support. I see no evidence that the Bible teaches anything like what some have called a “conversational relationship”&nbsp;with God.</p>

<p>The Bible does not teach we must “hear”&nbsp;God before we can make decisions. It is just not there. When the text says, “Listen to the voice of the Lord,”&nbsp;the word “listen”&nbsp;is synonymous with “heed.”&nbsp;It’s much like a mother saying, “Listen to me when I tell you to do something.”&nbsp;It’s an appeal for obedience.</p>

<p>I am not claiming there is no subjective element in knowing God. The Bible and the normal Christian life are filled with examples of believers having a deep personal communion with God. My principal concern is where we get our information about God. The Scripture teaches that such information comes from Scripture, not from private revelations from God.</p>

<p>Does the Bible teach we should get our private marching orders, our “assignments,”&nbsp;directly from God? It does not. Instead, we should seek God’s “voice”&nbsp;in the place Scripture tells us to: the Word. Spiritual maturity is not the ability to hear God’s voice. It is the ability to know, understand, and apply Scripture in every circumstance.</p>

<h2>God in a Box</h2>

<p>Does this put God in a box? Not at all. I am not dictating what God can or cannot do. He can intervene in any way He chooses. However, we must base our teaching and conduct on the Scriptures, not on what might be possible for a sovereign God.</p>

<p>Blackaby claims his model is Biblical. I am putting that to the test. I am showing what seems to be the pattern of Scripture, especially in the New Testament, which is the most reliable guide for the church today.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10">10</a></sup> The Bible simply does not teach Christians to seek personalized guidance or assignments from God.</p>

<p>J.I. Packer notes: “God may reveal Himself and give guidance to His servants any way He pleases. It is not for us to set limits on Him. But it remains a question as to whether or not we are entitled to expect ’hotline’&nbsp;disclosures on a regular basis. The correct answer is no. All the Biblical narratives of God’s direct communications with men are exceptional on their face, and the Biblical model of personal guidance is quite different.”<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11">11</a></sup></p>

<h2>A Fundamental Question</h2>

<p>Most people teaching error do not do so maliciously. Usually they have the best intentions, but having a good heart is not enough. Even someone who has a loyalty to truth can still undermine truth.</p>

<p>Many of Henry Blackaby’s ideas in <em>Experiencing God</em> are like that. I have addressed only a few of the serious problems with this work. There are more.</p>

<p>I’ll close with a fundamental question. Must I hear the voice of God and receive personalized direction, special assignments for my life in order to experience an authentic love relationship with God? Blackaby answers “yes”&nbsp;(132, 137). The Bible answers “no.”</p>

<p>Experiencing God involves only three steps. First, it requires accurate information about God (true knowledge). Second, we must live according to that truth (active faith). Third, we experience the effects of truth as God transforms our lives and the lives of others we touch (sanctification and ministry).</p>

<p>Contrary to what is taught in <em>Experiencing God</em>, you are not substandard if you do not “hear God’s voice.”&nbsp;The Bible does not teach that receiving personal revelations from God is necessary, ordinary, or to be expected for optimal Christian living. Godly Christians can go their entire life without such experience. There are dozens of verses about pursuing truth and sound doctrine, but none supporting hearing the voice of God in that sense.</p>

<p>It is perilous to construct doctrine from historical material alone. However, this is largely Blackaby’s approach. It is more sound to first develop one’s theology from the less ambiguous material in the Epistles. Then one can look for applications of those principles in the historical texts like Acts, the Gospels, or the Old Testament.</p>

<p>Blackaby can find no support for his doctrine of hearing the voice of God in the place where all essential disciplines of Christian living must appear: the Epistles. Search for verification in the writings of any disciple. You will find nothing but silence. Why are the Apostles unanimously reticent on a capability that is allegedly at the core of the Christian life?</p>

<p>The Bible never teaches us to wait for an assignment before making decisions, nor did the disciples model this concept. Instead, the Scripture gives page after page of assignments.</p>

<p>Yes, God gave special directions under certain circumstances, and He still can today. However, in the Bible such things are rare and generally happen with key leaders of God’s people. Even then it is not through an internal “sense”&nbsp;of God’s “leading,”&nbsp;but by an unmistakable, supernatural revelation.</p>

<p>The greatest movement of God’s Spirit in the last 1000 years was the Reformation. It was not started by a voice from God or by an assignment. It was started by a verse of Scripture: “The just shall live by faith.”&nbsp;Martin Luther was simply listening to the only Word of God we are ever enjoined to hear, know, and obey the Bible.<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12">12</a></sup></p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">I’ve actually been called a heretic for calling it into question. A heretic is someone who denies a cardinal doctrine of the faith.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">Henry Blackaby and Claude King, <em>Experiencing God</em> (Nashville: Broadman &amp; Holman, 1994).<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Though the book is co-authored, it is written from the perspective of Henry Blackaby, so I will refer to the authors collectively simply as “Blackaby.”<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">Jesus’&nbsp;use of the phrase “Son of man”&nbsp;may not always be a reference to Daniel’s prophecy. In this case, however, the conclusion is unavoidable. In this statement in John, Jesus is grounding His authority to render judgment, a function of his Messianic role, not His humanity.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">In Deuteronomy 18:18, God told Moses to look for the prophet in the future that God would speak through in a unique and unparalleled way: “I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.”<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">I know that Jesus’&nbsp;explanation in the latter part of the chapter is taken from a different encounter with the Jews than in the first half where the issue of hearing Jesus voice is originally raised. However, I’m convinced Jesus is still responding to the same issue, which is why John grouped the two separate encounters together here in chapter 10. The language of the text also seems to make this obvious.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7">I did not include the casting of lots in Acts 1:15-26 for two reasons. First, this was not an example of the disciple’s skill at “hearing”&nbsp;from God. They cast lots. Second, opinions are divided whether this was directed by God or merely the disciple’s misguided effort. The text isn’t entirely clear. Some think Paul was Judas’&nbsp;replacement. Note also that before the final straws were drawn, objective criteria had to be met (Acts 1:21-22).<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:8">The full list of 70 examples can be found on the Stand to Reason web site at www.str.org under “Divine Direction in Acts.”<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:8">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:9">Since I am not a cessationist regarding spiritual gifts, I acknowledge there may be unique ways God “speaks”&nbsp;to those with special supernatural gifts. Such gifts by their very nature are unique in kind, function, and distribution. These lay outside of our analysis and are not subject to the biblical concerns I’ve mentioned. The Bible says very little (virtually nothing) about the nature of their operation. The question at hand is how Christians are to understand the concept of hearing from God, regardless of their gifts.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:9">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:10">I don’t mean to suggest that the Old Testament is unreliable, but rather that our <em>application</em> of it is more prone to error for two reasons. First, it’s more perilous to extract principles from historical material than didactic material. Second, the shift to the New Covenant means certain aspects of the Old Testament are no longer normative.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:10">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:11">J.I. Packer, <em>Hot Tub Religion</em> (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1987), 117.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:11">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:12">Remarkably, Mr. Blackaby co-opts Martin Luther as an example of Blackaby’s view (108). The actual circumstance was quite the opposite.<a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:12">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
</div>

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title: I’m Pro-Choice
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/i-m-pro-choice
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The “coat hanger”&nbsp;argument is one of the most emotionally compelling appeals of pro-abortionists, yet the whole line of reasoning collapses because of the single element deified by pro-choicers: choice.</em></p>

<p>“We’re Afraid For Our Daughters,”&nbsp;the headline read. The ad was hard to miss, filling an entire page of my local paper. “Could it really happen?”&nbsp;it continued. “Could our daughters be forced into back alleys and illegal abortions? We need your help. For our daughters, our wives, and our friends, please help keep abortion safe.”</p>

<p>Listed in a line down the center of the page were the flowing, hand-written signatures of Cher, Ted Danson, John Denver, Betty Ford, and Cybill Shepherd.</p>

<p>It was a touching appeal. One could almost see Ted Danson’s little girl being dragged by her ponytail kicking and screaming into a dark alley, or Cybill Shepherd’s daughter gagged and strapped to a table while an unshaven dirt bag in coveralls readies a piece of bent wire.</p>

<p>Surely these children didn’t choose this evil fate. It was forced upon them by short-sighted and callused moralists who took away the only option available to them, abortion on demand.</p>

<p>This “coat hanger”&nbsp;argument is one of the most emotionally compelling appeals of the abortionists. It’s also among the most specious. It has little real substance and is dangerously misleading.</p>

<p>If we’re merely talking about personal, elective surgery this objection is compelling. Why burden a woman with the additional risk of a dangerous, septic environment to have her operation?</p>

<p>When the life of a human child is involved, though, the picture changes dramatically. Should the law be faulted for making it riskier for anyone to kill another innocent human being? The fact that bank robbery is dangerous to the felon isn’t a good reason to make grand larceny legal.</p>

<p>Ironically, the whole line of reasoning completely collapses when you consider the one element deified by pro-choicers: choice.</p>

<p>A woman has the right to choose to do whatever she wants with her own body, the argument goes. It’s her business and nobody else’s; it’s her choice. If that’s true, then she must take responsibility for those choices, even when they are self-destructive.</p>

<p>Yes, in the past some women chose dangerous, illegal abortions. People choose to do many foolish things when there are other reasonable alternatives available. That’s just the point: People choose.</p>

<p>Sometimes they make bad choices, but the choice is still their own. There’s no coercion. A woman is no more forced into the back alley when abortion is outlawed than a young man is forced to rob banks because the state won’t put him on welfare. Both have other options.</p>

<p>I’d like to believe Betty Ford has raised her children with respect for the laws of the country her husband served. I’d like to think John Denver taught his kids enough down-home, common sense that they won’t take the foolish route of a back-alley abortion. I hope Cher instills in her daughter the idea that when liberated adult women make their own decisions, they also must accept the consequences of their actions.</p>

<p>I believe in privacy, but privacy has its limits. I believe in choice, but choice has limits, too. Our right to privacy and our right to choose ends where harm to another individual begins. That’s true with every law. Every piece of legislation violates privacy and restricts choice to some degree.</p>

<p>In a sense, I’m pro-choice for the woman. She can choose not to conceive. If she gets pregnant against her choice, she can choose to carry the child to term and then keep her baby. Or she can choose to give the child up for adoption so he will be loved and cared for. But she can’t choose the quick way out of a difficult problem by taking the life of that little baby.</p>

<p>I’m pro-choice for the child, too. Cher, Ted, John, Betty, and Cybill, I’m not concerned for your daughters. They have a choice to make and if you trained your children well they’ll make a sensible one. I’m concerned for your granddaughters. And your grandsons. They have no choice. And they’re dying.</p>
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title: Murder Is Okay for the Unborn?
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/murder-is-okay-for-the-unborn-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg finds disturbing similarities between the viewpoint that abortion can be justified and reasons used to justify past genocides.</em></p>

<p>You know, it’s amazing how many people who are seemingly intelligent, moral, ethical, and level-headed are adopting a frightening point of view. They’re willing to admit that abortion does indeed take the life of an innocent, defenseless human being, but still they think abortion is justified in many cases.</p>

<p>This makes it very difficult for a pro-lifer, because we think if we could just make the case that the unborn is an innocent human being, then that ought to be enough. But it’s gotten to the point now where it’s not obvious that we should protect the lives of innocent human beings—that all humans have a defensible right to life.</p>

<p>File this next suggestion away, please. Place it in your mind somewhere that you can get at it quickly when this comes up in discussion. When somebody says to you, “Yeah, I think abortion takes a human life—that it kills an innocent human being—but I think it’s justified in certain circumstances,”&nbsp;then ask them this question (and don’t say it in a snide way, but in a very genuine way because it’s a fair question): “Please explain to me how this view is different from Nazi Germany. After all, it was the Nazis who coined the phrase, ’a life unworthy to be lived.’&nbsp;How is your view different?”</p>

<p>It’s one thing when you execute somebody because he or she is a criminal. It’s another thing when you justify taking the life of an innocent human being who can’t defend himself. The question is, what could possibly be a justification for that? You see, the answers you’re going to get for justification are the same kinds of answers that people used to justify genocide in the past. If it was wrong then, it seems like it should be wrong now.</p>

<p>What, they have a congenital defect? They didn’t have their body parts right? They weren’t smart enough? They were a burden on society? Isn’t that exactly how Hitler reasoned from 1934 to 1939? Before the massive death camps, when Jews became the ones considered a burden on society, the Nazis eliminated children with congenital defects and people who had mental incapacities.</p>

<p>In fact, there are documentaries you can still see, films made by the Nazis to persuade the populace that murder can actually be a loving act, a cleansing act. One of the Nazi films was called Existence Without Life. The title captures the Nazi’s view of humanity, that some didn’t have real life, that is, a quality of life that made it worthy to be lived. They merely had biological existence.</p>

<p>Aren’t we now doing the same thing, relegating human beings to non-human status because of something they don’t possess that we deem valuable: some skill, some capability, some mental quality? Because they lack this, their lives are no longer worthy to be lived as far as we’re concerned and, therefore, we are justified in taking their lives.</p>

<p>Someone tell me the real difference between that and the one who says, “Yes, I think an unborn child is a living human being, but it’s okay to kill him.”&nbsp;When people say this to you, ask them that question, and then wait for them to give you an answer. Don’t let them off the hook. How is their view different from the Nazis’? Don’t make it an accusation. Give them the benefit of the doubt; maybe they’ve got an intelligent justification. I doubt it, though.</p>

<p>People who are quick with moral judgments at other times can’t seem to find a moral problem with taking the life of an innocent human being simply because it’s in the way and can’t defend itself.</p>
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title: Jennifer and Baby Garcia
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/jennifer-and-baby-garcia
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>By Jennifer P., with Greg Koukl</em></p>

<p>I was a new nurse on a new job. The night shift nurses were hard on the newcomers, and I was particularly easy to intimidate.</p>

<p>One night a nurse on my shift came up to me and said, “Jennifer, you need to see the Garcia baby”&nbsp;[not its real name]. There was something suspicious about the way she said it, though. I see babies born every hour, I thought. Why do I need to see this one?</p>

<p>She led me to a utility room the nurses used for their breaks. Girls were smoking and drinking coffee, their feet up on the stainless steel counter. There, laying on the metal, was the naked body of a newborn baby.</p>

<p>“What is this baby doing here on this counter,”&nbsp;I asked timidly.</p>

<p>“Oh, that’s a preemie born at 19 weeks,”&nbsp;she said. “We don’t do anything to save them unless they’re 20 weeks.”</p>

<p>I noticed that his chest was fluttering rapidly. I picked him up for a closer look. “This baby is still alive!”&nbsp;I said. I thought they hadn’t noticed.</p>

<p>Then I learned the horrible truth. The nurses knew, and it didn’t matter. They had presented the baby to its mother as a dead, premature child. Then they took him away and tossed him on the cold, steel counter in the lunch room until he died. His skin was blotchy white, and his mouth was gaping open as he tried to breathe.</p>

<p>I stared at the little boy, trying to collect my thoughts. Inside I was in complete turmoil. What should I do? Should I talk to the supervisor? But she was involved in this, and I knew the doctors wouldn’t do anything.</p>

<p>I slowly realized that this child was going to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The only movement I could see was the rapid fluttering of his little chest.</p>

<p>I did the one thing I could think of. I held him in his last moments so he’d at least have some warmth and love when he died, which I was sure would happen any second.</p>

<p>Just then one of the nurses—a large, harsh woman—burst into the room. “Jennifer, what are you doing with that baby?”&nbsp;she yelled.</p>

<p>“He’s still alive...”</p>

<p>“He’s still alive because you’re holding him,”&nbsp;she said. Grabbing him by the back with one hand, she snatched him from me, opened one of the stainless steel cabinets, and pulled out a specimen container with formaldehyde in it. She tossed the baby in and snapped the lid on. It was over in an instant.</p>

<p>I was in such shock, hardly breathing. I was a new nurse. I didn’t understand the system. I was intimidated by these worldly and aggressive people.</p>

<p>Worst of all, though, I hadn’t given issues like this much thought, even though I was a nurse. I’d just rolled along like everybody else. I’d never consciously asked myself, “Jennifer, what is really going on here?”&nbsp;I’d been floating through life as a Christian not facing the hard issues.</p>

<p>When I was confronted with a horrible situation, I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t respond with what I knew to be true about myself in Christ. Instead, I was easy to push around. I gave in to intimidation.</p>

<p>I can’t express the failure, guilt and powerlessness I’ve felt over these years. In a profession that’s supposed to save lives, many people don’t really care. To them, this child wasn’t human. In seven more days he would have qualified, but at 19 weeks he was just trash.</p>

<p>That baby was meaningless to the world. But God allowed this life to begin because it had a purpose. It was God’s desire that this child be created.</p>

<p>That little boy was meaningful to God even though his own mother didn’t even know he was alive. He was meaningful to me, too, because it was his death that God used to completely turn my own life around.</p>

<p>Thank you, baby Garcia.</p>
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title: Neonaticide
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/neonaticide
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Perhaps the shocking increase in the numbers of “trash babies”&nbsp;is a result of the moral confusion that comes with legal abortion.</em></p>

<p>This week’s issue of <em>Newsweek</em> has an article entitled, “Cradles to Coffins.”&nbsp;It highlights the radical increase in this country of neonaticides—the killing of infants.</p>

<p>In New Jersey, for example, 18-year-old Melissa Drexler was charged with murder last week after going into a bathroom during her senior prom and delivering her infant son, then allegedly choking him to death before tossing him into the garbage. Two days later, Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputies charged 19-year-old Jennifer Garcia with killing her newborn baby girl, then dumping her into a garbage can outside of her home in a middle-class suburb.</p>

<p>Last November we talked about this on the air. Amy Grassberg, an 18-year-old college freshman and her boyfriend Brian Peterson, also 18, were charged with killing their newborn son and leaving his body in a trash bin.</p>

<p>People are asking, “What on earth is going on that teenage mothers can so readily dump their newborn children into trash bins?”</p>

<p>To be honest with you, I’m not entirely surprised.</p>

<p>Al Howard is a Christian worker with unwed mothers. He has a place in Long Beach called His Nesting Place where unwed mothers can go and be cared for. Yesterday’s <em>LA Times</em> published a piece he wrote entitled, “We All Must Answer for Why Teenagers Kill Their Babies.”&nbsp;The cartoon accompanying the piece shows a bathroom with three trash cans labeled for paper, for plastic, and for babies. The sign above it says, “Please separate your trash.”</p>

<p>This commentary has offended some people. In fact, today I was listening to Royal Oaks on KABC talk disparagingly about Al Howard’s position. He accused Howard of taking a tragic circumstance, drawing the wrong conclusions from it, and then promoting his own agenda.</p>

<p>Howard sums up his own view when he writes, “We live in a culture that has disposed of more than 35 million children through what we call freedom of choice. Abortion still removes 4,500 innocent babies everyday. They were also, I guess, an inconvenience to their moms and dads and in many cases their grandparents.”</p>

<p>Howard’s thesis is simply this: What have we been taught to do in this country with things we don’t want, including babies? We throw them away. That’s his explanation for neonaticide.</p>

<p>Now, one might make the point that we do not actually advocate throwing babies away. In this culture we discard fetuses, but we’ve never promoted the killing of infant children. Howard’s point is, “What’s the real difference?”</p>

<p>In response to Al Howard, Royal Oaks made the following points. First, abortion is a legal procedure. It has been made legal by countless court decisions. There’s no question on its legality. Second, after 200 years of struggle, we finally reached an consensus on this issue.</p>

<p>It’s not clear, though, how this answers Howard’s concern. Howard is asking why it’s wrong to kill the child outside the body, yet it’s okay to kill the child inside the body. That’s morally confusing. The law even supports partial-birth abortion, where a mother can give birth almost entirely and the child can still be killed. So Al Howard is justified when he asks, “What’s the moral difference?”</p>

<p>Royal Oaks’&nbsp;answer? “Abortion is a legal procedure.”&nbsp;But, of course, that misses the point doesn’t it? We all know it’s legal, but does the fact that abortion is legal provide an adequate, relevant distinction between abortion and what has come to be called neonaticide? The answer is no. It is not a significant distinction because the question must still be asked, “<em>Why</em> is one legal and the other isn’t?”</p>

<p>Oaks’&nbsp;second point is equally weak: After 200 years of struggle, we’ve finally reached consensus. It’s as if Oaks is saying, “We’ve been working on this for a long time and we’ve finally come to an agreement. Now Howard, would you shut up and quit beating a dead horse?”</p>

<p>Well, ladies and gentlemen, the fact is that we <em>had</em> consensus for almost 200 years, and there was no struggle. The consensus was that unborn human life was valuable and it ought not be taken. Abortion was illegal until just recently, and it wasn’t made legal because we changed our consensus. It was made legal because nine men in black robes said it must be legal, and with a stroke of the pen and the raw force of judicial power made it legal. Consensus had nothing to do with it.</p>

<p>There’s still no consensus. Indeed, if one wants to appeal to consensus, then the consensus of Americans is overwhelmingly that abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy should not be a legal right. There’s a reason why: abortion kills a child, a small human being.</p>

<p>Why, then, should we be surprised at neonaticide? Just a couple of minutes earlier these moms could have killed the very same child and had the law’s protection.</p>

<p>When we throw away human beings <em>before</em> birth and in the case of partial-birth abortion kill little human beings in the <em>middle</em> of birth by puncturing their skulls and sucking their brains out, why should we be shocked when young mothers start throwing away children a couple of minutes <em>after</em> birth?</p>
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title: Minimalist Ethic: Too Minimal
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/minimalist-ethic-too-minimal
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>“It’s okay as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.”&nbsp;Is that adequate justification for concluding something is ethical?</em></p>

<p>The <em>L.A. Times</em> yesterday, Saturday, February 18, had an article entitled “L.A. doctor’s license is suspended in sex case.”&nbsp;I do not bring this up to titillate. This is to make a point. “State accuses physician who has worked at three Southland clinics of abusing three patients. He pleads not guilty to charges also brought in criminal court.”</p>

<p>What happened? “An administrative law judge Friday suspended the license of an L.A. physician after the California attorney general’s office accused him of sexually abusing three patients, including raping one woman while she was under anesthesia and fondling another who had just had an abortion.”</p>

<p>Why do I bring this up? The reason is because there is an unusual ethic out there nowadays. It’s technical name is the “minimalist ethic.”&nbsp;It’s a response to the question, “How do you do ethics in a pluralistic society when there are all kinds of competing views?”&nbsp;Some people say you have reduce ethics to its most basic element so that everybody can agree on that basic, minimal requirement for ethical behavior.</p>

<p>That minimal requirement turns out to be this: A thing is ethical as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. So, what I do in my bedroom with my boyfriend or my girlfriend, or my same-sex boyfriend or girlfriend, is nobody’s business because “it doesn’t hurt anybody.”&nbsp;Actually, this particular argument is used to justify all kinds of different things.</p>

<p>Part of the failure of this argument is that it presumes we are omniscient when it comes to the harm that our actions cause. How do we know it doesn’t hurt anybody? There are lots of things we thought were innocuous that resulted in lots of damage. People have pre-marital sex. They get pregnant. Then they either get an abortion or carry the child to term. Either way, there are circumstances that are difficult and trying and bring harm and difficulty to other people not engaged in the original conduct—the parents, the friends, the government. In fact, the expectation of the difficulty is what prompts people to choose abortion. But this is not without cost either; the baby loses its life.</p>

<p>You start out doing what you want because “it’s not hurting anybody.”&nbsp;All of a sudden, lots of people are getting hurt in ways you never planned nor foresaw. You see, you never really know what is going to hurt other people and what isn’t. That’s one of the problems with this ethic.</p>

<p>But that’s not why I read you this article. There’s another reason. If one adopts the minimalist ethic as the ethic that governs conduct, as the ethic that becomes the determining factor in judging behavior, then the doctor in this article should not be punished.</p>

<p>Let me explain. The minimalist ethic says that an action is not wrong if it doesn’t hurt anybody. As long as no one is hurt, there’s no wrong-doing. That gets people off the hook. If you hold to that ethic as a defense for your own behavior, then you must also agree that this doctor should be released. Who did he hurt? The women in question were under anesthesia. The nature of being under anesthesia is specifically that the person feels no pain. That’s the point of being under anesthesia.</p>

<p>But how could I say he is guiltless when he violated these women? First, that’s not my view, but the view which follows from the minimalist ethic. Second, the alarm demonstrates that there seems to be more to harm than mere hurt. In other words, it is possible to avoid hurting another person but still harm them through violation. But this introduces a moral rule that goes beyond the minimalist ethic—one ought not violate another person—showing that the minimalist ethic is not adequate to capture what we value in morality. And if it’s inadequate, then it’s a poor justification for behavior.</p>

<p>Here’s the point I am making, ladies and gentlemen. People cast off conventional ethics and think they can build their own, so they construct this thing called the minimalist ethic and use it as a defense of their own immorality. One can do anything they want as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody. But the ploy doesn’t work. First, it presumes they know all the consequences of their actions, and they don’t. Second, even if they did, the standard is inadequate. If it’s adequate, then this doctor should not have his license suspended because he did not hurt the woman he raped while she was under anesthetics.</p>

<p>Listen, I am not saying it’s good he did that. I think that was wrong. I am saying that if you hold to this morality, then you have to declare his actions morally benign. This shows that the minimalist ethic is too minimal. It doesn’t capture what we understand moral behavior to entail. If it is too minimal, then it is not adequate for you to hide behind in justifying your own actions.</p>

<p>I had a conversation with a young lady a year ago who was an attorney and this very issue came up. She said, “Listen, who are you to judge? After all, I’m not hurting anybody.”&nbsp;I asked her, “How do you know?”</p>

<p>But maybe more to the point, a better rejoinder in the case of this doctor would be, “I guess you were really infuriated when that doctor’s license was suspended for raping a woman who was under sedation.”</p>

<p>“No, I thought that was terrible.”</p>

<p>“Well, wait a minute. I guess I misunderstood your point. I thought you said it was okay as long as you’re not hurting somebody. Now, he had a great time, apparently, and she didn’t feel a thing. So, I’m really at a loss to understand how it is that you could judge such a thing as immoral given your moral standards.”</p>

<p>Do you see how that works? It’s a tactic called taking the roof off. It’s adopting the other person’s point of view for the sake of argument and carrying it out to it’s logical conclusion. It���s forcing people to live in the moral world they created. It shows them that they can’t live in that world. It doesn’t work.</p>

<p>As I discussed earlier today with a group of singles at a church where I spoke, if you are a non-Christian, you are by necessity forced to live in some kind of contradiction because the biblical world view does, in fact, describe the way the world is in reality. If you try to live in denial of the Scriptures, your life will be a contradiction. The reason is that you are forced to live in the world God has made, and any other morality or way of life or world view that you adopt is going to be at odds with reality. That’s why the minimalist ethic doesn’t work. It isn’t true to what is.</p>

<p>This article in the <em>L.A. Times</em> demonstrates how ineffective the minimalist ethic is to give moral guidance. We have seen clear cases of conduct that satisfies the moral requirement of the minimalist ethic, yet at the same time seems to be patently immoral. It’s obvious. Even those who hold to the minimalist ethic know that’s true. And they get caught every time it’s pointed out.</p>
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title: Just Doing What Comes Naturally: The Is-Ought Fallacy
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/just-doing-what-comes-naturally-the-is-ought-fallacy
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The morality of homosexuality can never be defended by any appeal to nature, but only by an appeal to moral rules. Nature alone can never provide us with those. Nature merely tells us what is, not what ought to be.</em></p>

<p><a href="/w/morality-from-nature-" target="_blank">In a prior post</a>, I showed why justifying homosexuality as “natural”&nbsp;just won’t work. It’s not “natural”&nbsp;in any meaningful sense of the word. Today I want to build on that by explaining the logical fallacy at work in this argument that since same-sex attraction is natural for gays it must be moral.</p>

<p>Columnist Robert Scheer noted that, “Homosexuality in the vast majority of cases is a condition that is given and not chosen, and must therefore be honored as part of the natural order of things.”&nbsp;Scheer’s comments reflect a standard misconception about homosexuality and ethics: If we can find a connection between homosexuality and nature, then we must surrender our moral objections to it. The error is in thinking that one has anything to do with the other. It doesn’t.</p>

<p>Philosopher David Hume argued that it is impossible to produce a deductively valid argument with factual premises and an ethical conclusion. In short, you can’t get an “ought”&nbsp;from an “is.”&nbsp;This is called the naturalistic fallacy.</p>

<p>In layman’s terms, just because a behavior is “natural”&nbsp;doesn’t make it right. This is obvious on a moment’s reflection. Does a natural tendency towards violence justify assault? Does a natural desire for food justify theft? Does a natural aversion to homosexuals justify gay-bashing? Of course not.</p>

<p>Animals do what comes naturally. We are not beasts, we are human beings protected by morality from the tyranny of our natural appetites. The difference between “just doing what comes naturally”&nbsp;and principled self-restraint is called civilization.</p>

<p>Further, persisting in this line of reasoning annihilates the argument for adoption rights by homosexuals. If homosexuality is right because it’s natural, then adoption must be wrong because it’s unnatural. If nature dictates morality, and the natural consequence for homosexuals is to be childless, then it’s unnatural—and therefore immoral—for homosexuals to raise children. Artificial insemination of lesbians or adoptions by homosexual couples would be wrong by their own argument. The same principle governs both issues.</p>

<p>The morality of homosexuality can never be defended by any appeal to nature, but only by an appeal to moral rules. Nature alone can never provide us with those. Nature merely tells us what is, not what ought to be.</p>
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title: Hate Crimes Are Not About Hate
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/hate-crimes-are-not-about-hate
content:
            <div> 
		<p>The result of criminalizing hate under certain circumstances is that only certain types of people get protected. In a state with hate crime legislation, penalties levied for an assault on me would be milder by statutory requirement than for <em>the very same assault</em> on a homosexual. Why? Because as a straight, white male I do not belong to a class protected by this law.</p>

<p>Hate crime legislation, then, turns out to be not really about hate, but politics. It’s not hatred for the victim that is punished. That’s covered under existing statutes. Rather, it’s hatred for a protected class—African-Americans, Jews, homosexuals, etc.—that’s punished under hate crime laws.</p>

<p>Such legislation makes two crimes out of one. The assault is a crime against the victim. The hate is a crime against the victim’s group. Yet how does one make sense of a crime against a group that is a <em>different crime</em> from the one against the victim? Groups have no rights according to the Constitution.</p>

<p>Hate crime laws create a whole new category of faceless, personless victims—the injured class. They identify crimes against no one in particular, but crimes nonetheless, offenses that are punishable. They don’t prohibit all hate, only politically incorrect hate.</p>
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title: 20 Years of Clear-thinking Christianity
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/01/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/20-years-of-clear-thinking-christianity
content:
            <div> 
		<p>On May 1, 1993, I met with a group of 50 men and women whose opinion I respected. I wanted their counsel on—and financial help with, if they approved—an idea I’d been working on. I called it “Stand to Reason.”</p>

<p>For eight years I’d been productive as a staff pastor of a large local church in Southern California, doing part-time radio on weekends and taking every outside speaking opportunity I was offered.</p>

<p>My efforts had been fruitful, but scattered. I wanted to focus, to dial down on the unique, quality contribution I could make to the Kingdom in light of my own distinctive background, capabilities, and spiritual gifts.</p>

<p>I also wanted to make a change that mattered, to accomplish something bigger than me, not built on an individual person, but on a Kingdom purpose. There was trouble in the church and trouble in the culture. Could I do anything to make a difference?</p>

<p>On that Saturday morning in May two decades ago, I laid out my ideas. I later captured that vision in a short piece outlining my thoughts. Here is what I wrote.</p>

<blockquote>
<h2>Christians Need a Good Dose of Confidence</h2>

<p>The infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial”&nbsp;of 1925 was a watershed event for Christians. John Scopes and the ACLU lost the court battle, but it was an empty victory for believers who abandoned the field and took refuge inside the walls of the church. Choosing cultural monasticism rather than hard-thinking advocacy, they left the public square to the secularists. The disciples of Dewey, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Skinner, and a host of others replaced the disciples of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>Christians were the founding fathers of the intellectual community in the United States, but in the years that followed, Christianity lost its claim as a player in the marketplace of ideas. As Os Guinness pointed out, Christians had not been out-thought; they just had not been around when the thinking was being done.</p>

<p>But that’s beginning to change. Sharp and fair-minded thinkers like Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Plantinga, J.P. Moreland, Chuck Colson—to name just a few—have slowly been chipping away at the stranglehold non-Christians have on the world of ideas.</p>

<p>Now, nearly seventy years after Scopes, we’re balanced on the cusp of another historical watershed. On one side is a public square crying out for answers to the critical issues of life, but also heating up against virtually everything Christianity stands for. On the other side is the cultural and intellectual monastery that provided sanctuary—and ensured impotence—for Christians in the past.</p>

<p>Will the followers of Christ advance or will we retreat again as we did in 1925?</p>

<h2>It’s Time to Give the World a Piece of Our Mind</h2>

<p>The concept of Stand to Reason is based on the conviction that Christianity and Christian values, if properly understood and properly articulated, can “stand to reason”&nbsp;in the public square. The truth is on our side, but whether that truth will make a difference depends on whether we are equipped or not.</p>

<p>There’s a crying need to equip rank-and-file Christians to defend Christian beliefs and values in the marketplace of ideas against people who don’t understand our language and who don’t accept our source of authority. That need is especially acute for those Christians in positions of respect and influence in their communities—doctors, lawyers, teachers, office-holders, business leaders, school board members—who must function in a public square that is increasingly hostile to Christian values.</p>

<p>Our mission is to train Christians to think and send them into the public square to defend their beliefs and values. Stand to Reason is committed to cultivating the intellectual life in the defense of Christianity and in the nurture of Christian maturity.</p>

<p>Stand to Reason will use moral and rational suasion and fair-minded advocacy to make the point that Christianity is worth thinking about. It will give the average believer the tools of thought and the facts he needs to stand to reason for the historic Christian faith and for classical Christian values. It will aid him in communicating facts in a compelling, even-handed, and gracious way.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Now, after two decades of hard work, prayer, and the financial partnership of that first group and of thousands more just like you, I can say with confidence that we have delivered on our original intention. You are evidence of that.</p>

<p>Unlike earlier generations, we have not retreated. We have advanced. And by God’s grace, twenty years from now we will still be in the vanguard.</p>
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title: Leviticus and Homosexuality
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/leviticus-and-homosexuality
content:
            <div> 
		<p>A. Mosaic Law:</p>

<p><strong>1.</strong> Leviticus 18:22-23 “;You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an <strong>abomination</strong>. Also you shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it, nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it; it is a perversion.”</p>

<p><strong>2.</strong> Leviticus 20:13 “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a <strong>detestable act</strong>; they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”</p>

<p>B. The argument:</p>

<p><strong>1.</strong> Leviticus is not where we go for our moral instruction. It is a central thesis of Paul that Jesus has freed us from the Law.</p>

<p><strong>2.</strong> Leviticus is that book of the Law which has specifically to do with cult - sacrifice, priesthood, ritual purity. It is in this regard that it touches on homosexuality.</p>

<p><strong>3.</strong> The Hebrew word “toevah”&nbsp;(translated “abomination”&nbsp;and “detestable act”) is a cultic, not a moral, term. The English “abomination”&nbsp;means abhorrent, loathsome, unspeakably bad. Toevah means ritually unclean. Eating pork is toevah; having sex with a menstruating woman is toevah. You cannot come to worship after doing these things until you have been purified.</p>

<p><strong>4.</strong>&nbsp;“Nor does the naming of the death penalty mark homosexuality as particularly heinous. Also punishable by death in the Law is disobedience to parents (no age specified), picking up sticks on the Sabbath, adultery, and many other actions.”&nbsp;[1 <em>It’s&nbsp;curious Dr. Hart chose to conclude from this that homosexual practice was minor because it was no more offensive to God than picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Why didn’t he conclude that both homosexuality and Sabbath breaking were so offensive to God and such a threat to Judaism that they were capital offenses? If you want to know how God really felt, look at the punishment.</em>]</p>

<p>C. Ralph Blair argues [2 <em>An Evangelical Look at Homosexuality,</em> Moody Press, 1963 ]:</p>

<p><strong>1.</strong> That this was for ritual purity of the priests and not for moral purity.</p>

<p><strong>2.</strong> The Law no longer applies to the New Testament Christian.</p>

<p>D. Analysis:</p>

<p><strong>It’s true, much of the Law deals with religious activity rather than universal morality. However:</strong></p>

<p><strong>1.</strong> Ritual purity and moral purity are not always distinct.</p>

<p><strong>2.</strong> This section was not addressed to the priests, but to all the “sons of Israel”&nbsp;(v. 2).</p>

<p><strong>3.</strong> This isn’t merely ritual purity.</p>

<p><strong>a.</strong> Context determines the meaning here.</p>

<p><strong>b.</strong> The “toevah”&nbsp;(abomination) of homosexuality here is sandwiched between adultery (18:20), child sacrifice (18:21) and bestiality (18:23). Was Moses saying merely that if you committed adultery, bestiality, or child sacrifice you had to be careful to wash up before you came to church?</p>

<p><strong>4.</strong> Moral aspects of the Law do still apply, as NT citations demonstrate.</p>

<p><strong>5.</strong> It’s curious that some claim homosexual practice was minor because it was no more offensive to God than picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Why don’t they conclude that both homosexuality and Sabbath breaking etc. were so offensive to God and such a threat to Judaism that they were capital offenses? If you want to know how God really felt, look at the punishment.</p>

<p>E. No, Moses spoke clearly here:</p>

<p><strong>1.</strong> The fact that the Law has just two references to it and none of the prophets directly address it is inconsequential.</p>

<p><strong>2.</strong> The paucity of reference is do to one simple fact.</p>

<p><strong>a.</strong> It’s not because it was unimportant; it was a capital crime.</p>

<p><strong>b.</strong> It’s because it wasn’t prevalent, like idolatry; homosexuals were executed.</p>
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title: The Problem with Happiness
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-problem-with-happiness
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The late Dr. Francis Schaeffer said: All utopian ideals end up being cruel in the end, because they can never be fulfilled. Happiness can be an example.</em></p>

<p>Steel Magnolias (Sally Fields): “I just want you to be happy.”</p>

<p>It’s a very predictable thing for her to say and an interesting commentary on our culture. Where there’s such an emphasis, the goal of life, is on happiness—personal fulfillment and affluence. That’s the goal of life. And all our efforts are bent towards that. It’s the desire of every parent, and my own parents, as well: “Well, as long as you are happy.”</p>

<p>What that does, I think, is it sets up an artificial goal that I would consider inappropriate. I think it’s one of the most meaningless of all goals, pursuing happiness, because there are other values that are much more important. As a matter of fact I’m not entirely convinced that happiness is something that can be attained by pursuing it.</p>

<p>A colleague is writing a book entitled <em>Happiness is a Serious Problem</em>. The title makes a very significant point.</p>

<p>The problem is that it sets us up. Unhappiness becomes something that is abnormal. It’s a falling short of a critical ideal. The phrase then, “As Long as you’re happy”&nbsp;becomes not just a goal but a requirement for successful living, a requirement that breeds guilt if it’s not fulfilled—“What’s wrong with me?”</p>

<p>It’s a profound thought, I think, for us to chew on a bit, especially when you go through moments or periods or seasons of your life where there’s extreme anxiety and conflict. What that expectation breeds is a sense of personal failure. If the answer to the question, “But are you <em>happy”</em>&nbsp;brings an answer of “no, I’m miserable, I hurt, I’m confused,”&nbsp;the question then becomes, “What is wrong?”&nbsp;If you’re in the midst of anxiety or conflict you’re not “happy”&nbsp;and changes are in order.</p>

<p>My answer to that situation is, “More often than not, there’s nothing wrong at all.”&nbsp;Much of what we experience of a negative sort, maybe even most of it, is simply real life, common to everybody.</p>

<p>Author Garth Wood, in his book <em>The Myth of Neurosis</em>, says two things. First, life is tough, no matter how you cut it. Secondly, people who think they’re neurotic are usually perfectly normal people who have unrealistic expectations of what life should bring them. I’d contend that one of those unrealistic expectations, which ultimately becomes an inappropriate goal, is happiness.</p>

<p>We offer Christianity as a route to happiness. In that context Christianity is then perceived as good to the degree that it fulfills our desire for happiness. But God does not make that offer, and I don’t think that’s <em>Jesus’</em>&nbsp;appeal with His promise of an abundant life. Paul’s life of poverty, turmoil, persecution, and trial would not fit our current definition of “abundance.”&nbsp;Curiously, in the Scripture the concept of happiness (“blessed”) is described in unhappy terms: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who are persecuted for the gospels sake.</p>

<p>In the pursuit of happiness, human institutions are valid not because of transcendent ethic but because of temporal fulfillment, which is essentially <em>self</em>-centered. For example, marriage is a valid commitment as long as you’re happy. If you���re not <em>happy</em> anymore in the marriage, then you have reason to dissolve the marriage. But I would contend that if you’re getting married to be happy, then you’re getting married for the wrong reasons. Not that personal fulfillment is not a valid goal in some measure, but that’s not what it’s all about. You marry as a covenant agreement between two people to maintain a family unit in society to accomplish certain things, to help each other and embrace the events and issues of life together as helpmates, to raise a family and provide a stable environment for them. Though all of those things may breed a measure of happiness, they breed a measure of misery as well. That’s why the covenant, the agreement, the commitment between husband and wife is not based on happiness. If it was you’d have to amend your vows to say, “Until unhappiness do us part.”</p>

<p>Most people could not get themselves to say that at the altar, but on a visceral level that’s what they mean. How can I say that? Because I know what the goal of their lives are. It’s to be happy. Just ask them. So what they end up doing is perjuring themselves at the altar.</p>

<p>All of this because we have a cultural value, a cultural emphasis, on happiness. The pursuit of happiness becomes the rationale for all sorts of inappropriate behavior—“But she’s not happy married to him. She’s happy with me.”&nbsp;“I’m not happy raising my children.”&nbsp;“But I’m not happy when I’m not high.”&nbsp;“I’m not happy going to work every day.”&nbsp;These are the kinds of comments children make, not adults.</p>

<p>When I talk like this people think I’m being depressed and morbid. I’m not. I’m not <em>un</em>happy, I don’t think, and I’m probably as <em>happy</em> as the next guy. And this vague response really makes my point: I don’t think of it as a meaningful goal, so it’s not a meaningful question, and it’s hard for me to give a meaningful answer.</p>

<p>I guess my basic contention is that to the degree we cling to this expectation of personal happiness, we will define good <em>life</em>, appropriate life, successful living in the context of freedom from problems and pain. And it’s to that degree that life will deliver to us the severest disappointment, because life is not like that.</p>

<p>Instead, I would direct you to higher goals. Some things are more important than happiness, like faithfulness, and integrity and justice—that is, right conduct and right behavior, right living. I would hold that in the long run this right conduct will bring the most satisfaction, some may even say happiness. But it’s certainly often not true in the short run.</p>

<p>So don’t make it your goal to be happy. Make it your goal to be faithful. Happiness will take care of itself. And the times that it doesn’t, so what? Generally, if I’m really bummed out, I don’t despair because there’s probably nothing critically wrong with me, and it probably won’t last. And if I’m really thrilled about something I <em>enjoy</em> it, but I don’t <em>cling</em> to it because sooner or later I’ll return to normal living, and that’s OK—no guilt trips. And I never expect <em>anything</em> in this life to sustain me at anything like a blissful level.</p>

<p>The late Dr. Francis Schaeffer said: All utopian ideals end up being cruel in the end, because they can never be fulfilled.</p>

<p>I agree with him.</p>

<p>At least that’s the way I see it.</p>
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title: The “Murder” of a Fetus
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-murder-of-a-fetus
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>If the California state statutes use the term “murder”&nbsp;to describe the killing of a fetus, then why can’t pro-lifers use the same language?</em></p>

<p>Certain kinds of objections come up every time violence is perpetrated against an abortion provider. Though pro-lifers are, almost to a person, against the bombing of abortion clinics, most use the term “murder”&nbsp;to describe what goes on there. The use of this terminology makes some observers wonder how pro-lifers can be against abortion violence when it allegedly stops murder.</p>

<p>I don’t think pro-lifers have been careful here to articulate a sensible response, so they get stuck in this dilemma. I think this is a false dilemma and give some reasons why in <a href="http://www.str.org/articles/pro-lifers-on-the-horns-of-a-false-dilemma" target="_blank" title="Pro-Lifers on the Horns of a False Dilemma">“Pro-Lifers on the Horns of a False Dilemma.”</a>&nbsp;But there is another aspect of this issue.</p>

<p>Pro-abortionists have been very upset with pro-lifers who refer to abortion as “murder”&nbsp;and a modern day “holocaust”&nbsp;because this rhetoric, they say, incites people to violence.</p>

<p>The whole objection hinges on whether or not abortion takes the life of an innocent human being or not. This is the issue that is almost never addressed. Objectors simply throw up their arms and say, “Quit making these inflammatory statements. It only causes more trouble.”</p>

<p>Silence is certainly one solution. Empty, inflammatory rhetoric causes unnecessary problems. If that’s all pro-lifers are doing, then they should stop. But what if their comments aren’t rhetoric? What if innocent human beings <em>are</em> being killed simply because they’re in the way and can’t defend themselves? The real solution then is to stop the killing, not stop the objections.</p>

<p>The pro-life view is that sensible people are being aroused for a good reason. It’s not because pro-lifers say children are being murdered, but because pro-lifers are convinced that children are being murdered. It happens over 4,000 times a day; 1.3 million per year; 35 million over the last 25 years. I’d say that the word “holocaust”&nbsp;properly applies to that activity, if that’s what’s really happening.</p>

<p>Of course, that’s the rub. Which view is right? Is it rhetoric or is it reality?</p>

<p>I hold in my hands copies of the California State Statutes. My understanding is that on the issue before us, the situation is the same in virtually every state in the country. I’m reading: “Section 187, Murder defined: death of a fetus. Paragraph A—Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being or a fetus with malice aforethought.”</p>

<p>Please make careful note of this legal statement. This is not rhetoric. I’m quoting from the California statute. According to current California law, murder is the unlawful killing of a human being—<em>including a human fetus</em>—with malice aforethought.</p>

<p>The statute restricts this definition with a caveat: “This section shall not apply to any person who commits an act which results in the death of a fetus if any of the following apply: 1. The act complied with the Therapeutic Abortion Act, Chapter 11 of Division 20 of the Health and Safety Code. 2. The act was committed by a holder of a physician’s and surgeon’s certificate as defined in the Business and Professions Code. 3. The act was solicited, aided and abetted and consented to by the mother of the fetus.”</p>

<p>Let me clarify what’s actually being stated here. The California legal code says that taking the life of an unborn child is murder under the homicide statutes, and is punishable as such, unless it’s an abortion done by a physician with the mother’s consent.</p>

<p>Something ought to strike you as odd here. How does the blameworthy taking of an innocent human life become justifiable simply because Mom says it’s okay and a doctor does it?</p>

<p>That’s bizarre. Either a human being is valuable or she isn’t. Since human beings are not chattel property, it doesn’t strike me as legitimate to disqualify the value of any human simply by the fact that Mom doesn’t want her.</p>

<p>This is a serious problem of coherency in the law. If Mom says so, an otherwise valuable human being becomes a worthless encumbrance that can be discarded and destroyed, as long as the destruction is done at an abortion clinic by a doctor.</p>

<p>It also raises an odd conundrum—and Dr. Frank Beckwith has made this point. What do you do when you have a mother who’s driving to an abortion clinic intent on terminating her pregnancy, who’s fetus is killed when the abortionist who’s to perform that abortion runs a red light and crashes into the mother’s car?</p>

<p>The same doctor, the same mother, the same baby, who is now dead consistent with the ultimate intention of both the mother and the abortionist. In this case, though, the doctor is guilty of homicide. If he’d have just waited a few more minutes and not run the light, but killed the same baby through D&amp;C abortion or saline abortion or even partial-birth abortion, the very same baby could have been killed legally. Odd, isn’t it?</p>

<p>More to the point, the California statutes themselves call the killing of a fetus murder. And if the California statutes call it murder, I don’t know why pro-lifers are accused of “wielding irresponsible rhetoric”&nbsp;when they do the same.</p>

<p>So, if somebody says you shouldn’t use the term “murder”&nbsp;to describe the killing of an unborn through abortion, ask “Why not?”&nbsp;The homicide statutes of the State of California call it murder. It seems to me we’re justified in using that term as well.</p>

<p>It isn’t simply rhetoric. The mere fact that one is legal and the other is not doesn’t seem to change what it is: the unjustified killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Sounds like murder to me.</p>
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title: Is Marriage a Social Construction?
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-marriage-a-social-construction-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Government has no interest in affirming any other kind of relationship. It privileges and sustains marriage in order to protect the future of civilization.</em></p>

<p>What is marriage? There are only two possible kinds of answers to this question: Either marriage and family have a fixed, natural purpose (a natural “teleology”) or they do not. If not, marriage is some kind of social construction, an invention of culture like knickers or bow ties, fashions that change with the times. Marriages defined by convention can be anything culture defines them to be. No particular detail is essential. This, at least, is the argument of the same-sex marriage advocacy.</p>

<p>It is not possible, however, that marriage is a social construction. Here’s why.</p>

<p>Columnist Dennis Prager has observed, “Every higher civilization has defined marriage as an institution joining members of the opposite sex.”&nbsp;I agree with Prager’s position on marriage, though I take exception with one of his words.</p>

<p>I don’t think marriage has been defined by cultures. Rather, I think it has been described by them. The difference in terms is significant. If marriage is defined by culture, then it is merely a construction that culture is free to change when it desires. The definition may have been stable for millennia, yet it is still a convention and therefore subject to alteration. This is, in fact, the argument of the those in favor of same-sex marriage.</p>

<p>The truth is, it is not culture that constructs marriages or the families that marriages begin. Rather, it is the other way around: Marriage and family construct culture. As the building blocks of civilization, families are logically prior to society as the parts are prior to the whole. Bricks aren’t the result of the building because the building is made up of bricks. You must have the first before you can get the second.</p>

<p>Societies are large groups of families. Since families are constituent of culture, cultures cannot define them. They merely observe their parts, as it were, and acknowledge what they have discovered. Society then enacts laws not to create marriage and families according to arbitrary convention, but to protect that which already exists, being essential to the whole.</p>

<p>Why has civilization always characterized families as a union of men and women? Because men and women are the natural source of the children that allow civilized culture to persist. This is the only understanding that makes sense of the definition, structure, legitimacy, identity, and government entitlements of marriage. This alone answers our question, “What is marriage?”</p>

<p>Marriage begins a family. Families are the building blocks of cultures. Families—and therefore marriages—are logically prior to culture.</p>

<p>Families may fail to produce children, either by choice or by accident, but they are about children, nonetheless. That’s why marriages have always been between men and women; they are the only ones, in the natural state, who have kids.</p>

<p>Government has no interest in affirming any other kind of relationship. It privileges and sustains marriage in order to protect the future of civilization.</p>

<p>That’s why same-sex marriage is radically revisionist. It severs family from its roots, eviscerates marriage of any normative content, and robs children of a mother and a father. This must not happen.</p>
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title: Just Doing What Comes Naturally: Mother Nature’s Way
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/just-doing-what-comes-naturally-mother-nature-s-way
content:
            <div> 
		<p>A common defense for homosexuality is that same-sex attraction is natural for gays. There’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. The animal kingdom is filled with examples of same-sex erotic behavior. Further, scientific evidence indicates that sexual orientation is physically pre-determined. Condemning homosexuality and restricting adoption rights is wrong, therefore because sexual desires are not chosen; they are part one’s physical constitution.</p>

<p>There are two claims here that propel this kind of argument. The first is that homosexuality is “natural.”&nbsp;The second, which I’ll be addressing tomorrow, is that if a condition is natural, then it must be moral.</p>

<p>Now on the surface, there seems to be some truth to the claim that homosexuality is natural. It’s not unusual, for example, to see male dogs mount each other in an erotic way. There are two problems with this view, however.</p>

<p>First, the observation is flawed because it assumes that erotic behavior in other mammals is the same as homosexual desire in human beings. Male homosexuals engage in sodomy because of an attraction to a gender. They are male erotic, and sodomy is an expression of that desire.</p>

<p>Does the animal kingdom display this kind of same-gender eroticism? When a male dog mounts another male dog, is it because he’s attracted to the male gender of the other dog? I don’t think so. This same poor pooch will slavishly mount sofas or shrubs or anything else available, including the leg of your dinner guest. None of these things are the object of the canine’s sexual lust; they are merely the subject of it. The dog does not desire your unfortunate visitor. He simply desires to be stimulated. It doesn’t prove they have homosexual desire in any way parallel with humans.</p>

<p>Secondly, the view asserts that simply because the condition “occurs in nature”&nbsp;it is “natural.”&nbsp;But by this use of the word all sorts of things would be natural—humans mating with animals, children drinking cleaning fluid, rain forests being replaced with concrete—because all would be occurring “in nature.”&nbsp;Human beings are part of nature by this definition, and therefore all and any human conduct would be natural. Virtually nothing could ever be considered unnatural on these terms.</p>

<p>Generally we mean something else when we say that replacing virgin forests with parking lots, imbibing poison, and copulating with beasts are not natural. Things are natural if they fit the pre-technological, natural order of things; they are functioning according to their primitive pattern or purpose, and that’s key. A natural sexual desire, then, is a desire that serves to accomplish a sexual goal in the primitive order of things.</p>

<p>However, this definition of “natural”&nbsp;doesn’t help the homosexual either. According to the primitive natural order of things (evolution), the natural purpose of sex is reproduction, getting one’s genes into the next generation. But homosexuals don’t reproduce, so homosexuality can’t be “natural”&nbsp;on this definition either.</p>

<p>Further, wouldn’t one consider it unnatural if someone had eyes, but couldn’t see, or ears and couldn’t hear? Why is it then deemed natural to have male genitals, but be dispositionally incapable of using them to accomplish their reproductive purpose with the opposite sex?</p>

<p>Homosexuality does not seem to be natural in any meaningful sense of the word. Therefore, its morality cannot be defended by a mere appeal to nature.</p>
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title: Means and Ends
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/means-and-ends
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>“The end never justifies the means.”&nbsp;Actually, the end is a vital factor in evaluating ethical actions.</em></p>

<p>Often times you’ve heard the statement that the end never justifies the means. This frequently comes from a Christian who is trying to make an ethical statement about a decision that someone made. It’s an attempt to demonstrate that there is a relationship between means and ends and that, just because we have a good goal, we can’t do anything we like to accomplish that goal. As Christians, our commands from God are influenced not only by the goals that we set, but also by the means that we use to accomplish the goals.</p>

<p>Maybe we want a new car—that’s the goal. The means to that goal is stealing. Well, that’s not a legitimate means. What if the goal is not to get us a new car, but to give one to a very worthwhile cause? Then can we steal? In that circumstance you hear the statement “the end never justifies the means.”</p>

<p>But frequently this statement is really a nonsense statement. It’s an attempt to bring clarity to moral decision making, but as it’s stated it’s problematic. It’s an impossible statement. If we want to think clearly in an ethical fashion about issues, we can’t get away with this slogan because it ultimately means nothing.</p>

<p>Think about this. If the end never justifies the means, then no means would ever be justifiable. If no means are ever justifiable then you’d never be able to do anything at all. Dennis Prager brought this to my attention first and I got thinking about it.</p>

<p>Every single thing that you strive to do involves a means and an end. As I mentioned before, the goal might be to get money for your church and the means could be to work for it. But if the statement is true, then no matter what your end or goal is no means would ever be justifiable. You could never do whatever you wanted to do. Say you want to go buy some groceries. That’s the end. What’s the means? To drive the car. But if the end never justifies the means, then the means is not justified to go buy groceries.</p>

<p>The point I’m making is that this phrase is simplistic. If you want to talk about the relationship of means and ends then you’re going to have to do a little bit more work and think more clearly about this issue. The fact is that there’s always a relationship between means and ends. Is it okay to scream harshly at someone? Most of you would probably say no. My response is that it depends. If you want the salt and you screamed at the person at the table with you to pass it to you, that would be rude. So the end there doesn’t justify the means. But what if a person was on the highway and the cars were about to hit them? Would it be justified to scream at them then? Of course. There the end does justify the means. To save the person’s life you must scream at them.</p>

<p>I think what is usually the concern expressed in this phrase is that the particular end does not justify the means. That’s why we have to look at both of those things when we make decisions.</p>

<p>Utilitarianism is a way of doing ethics that say you’re goal is the thing that’s primary. And once you have your goal in sight, then any means will justify that particular goal. If your goal is to have pleasure as a hedonistic utilitarian, then anything that you choose to do to accomplish your personal pleasure is legitimate according to that point of view. That’s why we would say as Christians that the end doesn’t always justify the means.</p>

<p>There are times when we have to weigh in the balance the difference between the means and ends. What is it that we’re trying to accomplish and how are we trying to get there? Our ethic has got to inform both the goal and how we get there. Sometimes there is a delicate balance between what we’re trying to accomplish and the means that we use to get there, such that in certain circumstances a particular means is ethical but the same means in other circumstances would be unethical.</p>

<p>Some of you are probably saying that that sounds like relativism. Sounds to me like you’re saying everything is relative. I’m not saying that at all. Decision making is relative and ethical decision making is relative to circumstances. I am not saying that absolute moral rules are relative. An absolute, by the way, is any moral rule that applies equally to everyone in similar moral situations. But it’s the situation that’s in question and has to be considered carefully.</p>

<p>Sometimes we come into a situation where we are forced to keep one moral law and to violate another. Those are called ethical dilemmas. In that situation we certainly have to look at all of these different factors to decide what is the best thing to do.</p>

<p>I just want to draw your attention to the fact that the phrase “the end never justifies the means”&nbsp;is a meaningless statement as it stands. What we really mean to say as Christians is that there is a relationship between means and ends, and there are ethical considerations not just for the goals that we have in mind, but for the way that we get to those goals. We have to weigh both of those things in light of Biblical commands and the Biblical ethics of absolute truth.</p>
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title: Morality from Nature?
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/morality-from-nature-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>It’s common of late to justify one’s “sexual orientation”&nbsp;by an appeal to nature. The claim “I was born this way”&nbsp;is all that’s needed to stem moral criticism of homosexuality. But why settle for this approach? Why think that the state of nature is an appropriate guide to morality?</p>

<p>Seventeenth century Philosopher Thomas Hobbs noted famously, “Life in an unregulated state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”&nbsp;It was precisely this fact, according to Hobbs, that caused humans to enter into social contracts, gladly accepting the moral constraints of civilization to its alternative, the law of nature. Morality, as an extension of that contract, is a way of protecting ourselves from the brutality of living in a world where people simply did what came naturally.</p>

<p>I think Hobbs was wrong in his analysis of morality, but that’s not my point right now. My point here is that since living according to nature would easily justify all kinds of barbarism, how does it make sense to invoke the natural state of things to justify anything? By contrast, behavior that’s “natural”&nbsp;is the very thing morality is meant to protect us from. Animals always do what come naturally. Morality that counters one’s natural inclinations rather than commends them is our only refuge from a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”</p>
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title: Euthanasia, Rights, and Metaphysics
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/euthanasia-rights-and-metaphysics
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Think carefully about how you justify some moral actions because it could turn on you in another moral situation.</em></p>

<p>I got a hold of the Sunday <em>Oregonian</em> and right on the front page is an article that starts out like this: “Dutch Researcher Warns of Lingering Deaths.”&nbsp;The significance of this being a Dutch researcher is with regards to Measure 16, Oregon’s new measure that goes into effect in a couple of weeks, physician assisted suicide. The Dutch have been practicing this de facto, though not technically legally for the last twenty years. I think they are a good case example, by the way, to find out where this kind of thing leads, and I’ll tell you about that in just a moment. But here you have a Dutch researcher who is a leading authority on physician assisted suicide, and he makes an observation, which is basically, I don’t know if you folks realize what you are in for here with this because the fact is that one in four people that we try to euthanize using barbiturates don’t die quickly [which apparently is the restrictive element in this particular measure; in other words, lethal injection is not an option]. Sometimes the death can be prolonged over two days. He says, I hope you guys are ready for some nasty scenes here because the families are not going to appreciate this when they watch their loved one gasping during a comatose period of up to two days before they finally gasp their last.</p>

<p>Now you might think that that’s just kind of an aesthetic thing. It doesn’t really deal with the moral issue of physician assisted suicide, and you are right. But there is something else coming out of this article that I think is worthy of observation, and it points to a serious problem with these kinds of things.</p>

<p>I mentioned yesterday on a related issue that President Clinton has banned funding for embryo creation; but he has approved funding for doing experiments on embryos. In other words, you can’t make or create embryos for the purpose of doing experiments on these living human embryos, but you can use living embryos that you happen to find here and there. There are some leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization in which the mother had a successful fertilization from one of the eggs that was implanted. They’ve got to do something with the others instead of flushing them down the toilet, so they can sell them for research. The President thinks that’s okay, but creating embryos for that purpose is somehow morally offensive to him.</p>

<p>My response on this issue was that it seems curious that he would approve the one and object to the other because they seem to be the same kind of thing. It showed me that this is a man who was dealing on a national level with legislation that deals with a vital life and death ethical issue who has not carefully thought through the issue, so he has no rationale from which to work to either approve or disapprove these things. If he did, he’d either approve them both or disapprove them both, it seems to me. What it shows is the liabilities and confusion that results when people are making ad hoc decisions about things. In other words, he is kind of shooting from the hip. He is not making a reasoned policy about a particular thing and then applying that policy to an ethical issue.</p>

<p>I think you see a parallel in the paper today, and there is an interesting comment made by the Dutch researcher. He said that in predicting agonizing dilemmas for those who are witnessing such a scene, especially family members, he says that some might be tempted to suffocate loved ones by putting plastic bags over their heads. Now you see the picture? Under the patient’s request, the doctor gives a lethal dose of barbiturates which may take sixty tablets, according to this one report. Sometimes they can’t swallow that many, and sometimes they vomit up the capsules so they get a sub-lethal dose. Or they get a dose that kills them slowly and the loved ones watch this person labor on the brink of death for two days, and they simply can’t take it anymore so they say, We’re going to end it, and they want to put a plastic bag over their head.</p>

<p>Now listen to the remark of the Dutch researcher. This guy is a specialist in euthanasia. He’s assisted in hundreds of these kinds of things, that’s why he knows so much about it. He says, “Is that acceptable in a civilized world?”&nbsp;Is what? Killing them? No, not killing them, but putting a bag over their head to kill them. Is that acceptable in a civilized world? “In my opinion, no,”&nbsp;he says.</p>

<p>What is wrong with this picture? What this Dutch specialist is saying is that the act of killing itself is not immoral, only certain types of killing are uncivilized. If you want to give them tablets and let them die, that’s civilized. Or maybe a lethal injection, which isn’t allowed under the present measure, but that’s what the Dutch do when they have problems with barbiturates. They just shoot them up and they’re dead in five minutes. But what about putting a plastic bag over someone’s head, which can do the job in about ten minutes as well? Well that’s barbaric, uncivilized.</p>

<p>My point is, I don’t get it. I don’t get how lethal injection or tablets that may require a person to labor on the brink of death for two days are considered civilized, but putting a plastic bag over their head, or maybe strangling them, or lopping their head off is uncivilized. If the idea is mercy killing, shouldn’t we kill the person as quickly as possible? If that is the case, then the guillotine is the best solution.</p>

<p>I guess what I am saying here is what has happened as people have made in passing this measure just by a slim margin an ad hoc, emotional kind of response on a deep and substantial ethical issue. They have said, basically, you know I kind of like this idea about mercy killing so let’s allow it. And when they do, this decision has ramifications for a whole bunch of areas that they didn’t anticipate. And so they run into circumstances like this and they say ridiculous things like putting a plastic bag over someone’s head is an uncivilized way of killing them but it is civilized to allow them to linger on the brink of death for two days before they finally gasp their last.</p>

<p>Here’s something I want you to latch onto. And I feel frustrated talking about this now, because it’s somewhat like closing the gate after the horse is out. But this issue isn’t over. Even though it’s been passed a couple of weeks ago, measure 16. It isn’t over yet because if this goes anything like the Dutch practice has gone, you are going to see the dominoes begin falling and so your voice is going to be very valuable in doing damage control here. The thing that I think people don’t realize is that these kinds of laws make metaphysical statements. When I say metaphysical statement, I am not trying to blind you with science here. What I am saying is that this kind of law makes a statement about, in this case, human life that goes beyond mere physical things. It has to do with more ultimate issues. What does it mean to be a human person? Where is the value of being human? And I’m not talking about just a physical body, here. Because I think being a human entails much more than that.</p>

<p>By the way, the arguments for these kinds of propositions assume such. They assume, for example that a human being is the kind of being that one ought to allow to live freely. And so if a person wants to decide to commit suicide and take their own life, they ought to be allowed to do so. Now that is a metaphysical statement. It is a metaphysical argument that says that human beings are not mere animals but they are beings that have a substantial self that has value and ought to be respected. Most of us don’t see that same kind of thing in other animals. Because we hold other animals to be metaphysically different than human beings. Now, radical animal rights people see animals and human beings as all just animals and so consequently they have equal rights. It’s not an elevation of animals to human rights status, it is a demotion of human rights to animal rights status.</p>

<p>But the arguments in here for something like measure 16 is that a human being has a right to make a choice for himself and that’s a metaphysical statement. Because rights for choices don’t proceed from mere physical bodies. We can’t look at a mere physical body like a mere human being or a mere cow or a mere dog and say that this physical body has a right to anything. We are acknowledging that there is something elevated about a human being. He is a personal being with value of some sort, such that the value ought to be respected by letting him do what he chooses to do. And this is our argument for freedom. Human beings have arguments about freedom and liberty, animals don’t and it’s a mistake to apply that kind of argumentation to animals. So the point I am making is, when you argue for Measure 16 you are making a metaphysical argument based on something that is uniquely human. A liberty that one ought to respect to choose when one wants to live or die.</p>

<p>What happens though when you pass something like this you make more metaphysical statements than just that. And here’s that statement that is made. The statement is that a human life is not valuable in itself. This sounds contradictory. I thought you just said it is valuable that’s why we allow freedom and now you are saying that it isn’t valuable in itself. My point is, that is exactly true. There is a conflict here. People don’t see it. When we pass a law that says that human life is not valuable in itself, but it only has value in that it can product something good, like health or well being or making a contribution to society. It has instrumental value to produce this. Then when the life isn’t able to produce this other thing that is valuable, the life is then forfeit. Then we can take the life. You see, once we do that though we make the statement that there is a human life that is not worthy to be lived. Say a human life that is in pain, or one that is a burden on society financially or that can’t get better, or any of a number of things that are related that this kind of question. Then you’ve made a definitive statement, a metaphysical statement about human beings. And you know something? That statement stays and it begins to eat away at other things as well, so that pretty soon, remember this other metaphysical argument, that people ought to be free to choose what they want? Pretty soon, that argument, which is at odds with this one, gets eaten up. And that’s exactly what happened in Holland.</p>

<p>Now in Holland, twenty years later, twenty years of de facto, legalized euthanasia, where doctors administer it, nearly twenty per cent of the deaths of that country every single year, 19.4% specifically, are a result of euthanasia. One in five people in Holland are euthanized. But here’s the terrifying statistic. That’s pretty sad. The one that is terrifying is that 11.3%, more than one in ten, of the total number of deaths in that country, every single year (14,691 according to the Dutch government’s own report on euthanasia) are cases of involuntary euthanasia. What’s involuntary euthanasia? That’s when the patient says, “I don’t want to die,” and the doctor says, “You’re dead,” zap.</p>

<p>What happened to this metaphysical right, freedom to choose? That right that you argued for in Measure 16 got eaten up by another statement that is more powerful that the Measure actually makes. Because the measure says this, that your life isn’t worth anything in itself. And if your life really isn’t intrinsically valuable in itself, why ought we care what you think about when your life should be ended? Your life is valuable if it makes a contribution. It is not making a contribution, so you are out of here. That’s not just a slippery slope fallacy. That’s not the old domino scare tactic. It’s already happening in Holland and it started just this way. That’s why when you make this kind of decision you better do your metaphysical thinking first. Instead of having your metaphysical conclusions that you made unwittingly gobble you up in the end.</p>
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title: The Virtues of Virtue
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-virtues-of-virtue
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Is happiness or virtue the greater good to see and cultivate in our lives?</em></p>

<p>I want to pick up on a theme that was introduced by a caller yesterday. She called and asked, “How do you deal with people, especially people that are in your charge, people that you are trying to encourage, build up, shepherd in some fashion, how is it that you deal with them when they encounter tremendous adversity in their life? And how legitimate or useful is it to tell them that God is using it for good in their life? God is using it to develop their character. Something good is going to come out of it, some variation of the promise in Romans 8:28 that we know that “God causes all things to work for good for those who love God and for those who are called according to His purposes.”</p>

<p>Part of my answer was what I think is one of the most important things I could ever tell you that would equip you to lead a significant and full life. Now, I would normally say a significant and full life as a Christian, but it is not just pertaining to Christians, as I think about it. This is for anyone to lead a significant and full life. That is to understand the true nature of life and the world that we live in. Especially for the Christian, this is important because unfortunately I think Christians are more out of touch with life as it really is than people who do not have a belief in God or a religious perspective, and therefore they don’t have any predisposition to want to candy coat the world. Christians often times do because they think it’s their Christian duty to make everything look good and to act like they are happy and satisfied through every circumstance. It’s harder for Christians sometimes when the pains of life occur because they don’t expect this kind of thing. He thinks that God is supposed to protect him from that.</p>

<p>The most important thing that I could tell you about life, not as an apologist, not as a defender of the faith, but as a brother, as a friend, is that life—especially the Christian life—is often perplexing, and it’s punctuated with periods of pain and anguish, and sometimes that pain and that anguish is great. Now the reason that I am bringing this up is because, as Dennis Prager has said, “happiness is a serious problem.”&nbsp;It’s a serious problem because it gives people wrong goals in life and it gives them wrong expectations about what life is. And especially if you have a belief in a God that is good and a God that is somewhat committed to redeem your life and to make good out of your life, then we cast that promise in an expectation that focuses on our emotional state, not an expectation that focuses on our character. This is a significant stumbling block for people. It’s a mistake. Without being condemning—and I don’t mean to be—but it really is the spirit of the world to think this way, to think that what God is principally concerned with is our emotional state, our happiness, when that is just simply not the case. God is not principally concerned with our happiness. He is principally concerned with our character.</p>

<p>This brings us to the admonition or the attempt at encouragement when we face somebody who is dealing with something very, very difficult. We try to explain to them that God is using this for good in their life. This kind of counsel usually falls on deaf ears, at best, or seems cruel at worst, for the person who holds the belief that the greatest virtue in life is personal happiness. Why? Because they do not see how such difficulty and pain and sorrow and tragedy in their life can possibly contribute to their happiness in the future. We as their counselors try to soften the impact of their pain by trying to suggest in some convoluted way that this will actually cash out in increased happiness down the line. God will give you something that you will be happier with. He has closed this door to open a window for you—a better job down the line where you will have more fun and be more satisfied and make more money.</p>

<p>We are still trying to interpret God’s actions in our lives in terms of how it will increase our personal happiness, so it should not be surprising when counsel like that gets shoved back down our throat by a person who is hurt and now is angry at us for saying that kind of thing. Why are they angry? Because it doesn’t ring true to someone who’s in the midst of it, and I would say it doesn’t ring true principally because it’s not true. It’s false.</p>

<p>Future happiness, ladies and gentlemen, is not the issue. It simply is not. God’s goal is not to instill happiness such that we have to interpret every circumstance in light of how God may change these things and use them down the line to make us into happier people. God’s goal is not happiness, it’s to instill character. It’s not to make us blissful, but to make us virtuous. Are they inconsistent with each other? Not necessarily.</p>

<p>You ask the average person in the street what it is that he wants from life and he will tell you, “I want to be happy.”&nbsp;You ask what a parent wants of their child and they will say, “I want my children to be happy.”&nbsp;And it’s understandable that they would want those kinds of things. My simple point is that I personally feel it is one of the most worthless of all goals. I don’t know if happiness can be a goal, frankly. I think happiness is a very self-focused goal. In fact, it can’t be a goal because it seems that happiness usually is the outgrowth of something else. This is why when I mentioned earlier that I don’t think that God’s goal is to make us happy but to instill character, to make us virtuous. I don’t think the two are inconsistent with each other.</p>

<p>If we focus on that which I believe God is focusing on—our lives—happiness may often be the characteristic result. Happiness and virtue are not incompatible. In fact, I would argue that the deepest satisfaction from life comes not from being happy but from having virtue. And by the way, I suspect that most of us in a quiet and more candid moment really knows this to be true. We know that virtue is it’s own reward and when we do things that are deeply virtuous we experience a deep sense of satisfaction. We look at the people that are most virtuous who have not sought fun or happiness but virtue. And we look at them with a special kind of respect as if we intuitively know that what they have done is something that is patently more valuable than what we might be doing when we are seeking happiness or fun in life. So I really believe that the two ultimately go hand in hand.</p>

<p>But listen to this. When happiness becomes the principle goal, as opposed to right living, when we let the tail wag the dog, so to speak, we invite all sorts of confusion. We hear a statement like, “How could God let this happen?”&nbsp;If you think about it for a moment here is what that statement really means. Here’s the question that is really being asked. How could God allow me to face difficulty, pain and disappointment? How could God allow this tragedy in my life? And my response is, how could He not?</p>

<p>Do we expect that God is going to cover us with some kind of magical bubble and protect us from every contingency of living in a fallen world? Do we expect that He would protect us from the harm that other people will to do, but not protect other people from the harm that we will to do to them? If we deeply know and have been taught that this is what life with God entails—pain and suffering and difficulty, that’s part of the package—if we’ve been taught that God doesn’t isolate us from the contingencies of living in a fallen world, but rather He redeems us in the midst of them, or as one of my teachers told me early on in the Christian life that Christ is not the bridge over troubled waters but He will pull you through the troubled waters if you can stand the tow—if we understand that, I honestly don’t believe that this other question will ever come up or will come up very often.</p>

<p>If we understand that this is the way the game is played, this is what it’s about, then we aren’t going to ask the question so frequently. We will not allow the question to be an indictment on God because we realize that this is life and these are the kinds of things that are the most vital factors in our lives to make us the kind of people we truly and deeply want to be.</p>

<p>Frankly, I’m always a bit mystified by the person who asks, how could God allow this young person to die, or this earthquake to happen, or a war to happen? Fill in the blank. People ask the question all the time when tragedy strikes. I think the question itself shows a profound misunderstanding of both God and life.</p>

<p>I think it is possible to develop a point of view and understanding that would place us in a position to be more capable of dealing with life as it truly is. Simply put, I think it’s possible to develop and to prepare us for the development of character and virtue in our lives. One of the ways to do that is to breed the expectation of such a thing. In other words, we don’t tell our children or our friends or potential Christian people untruths, lies essentially. We don’t tell them that life is meant to be a bowl of cherries and that God will make life all wonderful and peaceful without difficulty. We should tell them the truth.</p>

<p>We tell them that life is filled with joys and pains together. And what God will help you to do is to get more in touch with both of them, to help you live real life more powerfully. When the hard things beset us He can actually use the hard things to do the thing that is most important—not make us happy, not thrill us, not give us more fun, but make us deeper people and allow us to lead a more meaningful life. God can do that for us. That’s one of the advantages of having God around. God is not the scapegoat for our anger and frustration when life deals us a rough hand. He’s there to partner with us in working through it. It’s possible to develop that.</p>

<p>I think we can develop virtue and character in a couple of different ways. The first way is through the inspiration and example of other people. The second way that we can do that is through using literature to harness the imagination for the purpose of moral training. Both of these, by the way, are useful even in the context of a so-called pluralistic society because virtues are the kinds of things that it seems that most people acknowledge are valuable. Thrift, hard work, kindness, mercy, forgiveness, love, good manners, and valuing other people will help us solve a tremendous amount of moral difficulties and moral problems if we focus on the development of virtues.</p>

<p>There are two ways that you can do to encourage your children or your friends to be virtuous, or even develop virtue yourself. The first way is just simply looking at people who are virtuous. This is the value of having heroes. This is the value of moral heroes, in particular—not anti-heroes, not bad guys that become heroes—but moral heroes—the people that sacrifice and suffer, the Albert Schweitzers of the world, the Mother Theresas of the world.</p>

<p>I mentioned a month or so ago that I saw the movie Tombstone. One of the things I liked about the movie was that it presented Wyatt Eerp and his two brothers as heroes, not as the overly machismo-type, but as men who were willing to stand in the gap and have their blood shed to protect innocent people. Wyatt Eerp was a type of hero in that way. A virtue that was being expressed in that, and when we watch that virtue in action, we are compelled in some measure to manifest a virtue in our own lives. I think that’s a wonderful thing. I have often recommended movies simply because those movies have that impact on me.</p>

<p>Reading from the book <em>Why Johnnie Can’t Tell Right From Wrong</em> written by William Kilpatrick, he talks about the moral crisis in our schools. He makes this point. “One of the best ways to teach virtues is in conjunction with history and literature. That way students can see that they are more than abstract concepts. In Robert Bolt’s play <em>A Man for All Season</em>, we see a remarkable combination of all four virtues in one man, Sir Thomas Moore.”&nbsp;Incidentally, that has been made into a film twice, and I highly recommend viewing the older version with Paul Scofield. If you would just view that film with Paul Scofield you will understand what I am talking about. This is a man who struggles with virtues and manifests them at great personal expense. That motivates you to want to be like that person.</p>

<p>Kilpatrick goes on to say, “The plot of <em>High Noon</em> revolves around the tension among justice, courage, and prudence. <em>To Kill a Mocking Bird</em> shows one kind of courage. <em>The Old Man and the Sea</em> another, measure for measure. And <em>The Merchant of Venice</em> teaches about justice. <em>Moby Dick</em> depicts a man who has lost all sense of prudence and proportion...In the story of David and Bathsheba we are shown a much harsher view of a man who yields to his desires.”&nbsp;Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I thought the movie <em>Camelot</em> was so good, the musical from the sixties with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. It showed the destructiveness of adultery, especially in the life of a man who had high ideals and wanted to have an impact for good in the world. There was a moral in that; it was moral instruction to watch this movie.</p>

<p>This is why I think it is so important for parents to demonstrate virtuous living before their children because virtue is something that can be caught, and it will be caught by those who are in a position to respect you.</p>

<p>The second way to develop virtue is through using literature to harness the imagination for the particular purpose of moral training. Often times I have recommended one particular chapter out of a book by C.S. Lewis. The book is called <em>The Screwtape Letters</em>, and although the whole book and many of his other writings are excellent, chapter eight in <em>The Screwtape Letters</em> is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read that pertains to the issue of Christians struggling with adversity. Here you have a fictitious character, a demon named Screwtape who’s writing a letter to his charge, his disciple Wormwood. Screwtape is teaching Wormwood how to deal with Christians, how to thwart them. The instruction is the foil that Lewis uses to give instruction to the Christian on right living. And there’s a tremendous encouragement in chapter eight of <em>The Screwtape Letters</em> that has to do with, as Lewis calls it, “the law of undulation,” and how to deal with the ups and downs of Christian living.</p>

<p>There was also a very wonderful book that has been assembled precisely to the end of using literature to harness the imagination for the purpose of moral training. The book is called <em>The Book of Virtues</em>. It’s a very, very popular book now. It was compiled by William J. Bennett. It’s a thick book—almost a thousand pages. It has all these wonderful stories in it. I’m going to read you a couple in just a moment. These are actually stories that are meant to capture the moral imagination and stimulate the birth of virtues in the one who reads them.</p>

<p>Remember <em>Aesop’s Fables</em> you used to read as a kid. All of Aesop’s Fables were stories that had characters that went through a drama in their life. There is a moral at the end of every story. You remember the moral because you remember the story. This is something that helps not just children but adults, as well, to get moral education. The story itself conveys the truth and the value of virtuous living. I’m going to read a couple of things to you that are excellent examples of literature that teaches virtue.</p>

<p>In reading the story you will see the powerful impact that it can have in influencing a person’s life to accomplish and do and be the kind of person that the story depicts here. Most of the stories start with just a short couple of sentences of introduction, I presume added by William J. Bennett himself. It begins, “Webster defines our manners as ’our morals shown in conduct.’&nbsp;Manners are morals shown in conduct. Good people stick to good manners, as this story from a turn of a century reader reminds us.”&nbsp;The author here is Allisia Aspen Wall and here’s how the story goes. The story is called “<em>Please.”</em></p>

<blockquote>
<p>There was once a little word named Please that lived in a small boy’s mouth. Pleases live in everybody’s mouth, though people often forget that they are there.</p>

<p>Now all Pleases to be kept strong and happy should be taken out of the mouth very often so they can get air. They’re like little fish in a bowl, you know, that come popping up to the top of the water to breath.</p>

<p>Now the Please I’m going tell you about lived in the mouth of a boy named Dick. But only once in a long while did it have a chance to get out. For Dick, I’m sorry to say, was a very rude little boy. He hardly ever remembered to say “Please.”</p>

<p>“Give me some bread! I want some water! Give that book!”&nbsp;This is the way he��d ask for things. His father and mother felt very bad about this and, as for the poor Please itself, it would sit up on the roof of the boy’s mouth day after day hoping for a chance to get out. It was growing weaker and weaker every day.</p>

<p>This boy Dick had a brother John. Now John was older than Dick. He was almost ten, and he was just as polite as Dick was rude, so his Please had plenty of fresh air and was strong and happy.</p>

<p>One day at breakfast Dick’s Please felt that he must have some fresh air even if he had to run away, so out he ran, out of Dick’s mouth and took a long breath. Then he crept across the table and jumped right into John’s mouth.</p>

<p>The Please who lived there was very angry. “Get out,” he cried, “you don’t belong here, this is my mouth!”</p>

<p>“Oh, I know it,” replied Dick’s Please. “I live over there in that brother’s mouth, but alas, I’m not happy there. I’m never used. I never get a breath of fresh air. I thought you might be willing to let me stay here for a day or so until I felt stronger.”</p>

<p>“Why, certainly,” said the other Please kindly. “I understand. Stay, of course, and when my master uses me we will both go out together. He’s kind and I’m sure he would not mind saying please twice. Stay as long as you like.”</p>

<p>That night at dinner John wanted some butter and this is what he said. “Father would you pass the butter, please, please?”</p>

<p>“Certainly,” said Father, “but why so very polite?”</p>

<p>John did not answer he was turning to his mother and said, “Mother, will you give me a muffin, please, please?”</p>

<p>His Mother laughed, “You shall have the muffin, dear, but why do you say please twice?”</p>

<p>“I don’t know,” answered John. “The words seem just to jump out somehow.”</p>

<p>“Katie, please, please, some water.”&nbsp;This time John was almost frightened.</p>

<p>“Well, well,” said Father, “there’s no harm done. You can’t be too pleasing in this world.”</p>

<p>All this time little Dick had been calling, “Give me an egg! I want some milk! Give me that spoon!,”&nbsp;in the rude way he had. But now he stopped. He listened to his brother. He thought it would be fun to try to talk like John. So he began, “Mother will you give me a muffin, mmmm?”&nbsp;He was trying to say please but how could he? He never guessed that his own little Please was sitting in John’s mouth. So he tried again and asked for the butter. “Mother, will you pass me the butter, mmmm?”&nbsp;That was all he could say.</p>

<p>So it went on all day and everyone wondered what was the matter with those two boys. When night came they were both so tired and Dick was so cross that their mother sent them to bed very early.</p>

<p>But the next morning, no sooner had they sat down to breakfast than Dick’s Please ran home again. He’d had so much fresh air the day before that now he was feeling quite strong and happy. And the very next moment he had another airing, for Dick said, “Father, will you cut my orange, please?”&nbsp;Why the word slipped out as easily as could be. It sounded just as well as when John said it. John was saying only one please this morning.</p>

<p>And from that time on little Dick was just as polite as his brother.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Now, isn’t that a great little story? It’s not only fun to read and to listen to, but don’t you just feel a little bit more like saying please next time around? Here is literature which makes use of your imagination to help develop virtue.</p>

<p>Here’s a little poem called “<em>Results and Roses”</em>&nbsp;by Edgar Guest.</p>

<blockquote>The man who wants a garden fair,</blockquote>

<blockquote>
<p>Or small, or very big,</p>

<p>With flowers growing here and there</p>

<p>Must bend his back and dig.</p>

<p>The things are mighty few on earth</p>

<p>That wishes can attain.</p>

<p>What e’er we want of any worth</p>

<p>We’ve got to work to gain.</p>

<p>It matters not what goal you seek,</p>

<p>It’s secret here reposes.</p>

<p>You’ve got to dig from week to week</p>

<p>To get results or roses.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>There’s a little three stanza, twelve line poem that probably wouldn’t be too hard for your children to memorize.</p>

<p>This one is a little bit longer written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called “<em>The Village Blacksmith.”</em>&nbsp;Longfellow said that he wrote this poem in praise of an ancestor, and it was suggested to him by a smith beneath a Horse Chestnut tree at his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Here is the character of a true, honest, willing laborer. It’s surely one of the most appealing images in American verse,”&nbsp;Bennett writes in the introduction to this piece. I’ve read this in the past and was very taken with it because not only does it sounds nice, it also has a wonderful encouragement. I’ll only read a portion of it to you, but I think you’ll get the point.</p>

<blockquote>Under a spreading Chestnut tree</blockquote>

<blockquote>
<p>The village smithy stands.</p>

<p>The smith, a mighty man is he,</p>

<p>With large and sinewy hands,</p>

<p>And the muscles of his brawny arms</p>

<p>Are strong as iron bands.</p>

<p>His hair is crisp and black and long.</p>

<p>His face is like the tan.</p>

<p>He earns what e’er he can</p>

<p>And looks the whole world in the face</p>

<p>For he owes not any man.</p>

<p>Week-in, week-out, from morn till night</p>

<p>You can hear his bellows blow.</p>

<p>You can hear him swing his heavy sledge</p>

<p>With measured beat and slow</p>

<p>Like a sexton ringing the village bell</p>

<p>When the evening sun is low.</p>

<p>He goes on Sunday to the church</p>

<p>And sits among his boys.</p>

<p>He hears the parson pray and preach</p>

<p>And hears his daughters voice,</p>

<p>Singing in the village choir,</p>

<p>And it makes his heart rejoice.</p>

<p>Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,</p>

<p>Onward life goes.</p>

<p>Each morning sees some task begin,</p>

<p>Each evening sees it’s close.</p>

<p>Something attempted, something done,</p>

<p>Has earned a nights repose.</p>

<p>Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,</p>

<p>For the lesson thou hast taught.</p>

<p>Thus at the flaming forge of life</p>

<p>Our fortunes must be wrought.</p>

<p>Thus on it’s sounding end wilt shape</p>

<p>Each burning deed and thought.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>You see, ladies and gentlemen, I’m not talking about clear thinking. I’m talking about sound living. You want to be skilled at life? It takes more than being able to manage your finances, or keeping your home in order, or making sure there’s food on the table. It means being able to manage yourself. In fact, if you can’t manage yourself then you probably won’t be able to do the other things very well either. I think the best way to learn self-management is to teach self-management.</p>

<p>A good way to develop virtue is through the inspiration and examples of others, and also by using literature to harness the imagination for the purpose of moral training. I can think of no better book to do that than <em>The Book of Virtues</em> by William J. Bennett.</p>
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title: Devon, My Brother
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/devon-my-brother
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>This piece is told in the first person from the viewpoint of my close friend, Martin Caveza, who lost his older brother to AIDS.</em></p>

<p>Devon is going to die. I know it. Even now I can see the life slowly drain from his frail body. His face is drawn. When he speaks, the words come in short spurts. He fights for each breath, the air scraping down his throat.</p>

<p>I stand by his bed. Sometimes when his pain is too much I hold him. We pray. I don’t ask questions. He has AIDS. And he’s my brother. That’s all I need to know.</p>

<p>When you see somebody you’re close to in pain and crying out, any resentment, any facade or barrier between you vanishes. All you can think of is how much you love them.</p>

<p>It wasn’t always like this, though. When Devon left home at 18, I was only seven. Later, when I moved to California, we’d visit. But it was a long drive from my place in Redondo Beach to Studio City in the Valley. Phone calls were infrequent. I was starting my career; he was busy.</p>

<p>One day Devon called. “I’m in the hospital,”&nbsp;he said. “I’ve got pneumonia. Can you come on out and see me?”</p>

<p>I drove out after work. When I went up to his room there was a sign on the door: “You must put on mask and gloves before entering.”</p>

<p>“What’s wrong with him?”&nbsp;I thought. “I guess pneumonia is contagious.”&nbsp;I donned my protective clothing and walked in. Devon told me the doctors thought he had AIDS, but they didn’t know for sure.</p>

<p>A couple days later the results were in. Devon called to tell me the tests were positive. I sat on the coffee table in my living room and cried. Devon cried too.</p>

<p>That week, coincidentally, I gave notice at my job, my girlfriend and I broke up, and my car got stolen. I came home every night and cried myself to sleep in a corner. It was unbearable.</p>

<p>“Look God, if you’re out there I need some help,”&nbsp;I’d say. “This is too much for me to handle.”&nbsp;I got out a Bible I had tucked away and started reading. I read for three nights in a row.</p>

<p>I’d lived across from a church in Redondo Beach for more than two years, but I’d never gone. One Friday night, feeling very alone in the world, I crossed the street and walked in to the evening service.</p>

<p>Inside, people were raising their hands and singing. “I’m in the wrong church,”&nbsp;I thought. As I listened to the pastor’s words, though, tears came to my eyes. I went back Saturday night, Sunday morning and Sunday night for three weeks.</p>

<p>I had two alternatives. I wanted God to pull me out of this, or I wanted to die. I was on my back looking up. Faith was all I had left. I prayed and gave my heart over to God sincerely, no bartering, no arbitrating.</p>

<p>I now knew there was only one answer for Devon. There wasn’t any cure for AIDS. There was nothing the doctors could do. But God was alive. My life had been touched by Jesus Christ. I could feel His power. It was real.</p>

<p>I began sowing some seeds, but I wasn’t very bold. Devon wasn’t receptive. To him it was religion. I prayed for him constantly.</p>

<p>I had tunnel vision. I’d go to Devon’s house or we’d talk on the phone and I’d tell him about the Bible. Sometimes we’d pray. There was only one thing that was important to me: that Devon realize he needed Christ.</p>

<p>In January, 1988, I was going to get baptized. I thought it would be a good way to get Devon to come to church with me. When I invited him he came, but he was skeptical.</p>

<p>“My church is kind of unique,”&nbsp;I warned him. “It might be a little different than what you’re used to.”</p>

<p>“I’ve been to a lot of churches. Nothing can surprise me,”&nbsp;he said.</p>

<p>I began to pray quietly to myself. “Lord, let this get through to him. Let him see something real in all of this.”</p>

<p>Before I got baptized I told the audience how Jesus had changed my life. I could see Devon in the middle of the auditorium watching me intently.</p>

<p>We didn’t talk until we got in the car and headed home, then Devon told me what he thought.</p>

<p>“When the pastor said everyone would give a little testimony, I thought, ’Oh no. I don’t want to listen to this.’&nbsp;But the words of the songs, the things people said, the things you said...It really meant a lot to me.”</p>

<p>As we talked, we drove out of the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley. A brilliant moon hung motionless in the sky. Devon looked out the window. “Every time I see the moon, I’m going to remember this night,”&nbsp;he said. “I’m going to remember everything you said.”</p>

<p>When we got to his house it was late. He sat quietly with me in the car while I prayed. I thanked God for what He’d done in my life. I told Him how much it meant to me to have my brother at my baptism. Then I hugged Devon a long time.</p>

<p>Over the next nine months Devon’s health began to go downhill. He looked forward to the times he could come down to church with me. Sometimes I’d go up to his place and we’d sit and talk. At times he’d be hurting so much he would cry while I held him.</p>

<p>“It feels nice to be hugged by somebody,”&nbsp;Devon would say. “It’s really good to know that somebody is there.”</p>

<p>Sometimes I’d read Psalms to him. One night when Devon’s pain was especially bad I read Psalm 6.</p>

<p>Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint;</p>

<p>O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony.</p>

<p>My soul is in anguish.</p>

<p>How long, O Lord, how long?</p>

<p>I am worn out from groaning;</p>

<p>All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.</p>

<p>Devon had me read this Psalm to him over and over. In a strange way it gave him comfort. Soon after, Devon asked Jesus into his heart.</p>

<p>At Christmas time we went home together. It was the first time my family saw Devon really sick. He had a rough Christmas and spent a lot of time in bed. He was very, very weak, had trouble swallowing and couldn’t eat much.</p>

<p>By spring Devon was even worse. He had cancer from his knees down and open sores on the inside of his throat.</p>

<p>On Easter I got him a card. I told him how thankful I was to share Easter with my brother the way I could only do with somebody who really knows Jesus.</p>

<p>Easter morning was cold and Devon was really weak, but he wanted to go to the sunrise service so I bundled him up in a sleeping bag and we went. Afterwards I made brunch for him and we dyed Easter eggs. We talked about Easter and the pastor’s message. Then we prayed together.</p>

<p>“How would you like to fly a kite?”&nbsp;I asked. We drove to the beach and got the kite in the air, but it was too cold for Devon so he sat in the car while I pulled in the kite.</p>

<p>When I came back Devon was deep in thought. “Before you dust off your shoes I’d like for you to do me a favor,”&nbsp;he said. He got out of the car and led me to the edge of the water.</p>

<p>“I’m not sure I’m going to make it another year,”&nbsp;he said simply. “I want to make sure I make a testimony to the world. I want to be baptized. I can’t think of a better day to be baptized than on Easter, and I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be with and have baptize me than you.”</p>

<p>I walked him gently into the water until it was just below our waists. “Shall we go further out?”&nbsp;I asked.</p>

<p>“No. It will come to us.”</p>

<p>We prayed together, our faces towards the sun. I took handfuls of water and poured it over Devon’s head. His heart was so sincere. He was so thankful.</p>

<p>“The water on my body and the sunshine on my face feels so good,”&nbsp;he said. Suddenly a big wave came and immersed us both.</p>

<p>That morning we prayed and we cried and we baptized. We stood there in the water holding each other, hugging each other, enjoying the moment.</p>

<p>I thought to myself, “What actually is happening here? It’s not just two people standing in the water. This is my brother being baptized. This is God smiling down as Devon publicly declares his faith.”</p>

<p>We went back to the car, drove up to the cliffs over the ocean in Palos Verdes and talked. I looked at Devon watching the sunset. Maybe he was realizing he was in the sunset of his own life, reflecting on the differences in life now, knowing what it’s really all about.</p>

<p>Three days later Devon was admitted to the intensive care unit. His lungs had collapsed and he was in agony. When I got to the hospital he was in isolation. I had to wear gloves and a mask again because they thought he might have tuberculosis.</p>

<p>In the ICU he was in so much pain he asked me to sing to him. I sang a hymn that was a favorite at my church:</p>

<p>I worship you, surrender all I have to you.</p>

<p>I run to you and fall at your feet.</p>

<p>I feel your grace embracing me.</p>

<p>I see your face.</p>

<p>It’s telling me you’re healing me, restoring my soul.</p>

<p>O, Lamb of God, you are my life.</p>

<p>Take me in your loving arms, O Lamb of God.</p>

<p>Even though he was in pain, he listened hard, concentrating on each word. I reminded him that the Bible says these present sufferings cannot compare to the glory that would be revealed in Jesus Christ. I recounted God’s promises.</p>

<p>“God hasn’t let you go, Devon. He’ll never leave you or forsake you. Just as I’m holding your hand, God’s holding your hand. He knows exactly how you feel. He knows the pain. He’s been through it, too.”&nbsp;Talk like that meant more to Devon than anything else because it was real.</p>

<p>One day he hurt so much he could hardly endure it. I put my arms around him as he cried. “Promise me you’ll never leave me,”&nbsp;he said.</p>

<p>“Promise me that every time you see me you’ll talk to me about Jesus.”&nbsp;As we cried and prayed I thought to myself, “This guy wants as much of Jesus as he can get, and I want to be the one who shares it with him.”</p>

<p>Now as I stand here looking down at him, I can sense his frustration. He lies there knowing and understanding the eternal issues of life, but he’s confined to a bed. He may never get to teach anyone.</p>

<p>“I wish God would perform a miracle,”&nbsp;he once said, “so I can baffle the doctors and live my dream, to go out and spread truth to other lost souls. That’s all that counts.”</p>

<p>From that bed, however, Devon has taught me more truth than he’ll ever know. To outsiders this is a defeat, a tragedy. But I have seen more life in these tragic circumstances than most people see in life itself.</p>

<p>The beauty of some things far outweighs the ugliness of disease and death. I have a brother I never used to have before. Unfortunately it sometimes takes disaster to bring people close together. But I’d rather have one year like this with Devon than 20 years of never knowing him.</p>

<p>I don’t see a man dying of AIDS. I see a man who knows God. I see goodness, and gentleness and honesty. I see a friend. I see someone I love, someone I’d die for.</p>

<p>I see Devon, my brother.</p>

<p>Devon Caveza, a Christian, died of AIDS in August, 1989. He was survived by, among others, a brother who loved him.</p>
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title: Marriage Is about Love
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/marriage-is-about-love
content:
            <div> 
		<p>The controversy about same-sex marriage churns principally around the definition of marriage. Activists deny the traditional view that marriage is about children. Instead, marriage is an ever-changing, socially-constructed institution constantly being redefined by society. There is no essential connection with children. Rather, at the core of the enterprise are two people in love.</p>

<p>Understandably, love is a predominant theme in discussions about marriage. "As long as people love each other," one person asserted, "it shouldn't matter whether they are the same sex. What's important in marriage is love."</p>

<p>Initially, this seems hard to deny. In our culture, love is often the immediate motivation for marriage. On reflection, though, it's clear that love and marriage don't always go together. In fact, they seldom do.</p>

<p>If marriage were about love, then billions of people in the history of the world who thought they were married were not. Most marriages have been arranged. Love may percolate later, but only as a result of marriage, not the reason for it.</p>

<p>Further, if love were the sine qua non of marriage, no "for better or for worse" promises would be needed at the altar. Vows aren't meant to sustain love; they are meant to sustain the union when love wanes. A pledge keeps a family intact not for love, but for the sake of children.</p>

<p>The state doesn't care if the bride and groom love each other. There are no questions about a couple's affections when granting a license. No proof of passion is required. Why? Because marriage isn't about love. Ask any married person. It's about a commitment that is supposed to deliver stability for families. That's what society is really interested in because that's what ensures the continuation of a society.</p>

<p>Since, love may be the reason some people get married, but it isn't the reason for marriage. It may be a constituent of marriage, but it isn't the purpose of marriage. Something else is.</p>
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title: Sanctity of Life Sunday
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/02/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/sanctity-of-life-sunday
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Most issues raised in the abortion debate are red herrings that drag us off the track of the pertinent questions.</em></p>

<p>Is there any situation or circumstance where an abortion may be ethically acceptable if you are a Christian? First, being a Christian has nothing to do with this issue. One might suggest that Christians ought to know better on this issue or that one would expect they’d be more morally sensitive. But whether one is a Christian or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether this particular action, abortion, is right or wrong because this question is a human question, not a question of partisan, religious ideology, regardless of how the pro-abortion advocates have tried to frame it. It is a question about basic human rights and basic human respect.</p>

<p>Which brings up another issue for me. I’d say 75-80% of the popular discussion and debate on this issue is not on this issue at all. Most issues that are raised in the abortion debate are red herrings, irrelevant considerations that drag one off the track of the pertinent questions. In other words, most of the so-called complexities of this question have little to do with the true issues. They are irrelevant.</p>

<p>I’ve heard some professional thinking types, media persons, educators, reflect as they shake their heads solemnly, “Ah, yes, abortion. It’s a very complex issue. There are no easy answers.”&nbsp;It’s not a complex issue at all. It has been made complicated, but there’s very little that is complex about it. When one clears the brush of the insignificant, the irrelevant, the ad hominems, the character assassination, the name calling, the straw men, the circular reasoning, the medical misinformation, the emotional language on both sides, the issues become very clear and, I contend, reasonably easy to answer.</p>

<p>Let me give you an example. One of the so-called issues is the “choice”&nbsp;issue, the question of the rights a woman has over her own body. “I have a right to do anything I want with my body,”&nbsp;some women claim. This statement raises some salient questions about the source of rights, questions that have implications for natural law—theistic implications, ultimately. Questions that I think when answered soundly result in some embarrassment for those who relegate morality to individual choice.</p>

<p>Remember, all alleged rights claims in this issue depend on what you understand the fetus to be, because the question to have a right to something depends upon a prior decision about what that something is that you’re discussing. You don’t have an absolute right to do anything you want. The statement also begs the question about whether the individual child inside the woman is really her body or someone else’s body domiciled, nesting inside of her.</p>

<p>Aside from those two serious problems the statement itself is patently false. A woman cannot do anything she wants with her own body in this country—or any civilized country, for that matter—and neither can a man. It’s hard to think of any liberty that is autonomous, existing unrestrained and unfettered by other concerns and legal limitations. Virtually all so-called rights have limits. Choice is a red herring. It’s not the real issue.</p>

<p>Neither is privacy the real issue. The statement, “I can do what I please in private”&nbsp;is also patently false. Can we do anything in privacy? Or more to the point, as my friend Jeff Cannon pointed out, “Can you go into a closet and murder someone and then claim protection on grounds of your right to privacy?”&nbsp;Of course not. It seems patently self-evident that the right to life always preempts the right to privacy. The law routinely invades our privacy for much less weighty reasons.</p>

<p>No, the fundamental question is not about privacy or choice or a host of other equally misleading candidates for center stage. Rather, the fundamental question is simple, as I stated in the beginning. It is this: is the unborn child a separate, living, human being, a person whose rights should be protected? Or is it not separate, not living, and not a human person and, therefore, has little or no rights.</p>

<p>If you answer no to the first question, that an unborn child is not a separate, living human being with inalienable rights—and that assertion can be defended with sound medical facts and rational thinking—then no defense of abortion for any reason is necessary. You can have an abortion anytime you want as frequently as you want and you can do anything you want with whatever that is in there which is not a separate individual life that has unalienable rights. I don’t care if you eat it, frankly, if it’s not a person in that regard.</p>

<p>If, however, the answer is yes, the child is a separate, living, human being, a person whose rights should be protected, then no defense for abortion is adequate, regardless of the circumstances. End of issue.</p>

<p>Incidentally, I believe the burden of proof is on the those who would counter the testimony of history, morality and medicine on this issue. The burden of proof is on the pro-abortionist.</p>

<p>As one of my ethics students put it, “When it gets right down to it, most people think the status of the fetus depends on whether they want it or not.”&nbsp;That’s the sad truth. Most people do ethics by deciding what it is they want and then reason as best they can ethically from that point.</p>
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title: When Is a Human Being Human?
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/when-is-a-human-being-human-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The humanity of the unborn is a fact from the point of conception. It is fully human. There is no gradation in that regard. There are merely gradations of development.</em></p>

<p>A baby is fully human from conception. There’s no question about it. Even to say that it’s fully human is missing something. Jot this down. The law of identity: a thing is itself and not something else. What that means is that whatever a thing is it remains what it is for as long as it exists. Things don’t change from one essential thing into another essential thing.</p>

<p>People say, what if you became a cat? It’s impossible for you to become a cat because a cat is a different essential substance. If you became a cat, one could ask the question, what is it about the cat that is the same as what you were? There is nothing about a cat that is remotely human, and there is nothing about a human that is remotely cat. Even the soul of a cat is a different kind of soul than a human soul so you could never become a cat. You would be destroyed and some cat created in your place or maybe molded from your physical molecules, but that wouldn’t make you the cat.</p>

<p>Things don’t change their essential nature. What they change is their properties. They get bigger, smaller, different color hair, they change their textures, they grow appendages. But what they are doesn’t change. You were five or six pounds at one point in your life, now you’re much larger. Just because you’re bigger doesn’t mean you’re more of a human. There’s more of your physical body, but you are not more of yourself. You are still the same self that you were - human. You are fully human when you’re conceived; you’re fully human when you’re born; you’re fully human when you’re twenty times the size you were when you were born. Your properties changed; your essential character didn’t. The nature of your humanness doesn’t change.</p>

<p>Now, when a being is brought into being, that being stays itself forever until it’s destroyed. It doesn’t become more human because humanness is not a quantitative kind of thing. If that were the case we’d have to say that people who don’t have certain characteristics or have less of those characteristics than others are less human. If humanness was self-consciousness, for example, then those who are more highly in tune with themselves are more human, and those who are less in touch with themselves are less human. If it was intelligence, then those who are more intelligent are more human and worthy of more rights, and those who are less intelligent are less human and not worthy of the same kind of respect.</p>

<p>What we’re talking about are the changes in attributes or, technically speaking, properties. We’re not talking about changes of the nature. So when the new human being comes into existence at conception (by the way that is an unarguable scientific reality, it is not open to debate anymore) that being remains itself until it’s extinguished from existence. The being that comes into existence from the joining of two human beings is also a human being. It’s the Law of Biogenesis that everything recreates according to its own kind. It is not possible for two human beings to produce an offspring that is not of the same kind, that is non-human. The humanness is a fact from the point of conception. It is fully human. There is no gradation in that regard. There are merely gradations of development.</p>

<p>That point is conceded by the more sophisticated philosophers arguing for choice on the abortion issue. You will find a lot of people who aren’t sophisticated who use this and quite a lot of other bad arguments. What they have tried to do is make a distinction between humanness and personhood but you run into the same problem.</p>

<p>How do I know that the unborn is a person from conception? Because it’s a human from conception. Human beings are personal type beings. Personhood is a quality that inheres the very nature of a human. It is not a property that is developed later on. A human is a personal kind of being. There are other personal beings, by the way. Angels, for example. Or God, theoretically, if He creates and has personal attributes. The attributes don’t make Him personal, they just allow us to identify Him as the personal being that He is. So there may be other beings that are personal, but there are no human beings that aren’t personal because all human beings are personal beings. So personhood is the larger category, humanness is the smaller category. I know personhood starts at conception because it is a characteristic that inheres the nature.</p>

<p>Now, someone might not be willing to accept all that philosophy and you may not be able to articulate it well. That’s okay. Here’s a simple way out. When somebody says it’s a human being but not a person, you ask them what’s the difference? It’s a fair question because they’re apparently offering you a rationale why it’s okay to take the life of another innocent human being who can’t defend itself but is in the way. So you say, if you’re argument based on personhood is so weighty that it can justify taking the life of an innocent human being, then it seems reasonable that you have a very clear fix on what a person is if it’s not the same as being human.</p>

<p>Now, 99 times out of a hundred you won’t get an answer because they’ve never thought it though. This is a rhetorical throwaway. It’s a way of ending the discussion. It’s a way of putting their point of view in your face and shutting you up. So you just toss it right back to them. What’s the difference? Sometimes you will get someone who tries to set up some criteria for personhood. There are two additional responses to a list of attributes for personhood. Ask, where did you get the list? If the list is merely arbitrary then why don’t you make up a list too? A person is someone who has white skin. If they argue with you, then you can ask them how they justify their list but disallow your list.</p>

<p>The second problem with all of those lists is they always disqualify people who are clearly and undeniably human persons. They say self-awareness is a criteria. Then what about people who are in comas? Are they not persons? Some extreme people will say that, by the way. If they aren’t persons then they have no rights and we can justify doing all sorts of things to them. Some will say self-awareness is a criteria. A child a couple months old can’t distinguish between himself and his surroundings so they would not be persons. Some people like James Rachels will say that they aren’t a person and we can kill infants. You’ll also have a problem with the personhood list in that you’ll have humans who are clearly persons who are disqualified by the list, but you’ll have other beings which qualify, like chimpanzees and gorillas. Those are the problems with the lists.</p>
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title: Slavery, Abortion, and Unalienable Rights
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/slavery-abortion-and-unalienable-rights
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Did the Supreme Court enact a law that encourages the concept of <em>unequal</em> rights, contradicting the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?</em></p>

<p>(Regarding a column in the <em>Orange County Register</em> by Tyber Machen, a response to presidential candidate Dr. Alan Keyes’&nbsp;premise that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. Machen claims that comparing slavery and abortion, as Keyes does, is not a fair parallel.)</p>

<p>We look at human beings and ask what is distinctive about human beings? One of the things that we see that is distinctive about human beings is that they have certain mental capacities that other beings do not seem to have. But that isn’t what qualifies a human being as a human being. If it were what qualified a human being, then anyone who did not have that quality in sufficient degree would not be a human, which is precisely what he is arguing. Here is the problem. What it becomes is an I.Q. test for being a human being. That���s what it really amounts to.</p>

<p>There is another point, too. If I were to accept his definition of what it means to be human, then I would that everybody in the Senate believed like he did because then minimally we’d have some kind of a period of time after which abortion would be immoral. Let’s say we have the full development of the cerebral cortex. That’s the second trimester. Well, good, then all third trimester abortions should be illegal. I have a dear friend that had a child at 22 weeks, and her daughter is still alive after six weeks of intensive care and is growing. So 24 weeks is pushing it a little bit far. But I’d even take that, frankly, because we’d save a lot of lives. But I think that there is another confusion here, and this is why I think that the objection or the comparison with slavery is a fair one.</p>

<p>Everyone is going to have to put their thinking caps on for a minute. We are going to have to spend a few moments talking about some metaphysical issues that are a little difficult for the rank and file, but I am going to try to put it in terms that will make sense.</p>

<p>I think the gentleman’s argument is flawed because it misunderstands something about the nature of being human and the foundation for human rights. If this man is a materialist then he must deny the argument of the Constitution with regards to basic human rights. The argument in the Constitution is this: Men have rights qua man—in other words, as men. Men qua men. Men in the capacity of being a human have particular rights. These rights are transcendent rights. They are not rights that are given or taken away by government, but are rights that come from God. Therefore, government must acknowledge them.</p>

<p>If you are a materialist, you can’t even argue that way. If you are a materialist, there is no God and there are no rights because rights are not material. There is no morality because morality is not material. If you are an atheist, you cannot argue this way. It just doesn’t work. An atheist would have to abandon the argument based on rights because he doesn’t believe that such things exist.</p>

<p>I’m going to accept the argument of the Constitution because I think it is a good one. I think human beings do have rights and those rights can only be properly justified and explained in the context of a theistic world view. That is the way they argued. If you read the Declaration of Independence, some form of the word God is used four different times and it is the very foundation of their entire case against England, the foundation for the Constitution, and our Republican way of government.</p>

<p>I’m going to accept the argument because this brings us back to the slavery issue, which the writer here said was not a fair parallel. I think it is fair because of the way the Constitution is worded. Lincoln, when he had his debates with Douglas, argued in a particular way. In his private notes he developed an argument and said something like this: Now, if you are saying that a black man is inferior, then you have to be careful because if his inferiority is in basic lack of intelligence and that gives you the appropriate right to enslave him, then someone else can use that argument against you if they have a higher I.Q. than you. In other words, he is saying that whatever rule you establish becomes a rule—rule to justify one kind of behavior can be applied consistently in other areas and it is going to have some very deleterious results. This ought to be a hint to us that our rule is a bad one.</p>

<p>Lincoln’s particular objection was to disqualify rights of a human being—what the Constitution calls “unalienable”—because of some physical characteristic. That was the foundation of his discussion. You can’t say that because he is black, that he doesn’t have rights. It is a physical quality. And anybody who is lighter than you are has more rights than you. That’s your rule, isn’t it? You can’t say because Negroes are, to use his term, less intelligent gives you the right then to enslave them because somebody more intelligent can use your rule to enslave you.</p>

<p>Lincoln points out that it misses the point entirely to ground rights in some kind of physical quality of the body. Isn’t this precisely the way this argument against the personhood of the unborn goes? It says in the Constitution—and it was even quoted in this article—that men are endowed with certain rights. How are they endowed? What qualifies them for the endowment of this unalienable right? It certainly isn’t anything about their physical body because we would claim that all men are created equal in the context of this discussion in the Declaration. When we ask the question, In what way is it true that all men are equal?, we will never come up with any physical criteria that makes us equal. This helps us to realize and understand that the point of this statement is that men are equal in a way that is non-physical. The particular thing that is in view here is that they are endowed as men. That’s why I said man qua men. They are endowed with rights as human beings. It is the fact that they are human beings that allows us to acknowledge the endowment by God of their unalienable rights. So what the Constitution says is that human beings are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights, and the endowment is not related to any physical thing in itself—any particular physical thing. We are endowed in a metaphysical way that is not related to our physical characteristics, but it is related to our humanness.</p>

<p>When does a human being become a human being? A human being becomes a human being when it becomes a being. The fact is, when a thing is something it never becomes something else. You don’t have creatures that start out as one kind of being and slowly become another kind of being. The development that we see in our life from single cell into maturity is dictated by the kind of being we happen to be. It can develop into twins or triplets. It can attach itself in a way that it ends up killing the child. But what it cannot do is to become something other than what it is, and that is the point. It is a human being.</p>

<p>It is very easy to get there. It is alive and it is a separate being. That’s clear scientifically. Now, the question is simply, What kind of being is it? Every being is a kind of being, and the law of biogenesis, which is a well-established law of science, says that every being reproduces after its own kind. Human beings reproduce other human beings. From the time this separate being comes into existence it is a human being and it is a human being throughout. The only thing that changes is what it look like.</p>

<p>Here’s my basic point: An unborn child is a human from the moment it comes into existence and continues to be a human until it dies. Whether real death is brain death or not, that may be a moot issue. Whatever it is, it is throughout. It doesn’t become a human when it gets a brain because then one could ask the question, What was it before then? Clearly it is a being developing according to a certain pattern, and the pattern seems to be dictated by the kind of being that it is. The professor or doctor writing this piece couldn’t argue that up to the sixth week or the sixth day it could kind of go into any direction. It could be a rabbit or a squirrel. He is saying something can go amiss, or it can split into two or three human beings, but it still has the nature of being human.</p>

<p>The second point is that rights accrue to human beings as human beings. They don’t accrue regarding a particular physical state of development because then we are right back to Lincoln’s point again. You don’t have any grounds then for equal rights. There is only ground for equal rights if human beings are equal in some significant way. They are not equal physically in any way, so equal rights must be grounded on something else. The equal rights are grounded in the humanity, and that is the basis upon which God bestows the rights. Rights are bestowed to humans as humans. Therefore, any human being has those unalienable rights regardless of the kind of physical development that they happen to be in at the time.</p>

<p>Someone might point out that a zygote is obviously not a human being. My reply would be that that is circular reasoning. It is a human being at that particular stage in development. It may not look like one, but it sure looks exactly like a human being is supposed to look when it is two days old. All that is saying that an adult doesn’t look like a child, that there are different levels of development for any particular being. But when a being develops it doesn’t become more or less of that being, it just changes its properties.</p>

<p>Here is another thing that some folks can chew on. You may have heard of this concept before but think of it for a moment. Clearly, the unborn child changes through time. She develops through time. Now the notion of change presupposes that some part of that thing is always the same. When I say that I altered or changed a shirt, I have the same shirt from the beginning to end, but changes have been made to parts of the shirt. So in order for something to be changed, something about it must stay the same. It’s fundamental identity must stay the same throughout. Clearly the child changes physically as it grows, and in fact everything about its physical body changes.</p>

<p>What allows us to say that the child who is born at term is the same child that was conceived nine months prior in the womb of the mother? Clearly, physically speaking everything is different—the size, the shape, the composition, everything is different about this child that is born. We can say it is the same child because there is something about it that hasn’t changed at all. It still is itself, the particular being that it is. The being that it is a human being, and human beings are personal beings that have certain unalienable rights that God has given them. This is why we have something called human rights.</p>

<p>This discussion might be viewed as just a philosophical discussion that people could simply take exception with if they wanted. Well, that just simply isn’t true. The problem for Americans is that they’re locked into the Constitution, and once you toss out my assessment, you have tossed out the foundation for any rights whatsoever. You are back to rights not being equal rights, but rights and personhood being assigned based on physical qualities that different people have in varying degrees. Therefore, you have no foundation for equal rights whatsoever. You might have a foundation for some kind of right, but you don’t have any foundation for transcendent rights.</p>

<p>If you want to hold to equal rights for human beings, such that slavery is unjust—and this brings us back to the first part of the discussion—you are going to have to justify that in some fashion. The Founders justified it in a very precise way. The justification that the Founders used to argue for equal rights for all human beings, and then applied to the issue of slavery by Lincoln and civil rights leaders since then, is the same argument that can be applied to unborn children as human beings. Their rights should not be infringed through abortion. It’s the same argument. That is why it is a proper parallel.</p>
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title: Now We Wait for the Ruling
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 03/29/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/now-we-wait-for-the-ruling
content:
            <div> 
		<p>If you’d like a quick primer on what the Supreme Court will be deciding in the next few months, this New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/24/us/how-the-court-could-rule-on-same-sex-marriage.html" target="_blank">chart</a> on how the justices could rule on Prop 8 and DOMA is clear and helpful.</p>

<p>Over at First Things, Glenn Stanton <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/03/supreme-court-finally-asks-the-tough-questions-on-same-sex-marriage" target="_blank">comments</a> on some good questions the Justices asked. I tracked down one of the quotes he cited from Justice Sotomayor to get more of the <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/343980/good-question-justice-sotomayor-and-not-much-answer-ed-whelan" target="_blank">context</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>SOTOMAYOR: Mr. Olson, the bottom line that you’re being asked—and it is one that I’m interested in the answer: If you say that marriage is a fundamental right, what state restrictions could ever exist? Meaning, what state restrictions with respect to the number of people...the incest laws, the mother and child...I can accept that the state has probably an overbearing interest on protecting a child until they’re of age to marry, but what’s left?</p>

<p>OLSON: Well, you’ve said in the cases decided by this court that the polygamy issue, multiple marriages, raises questions about exploitation, abuse, patriarchy, issues with respect to taxes, inheritance, child custody, it is an entirely different thing. And if you—if a state prohibits polygamy, it’s prohibiting conduct. If it prohibits gay and lesbian citizens from getting married, it is prohibiting their exercise of a right based upon their status.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>The first mistake Olson makes here is that he thinks people are being denied marriage because of their sexual orientation (i.e.&nbsp;“their status”). This has never happened. There is no test whatsoever for sexual orientation when a person applies for a marriage license. There is no class of people being told they’re not eligible for marriage. In fact, the exclusion of same-sex couples (that’s same-sex couples, not homosexual citizens) from marriage isn’t about prohibiting something on the basis of bad conduct <em>or</em> the status of a group, it’s about the definition of marriage.</p>

<p>As Justice Roberts <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/03/supreme-court-finally-asks-the-tough-questions-on-same-sex-marriage" target="_blank">pointed out</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say let’s have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>If marriage is a particular thing, then everyone has a right to take part in that institution as it stands, regardless of their personal characteristics. But to be part of the institution, they must be part of <em>the institution</em>. They <em>don’t</em> have a right to change that institution into <a href="/w/the-competing-views-of-marriage" target="_blank">something different</a> simply because they don’t want to be part of it the way it is.</p>

<p>Imagine a public park builds a tennis court so that people can come to play tennis. Nobody should be denied the right to play tennis games there. Period. It’s a public park, open to all. One day, a group of basketball players comes to the park, wanting to play a game, but they find they can’t play basketball on a tennis court. They immediately go to City Hall to complain: “Everyone has the right to competitive exercise with a ball on that court! We’re being denied our rights based on our status as basketball players!”&nbsp;Can you see the problem? The fact that they don’t want to play tennis doesn’t give them the <em>right</em> to demand that the government build a different court at the park. Their right isn’t to “competitive exercise with a ball”&nbsp;(tennis shares that in common with basketball, but it can’t be <em>reduced</em> to that), their right is to play tennis on that court, just like everybody else.</p>

<p>Please don’t take that illustration farther than it’s intended to go. I’m merely trying to show that rights aren’t being denied simply because a person (or group of people) doesn’t want to take part in something. The park promises the same thing to all. It doesn’t promise “competitive exercise with a ball,”&nbsp;it promises tennis. And tennis excludes basketball—not out of prejudice, but by nature. One could certainly argue over whether the park ought to change that court into something different, but <em>as things stand</em>, no rights are being violated. Neither justice nor equality <em>demands</em> that the park change its court to accommodate the desires of the basketball players to play a different game in that space. The same is <a href="/w/it-s-not-about-equality" target="_blank">true for marriage</a>.</p>

<p>Secondly, even if it were legitimate for Olson to make the argument that homosexuals are being denied the right to marry “based upon their status,”&nbsp;I don’t see why one couldn’t equally say that polygamists are being denied their rights <em>based upon their status</em> as people who prefer to have many marriages. Isn’t that class of people being denied their right to define marriage for themselves, if Olson’s way of looking at this is correct?</p>

<p>Another problem: Olson says polygamy is an “entirely different thing”&nbsp;from same-sex marriage because it “raises questions”&nbsp;about legal, social, and moral harms, and that’s what prevents it from being a right. But in making this distinction, he’s merely assuming what he needs to prove. Those defending traditional marriage also have <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1364570116&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=what+is+marriage" target="_blank">arguments</a> explaining the harm that will be caused by removing the core principle of sexual complementarity from the definition of marriage (including the legal difficulties resulting from surrogacy, sperm and egg donors, etc.—difficulties that will <a href="/w/same-sex-marriage-won-t-be-enough" target="_blank"><em>inevitably</em></a> result because a third person outside the family must always be involved in the creation of a child for same-sex parents).</p>

<p>If Olson is correct that the harm that would result to society from changing the definition of marriage is grounds for <em>not</em> changing the definition to accommodate a particular group’s desires, then same-sex marriage can be disallowed if it causes harm.</p>

<p>But if Olson is correct that same-sex marriage is not merely a desire, but actually a right that <em>can’t</em> be disallowed, even if it raises questions of harm, then Sotomayor’s question stands: If defining marriage for yourself is a fundamental right, what state restrictions could ever exist?</p>

<p>Olson can’t have it both ways.</p>

<p>You can read more quotes from the proceedings in Stanton’s <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/03/supreme-court-finally-asks-the-tough-questions-on-same-sex-marriage" target="_blank">article</a>, “Supreme Court Finally Asks the Tough Questions on Same-Sex Marriage,”&nbsp;and on the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130327/us-supreme-court-gay-marriage-excerpts/?utm_hp_ref=politics&amp;ir=politics" target="_blank">Huffington Post</a>.</p>
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title: Wouldn’t I Still Be Me?
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/wouldn-t-i-still-be-me-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Those who play the personhood card argue that there is a difference between being a human and being a person. There are, they say, human beings that don’t qualify as persons, and therefore should have no legal protection as persons. The unborn is an example of a human who is not a person.</p>

<p>When asked “What’s the difference between a mere human and a human person,”&nbsp;which is a fair question to ask, there are three possible answers. First, an unborn child doesn’t <em>look like</em> other bonafide human persons who are at different stages of development. “After all,”&nbsp;they say, “an acorn isn’t an oak.”&nbsp;Second, an unborn child doesn’t <em>do like</em> other bona fide human persons who are at different stages of development.</p>

<p>You recall the unfortunate case of baby Theresa in Florida who was born without a cerebral cortex. What was the argument there? She’s not a person because she can’t think like other babies think (this was used as an argument for infanticide in Florida). She can’t do what other real persons do. The law implicitly offers a third distinction. The unborn child isn’t located at the right place as are other human persons who are at the <em>same</em> stage of development.</p>

<p>In summary, some human beings aren’t worthy of human rights because they don’t look like the rest of us, they can’t do what the rest of us can do, or they’re in the wrong location. My question simply is this: Are any of these factors truly relevant to the issue of human rights? I am presuming here that all unborn children are in fact humans. It cannot possibly be otherwise because they are separate beings in themselves produced by two other human beings, a mother and a father human being; and according to the law of biogenesis, which has been around for a long time in science, all beings reproduce after their own kind. Two human beings can only reproduce another human being. Since an unborn child is the conceptus of two human beings, then it must be a human being. That’s a foundational point here.</p>

<p>The question is, though it is a human being, is it really a person? The answer with regards to unborn children is no, it isn’t. When I ask why people either say that it doesn’t look like a person, it doesn’t do the things a person does, or it’s in the wrong location.</p>

<p>Let’s take the last one first. You will understand immediately what I mean. According to our law if an otherwise bona fide human person is not located at the right place, then the mother has the liberty to take its life for any reason.</p>

<p>I’m thinking of a little girl right now. Her name is Rachel. She’s the daughter of close friends of mine. Rachel is two months old, but she is still six weeks away from being a full-term baby. Rachel was born prematurely at 22 weeks, in the middle of her mother’s second trimester. In other words, Rachel is still mid third-term even though she’s almost two months old. When she was born she weighed one pound, eleven ounces, but dropped to just over a pound soon after. She was so small that she could rest in the palm of your hand and you’d hardly know she was there.</p>

<p>Here is the relevant point. It would be murder to take the life of little Rachel if she was lying nursing at her mother’s breast today. But if the same Rachel, at the same stage of development, was six inches away resting inside of her mother’s womb she could be killed, and in many cases the state would pay for it.</p>

<p>If it’s wrong to kill an innocent human child at one location, then it’s wrong to kill that same innocent human child six inches away. I take this as obvious and axiomatic. If you take this as obvious and axiomatic—and I don’t see how you can refute it, frankly, regardless of your view of abortion—if it would be murder to take the life of little Rachel outside of her mother, it is murder to take the same life of the same person at exactly the same point of development inside of her mother. If this is true, then all mid-&nbsp;to late-term abortions are deeply immoral, because the liberty to kill the child is based merely on location.</p>

<p>But does even development make a difference? What about a person who is disqualified because it doesn’t look like or doesn’t do like? You could argue that Rachel at 22 weeks did survive and so she was a bona fide human person now and doing things little human beings do and little human persons do. But what about prior to that? Many have said clearly a zygote or a child in its earliest stages of development doesn’t look like a human being and it doesn’t act like a human being. It is not capable of doing those kinds of things that other human beings do. One could point out that this is circular reasoning. In other words, I could say it certainly looks exactly like a human person does at that stage of development. Let me take it from a different direction.</p>

<p>Regarding the other two issues, I have a very important question here. Do I forfeit my rights as a human person—my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—because my body is <em>shaped</em> differently than yours? Do I forfeit my rights as a human person—my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—because my body can’t <em>do</em> what your body can do?</p>

<p>What if I were smaller than you? Am I any less myself? If I weighed only one pound, or even a few ounces, as long as I was alive wouldn’t I still be me? If I had no arms or legs, or my body was terribly misshapen (remember the movie Elephant Man?), as long as I’m alive, wouldn’t I still be me? And if body size and shape is the criterion, then do larger people with more attractive bodies have more rights?</p>

<p>That’s what this argument asserts regarding the unborn. If a human being is smaller, if it looks different, if it isn’t just like me, then it has no rights.</p>

<p>But what if it wasn’t what I looked like, but rather what I could <em>do</em> that makes the difference. What if I weren’t as smart as you? Am I any less myself? What if I had a lower IQ—an IQ of 70 or 50, or even 10, or 1? What if I could hardly think at all? Wouldn’t I still be me? What if I couldn’t play basketball, or couldn’t write, or couldn’t even feed myself? Wouldn’t I still be who I am, a human person with rights and value? Do I as a human being become disposable simply because I can’t do all that you can do, because I may be helpless and defenseless and dependent? And if this is the case, then do stronger and more capable and more intelligent people have more rights than others? That’s what this argument asserts regarding the unborn. If a human being is not as intelligent, if it can’t do what others can do, then it has no rights. That’s the argument. The unborn doesn’t look like other real persons and it doesn’t act like other real persons, therefore it is not a real person. My point is, being a real person is not a look like or an act like kind of thing. It is a be like kind of thing. Human beings are persons by their nature.</p>

<p>This was an argument that Lincoln made regarding the Lincoln-Douglas debates against slavery.</p>

<p>Do you begin to see how devastating this argument is to human rights—all human rights, even yours? If personhood is gradual and admits to degrees, then human rights <em>based</em> on personhood are gradual and admit to degrees. If any human being can be disposed of simply because he or she doesn’t look just right or can’t do what others can do, then the world is only safe for the perfect.</p>

<p>That’s what this argument says. Is this the kind of argument you want to stand behind? That is precisely what the personhood argument entails. If so, be very careful, because sooner or later someone is going to discover your imperfection. Then what?</p>
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title: Religion and Euthanasia
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/religion-and-euthanasia
content:
            <div> 
		<p><strong>Me:</strong> You believe that euthanasia should be allowed because it eases the psychological or physical suffering of a person. Is that correct?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Yes.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> I object because I believe that life is a gift from God and we must answer to Him for how we use our life. Therefore, we don’t have the liberty to take our life; it’s not ours to take.</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> You’re inappropriately bringing religion into the issue because my views are otherwise.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> Yes. Can I ask you a question? Does belief about an afterlife qualify as a religious belief?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Yes.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> Do you believe in an afterlife?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> I’m not sure. I think that there probably is life after death but I’m not sure what it entails.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> But you do have a belief about the afterlife whatever it happens to be?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Yes.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> Do you believe in hell? In other words, is there a hell in the afterlife, a place of eternal punishment?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> No, I don’t believe in that.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> So beliefs about the afterlife are religious beliefs. And you have a belief about the afterlife which excludes the belief of hell. Therefore, you have a religious belief about the afterlife. Is that correct?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Well, if you put it that way I guess I’d have to agree.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> There’s nothing clever about the way I put it, it just seems to naturally follow from the comments you made.</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Okay.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> So you have a religious conviction that there is no hell. Could you be wrong?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> I guess it’s within the realm of possibility.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> You don’t know for sure, do you?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> No, who can?</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> Okay, that makes my point. You could be wrong about this.</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Yes, I could.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> If you are wrong and there is a hell, euthanasia could be sending a suffering person, not to peace and rest, but to an even greater suffering in hell. Theoretically that’s possible, isn’t it?</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> Yes.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> But look for a moment at what you have done. You have faulted me for espousing a particular position against euthanasia because it necessarily entails a religious belief that cannot be, at least in your mind, adequately justified or proven. But your position on euthanasia involves the exact same kind of assumptions about the afterlife that are necessarily religiously based and, at least at this point of the discussion, are equally unprovable by you</p>

<p><strong>Him:</strong> I see what you’re getting at.</p>

<p><strong>Me:</strong> In other words, it seems that it’s impossible to avoid the intrusion of religious views on either side of this issue. So it’s not a matter of one party in this discussion forcing his religious view on another. It’s a matter of two competing religious views, isn’t it? So you’d have to admit that your attack on my position as being a merely religious imposition is an unfair attack, because both of our positions qualify as religious positions, and both positions advocate incumbency. In other words, both try to “force”&nbsp;their views on others who disagree.</p>
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title: Life Unworthy of Life
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/life-unworthy-of-life
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Things like great steps of moral depravity are not really taken in great steps; they’re taken in little pieces.</em></p>

<p>My remarks today are precipitated to some degree by two things that happened to me in the last 24 hours. I had a very interesting and significant conversation with two of my neighbors, Tony and Ollie, in Carson. We talk frequently because we’re neighbors and Tony is a fishing buddy, and ethical issues frequently come up.</p>

<p>I also I saw the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg,”&nbsp;a very important film. I’ve been doing some reading in a book called <em>The Nazi Doctors</em> by Robert Jay Lifton so I thought I’d see this film because the book frequently refers to the trials at Nuremberg.</p>

<p>So I saw the film and it’s not only a good film in its own right and stimulating and invigorating to the mind, but it also deals with some of the issues that we’re talking about now. It deals with the issue of justice and the law and euthanasia. Among other things it’s a commentary on normative relativism, the idea that every culture should make up its own idea about what’s right and wrong and that one culture does not have the right or liberty to judge another culture. It’s a very popular viewpoint in our own culture right now. And it’s interesting that this was one defense the Nazis used at Nuremberg, that they should not be judged by another culture.</p>

<p>In any event let me tell you about both my conversation with Tony and Ollie first and some reflections on “Judgment at Nuremberg”&nbsp;and how that tied into the conversation.</p>

<p>Part of what I’ve done here in the last two and a half years, and what we’ve done together, quite frankly, is not to just discuss ethical issues per se, but look at ways of thinking and looking at the world that have ethical ramifications, and in so doing become equipped to think ethically and also to have the language and eyes to see what’s happening beneath the surface, the trends. I talked a few weeks ago about the trend that I call “The Death of Humanness,”&nbsp;the death of the idea that human beings are valuable in themselves, and the ramifications that this idea—pervading our society in a very quiet fashion—is having on public policy and ethical decisions that we make in our culture—truly issues of life and death.</p>

<p>Now I’ve recently been reading the book <em>The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide</em>, by Robert J. Lifton, published by Basic Books. It’s one that I footnoted in the talk, “The Death of Humanness.”&nbsp;This book it talks about the Nazi’s program of euthanasia and how it started with sterilization and progressed to euthanasia. Lifton even seems to suggest that the word “euthanasia”&nbsp;might even have been coined by the Nazis. If not coined by them, they were the first ones to really put it into popular use. And of course, the word comes from the Greek “<em>eu”</em>&nbsp;which means good and “<em>thanatos”</em>&nbsp;which means death—i.e. “good death.”</p>

<p>In any event, Tony and Ollie and I were talking about this last night and I was talking about my concern in our culture. I’ve been reading through the book and I’ve seen the pattern of euthanasia in Nazi Germany, how it escalated into what came to be known as the Final Solution—Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camps and the attempted destruction of the Jewish race. But the book is not so much about the ethics of genocide. Instead it seeks to come to grips with why and how the medical profession could have participated in this killing process. So it’s a psychological analysis, to some degree. But as I’m reading through this book I see a very chilling scenario that unfolds, one I also I see unfolding at this time and I’m chilled by it, not only because it was a historical event of the past, but because I see some of the same elements in place right here in our own time.</p>

<p>As we talked I explained the process as Lifton describes it in the book. First all children three years of age and under who were even suspected of idiocy or mongolism or microcephaly or hydrocephaly or malformation of limbs or head or spinal column, paralysis including spastic conditions, all put into a group called “The Children’s Specialty Department”&nbsp;and trucked to killing centers and put to death. Sometimes they were put to death by injection, but usually they were killed by starvation and occasionally by carbon monoxide gas.</p>

<p>But you see, it didn’t stop with euthanizing defective little children. Pretty soon juvenile delinquents began to be euthanized, and then Jewish-Aryan half-breeds began to be euthanized. At the same time there was another project under a camouflage organization called “The Reich Group of Sanitarium and Nursing Homes”&nbsp;with the goal of euthanizing older people. Before long it was not just the young and the old but people in the middle being killed for political reasons and ethnic reasons. But it started with the young and elderly that were considered a drain on the resources of the state.</p>

<p>They did this through camouflage organizations, as I mentioned, groups that had very nice sounding titles, and they did it by manipulating language. This is how they deceived the general population. For example, the children were transported to the thirty or more killing areas in vehicles that had printed on the sides “The Common Welfare Ambulance Service.”&nbsp;It sounded so nice and pleasant, yet “common welfare”&nbsp;meant that these undesirables were being put to death, cleansed from the race. This was a “cleansing”&nbsp;act; they called it “therapy,” in fact, “healing.”</p>

<p>And as we talked about this Tony asked a question, “How could this ever happen in our time?”&nbsp;And he brought up homosexuals because homosexuals were also put to death in the camps along with Gypsies and political dissidents and Jews. How could this kind of thing ever eventuate here?</p>

<p>I think things like great steps of moral depravity are not really taken in great steps; they’re taken in little pieces. It’s like the guy who was asked if he could eat an elephant. “No, I can’t eat an elephant,”&nbsp;he said. But the answer to that question is, “Yes you can, if you eat the elephant one bite at a time.”&nbsp;And this is what happens in any culture that moves toward this type of a thing, the elephant is eaten one bite at a time.</p>

<p>The first bite is taken when someone decides that there is a life that is unworthy of life. This phrase “life unworthy of life”&nbsp;is a Nazi term, by the way. They coined the phrase. Once someone decides there is a life unworthy of life then the question becomes “Which life is it that is unworthy?”&nbsp;With the Nazis there were two different groups in that category: the most troublesome and also those perceived to be the source of social turmoil. Now the most troublesome at that time were the infirm, the children with congenital defects, and the old people that were a drain on society. Those that were the source of social turmoil were the Jews and Gypsies and the homosexuals and the political dissidents.</p>

<p>Which brings me back to Ollie’s question. I think that if this kind of thing was going to be repeated it would follow the same pattern. Euthanasia becomes acceptable when we say that there is a life that is unworthy of life. Then groups that are both the most troublesome and those perceived to be the source of social turmoil are systematically eliminated.</p>

<p>The fact is that the most troublesome groups in our culture right now are already being killed—inconvenient unborn children, burdensome newborns with congenital defects, and old people. We are already sacrificing their lives.</p>

<p>But what of the groups that are the source of social turmoil? In Nazi Germany it was Jews, political dissidents, homosexuals. Are those the kinds of people that might be, in our future, the objects of a more widespread euthanasia program in this country? I don’t think so, partly because each of those are very strongly politically connected, the homosexuals being an obvious example. There is, however, another group of people increasingly being considered in our culture as philosophically troublesome, annoying and increasingly problematic, so much so that there is an aggressive attempt to marginalize them. In other words, this group appears to contribute to social turmoil and could very well be at the bottom end of the euthanasia slope we’re presently sliding down.</p>

<p>I realize that right now some of you are scratching your heads saying, “This wild-eyed reactionary conservative is raising the specter of the Third Reich and comparing us to Nazis and the Third Reich and storm troopers.”</p>

<p>I admit to you that there have been many who have raised that specter inappropriately and have used that imagery from the past illegitimately. What I am trying to do is refer to specifics from history, not just past history but what’s happening right now, to demonstrate for you that this is not a wild-eyed claim. I am convinced that we are on the exact same slippery slope as the Germans were in 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, those years just prior to the death camps. And I am not suggesting that as we continue this course we will face concentration camps. I don’t know if that’s the case.</p>

<p>But what I’m saying is that there is a slippery slope and we are on it, my friends, because we have made the same decisions they did. We are arguing the same way. We are using the same kinds of language those did who forty years ago euthanized innocent people by arguing that there was a life unworthy of life. And that process ended up in a very few years to the extermination of not just dozens, not just hundreds, not just thousands, not just ten thousands, but millions of people. What makes us so confident that we will escape their fate?</p>

<p>They did it one bite at a time. They started by saying that there is a life unworthy of life. They continued by including more and more people in that group from each end of the age spectrum, from the youngsters to the old people and they moved towards the middle. Then everybody was in danger; nobody was safe from being declared unworthy of life because it was no longer just the physically infirm on either end of the age spectrum, but it became those people who had ideologies that were offensive to the status quo. And that’s what I’d like to talk about right now, those people who have ideologies that are offensive to the status quo, who are increasingly being perceived as a significant source of social turmoil.</p>

<p>We’ve already got the first step, my friends. We are already euthanizing those on each end of the age spectrum and we do it without hardly lifting an eyebrow. We started with the unborn children, we’re continuing now with the elderly and we’re moving closer and closer to the middle.</p>

<p>Now, if we did cross this threshold in which the life unworthy was not merely a life victimized by some physical malady, but somebody victimized, if you will, by a philosophical malady, what group in this country would qualify? What group could possibly qualify? Following the pattern it would have be that group which seemed to be responsible for social turmoil.</p>

<p>Now I am going to make not a prediction, but a speculation. Please understand that the distinction is very important. Having said that, let me ask you a question. What is the ruling ethic of our culture? The ruling ethic of our culture is relativism, often described as pluralism. And it’s not the old pluralism which meant that everybody had a right to their view and we could argue about our views and I could say, “You have a right to your view but I think you’re dead wrong and here are the reasons why.”&nbsp;It is a new pluralism that is influenced by moral relativism. This pluralism says that everybody has a view, but since truth is relative and morals are relative you can never say that your view is any better than anybody else’s. You can never say that any morality is better than another. You could never say that your point of view is more reasonable to be believed because that would be divisive and intolerant.</p>

<p>The most intolerant people, the greatest sinners and those that cause the greatest problems in a deeply relativistic culture are those that do not buy that particular concept of pluralistic relativism, in other words, those people who make moral judgments. If the biggest sin is being intolerant, taking a moral stand, then moralists would be the biggest “sinners”&nbsp;and the most dangerous in a this type of pluralistic society. Moralists would be the most dangerous because they would fracture and injure the social organism with divisive, private, personal moralities that really “belong in the church”&nbsp;or really “belong in the privacy of one’s own home”&nbsp;but are being “forced upon the public.”</p>

<p>Simply put, religious people that hold moral absolutes—principally conservative Jews and conservative Christians in this country—would be the biggest enemies of a pluralistic, morally relativistic culture. They would be the ones increasingly viewed, as they are now, as the source of social turmoil, those people that are trying to force their morality on others, those people that are trying to draw moral lines, those people that are trying to say there is a higher law to which every other law must obey.</p>

<p>If the culture, the popular voice becomes the arbiter of morality, if voting determines what is moral and immoral, then the moral reformer becomes the criminal. The group that says that there is an absolute law that transcends opinion, that transcends the polls, a higher law that transcends the law of men to which man’s laws are subject, this group of people will be the problem. And this group of people will become expendable, I fear. It’s happened before.</p>

<p>I’ll tell you how the slippery slope works. Right now we’re killing people to end their suffering. That’s why the group in favor of initiative 161 is called “Californians Against Suffering.”&nbsp;And who wants people to suffer? I understand that sentiment. That is very appealing, but once you do this you cross a line that says that there is a life not worthy of being lived, in this case a suffering life.</p>

<p>I call this the “quality of life poison pill.”&nbsp;When you swallow this pleasant sounding argument you swallow poison because what next? You have to define what suffering is. What is suffering? It starts with a terminally ill patient dying of cancer. Then it becomes a newborn baby with spinabifida. Who would want that baby to go through such a life of suffering? Then it becomes a Down’s Syndrome child with a low I.Q. If we let that child survive it will suffer all of its life; people will make fun of it. Then it becomes a quadriplegic who is immobilized from a car accident. Then it becomes an insane person suffering because he is talking to someone who doesn’t exist. Then it becomes a Christian talking to a God who doesn’t exist.</p>

<p>“Ah, come on, Koukl, that’s bizarre. What a leap! Talk about stretching, going from euthanizing a terminally ill cancer patient to killing Christians because they’re praying. That’s an awfully big step.”</p>

<p>You’re right, it is a big step, but let me add this. Almost twenty years ago now, 1973, Roe v. Wade legalized abortion for all nine months of pregnancy. Dr. Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop wrote a book called <em>Whatever Happened to the Human Race?</em> Aptly titled. They said if we do this to unborn children infanticide will follow and we’ll be killing old people. And people said they were crazy. What a leap in logic from allowing a woman to make a choice about her pregnancy to killing old people. That’s ridiculous.</p>

<p>But here we are twenty years later sliding down the slippery slope and this November you get to vote on initiative 161. And unless we get out and tell people what this really means and identify the truth for what it is then this will pass in this state. And you know what? People are shrugging their shoulders. Initiative 161 is no big deal. It makes sense.</p>

<p>My friends, there is a slippery slope. In Holland there is an estimated 2300 cases of adult euthanasia annually. And a recent report of the Dutch Pediatric Association has now proposed mercy killing of severely handicapped newborns. You see, friends, what was unthinkable yesterday is thinkable today and ordinary and commonplace tomorrow.</p>

<p>What’s really ironic is that up until just recently Christians in what was then the Soviet Union were routinely jailed in asylums and the Gulag as insane for talking to a God who doesn’t exist! And we looked at that and thought how ludicrous. What a violation of human rights. And the absolute irony is that the Soviet Union now has more functional religious liberty than the United States does.</p>

<p>So while all of this is going on in my head I saw this film “Judgment at Nuremberg.”&nbsp;I was deeply moved by it, as I mentioned. In this movie Justice Hayward, played by Spencer Tracy, is the chief justice of the tribunal. In his opinion against the defendants at that trial he included these words: “Before the people of this world let it be now noted that this is what we stand for: justice, truth and the value of a single human being.”&nbsp;Well, these words sound almost quaint in the present moral environment. It sounds like a superman line or something. “Justice and truth and the value of a single human being!”&nbsp;What a joke! Spencer, come out of the Dark Ages. Join the twentieth Century. Wake up! People don’t think that way anymore.</p>

<p>As the movie ended, Harry Yonick, a former Nazi judge, powerfully portrayed by Burt Lancaster, on trial for the perversion of justice during the Third Reich in his remarks to the bench actually admits his guilt. And he reasoned this way. He said that at the time he was willing to put up with a passing phase of injustice—the taking of innocent life, life that was unworthy of life, just a passing phase—because that would lead to a finer world that would emerge from this temporary injustice of the Third Reich. And as he hung his head in shame before the tribunal he said, “Tragically, the passing phase did not pass, but instead became business as usual.”</p>

<p>At the end of the movie the now convicted Harry Yonick asked to see the Chief Justice. When the Justice met him in his cell Harry Yonick said, “Those people, those millions of people. I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it.”&nbsp;To which Justice Hayward replied, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death that you knew to be innocent.”</p>

<p>My friends, saying that any innocent human life is not worthy of life is the first step. And we took that step nearly two decades ago. We have slid a long way down the slope since then. And the tragic and deeply frightening thing is that no one seems to have noticed. It’s become just business as usual.</p>

<p>At least that’s the way I see it.</p>
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title: Theistic Evolution: Designed by Chance?
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/theistic-evolution-designed-by-chance-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>I want you to think about Darwinian evolution for a moment.</em></p>

<p>The neo-Darwinian synthesis necessarily entails a particular mechanism that determines (an important word) which changes are reproduced in the next generation of living organisms. This mechanism is called natural selection.</p>

<p>In natural selection, specific circumstances in the environment allow a particular individual to survive and reproduce, passing its mutated genes on to the next generation. Serendipitous conditions in nature, not God, make the “choice”&nbsp;about what survives. Now, if nature is selecting, then God is not selecting. The two are at odds with each other. What could be more obvious?</p>

<p>Either God designs the details, or nature shuffles the deck and natural selection chooses the winning hand. The mechanism is either conscious and intentional (design), or unconscious and unintentional (natural selection). Creation is teleological; it has a purpose, a goal, an end. Evolution is accidental, like a straight flush dealt to a poker rookie.</p>

<p>Theistic evolution means design by chance. That’s like a square circle—there is no such thing. Blending Darwinian evolution with creation is like putting a square peg in a round hole. It just doesn’t fit.<em>—GK, Solid Ground, Jan-Feb 97</em></p>
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title: Putting a Stone in a Shoe
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/putting-a-stone-in-a-shoe
content:
            <div> 
		<p>While waiting in line at the theater, I spoke to a young man named Ira who was a musician from Canada. I don’t know what led up to it but somehow the issue of karma came up, the eastern religious concept of cause and effect. We were walking into the theater for the showing so I couldn’t get into detail exploring the issue and trying to refute it so I used a tactic I call “Columbo”&nbsp;to get him thinking.</p>

<p>Ira had said he never harms any other living thing because everything has an equal right to live. Now, I’ve heard this kind of language before and I don’t believe first of all that people really believe that and secondly that it can be lived out consistently. So I probed with questions—that’s the “Columbo”&nbsp;part—to find inconsistencies to demonstrate how foolish and how frightening—if carried very far—such a view can be.</p>

<p>I said, “Let me ask you a question. Do you use antibiotics? Do you believe that the AIDS virus has a right to live?”</p>

<p>He looked at me with a stunned look on his face. “Are you serious?”&nbsp;he asked me. The impression that I got—and it was the same for those with me who were looking on; I asked them later—was that here was a musician espousing a pleasant, warm, feel-good view of the world: make good karma, don’t make bad karma; be kind to everything; don’t kill anything. And probably in the circles in which he runs—the Hollywood creative community—most people smile and nod their heads with a knowing “Ah yes...”&nbsp;affirmation.</p>

<p>But this time was different. Here was somebody that asked him in the midst of his mellow, measured, spiritual reflection—one in which I’m sure he expected the same knowing nod of approval—here is someone unmoved asking him about the AIDS virus. He didn’t know what to make of me.</p>

<p>I said, “Yes, it’s a serious question. Believe me, I’m not trying to be glib.”&nbsp;He reflected for a minute and then said, “Well, I think that everything has a right to protect itself. So if another organism is attacking you, you can kill it. But you can’t kill it unless it’s self-defense.”&nbsp;And I thought that was an interesting response. Our conversation ended there because we went into the theater.</p>

<p>When we came out Ira immediately came up to me and asked, “What did you think of my response?”&nbsp;Maybe he had been musing about it during the film. I told him that it was an interesting response and it was a good one as far as it goes. But my point was to point out inconsistency because I don’t think people who believe what he really espouses can live that way. So I was looking for inconsistency.</p>

<p>The answer he suggested to me, I told him, seemed to deal with a significant amount of that inconsistency. However I pointed out that people don’t kill micro-organisms simply because they are a lethal threat. The more telling question was whether he took antibiotics for his cold or not. If so, that would be inconsistent with his karmic beliefs because a cold virus isn’t going to kill him. It just makes life uncomfortable. If he takes antibiotics for colds, he is killing another organism simply to make him feel more comfortable, which would be a violation of the cold virus’s equal right to live. Of course, there are lots of examples of this kind of inconsistency in the life of someone who regards all of life as equally valuable.</p>

<p>Ira then reaffirmed his point, “Well I still think that all organisms have an equal right to live.”</p>

<p>Then I responded to this pleasant, peaceful, kind, and seemingly harmless, musician—the picture sensitivity and gentleness—that his views terrified me. He looked at me like “Who <em>is</em> this guy, anyway?”</p>

<p>I said, “Then you don’t believe in human rights.”</p>

<p>He said, “Of course I believe in human rights. I just said I believe in the rights of all living things.”</p>

<p>I said, “The point I’m making is that you don’t&nbsp;believe in <em>unique</em> human rights. You believe that humans have rights but all other animals have the same rights because they all have the same right to live.”</p>

<p>I asked him this question to clarify things. “If there was a dog drowning and a human being drowning, which would you save?”</p>

<p>He said, “I’d try to save them both.”</p>

<p>I said, “In the context of my story, let’s say you couldn’t save them both, but you could only save one. What would you do?”</p>

<p>He said, “I would save the human being.”&nbsp;When I asked him why he said that the reason is because human beings have rights between themselves.</p>

<p>I didn’t exactly understand what he meant there until I began questioning him and I realized that what he really meant is that there is empathy from one human being to another human being, a kind of species empathy. Because of that, we have a self-preservation mentality so we would be motivated to save the human being rather than the dog.</p>

<p>I said, “I understand your motivation. I understand why you <em>would</em> save the human being. But my question isn’t which one <em>would</em> you save? The real question is which one <em>should</em> you save? Do you have a moral obligation to save one over the other?”</p>

<p>“You see, this is what frightens me about your position. Earlier I said, ’Your views are terrifying.’&nbsp;You didn’t understand how it could be terrible to think that all life should be respected. What’s terrifying is not that you think all living things should be respected, but that you think all living things should be respected equally. I believe that man is made in the image of God so he has a special place in creation. He has a special value that he doesn’t share with the animals. All things being equal, there’s no harm in suggesting that everything should be respected, that we should try to protect the life of everything. But all things aren’t equal, and there are obvious times when one “right”&nbsp;to live is pitted up against the “right”&nbsp;of another to live.&nbsp;That’s why I raised the dog illustration. What the illustration shows is that if everything is equal in value then the choice to save a man over a dog, or a fish, or an insect for that matter is purely arbitrary, having to do with a generic kinship, a species survival instinct—protect your own—rather than moral obligation. That’s frightening. It’s terrifying.”</p>

<p>By the way as a side-bar, this doesn’t address the fact that no other species in the animal kingdom exhibits behavior that implies it believes in karma and the respect of life. If only human beings think this, that seems to imply that human beings are special because they can think moralistically. And why is it that human beings think moralistically, but no other species is concerned about the well-being or life of other creatures? If karma and the respect for life is nature’s way, there seems to be no exemplar of nature’s way in nature except for man. Why is that so?</p>

<p>Had I more time I would have explored it more along this vein: is it more tragic that 6 million Jews died, or that 6 million dogs died in the animal pounds in the cities of America last year, or that 6 million rats were exterminated in Los Angeles last year, or that six million termites died when we fumigated our house, or that 6 million AIDS viruses died when a needle was washed with bleach. What is more tragic? You see, with his viewpoint you would have to say that they were equally tragic and it is no <em>more</em> tragic that human beings were murdered than that animals were murdered, if you can even apply the term “murder”&nbsp;to animals. That they’re morally equivalent in his view, that’s what’s terrifying.</p>

<p>“That’s a good point!”&nbsp;he said, and we ended our conversation there.</p>

<p>This is the extreme view of the animal rights view. The idea that all life is equally sacred ultimately brings us to this point of moral confusion because it doesn’t give us any way to make moral distinctions between life when one life must be taken or some life must be lost. Since everything is equal, it’s an arbitrary choice. I did point this out to him. “So in other words, your choice to save the human being is an arbitrary choice because of your kinship with him as a human being. In the greater scheme of things, there is no more moral value to saving the human being than saving the dog.”</p>

<p>By application one would have to say, then, if there is something that one would do to save the lives of human beings but would cost the lives of a larger number of other creatures than the number of human beings saved, then on balance it would be better to let a fewer number of human beings die and let the larger number of other creatures live than the other way around?</p>

<p>It all sounds so pleasant and warm and cuddly, so loving when you’re talking about karma and respect for life at a cocktail party. My point was that ultimately that’s a devastating kind of argument in application.</p>
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title: Rubber Crutches
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/rubber-crutches
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Everyone has a crutch.&nbsp; Will yours hold you up?</em></p>

<p>When people ask me, “Isn’t Christ just a crutch?” I have a simple reply.&nbsp; I tell them, “You’re right.&nbsp; Christ is a crutch.&nbsp; But you’ve asked the wrong question.”&nbsp;</p>

<p>No one makes fun of a&nbsp;lame&nbsp;person who uses a crutch.&nbsp; So the real question is, “Am I lame; am I crippled?” because crippled people need crutches.</p>

<p>The fact is, everybody leans on something.&nbsp; As a Christian I lean on Jesus, because He’s a crutch that can hold me.&nbsp; What about you?</p>

<p>When I was a kid and someone told a dumb joke, we’d say, “That’s as funny as a rubber crutch.”&nbsp; The point is “rubber crutches” aren’t funny.&nbsp; As it turns out, though, a lot of people are leaning on rubber crutches.&nbsp;</p>

<p>The real question is not whether you have a crutch or not.&nbsp; Everybody does.&nbsp; The real question is, “Can your crutch hold you?”</p>

<p>What’s your fancy?&nbsp; What is it that makes your life work for you?&nbsp; A relationship?&nbsp; A secure job? Your bank account? Your health? Power?&nbsp; All of those are rubber crutches.</p>

<p>If whatever you’re depending on for security and significance can be here today and gone tomorrow, then you’re in trouble.&nbsp; You’re leaning on a rubber crutch.&nbsp; And that’s not funny.</p>

<p>Yes, Christians lean on Christ.&nbsp; Call it a crutch if you want, but our crutch can hold us.&nbsp;</p>

<p>&nbsp;One person put it this way:&nbsp; A Christian is one who has come to the end of his rope. He admits his deep need.&nbsp; He knows he’s crippled in many ways, and needs help.&nbsp; When you finally come to your senses and realize you’re deeply crippled and dying, Christ isn’t “just” a crutch—He’s an iron lung.</p>
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title: End of Life Ethics: A Primer
topic: Bioethics
author: Melinda Penner
date: 03/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/end-of-life-ethics-a-primer
content:
            <div> 
		<h2>Would You Want to Live that Way?</h2>

<p>That’s the challenge I’ve heard a number of times from advocates of starving Terri Schiavo to death. It usually comes in the conversation when what they’ve offered so far in the way of justification has been refuted. It’s a rejoinder of last resort, but since it’s offered purportedly as an argument, let me take it seriously.</p>

<p>Would you want to live that way?</p>

<p>No.</p>

<p>But what follows from that?</p>

<p>I suppose the “argument”&nbsp;is supposed to go this way: Would you want to live that way? “No.”&nbsp;Then you shouldn’t live that way and neither should Terri Schiavo. But that’s a non sequitur—it doesn’t follow. Just because I don’t want to live that way, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t or wouldn’t live that way if that’s the condition I found myself in. The challenge doesn’t provide any justification. It certainly doesn’t provide any justification for imposing the conclusion on someone who can’t speak for herself. And, in fact, it’s a dangerous premise to accept.</p>

<p>The challenge is based on the “quality of life”&nbsp;view, which has to do with two easily understood ethical categories: intrinsic and instrumental value.</p>

<p>Something has instrumental value because it’s an instrument of obtaining some other end that is valuable. Something with instrumental value isn’t valuable in and of itself, but is only valuable if it gets you the other object with value. It’s a means to an end. Money is an example of something with instrumental value. It’s paper or metal, or even shells, or something else that is exchanged for something else you want. Nobody holds onto money for its own sake. We earn and accumulate money in order to buy groceries and pay the rent, in order to feel secure, or maybe to obtain satisfaction from being the most successful as measured by money. When money doesn’t do its job as an instrument to obtain the valued end, it loses its value. Confederate currency after the Civil War had no value at all because it couldn’t get anything else. Nobody wants a pile of valueless paper.</p>

<p>Intrinsic value is very different. Things with intrinsic value are valued for their own sake. They don’t have to achieve any other goal to be valuable. They are goods in themselves. Beauty, pleasure, and virtue are likely examples. Family and friendship are examples. Something that’s intrinsically valuable might also be instrumentally valuable, but even if it loses its instrumental value, its intrinsic value remains. Intrinsic value is what people mean when they use the phrase “the sanctity of life.”</p>

<p>Now when someone argues that someone doesn’t have “quality of life”&nbsp;they are arguing that life is only valuable as long as it obtains something else with quality, and when it can’t accomplish this, it’s not worth anything anymore. It’s only instrumentally valuable. The problem with this view is that it is entirely subjective and changeable with regards to what might give value to life. Value becomes a completely personal matter, and, as we all know, our personal interests change over time.</p>

<p>There is no grounding for objective human value and human rights if it’s not intrinsic value. Our legal system is built on the notion that humans have intrinsic value. The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each person is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights...”&nbsp;If human beings only have instrumental value, then slavery can be justified because there is nothing objectively valuable that requires our respect. There is nothing other than intrinsic value that can ground the unalienable equal rights we recognize because there is nothing about all human beings that is universal and equal. Intrinsic human value is what binds our social contract of rights.</p>

<p>So if human life is intrinsically valuable, then it remains valuable even when our capacities are limited. Human life is valuable even with tremendous limitations. Human life remains valuable because its value is not derived from being able to talk, or walk, or feed yourself, or even reason at a certain level. Human beings don’t have value only in virtue of states of being (e.g., happiness) they can experience.</p>

<p>The “quality of life”&nbsp;view is a poison pill because once we swallow it, we’re led down a logical slippery slope. The exact same principle can be used to take the life of human beings in all kinds of limited conditions because I wouldn’t want to live that way. Would you want to live the life of a baby with Down’s Syndrome? No? Then kill her. Would you want to live the life of an infant with cerebral palsy? No? Then kill him. Would you want to live the life of a baby born with a cleft lip? No? Then kill her. (In fact, they did.) Once we accept this principle, it justifies killing every infant born with a condition that we deem a life we don’t want to live. There’s no reason not to kill every handicapped person who can’t speak for himself—because I wouldn’t want to live that way. This, in fact, is what has happened in Holland with the Groningen Protocol. Dutch doctors euthanize severely ill newborns and their society has accepted it.</p>

<p>Would you want to live crippled, unable to walk? No? Then kill Franklin Roosevelt the summer he contracted polio. Would you want to live as a quadriplegic? No? Then kill Joni Erickson Tada as she lay in her hospital bed after her diving accident. But, you say, they’ve lived productive lives, accomplished great things. True, they have, but that’s treating their value as mere instruments. Would it be okay to kill them if they hadn’t accomplished good things? I suspect that many of us would not want to live that way despite what they’ve accomplished, but that doesn’t mean it would be okay to kill them.</p>

<p>A variation on “Would you want to live that way”&nbsp;is usually offered when the fact is made clear that Terri isn’t dying, that this isn’t a “right to die issue,”&nbsp;but a “right to life”&nbsp;issue: “That’s not living.”&nbsp;Well, by every medical measure it is. What they mean is that she doesn’t have the quality of life we’d all prefer to have. This is simply the same poison pill that views life as instrumental value rather than intrinsic.</p>

<p>Terri is a valuable human being as she lies in bed. Terri is a valuable human being even if she never recovers. Her right to life that derives from her intrinsic value must be protected.</p>

<p>Would I want to live that way? No. I pray for God’s mercy that I never will. But no justification follows from this challenge that justifies killing Terri Schiavo. It’s a mere assertion. And it asserts an idea that is very dangerous.</p>

<h2>Does Terri Have a Right to Die?</h2>

<p>Terri Schiavo’s husband claims that Terri expressed her desire never to “live this way.”&nbsp;Her case has been described as the “right to die.”&nbsp;But Terri isn’t dying. Killing her has been described as the “merciful”&nbsp;thing to do for her. All of these characterizations are popular expressions of some ethical categories that I think are important to understand in order to know what the right thing to do is.</p>

<p>“Terri didn’t want to live this way.”&nbsp;That is an imprecise expression of the autonomy principle, which is the idea that human beings are free to make their own choices regarding their own lives. We may not always approve of the choices, but respecting an individual’s autonomy in general is an important principle. But the autonomy principle doesn’t get you the “right to die.”&nbsp;At most, it justifies voluntarily refusing treatment when there is no obligation to provide it. There is no “right to die.”&nbsp;The “right to choose”&nbsp;is another expression of the autonomy principle that was enshrined in Roe v. Wade, and now underlies the claim that Terri has a right to choose her death. But autonomy doesn’t permit any and every choice. That’s why some precision is important in discussing the issues raised by Terri Schiavo’s case. Without precision, we might make fatal mistakes.</p>

<p>In cases of taking someone’s life, there are three forms of consent: voluntary, nonvoluntary, and involuntary. Voluntary “euthanasia”&nbsp;is when a competent, informed patient requests death under certain circumstances. (I actually dislike the word “euthanasia,”&nbsp;which means “good death,”&nbsp;because it is usually a euphemism for something very insidious.) Living wills and advance directives are attempts to honor voluntary, autonomous wishes. In nonvoluntary “euthanasia,”&nbsp;a patient is incapable of expressing that desire (e.g., newborn, incompetent adult). Involuntary “euthanasia”&nbsp;is when a patient expresses a wish to live, but is still killed.</p>

<p>There’s also an important distinction between active and passive “euthanasia.”&nbsp;Active “euthanasia”&nbsp;is the direct, active, and intentional taking of human life when the patient isn’t dying, an intervention to bring about death when death is not imminent. Passive “euthanasia”&nbsp;is allowing someone to die, permissible under certain circumstances. There is no intervention to take life, though death may be foreseen.</p>

<p>An example of passive “euthanasia”&nbsp;is refusing treatment when it’s futile and provides little or no hope of success. Almost exactly five years ago my father was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. The oncologist told us that chemotherapy would prolong his life, but not save it. So we all agreed to let the dying process take place and care for him until he went to Heaven on Good Friday four weeks later. The conditions for our decision were clear: He was dying and there was no effective treatment.</p>

<p>It’s very important to understand whether someone is referring to active or passive “euthanasia,”&nbsp;because it’s a critical ethical distinction in cases like Terri Schiavo’s.</p>

<p>With these ethically important categories in place, there are six distinct categories of “euthanasia,”&nbsp;each with its distinct moral obligations:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>1. voluntary/active—taking someone’s life at their request (e.g., suicide, doctor-assisted suicide)</p>

<p>2. voluntary/passive—allowing someone to die at their request (e.g., “Do not resuscitate”&nbsp;and “No heroics”&nbsp;medical orders, durable power of attorney)</p>

<p>3. nonvoluntary/active—taking the life of someone who is unable to express her wishes (e.g., injecting a deformed infant or a senile adult with a fatal drug, or removing morally obligatory care, like a feeding tube)</p>

<p>4. nonvoluntary/passive—allowing someone to die who is unable to express their wishes (e.g., an infant with anencephaly or a stroke victim who is brain dead)</p>

<p>5. involuntary/active—taking someone’s life against their expressed will</p>

<p>6. involuntary/passive—allowing someone to die against their will</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Some of these are ethically acceptable and others are not. Involuntary active “euthanasia”&nbsp;is always unethical and illegal in the United States. Voluntary/passive and nonvoluntary/passive may be ethically acceptable if there is no obligation to give medical treatment to the ailing patient in that case. Voluntary/active is not ethical and the law should not advocate it. Nonvoluntary/active “euthanasia”&nbsp;is unethical and should be illegal because it intervenes to cause death without knowing what her wishes are.</p>

<p>Terri’s circumstance is a case of nonvoluntary/active “euthanasia.”&nbsp;She is being killed when her wishes are unclear. Her husband claims she has expressed her desire, but at best it’s uncertain. She left no advance directive. Whatever her wishes may have been years ago, it isn’t necessarily helpful in deciding what she wants or would want now. Some of those close to Terri report that she has reacted to the removal of her feeding tube and expressed a desire to live, but her verbalizations are very indistinct.</p>

<p>A conclusion is hard to come to based on the nonvoluntary distinction, but it is crystal clear when it comes to the active distinction. Terri isn’t dying, so someone has to intervene to cause her to die. Terri has survived for 15 years in her current condition; she will likely live for many more years if she’s given the minimal care that all living things need to survive—nutrition and hydration.</p>

<p>This isn’t a case of respecting an autonomous decision. When Terri can’t make her wishes clear and she is not dying, the ethical, the humane, the legal recourse is to favor life. This is not a “right to die”&nbsp;case; it’s a right to live case for a woman facing active “euthanasia.”&nbsp;When people defend “the right to die,”&nbsp;they seem to be saying that the benefit of the doubt should dictate death. Perhaps that’s so in some cases of nonvoluntary/passive “euthanasia,”&nbsp;but not in this case of nonvoluntary/active “euthanasia.”&nbsp;Some people say, “Maybe she didn’t want to live this way.”&nbsp;“Maybe”&nbsp;isn’t good enough in nonvoluntary/active cases. An ethical, civil society should always favor the life of the innocent human being. A handicapped woman deserves our protection, not intervention to cause her death.</p>

<p>Some decisions are wrong no matter who makes them. Being a husband doesn’t give a man authority to cause the death of his wife. Any “guardian”&nbsp;who attempts this should automatically be disqualified.</p>

<p>Nonvoluntary/active “euthanasia”&nbsp;unjustly takes a human life, no matter who decides it. The government should never let an innocent life be intentionally taken by anyone without proper justification. A judge’s opinion is not enough. When the judiciary allows a husband to kill his own wife, the legislative and the executive branches of our government must intervene to check the inappropriate power exerted by the judiciary.</p>

<p>Michael Schiavo’s right to decide for his wife does not trump Terri Schiavo’s right to life. The government’s job is to protect the right to life, not the so-called right to death.</p>

<h2>Is a Feeding Tube Extraordinary Means?</h2>

<p>Here are the final ethical issues that lay the necessary foundation before concluding whether Terri Schiavo’s husband has the right to remove her feeding tube. There are other issues and ideas that are part of the discussion, but I’ve tried to present the fundamentals. Most other questions and challenges can be decided using these tools.</p>

<p>The next distinction has to do with the kind of treatment Terri is receiving. Is it ordinary or extraordinary? Here’s how you decide. “Ordinary means”&nbsp;are medicines, treatments, and operations that offer a reasonable hope of benefit without placing undue burdens on the patient. An example would be providing insulin to a diabetic, or performing surgery to correct a cleft lip for a newborn. Ordinary means are obligatory to provide; it’s never morally justified to withhold or withdraw ordinary treatment.</p>

<p>“Extraordinary means”&nbsp;of treatment are those that involve excessive burdens on the patient and don’t offer reasonable hope of benefit. Extraordinary means aren’t obligatory so they can be withheld or withdrawn.</p>

<p>I just used some “weasel words”&nbsp;that can be a little difficult to apply in some unclear circumstances. “Reasonable hope”&nbsp;and “undue burden”&nbsp;might be judged differently in some difficult cases because we can’t always reasonably predict the outcome. Sometimes doctors just can’t predict what the outcome will be or how a patient may respond. The chances of a successful surgery might be 50/50. Most often the times it’s hardest to evaluate “reasonable hope”&nbsp;and “undue burden”&nbsp;in end of life scenarios. So there are some circumstances that are difficult to navigate. But in the vast majority of medical cases—and, I would contend, in Terri’s cases—these terms provide guidance on how to evaluate the treatment.</p>

<p>This leads me to an important caveat. These medical judgments pertain to the types of treatments for individual patients, not to the patients themselves. The treatment is an undue burden, rather than the patient is a burden. The treatment provides reasonable hope of accomplishing its medical goals, rather than the patient having a reasonable hope of accomplishing her personal goals. The quality of life of the patient is not the issue because the patient is an intrinsically valuable human being regardless of her life’s quality.</p>

<p>The final distinction is between malfeasance and nonfeasance. There is little moral difference between withholding or withdrawing medical treatment. Withholding treatment is preventing treatment that has not yet started. Withdrawing treatment is stopping treatment that has already begun. If a treatment isn’t morally obligatory to begin with, then it’s okay to withhold and/or withdraw it; and if a treatment is morally obligatory, then treatment should neither be withheld or withdrawn. That is the legal distinction between malfeasance and nonfeasance. Malfeasance is doing that which should not be done, an active notion. Nonfeasance is failing to do that which should be done, a passive notion. What is morally relevant is whether or not treatment is obligatory in its own right, not whether our actions toward a patient are active (withdrawing) or passive (withholding).</p>

<p>If medical treatment is not obligatory, it can be withdrawn or withheld. This was the case with my father who had pancreatic cancer. Treatment provided no hope and would have been burdensome to him, therefore there was no obligation to provide treatment, and if provided there was no obligation to continue. This is also the case with a massive stroke patient who is kept alive only by machines; the machines can be removed and the patient allowed to die.</p>

<p>Conversely, if it is obligatory to provide treatment, then it cannot be withdrawn or withheld. You can’t fail to give CPR to a drowning child. You can’t take away medication from a heart patient.</p>

<p>Food and water aren’t extraordinary treatment, even if delivered through the artificial means of a tube; they’re normal care. Feeding through a tube is not unduly burdensome and certainly holds reasonable hope—for all human beings. People in dependent circumstances rely on others to feed them. Babies and quadriplegics need to be fed by others or they’ll die. Someone with a broken jaw has to eat prepared food through a straw. They’re simply different modes of delivering what is basic to everyone’s survival. If they’re taken away, the only intention can be to cause death because removal creates sufficient conditions for death where they don’t otherwise exist. The difference between a respirator, for example, and a feeding tube is that the respirator substitutes for a body function that is no longer working, while the feeding tube doesn’t; it simply is a delivery system.</p>

<p>Judgments about food and water usually turn out to be evaluations of ordinary and extraordinary patients, not of ordinary and extraordinary treatment. Nancy Cruzan was diagnosed to be in a “persistent vegetative state”&nbsp;and her life was judged unworthy of living, so her food and water were removed. She died of starvation, not of her injuries or disease.</p>

<p>The same is being said of Terri now. She doesn’t have an adequate “quality of life,”&nbsp;so her nutrition and hydration have been removed. But Terri is handicapped, not terminally ill. She will die of starvation, not of injury or disease.</p>

<p>Terri’s husband claimed on “Larry King”&nbsp;Monday night (March 21, 2005) that she won’t die of starvation. It’s a “natural”&nbsp;death. Well, starvation is natural for anyone who isn’t permitted to eat, but it’s still starvation. What is morally offensive is that it is not humane. It is neither natural nor peaceful, as some claim. If death row inmates were left to starve in their cells, it would be “cruel and unusual,”&nbsp;not natural and peaceful.</p>

<p>Often patients in the final stage of dying will stop eating. In those cases, nutrition and hydration are almost always considered extraordinary treatment because it serves no purpose. Death is imminent and the body is shutting down. In that case the person dies of the disease, not starvation.</p>

<p>Food and water offer reasonable hope of benefit with little burden to any patient who isn’t dying, as it does to all of us. Removing the tube that supplies food and water is no different than placing a pillow over her head to remove the supply of oxygen. It deprives her of a fundamental requirement for life.</p>

<p>Sometimes severely injured patients can eat, but have to be fed slowly by nursing staff. It’s time-consuming and puts demands on limited staff. Sometimes it’s so slow and difficult that the patient doesn’t get adequate nutrition. So they insert a feeding tube as a more efficient means of delivering nutrition.</p>

<p>Several years ago Greg Koukl was speaking at a local church about “The Death of Humanness,”&nbsp;in which he describes the consequences of the erosion of human value. Two people approached Greg after the lecture and introduced themselves as Nancy Cruzan’s aunt and uncle. They told him that Nancy had been able to swallow and eat, but that it was a slow process, so a feeding tube was inserted. Her aunt and uncle pointed out that eating was one of the few pleasures Nancy had left after being incapacitated by an accident. Later, that feeding tube was deemed by a judge as an extraordinary means of keeping Nancy alive. It was removed and Nancy died of starvation and dehydration.</p>

<p>Terri Schiavo was once able to eat soft foods. But for the very same reasons as Nancy Cruzan a feeding tube was inserted. What is outrageous is that the tube, inserted to make a nurse’s job easier, is then judged to be an extraordinary means of keeping her alive.</p>

<p>Here’s how all of these ethical considerations work together (blog entries 3/21-23/05). Human beings with intrinsic value have a right to life that must be protected unless there is proper justification to take it. The presumption falls to life, and the burden of proof is on death. Quality of life issues treat human beings as mere means to ends. Nonvoluntary/active euthanasia—what Terri is facing—is unethical and should not be legally permitted because it is actively, intentionally causing a death when patient's wishes cannot be determined. Nutrition and hydration delivered through a feeding tube is ordinary medical care that offers reasonable hope of benefit with little burden to the patient, so it should not be withdrawn or withheld.</p>

<p>Terri Schiavo is a human being with intrinsic value despite her significant handicaps. Her wishes are unknown, or at best unclear. She’s not dying, so removing her feeding tube is not an “end of life”&nbsp;issue in the normal sense of the phrase; it’s intentionally taking her life. It’s morally obligatory to provide ordinary, medical care for Terri, so her feeding tube should neither be withdrawn or withheld from her.</p>

<p>Some question why so many of us are up in arms and want to intrude ourselves in a “private”&nbsp;matter. Here is why. Because taking someone’s life is never a private matter. Because the intrinsic value of one innocent human being is so great we should all care when Terri’s life is taken from her unjustly. Because how we treat the “least”&nbsp;among us reinforces the most basic value of our country: human dignity. Because the law is supposed to serve justice not just proper procedure, and judges don’t always get justice right.</p>

<p>Because the right to life is one of the most fundamental features of our law and social contract, and each violation chips away at the foundation that protects us all.</p>

<p>A couple of resources on this topic that I like are:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>The Life and Death Debate</em> by J.P. Moreland</p>

<p><em>Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong</em> by Louis P. Pojman</p>
</blockquote>
</div>

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title: Nothing Hidden in D&X
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/29/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/nothing-hidden-in-d-x-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The controversy surrounding D&amp;X is not like other abortion debates, because D&amp;X is no ordinary abortion. One strains to be able to understand the procedure in civilized terms. Partial-birth abortion make irrefutable what has been obvious to so many for a long time.</em></p>

<p>What is partial-birth abortion? To help answer that question for the legislature, Representative Canady presented Congress with five simple line drawings. They were captioned by seven brief, precise sentences describing the process.</p>

<p>Dr. Haskell, who as of 1992 had already performed over 700 of these abortions, said the drawings were accurate “from a technical point of view.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> The captions were virtually identical to a description of D&amp;X abortions published in the <em>LA Times</em>, June 16, 1995.</p>

<p>The National Abortion Federation (NAF), however, called the material “sensationalized drawings and graphic language to attempt to enflame opposition to this surgery.”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<p>Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) actually tried to prohibit the lawmakers from seeing the sketches during public, congressional debate on HR 1833.</p>

<p>One <em>LA Times</em> columnist claimed the procedure “has been successfully and inflammatorily mischaracterized as the heartless slaying of the helpless with scissors jabs to the skull and a sucking out of the brains.”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></p>

<h2>A Clear, Medical Description</h2>

<p>To settle the controversy, I refer now to a description from Dr. Martin Haskell’s own instruction manual, “Dilation and Extraction for Late Second Trimester Abortion.”&nbsp;It was included in presentation materials of the National Abortion Federation (notice this is a powerful, pro-abortion organization), entitled “Second Trimester Abortion: From Every Angle,”&nbsp;pages 30-31. This material was distributed at the NAF Fall Risk Management Seminar, held September 13-14, 1992, in Dallas, Texas.</p>

<p>“The surgeon introduces a large grasping forceps, such as a Bierer or Hern, through the vaginal and cervical canals into the corpus of the uterus...When the instrument appears on the sonogram screen, the surgeon is able to open and close its jaws to firmly and reliably grasp a lower extremity. The surgeon then applies firm traction to the instrument causing aversion of the fetus (if necessary) and pulls the extremity into the vagina...”</p>

<p>“With a lower extremity in the vagina, the surgeon uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the torso, the shoulders and the upper extremities.”</p>

<p>“The skull lodges at the internal cervical [opening]...The fetus is oriented dorsum or spine up. At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left hand along the back of the fetus and ’hooks’&nbsp;the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down)...”</p>

<p>“While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.”</p>

<p>“...The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.”</p>

<p>“The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.”</p>

<p>This procedure is almost never done before viability.<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup> By Haskell’s own admission, two thirds of the children are still alive when he “forces the scissors into the base of the skull.”&nbsp;He adds, “When I do the instrumentation on the skull [thrusting the scissors into the cranium]...it destroys the brain sufficiently so that even if it (the fetus) falls out at that point, it’s definitely not alive.”<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup></p>

<h2>D&amp;X is Not “Surgery”</h2>

<p>One strains to be able to understand this procedure in civilized terms. There’s no need to resort to “sensationalized drawings and graphic language.”&nbsp;Dr. Haskell’s description speaks for itself.</p>

<p>This procedure cannot be sanitized or legitimized by calling it “surgery,”&nbsp;as the NAF repeatedly does. Partial-birth abortions are not surgery. <em>Webster’s New World International Dictionary</em> defines surgery as “the treatment of disease, injury, or deformity by manual or instrumental operations, as the removal of diseased parts or tissue by cutting.”</p>

<p>First, there is no disease or injury; this is a pregnancy, not a sickness. Indeed, there may be deformity in the child, but the D&amp;X procedure does not remove the deformity; it removes the child. Second, the only cutting done is in the back of the baby’s skull to end its short life, not to treat its defect.</p>

<p>Surgery removes a disease, an injury, or a deformity; an abortion removes a child. The use of this term treats a baby like a disease.</p>

<h2>Nothing Hidden</h2>

<p>Partial-birth abortions make irrefutable what has been obvious to many for a long time: abortion brutally kills a human child. You can no longer get away with distracting terms like “fetus��&nbsp;or “conceptus.”</p>

<p>Nothing is hidden in D&amp;X abortion. This is not a piece of tissue or a mere part of a woman’s body. This is a little boy or girl dangling between the legs of its mother. You can clearly see its sexual organs, male or female. It squirms and kicks. Its hands open and close, grasping for something to hang onto, until the moment when the doctor’s instrument pierces the back of its skull. Then, of course, everything goes limp, because the baby is dead.</p>

<p>Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse from Dayton Ohio, accepted assignment to Dr. Haskell’s clinic because she was “strongly pro-choice.”&nbsp;In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, nurse Shafer described the end of life for one six-month-old “fetus.”</p>

<p>“[Dr. Haskell] delivered the baby’s body and the arms—everything but the head...The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall...[Then] the baby was completely limp...After I left that day, I never came back.”<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup></p>

<p>That child, a baby boy, had Down’s Syndrome. The babies in the other two abortions she assisted in that day were perfectly healthy, she testified.</p>

<h2>Amazing Justifications</h2>

<p>The things people say to justify D&amp;X are amazing. Some of the attempts are more sophisticated, and I’ll speak to them in the next section, but some defy belief.</p>

<p>One woman told a radio interviewer that she preferred partial-birth abortion because the baby was delivered whole and not chopped up into pieces. It gave her the opportunity to say good-bye. As the NAF material puts it, “Removing the fetus intact meant that the family can see it, hold it, and mourn their loss.”<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup></p>

<p>Another said it’s the most “humane”&nbsp;way for the child itself. I thought this was an odd thing to say for a couple of reasons.</p>

<p>First, the question at hand is the <em>morality</em> of killing the child, not the <em>manner</em> of the killing. Our concern is not finding the best way to take a child’s life, but whether it’s right to dispose of children at all.</p>

<p>Does it somehow strengthen a killer’s legal defense because it took one shot to the back of the head to dispatch his victim? Imagine the appeal: “Your Honor, it was the most humane way; he didn’t feel a thing.”</p>

<p>A second thought occurs to me, though. If this is the most humane way for the baby, what then of the morality of other abortions that are not so humane? Doesn’t this automatically call into question other more “inhumane”&nbsp;forms of abortion?</p>

<p>What of the mother, who is conscious during the whole gruesome procedure? What must she be thinking as she watches her newborn child hanging between her legs? It’s not crying yet, because its head is still in her vagina, though it would cry, in most cases, if it was simply given some air.</p>

<p>What must be going through her mind as she watches the doctor methodically suction out the brain tissue of her own flesh and blood—and in some cases remove his vital organs—while he’s still alive, then gives one last tug to expel the baby’s shapeless head and lifeless body?</p>

<h2>Ignoring the Obvious</h2>

<p>What goes through your mind when you contemplate the reality of this procedure? Sometimes it’s possible to talk about an issue in the sterility of a classroom or a radio talk show. When we get a clear, unambiguous look at the particular thing we’re discussing, though, words of justification fail us.</p>

<p>There is a moral quality to partial-birth abortion that is self-evident. This is why Pat Schroeder doesn’t want line drawings displayed in Congress. All you have to do is picture it and you know immediately what’s going on. Yet it’s a medical procedure being performed on a regular basis, protected by the laws of our government.</p>

<p>Why don’t more people see this? Because of our moral confusion. We’re dizzy with the speed of our own moral decline.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Diane M. Gianelli, “Shock Tactic Ads Target Late-Term Abortion Procedure,”&nbsp;<em>American Medical News</em>, AMA, July 5, 1993, p. 21. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">National Abortion Federation, “Later Abortions: Questions and Answers,”&nbsp;<em>The Abortion Rights Activist</em>, p. 1. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Robin Abcarian, “Lifesaving Option or Criminal Conduct?”, <em>LA Times</em>, Nov. 26, 1995, p. E-1. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">Douglas Johnson, “Pro-Aborts Fight Bill to Ban Partial-Birth Abortion,”&nbsp;National Right to Life Committee, p. 2. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5"><em>Dayton News</em>, interview, Dec. 10, 1989. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">NRLC brief, “Senate Hearing Explodes Pro-Abortion Misinformation About Partial-Birth Abortions,”&nbsp;Nov. 28, 1995, p. 1. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7">NAF, “Later Abortions: Questions and Answers,”&nbsp;p. 2. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
</div>

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title: Partial-Birth Abortion Is Not About Abortion
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/partial-birth-abortion-is-not-about-abortion
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>When we justify the killing of a fully human child because of severe, congenital defect, we are not making a case for abortion; we’re promoting something much more chilling. Even the mothers involved know what’s going on.</em></p>

<p>If there is no good reason to allow partial-birth abortion, then why the intense resistance? Why is there so much confusion on this? Why do so many—mothers, doctors, Senators, members of Congress—accept such bad reasons for this barbaric practice?</p>

<p>As I turned this question over in my mind, I realized in a flash of insight why people don’t see the obvious. They misunderstand this procedure—partial-birth abortion, D&amp;X abortion—because of one very misleading term: abortion.</p>

<p>Abortion is sacred to many in this country. “Abortion is a woman’s Constitutional right, therefore all abortions must be defended,”&nbsp;you’ll hear. “Make one type of abortion illegal and the dominoes begin to fall,”&nbsp;others warn.</p>

<p>There’s a problem, though. Simply calling a procedure an abortion doesn’t make it one. A thing is what it is, regardless of the name used for it. Language may change perception, but it doesn’t change the thing itself.</p>

<p>An abortion is what happens to a child <em>within</em> the womb of its mother. This is clear from every court case dealing with the issue. In partial-birth abortion, however, the delivery is 85% complete. The child is not on the inside of its mother when it’s killed; it’s on the outside.</p>

<p>If partial-birth abortion is not really an abortion, then what is it? Let me ask a question. What is it called when a newborn child is killed <em>outside</em> the womb? It’s not called an abortion; it’s called infanticide. <strong>The chilling truth is this: Partial-birth abortion is not really abortion; it’s infanticide. It’s the killing of an innocent human child outside his mother’s body, often solely because of the baby’s handicap.</strong></p>

<h2>Even the Mothers Know</h2>

<p>Coreen Costello had a partial-birth abortion last spring, midway through her third trimester. In her testimony before the Senate she said, “Our darling little girl was going to die.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> Why was her little girl going to die? Because she had a lethal neurological disorder, and therefore Mrs. Costello, a Christian pro-lifer, chose a D&amp;X abortion.</p>

<p>Please, do not mistake the argument here: “’We must kill our darling little girl.’&nbsp;’Why?’&nbsp;’Because she’s severely handicapped and is going to die anyway.’”&nbsp;Even if you sympathize with Coreen’s reasons, realize this is not an argument for abortion; it’s an argument for infanticide. When you justify the killing of a human child because of a severe, congenital defect, you are making a case for euthanasia, not abortion.</p>

<p>(In Mrs. Costello’s case, it’s not clear she even had a partial-birth abortion as defined in HR 1833. In a moving account distributed nationwide by the <em>New York Times News Service</em>, Costello claims her pregnancy was life-threatening, and that the anesthesia killed the baby before delivery. Both conditions would exempt her from the restrictions of this bill. Nevertheless, my point still stands. Here is a clear admission of the <em>full</em> humanity of the child <em>before</em> its birth. Costello even refers to her little girl by name, Katherine Grace.)<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<p>Both of the women I heard in radio discussions said they held their babies and sang to them after their partial-birth abortions. Why would a mother gently cuddle the dead body of her aborted child? Would she cradle her extracted tonsils and sing softly to them? Would she affectionately name her spleen after it’s been surgically removed from her body? “This is different,”&nbsp;she’ll tell you. “It’s my baby.”</p>

<p>This is a tacit admission that these children were human beings. If the baby’s body is a human corpse <em>after</em> the abortion, then how can one ever deny the baby was a human child <em>before</em> it was killed?</p>

<p>Do you know what this tells us? Their actions and their words prove they’re talking about taking the life of a fully human baby. It tells us that even the mothers know that human children are being killed because of their handicap. Do you know what you call that? You don’t call it abortion; you call it infanticide.</p>

<h2>Changing Tactics</h2>

<p>Pro-abortionists know this. Graham Walker of the <em>Orange County Register</em> points out, “Schroeder and Boxer didn’t stick to pro-choice logic. They didn’t oppose the criminalization bill on the grounds that a woman’s reason for choosing an abortion is no business of anyone’s except the woman and possibly her doctor. Instead, they opposed the bill on the grounds that the reasons women elect this particular abortion procedure are ’good’&nbsp;reasons, not frivolous ones.”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></p>

<p>Since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the courts have spoken. They have not allowed any meaningful restriction on any kind of abortion. Abortion is a matter of privacy and choice. Period.</p>

<p>If D&amp;X is really an abortion, then why any further defense or justification? Here’s why: the same action taken on the same baby at the same stage of development would be felony infanticide if the child moved a mere three inches further down the birth canal.</p>

<p>Dr. Pamela Smith of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago told the House Judiciary Committee, “The surgeon must move quickly to insure that the baby does not manage to move the inches that are legally required to transform its status from one of an abortus to that of a living human child.”<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup></p>

<p>Pro-abortionists know that D&amp;X is not a standard abortion, so the standard justifications—a woman’s right to privacy or her right to choose—don’t work. I have yet to hear the challenge, “You can’t tell me what I can do with my own body,”&nbsp;applied to partial-birth abortion.</p>

<p>The emerging baby is clearly not her body—not a piece of tissue, or a “conceptus,”&nbsp;or even a fetus—but a child’s body coming forth from hers. It’s her son or daughter, squirming and writhing, struggling to complete its entry into the outside world.</p>

<p>Pro-abortionists know they need stronger justification, so they switch to arguments traditionally used to defend euthanasia. Everybody knows intuitively what’s going on here. The mother knows. The doctors and nurses know. Pro-abortionists know. But it doesn’t seem all that bad.</p>

<p>We listen to heart-rending personal anecdotes by anguished moms who desperately wanted their babies, but something went wrong. Moved with emotion we concede, “Well, I can understand her decision. I’d do the same thing myself.”&nbsp;Coreen Costello said, “[I] always believed abortion was wrong. Then I had one.”<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup></p>

<p>Such personal glimpses are moving, even compelling, but unfortunately cause us to lose sight of the real question at hand: How ought we treat physically imperfect children, even if they are destined to die soon after birth?</p>

<p>The answer now being given is the wrong one and increases the velocity of our moral decline as we slide further down the slippery slope.</p>

<h2>Slipping Down the Slope</h2>

<p>Ethics makes a distinction between two kinds of slippery slopes. The “causal slippery slope”&nbsp;is like a line of dominoes falling. An action that might be morally benign in itself, leads to something else that’s immoral, casting a shadow on the first. For example, if pornography causes violence against women, then pornography may be morally suspect.</p>

<p>The second is called a “logical slippery slope.”&nbsp;When one thing is immoral, and a second is logically similar in a morally relevant way, the moral quality of the one slips over into the other. Murder is immoral, and some think capital punishment is similar enough to murder to make capital punishment immoral too. That’s how it works.</p>

<p>A logical slippery slope can slip in either direction. If you have a morally acceptable thing, and something else is logically similar to it, then arguably the second thing becomes morally acceptable, too.</p>

<p>Judith Jarvis Thompson justifies abortion using a logical slippery slope tactic in her famous argument, “A Defense of Abortion.”<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup> Thompson describes a woman surgically connected, against her will, to a world-famous violinist who has a lethal kidney ailment. The connection is temporary—only nine months—and is necessary to save his life.</p>

<p>In Thompson’s view, the woman is morally justified to disconnect the violinist even though he’ll die. Abortion is a meaningful parallel to unplugging the violinist, according to Thompson. Therefore, it’s moral to abort a child, even if he or she is a fully human person, just like the violinist. The moral acceptability of the first act, the argument goes, “slips”&nbsp;over into the second act.</p>

<h2>The Real Reason</h2>

<p>The partial-birth abortion question places America at a critical juncture in the sanctity of life debate. Which way will we slide?</p>

<p>When you start with the view that abortion is a sacred right, then by reason of a logical slippery slope, you must argue for anything called abortion. “All abortions ought to be legal. D&amp;X is an abortion. Therefore, D&amp;X ought to be legal, too.”&nbsp;Slide a bit further and it looks like this: “If partial-birth abortion is moral, and partial-birth abortion is essentially the same as infanticide, then infanticide must be moral, too.”</p>

<p>We could, however, regain our moral sanity and slide the other way. If this atrocity is made illegal, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the very same thing is happening out of sight inside the womb in every late-term abortion. If the first is morally grotesque and illegal, then the second is grotesque and should be illegal, too.</p>

<p>Pro-abortionists know this, and that’s why they’re fighting so hard. They want freedom of choice at any cost, regardless of the moral consequences. When they raise the alarm, “This is the first step towards making all abortions illegal!”,&nbsp;we finally have their real objection to HR 1833.</p>

<p>It’s a legitimate fear. Once one realizes D&amp;X abortions are clearly immoral, it’s going to be hard to justify any late-term abortion. On the other hand, if it’s clear that a living human child is being butchered, yet D&amp;X remains legal simply because abortion is legal, then even the hardiest libertarians should realize there’s something terribly wrong with the current state of abortion law.</p>

<h2>No Clear Moral Intuitions</h2>

<p>The question we now face is, “Which way will we slip?”</p>

<p>Will we admit D&amp;X is really infanticide by another name? Will we then recognize that any late term abortion under cover of the mother’s womb is enough like D&amp;X to be immoral, too? If partial-birth abortion is <em>de facto</em> infanticide, what meaningful moral distinction is there between infanticide and any other late-term abortions? They all destroy a little human being.</p>

<p>Or will we slide the other way? Will the public, will the Congress, will the President admit that pro-lifers are right (that partial-birth abortions are virtual infanticide), but then conclude that since abortion is moral—and here we slip the other way—then infanticide must be moral, too?</p>

<p>We can go either way. That’s why we’re at such a critical juncture.</p>

<p>Don’t count on much help from clear-case examples, either. These depend for their force on having a fairly robust moral intuition intact to begin with. If one asked, “Would we do this to a two-week-old child?”,&nbsp;many would shrug their shoulders and say, “Why not? Take the baby’s life right now and use its organs for somebody else.”</p>

<p>Even as I write, the <em>LA Times</em> features a letter from Dr. Charles Plows, Chair of the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the American Medical Association. He wants the liberty to harvest organs from children born anencephalic, missing most of their cerebral cortex.</p>

<p>Dr. Plows calls it a “life saving”&nbsp;policy considering the “numbers of infants born with vital organs that are incapable of sustaining life who are dying because of the lack of donors...”<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup> But the donors he has in mind are <em>living</em> children who would be euthanized, sacrificed for their body parts.</p>

<p>Of course, you’ll never hear any put it that way. You won’t hear the word infanticide. Instead, you’ll hear about the safest late-term abortion technique yet: deliver the baby completely, then kill it.</p>

<p>What kind of abortion is this, you ask, where the doctor delivers the child before taking her life? Why, it’s a post-natal abortion, of course.</p>

<h2>The Ostrich Fallacy</h2>

<p>This debate is like the proverbial ostrich hiding its head in the sand, blocking out the world to escape trouble. We use the illustration to discredit someone who won’t see the obvious. He is a fool who, like the ostrich, thinks the real world disappears when his head is covered and his eyes are closed.</p>

<p>Those defending partial-birth abortions want to define the real world of the child by where its head is located. But how much of a newborn’s body must be inside the mother to justify killing it? The baby’s arm? His little fist? Why not just one finger?</p>

<p>If the baby was a bird, we’d call this stupid. Instead, it’s considered sound ethics. Those who hold this view are themselves sticking their heads in the sand. They ignore what’s obvious to anyone who has his eyes open: D&amp;X abortion is infanticide with the baby’s head covered.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Quoted in Robin Abcarian, “Lifesaving Option or Criminal Conduct?”, <em>LA Times</em>, Nov. 26, 1995. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">Coreen Costello, “Late Abortion Tragic, Private Matter, Not Decision for Congress to Make,”&nbsp;<em>New York times News Service</em>, featured in <em>LA Daily News</em>, Conejo Valley edition, Dec. 4, 1995, p. 2. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Graham Walker, <em>Orange County Register</em>, “Why Stop at the Third Trimester?”, Nov. 10, 1995. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">Dr. Pamela Smith, testimony before the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, June 15, 1995. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">Costello. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">Judith Jarvis Thompson, “A Defense of Abortion,”&nbsp;<em>Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs</em>, 1 (1971), p. 47. I’m currently working on a full critique of Thompson’s argument for a future edition of <em>Clear Thinking</em>. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7"><em>LA Times</em>, January 17, 1996, B-8. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
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title: White Lies and Other Deceptions
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/white-lies-and-other-deceptions
content:
            <div> 
		<p>I think lying is wrong. However, we have to be clear on what constitutes lying, that is, immoral deception.</p>

<p>It seems that not all deceptions are immoral. Did you ever make a fake while playing basketball? Isn’t such a feint a deception? It is, but I don’t think most people would consider it immoral, even though it was, in fact, deceptive.</p>

<p>There are other examples. We dress to flatter our figures instead of being entirely truthful about our physical shape. We wear hairpieces if our hair is thinner than we’d like to show. There are times we’re not forthcoming with all the truth. More could be said, but we withhold information.</p>

<p>So it seems reasonable to say there are “deceptions”&nbsp;we wouldn’t really consider immoral—faking in basketball, trying to dress in a flattering way, or not being forthcoming with all the information we might have.</p>

<p>Incidentally, I don’t think Jesus was always forthright. Take, for example, the woman at the well (John 4). Jesus had a goal He was not immediately forthright about. I don’t see this as manipulation, though, but as sensitivity to the moment. If Jesus wasn’t always entirely forthright in some cases, yet we know He never committed any sin, then that means it isn’t necessarily a sin if you’re not forthright about everything.</p>

<p>Take this example. You come into a store and want to get the best price for something you intend to buy. You’ve done some research, but you don’t let on up front. Instead, as a tactical move you play stupid. There is a kind of deception here, one could argue, but I think you’d be hard pressed to call it sinful. It seems we’re not obliged tell everything we know.</p>

<p>On the one hand, there are blatant deceptions that are clearly sinful. Then there also seems to be a category of deceptions that don’t rise to the category of sin. Then you have, in the middle, situations I would call moral dilemmas. These are more difficult judgment calls.</p>

<p>A moral dilemma is when you must choose one of two things, but either thing would be wrong to do when taking on its own. Do you endanger a human life, or do you tell a lie? If you choose to tell the truth, and may you do right by telling the truth, but it seems you do wrong by exposing a human being to serious harm. If you protect the human being by lying, well, you’ve saved a life, but told a lie. That is a moral or ethical dilemma.</p>

<p>There are a couple of different ways Christians have approached this historically. One is to claim there really is no such thing as an ethical dilemma. Some will say you should never lie, you should always tell the truth, and let God worry about the consequences.</p>

<p>What if you see a woman run into an alley to escape someone who’s trying to kill her, and they ask you, “Where is she?”&nbsp;What do you do? Do you send them on a wild goose chase to protect the woman’s life? Or do you lead them to their victim?</p>

<p>Some would say you are morally obliged to tell exactly where she’s hiding and let God take care of it. But that option can cut in both directions. Why not protect her by lying and let God take care of it by forgiving the lie? Which do you choose? This question is at the heart of all ethical dilemmas.</p>

<p>The Bible gives us some guidance on this. It teaches that not all sins are the same. Some are more egregious than others. This is very clear in the Scriptures. Jesus said to Pilate, “He who delivered Me up to you has the greater sin”&nbsp;(John 19:11). According to Jesus, some sins are greater than others.</p>

<p>Common sense alone tells us that stealing a pencil is not as serious a crime as taking someone’s life. Make no mistake, it’s still a sin, and even a small sin is enough to make us guilty before God. But all sin is not the same to God. He certainly does make distinctions. And because God makes distinctions, it’s possible for us to solve ethical dilemmas. When stuck between two options, we choose the greater good.</p>

<p>What about so-called “white lies.”&nbsp;Are they okay since they’re only small deceptions? My rule is this: I think people should tell the truth unless they have a more weighty moral reason not to be straightforward.</p>

<p>If my wife asked me if I thought she was overweight and she was, I wouldn’t say, “No, honey, you’re perfect.”&nbsp;First, she probably knows better. Second, I think she’d actually be looking for affirmation from me, not really an assessment of her weight. I’d tell her what I thought, but would be careful to do it in a way that protected her as an individual. I’d let her know that being overweight wouldn’t change my love for her.</p>

<p>Here is another example, a classic for single guys. A guy goes out on a date and doesn’t enjoy himself, so he wouldn’t be inclined to ask the young lady out again, though he suspects she enjoyed herself and would like to get together again. What does he say when he drops her off? He isn’t going to say, “I’m never going to call you again,”&nbsp;yet he doesn’t want to just walk away and say nothing. Because of the awkwardness he says, “I’ll call you,”&nbsp;but he doesn’t intend to and never does.</p>

<p>I think that’s wrong. There is no moral reason to lie to her. He’s just saving himself from a little awkwardness, but he’s telling an untruth.</p>

<p>I also think it’s wrong to tell children that Santa Claus is real. It accomplishes no superior moral purpose. It’s only deception. Children might eventually believe you’ve deceived them about God, too. They can’t see Santa and they can’t see God, either. There’s no good reason to create a problem by starting with a deception.</p>

<p>It takes some moral development to be able to solve ethical dilemmas. People who aren’t working at it will not be capable of making good ethical decisions because they are not alert to ethical distinctions.</p>

<p>J. P. Moreland once asked why he should trust the moral judgment of a professor, or Hollywood star, etc., if they have not given any effort to developing their moral sensibilities. You might ask the opinion of somebody like Mother Teresa who has given her life to doing good and developing virtuous behavior. Through practice, she has developed her sense of ethical judgment. But why go to anybody who hasn’t done anything to develop their ethical sensibilities and who basically is committed to ethical egoism? Why should we accept their instruction?</p>

<p>Why should we accept Hollywood’s ethical assessment on anything? Why should we care what a movie star thinks about homosexuality, or abortion, or any other ethical issue? I’m not trying to commit genetic fallacy here and say that movie stars know nothing. What I’m saying is that what we see in most of those people, once we’ve been exposed to their private lives, are people who are deeply consumed with self. Their lives are about themselves, not about living morally. Why should we care what their ethical assessment is on anything? They are not qualified.</p>

<p>We can only be adept at solving ethical problems if we give some effort to thinking about it and to living the ethical life.</p>

<p>I think lying is right sometimes. I think Rahab did right when she lied about the spies. I think the Hebrew midwives did right when they lied to Pharaoh to protect the lives of the Hebrew children.</p>

<p>I think trespassing is right sometimes. I think violence is right sometimes. I think there are many things that, in isolation, would be wrong, but when a higher moral good is served, they not only become not wrong, they become obligatory. That’s hard for some to accept.</p>

<p>Rahab was obliged to lie to protect the lives of those spies. Both James and the writer of Hebrews applaud her for her action. They didn’t say, “Shame, shame, but I guess you chose the lesser of two evils.”&nbsp;Instead, they acted like she chose the greater of two goods. She did what was right.</p>

<p>I think that’s the Biblical view. In Acts 4, the apostles were told to disobey the government and preach the gospel. Paul says that we are obliged to obey the government. Yet when the government tells us to disobey a higher command of God, then we are morally obliged to disobey the government. We have to choose the greater good, as the disciples did.</p>
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title: It’s Not About Equality
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 03/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/it-s-not-about-equality
content:
            <div> 
		<p>The term “marriage equality,”&nbsp;if it means “the right to marry whomever you want,”&nbsp;is simply not an accurate term for what same-sex marriage supporters are advocating—not if they favor any restrictions whatsoever (age, number of people, incest, etc.). The truth is that nearly everyone <em>does</em> favor a definition of marriage that has boundaries and thereby denies “marriage equality”&nbsp;to some category of couple (or group).</p>

<p>As you’re likely to hear this term often this week while the Supreme Court is reviewing Prop 8, below is a reposting of “<a href="/w/we-re-arguing-definitions-not-rights" target="_blank">We’re Arguing Definitions, Not Rights</a>”&nbsp;that can help you move your conversations past the charge that you want to deny people equal rights to the real question: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1364365125&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=what+is+marriage" target="_blank">What is marriage?</a></p>

<p>And for a collection of links to more posts and resources discussing this issue, see “<a href="/w/three-judge-panel-strikes-down-prop-8" target="_blank">Three-Judge Panel Strikes Down Prop 8</a>.”</p>

<h2>We’re Arguing Definitions, Not Rights</h2>

<p>One common misconception in the same-sex marriage debate is the idea that the traditional legal definition of marriage is a violation of equal rights. Since this is an extremely emotionally charged accusation, it’s difficult to get past it into a real discussion of the issue.</p>

<p>Here’s the approach I usually take:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>1. Nearly <em>everyone</em> who thinks the government ought to issue marriage licenses favors defining marriage in some way. That is, they favor excluding some <em>combinations</em> of people (polygamy, incest, etc.), not <em>individuals</em>, from the definition. Even <a href="/w/federal-judge-strikes-down-prop-8" target="_blank">judges</a>. Even you!</p>

<p>2. You can’t consistently argue that by excluding certain combinations of people, traditional marriage violates equal rights—<em>unless</em> you also argue to remove every single boundary from the definition of marriage and say anyone can marry anyone, in whatever combination of numbers they like.</p>

<p>3. If you’re not willing to argue this, then you’re <em>for</em> having a definition with boundaries, which puts you on equal footing with the traditional marriage supporters.</p>

<p>4. So the question is, which definition should we use? It’s fine for you to argue that your definition of “two people who love each other”&nbsp;is better than my definition of “one man, one woman,”&nbsp;or someone else’s definition of “one man, multiple women,”&nbsp;but we need to start off by understanding that we’re arguing <em>definitions</em>, not rights.</p>

<p>It’s not unconstitutional to adopt either my or your definition, as long as it’s applied equally to every <em>individual</em>. Remember that the Constitution doesn’t recognize rights for <em>combinations</em> of people; rights only belong to individuals. So one can’t say that a man and five women have a <em>right</em> to get married; one can only say that each individual man or woman has the right to enter into marriage (no individual is excluded). This right is then acted upon according to the boundaries set by the state’s definition of what marriage <em>is</em>—boundaries which are equally applied to every <em>individual</em>. You would like to equally apply the boundary of “two people who love each other”&nbsp;(excluding some other combinations), and I would like to apply the boundary of “one man, one woman”&nbsp;to each individual equally.</p>

<p>But I agree that the boundaries we place on marriage need to be relevant to the institution of marriage in order to be legitimate, so why don’t we sit down and talk about the reasons why we each think the country should use our definition?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This definition-vs.-rights issue needs to be clarified. Otherwise, if you’re arguing for the boundaries of traditional marriage, you’ll enter the argument having already been unfairly declared an unconstitutional bigot before any of your reasons are explained (despite the fact that your opponent <em>also</em> favors certain boundaries), and anyone would be unlikely to listen to the reasons <em>why</em> you’re an unconstitutional bigot. We have to get past this first barrier if we want to be given the chance to make our case.</p>
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title: Catholics, Protestants & Justification
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/catholics-protestants-justification
content:
            <div> 
		<p><strong><em>How close are Catholics and Protestants on the issue of justification?</em></strong></p>

<p>As we work through the issue of justification from the different viewpoints of Catholicism and Protestantism and try to look carefully at what the distinctives are, it may sound like we're really talking about the same thing. But we're not. There is a sense that the grace of Jesus Christ is working through us all and that in the process of receiving the grace and having that grace manifest our lives are demonstrating more holiness. But the Catholic concept of merit is different from a Protestant perspective, and I don't mean just as we see it, but I think this is the Biblical view.</p>

<p>I guess I would like to ask a Catholic, Do you know if you died at this moment whether you are going to heaven? Do you know that you have eternal life? When I was a Catholic myself I could never say that. And even the Catholics that I talk to now think that it's kind of arrogant that you would know that you have eternal life, as if I know that I would merit it. I don't know I merit it, I know that Christ's merit applies to me and that's why I get it, so it wouldn't be arrogant from where I sit. But even that they would think that it was arrogant makes the point that it isn't all Christ that's doing this, in their view, that we're the ones who are meriting it and we will only know at the end of our lives. So the merit in this sense is keeping or adding to the score, as it were, and then we know after it's all over when we add up the points to see if we have a score that qualifies us for heaven. And if we do, we'd say that Christ did that through us.</p>

<p>I am talking about an entirely different order of things when I'm talking about sanctification and justification. I'm saying that the score is settled when I deal with the issue of sin in my life judicially before God. God knows that I have all kinds of sins to my credit. That's the certificate of debt that Paul talks about in Colossians 2. There's the list of things and all of those were future events to Christ. God knows from the beginning to the end the sins I haven't even committed yet, sins that my mind has committed that my hands haven't gotten to yet. God has them all on His list because they will all eventually be against me in the final tally. Jesus had to die for every one of those sins or else I have to pay for some that He didn't die for. If I have to pay for some, then I'm sunk. But if Jesus paid for them, <em>then He paid for them and that's it </em>. Do you see?</p>

<p>It isn't like Jesus is around to help me to earn "holy points" as I work through my life so that I make the score at the end. That misses the issue entirely. Even if I win a billion holy points throughout the rest of my life with Jesus' help, that doesn't speak one iota to the real issue: what about the sins I <em>have </em>committed? You don't pay off sin by getting holy points with Jesus' help. Sin is always there. The ancients wrote, "How can we pay off sin by doing good things?" We already owe good things. That's what God deserves anyway, so it can't be used to pay off our past sin. We're still faced with sin. Jesus came to pay off the sin so I go to Him and say, "I can earn all the holy points I want with Your help", that doesn't deal with the problem. I need someone to pay for my sin so I don't have to pay for it. Jesus said, I already paid. <cite>Tetelestai </cite>. It is finished. Paid in full. The certificate of debt has been taken away, having been nailed to the cross. I say, that's great. I'll join up. I like those terms. I'm guilty. You're saying I can be forgiven. I trust you, Jesus, and you offer me forgiveness.</p>

<p>You know what happens when that happens? I get forgiven. Period. The guilt of my sin is forgiven. Now I'm His. I walk with Him. Yes, He does help me to do good things and I do that through His help, but I am no longer an outsider using Jesus to rack up merit points hoping to get in when I die. No, I'm already a son. I'm in the family and God is now training me by the grace that is available through Jesus how to be a son. That's the difference.</p>

<p>That's why Paul can say in Romans 8, "You haven't received a spirit of slavery leading to fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons in which we cry out 'Papa, Daddy.'" In other words, folks, we are safe. Don't you see that? If it's just a matter of racking up enough merit points with Jesus' help, hoping that I have enough points at the end of my life, then I'm not safe. I have received the spirit of slavery leading to fear again. I am still subject to the sting of death and the fear that accompanies it because I don't know what's on the other side. John writes very clearly in 1 John 5, "I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you might know that you have eternal life." You might <em>know </em>it. You don't hope for it. When you die, you know it.</p>

<p>That's why the Christians were so excited--forgiveness was available and they became inheritors of eternal life. They were not excited because now Jesus could help them work to Heaven. That, by the way, is the Galatian heresy. That was the problem in Galatia. And Paul wrote the book of Galatians to deal with this in mind. It was the same problem that was addressed at the first Jerusalem council in Acts 15. It is not Jesus plus works. It is Jesus alone.</p>

<p>The Catholic church has always been guilty of confusing this issue. It's been Jesus plus works. Jesus helps you to work to heaven. Part of the frightening thing that I have heard of late from Catholic priests and spokespeople is that Jesus is no longer an essential factor. You can be a good Buddhist, or Muslim, or a good atheist and still go to heaven. You don't need Jesus anymore. You just need goodness. We're right back to the law once again.</p>
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title: God and Evolution
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/god-and-evolution
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>What is the problem with evolutionists referring to “Mother Nature?”</em></p>

<p>I’ve got tons of fishing magazines at home; they’re laying everywhere. This one is entitled <em>In-Fisherman</em> and it is one of the best fishing magazines around. It’s very helpful in educating you about fishing—fresh-water fishing in particular. But they have these short sections in the beginning—snippets, side-bar type things. This one is entitled “New View of Eye-Spots.”&nbsp;It talks about how they are reassessing why these creatures have eye-spots. The purpose for eye-spots, according to evolutionary theory, is to trick the larger fish into attacking the eye-spot and away from the vulnerable spot on the fish in order to give the shad a chance to get away. But now there’s a case of a shad, which is a small bait fish that larger fish eat, that has an eye-spot right in the middle of its body, which seems to be the most vulnerable spot. Why would they have an eye-spot there if the purpose of an eye-spot is to provide a protective advantage for the shad?</p>

<p>There’s a comment made in the article, “The spots on the sides of shad may have evolved as a way to help the species maintain formation while schooling or spawning and not for defense against predators.”&nbsp;Here’s another case where you have the evolution language mixed with design language. It “may have evolved as a way to help.”&nbsp;In other words, there is a purpose for this and that’s to help schooling fish. It’s so interesting when one explanation based on evolution doesn’t work and they try to come up with another explanation, but both of these explanations imply design and purpose.</p>

<p>I then began reading a book called <em>Big Bass Magic</em>. This author is quite a conservationist, and I’m glad for that. He advocates catch and release, which is big among bass fishermen because we catch our fish for the sport of it and then let them go unharmed. Of course, then they can return to their natural habitat, spawn and enjoy a long life there and maybe be caught again, so we have a resource that is maintained.</p>

<p>The author writes this unusual paragraph. Listen carefully to the words: “Generally, today’s fish management has its roots in the agencies and programs of the forties. The purpose at that time was to determine how to exploit what was considered the lavishly over-abundant fish resource.”</p>

<p>Let me pause for a moment. He used the word “purpose.”&nbsp;Who has the purpose? Fish management people, right? “The purpose at the time was to determine how to better exploit what was considered the lavishly over-abundant fish resource.”</p>

<p>He continues, “We often still find that attitude in fish management today, and it is typified by the much publicized statement that any fish that grows up, dies of old age and is never caught is a wasted resource. Well, that presumes that in nature no purpose is served by the complete life of that fish, and it is too much for me to take when that is denied. Nature would not allow a bass, for instance, to reach ten pounds if a bass that size served no purpose in the balance of the ecosystem.”</p>

<p>He’s saying, look, older bass, bigger bass, the ones that people catch and hang on their wall really serve a purpose in the ecosystem. Notice how he used the word purpose to describe the intent of fishery management and then he used the word purpose to describe the intent of nature. Now, what the heck is that? Nature is not a person, therefore nature cannot have intent. Only agents have intents. Nature doesn’t. Nature is just a general way of describing the accident of cause and effect in a naturalistic system. So to say that nature has a purpose that is served by the complete life of the fish in the ecosystem is to say something that is nonsense. It’s ironic that it is said so glibly without a blush by a man who is deeply committed to evolution.</p>

<p>Now, I think that his gut-level observation is accurate. I think it seems clear that there is some purpose for the full life span of different species, but we can only make a comment like that if there is <em>someone</em> behind the scenes that is purposing, such that the things that we see have purposes. I think it is obvious there is a designer and that’s why it is very easy for this man to talk about the purpose of individuals in wildlife management in the same breath as talking about the purpose of nature. It appears that both nature and wildlife management individuals are people that purpose. I think he is right, but nature is not like a mother nature that is to be worshiped. What we call nature is really the purposes of God. It is so obvious that even this evolutionist can’t speak in such a way as to avoid that conclusion, which goes to make another point.</p>

<p>If you are an evolutionist, you are not a theist in the sense that your theism has anything to do with the real world. If you want to believe in God and believe in evolution, fine, go ahead and do that, but don’t act like your belief in God has anything to do with the real world. It doesn’t. Your belief about the real world is evolution, and that means time and chance. If you believe that God has something to do with the real world, then you can’t be an evolutionist because evolution is run by chance, not by God, by definition.</p>

<p>Secondly, if you are an evolutionist, then please be honest with yourself and everyone else and abandon this Mother Nature language and all of this purpose talk that you invariably allow to be smuggled into your language when talking about the natural realm. You are rationally obliged, if you want to be intellectually honest, to refer to the rest of the time/space continuum world in entirely chance terms. No more Mother Nature language. No more purpose language. No more design language. Nothing.</p>

<p>I think if you consistently talk in a way that fits your basic world view you will see how ridiculous that world ends up being. It becomes untenable. It can’t be held because the world is obviously designed. Things obviously fit into ecosystems with a particular purpose. They obviously have their place. Bodies are obviously artifacts. Mouths were made for eating. Hands were made for grasping. Legs were made for walking. They don’t just happen to do that because they accidentally formed that way through the forces of nature acting on mindless matter. That, by the way, is the thing that gives human beings purpose. Not only are their bodies purposeful but their lives are purposeful as well.</p>

<p>Why? There is an intelligent Creator who is behind everything. A Creator we see quite obviously, as Paul says in the book of Romans, and as you say consistently every time you use the words Mother Nature.</p>
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title: Treating Equals Equally
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/31/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/treating-equals-equaly
content:
            <div> 
		<p>The key to answering the claims of same-sex marriage advocates is understanding the basic rule of justice: Treat equals equally. If parties are not equal in a relevant sense, then there is no obligation of justice to treat them the same.</p>

<p>When someone demands the same recognition for homosexual unions as for heterosexual unions, remind him of the rule of justice. Then ask if homosexual relationships are really equal with heterosexual ones. Does he actually believe there is no essential difference between the two? If there are essential differences, then the two are not equal and there is no moral obligation to treat them as if they were.</p>

<p>Further, since legal marriage is really nothing more than officially granting public respect and approval to a union of two individuals, and since you as a member of the public do not in fact approve, then you have no obligation to support homosexual “marriage,”&nbsp;and can even oppose it.</p>
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title: I’m Not Dead Yet
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/i-m-not-dead-yet
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Why are human beings valuable? What is a human being? You have to answer those questions before you can say that this child isn’t a human being without value.</em></p>

<p>I had a fascinating discussion with some Christian friends and some non-Christian acquaintances last evening at a dinner party. It reminded me of something that Chuck Colson said last year when he addressed the Harvard Business School on the issue of ethics. He said, “Every person has an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.”</p>

<p>I think about that often. Although this immediate application has to do with how non-Christians often rationalize their unbelief, I think about it in another way. Am I just seeking some answer, any answer, for what I happen to believe <em>now</em>, grasping about for any solution to a problem Christianity presents, no matter how thin that solution may be? Some proposed solutions to questions people raise are just not adequate, yet we believe them because it assuages out doubt. “There’s something I can hold onto,”&nbsp;even though it may not be a real good solution to the problem we’re facing. They’re enough to calm our fears, our doubts, for the moment, but other people see right through them.</p>

<p>This is a good reason we should always be vigilant as we seek to justify our faith. We need to always come back to two things when we confront these issues: are our facts accurate and is our reasoning sound. That’s the long and short of it when seeking correspondence truth, truth that corresponds to reality. If there’s a problem with our thinking, either our facts are wrong our reasoning wrong. But if our reasoning is sound and our facts are right, then there’s no escaping the truthfulness of our conclusions. It’s the way reason and logic works. We all live in a world where our survival depends upon that. So that’s why we should be vigilant and ask ourselves, “Is this a good explanation or am I just grasping for a rationalization that will help me cling to my belief?”</p>

<p>In any event, we had a discussion last night that reminded me of Colson’s remark. It was a discussion about how we make ethical decisions.</p>

<p>I had made a comment, which I have made here, that people do ethics by determining what they want and then reasoning backwards and rationalizing their conclusion based on what they really want. I call it happiness as ethics. “This is what I want in my circumstance. This will cause me the least discomfort, this will make me happy. How can I justify this?”</p>

<p>Of course, I think that’s reasoning backwards about ethics. We talked about not making ad hoc decisions about ethics. In other words, not facing an ethical decision and as they come up, thinking what sounds best and spouting off about it. But first examining in our lives what it is we believe, what is truth, what is right and wrong, and then reasoning from a foundation of truth to an applicational situation that we might face. And one came up yesterday.</p>

<p>In Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, three weeks ago a little girl was born with anencephaly. Most of her brain was missing and she only had a brain stem, but she was still alive. She had reflex functions but no cognitive functions. 95% of such babies are dead within a week, and virtually all die within two weeks.</p>

<p>The reason this case was so controversial is that anencephalitic children make great organ donors, but their organs must be removed while they’re still alive, and that means the children must be killed to harvest the organs that will save the lives of other children. Technically this is called non-voluntary active euthanasia, in other words, a case where the life is purposefully taken from an individual who cannot decide for themselves. In this case, of course, the end in view was clear—saving the lives of other children with the organs of a child who was going to die shortly anyway.</p>

<p>When the parents sought the permission of the courts to allow this action, the courts ruled against them and the reasoning was that the child wasn’t dead yet and therefore it would be against the law to take organs that would kill the child.</p>

<p>I listened to some radio discussions about this issue on a secular station, and characteristically people were not just in disagreement but enraged at the judge’s decision. I heard remarks like:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>“We’re not killing a human being. This little baby is not a human being.”</p>

<p>“This may be a human body, but it’s not a human person because it doesn’t have that which distinguishes it from animals.”</p>

<p>“Did this judge think the baby would grow a brain? She’ll never develop into a person.”</p>

<p>“This judge is killing other babies that will die without the organs.”</p>

<p>“This is not a decision for <em>courts</em> but a decision for <em>parents</em>.”</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Now, listening to those comments I’m struck by two things. First of all, they sound pretty sensible. There’s a basic appeal to those sentiments. But also there are some things that are a tad curious. I quote, “This little baby is not a human being.”</p>

<p>Of course, before one can say this is not a human being, he must have a pretty clear idea of what a human being is before he can say that any particular child is not one. And it strikes me that there’s something patently unusual about saying that it’s possible that any particular child could <em>not</em> be a human being. A baby isn’t a human being? A child isn’t a human being? How can a baby or a child not be a human being? But what is it that distinguishes us from animals if it is not our innate humanness?</p>

<p>So this whole issue hinges on what a human being is and what, if anything, makes a human being valuable. Why are human beings valuable? What is a human being? You have to answer those questions before you can say that this child isn’t a human being without value.</p>

<p>The pragmatic, utilitarian answer to this dilemma is clear: take the organs because of the good that will come out of it. OK, maybe we have to kill the little girl early, but she would die soon anyway and there’s an advantage to others to taking her now and gathering the organs.</p>

<p>I don’t mean to be irreverent here, but this reminds me of a scene from <em>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</em>. It was a Medieval scene and a man was dragging a cart through town in the early morning chanting “Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.”&nbsp;People were bringing out the corpses of those who had kicked the bucket during the night and throwing them on this old haywain. And some young guy comes over and he’s got an old man over his shoulder. He’s about to throw this old man into the pile with all the other corpses and the old man says something. He says, “I’m not dead yet.”&nbsp;The young man speaks to the man gathering the corpses and says, “He’ll be dead soon, anyway.”&nbsp;The old man says, “I’m getting better.”&nbsp;So the young man picks up a log, bangs him on the head, kills him and throws him on the pile.</p>

<p>The way this story relates to the issue is that this unfortunate little girl was not dead yet. Because she would be dead shortly was no justification for hurrying the process along simply because there was a convenience to her earlier demise.</p>

<p>And this is where we start reasoning backwards. We first think about what it is that we think is right or what it is that we want and then seek to develop some ad hoc justification for it. If we reason that way, instead of first starting with the fundamental question “What is a human being and why are they valuable?”&nbsp;then we’re in for all sorts of trouble.</p>

<p>I was asked point blank last evening if I thought it was OK to harvest the organs in this case. I said no, and then explained why. And for those of you who are utilitarian on this issue, this isn’t going to sit well with you, but please hear me out. I start from a certain premise. My premise is that I believe human beings have infinite worth and are not to be treated merely as a means to an end, even if the end itself is a good one.</p>

<p>If we were to take the case of this little girl, we would have to say that her life is not as valuable as the end to which we will use her organs. It is not a trade off one life for five lives, if her organs would save five other children. We must view her life as infinitely valuable in and of itself and not a means to an end. And it may be true that killing one person would save the lives of five, but we won’t look at human beings that way.</p>

<p>During the Vietnam War, if a man was wounded, they would send in helicopter after helicopter after helicopter to try to rescue that one life because it was so valuable. The loss of other life was risked to save the one.</p>

<p>It’s the same with this little girl. We don’t have the right to say her life is forfeit to save the life of someone else.</p>

<p>The fact is, we’re all going to die eventually. If we transfer this reasoning, there is a slippery slope that is deadly in all of this. We can see this slippery slope happening. Whenever you argue quality of life, it ultimately has a poison pill buried in it. The only way you can argue quality of life is to say the life as a life, the human being as a human being, is not valuable in itself. And it has value in as much as it leads to a certain quality of life. Once you argue that way, you’ve destroyed something. Something that is the foundation of our Constitution and all our fundamental rights, that all men are created equal.</p>

<p>The only way I can illustrate this clearly is by asking a question I asked last night and I’ve also asked rhetorically here on this program: Are all humans created equal? Of course, it’s in our Constitution. How are all men created equal? Men are not equal except in one way—they are all men. This statement “all men are created equal”&nbsp;is tantamount to saying all men have inherent dignity apart from any other quality they can experience or value they bring to society. Upon that truth our system of justice and human respect and dignity stand. If we remove that, there is no reason to treat people with respect, there is no reason to protect human rights, there is no reason not to treat human beings as animals. There is no reason not to treat human beings as simply a means to another end.</p>

<p>That’s the circumstance that prevails whenever a quality of life argument is used. That’s the poison pill.</p>

<p>Pardon me for using this illustration because it’s oft over used, but that’s precisely what happened in Nazi Germany. There was an idea that there was such a thing as a life unworthy to be lived. If that’s the case, then human beings are expendable.</p>

<p>If you ever watched the TV mini-series “The Holocaust”&nbsp;with James Woods as an artist. In that movie they depicted the destruction of people not just in concentration camps, but prior to that. Before they started to destroy Jews and Gypsies and political dissidents, they first started destroying retarded children, people with brain defects. And they put them into vans and piped in carbon monoxide and killed them all. They looked on it as good because these people were difficult, they were expensive, they were awkward. They didn’t have the quality of life required of the Third Reich. They were expendable. And from that came the Holocaust.</p>

<p>I submit to you that we’re thinking the same way. Every time you raise a quality of life argument or discussion you have this poison pill of the fundamental loss of human dignity and the loss of the foundation for all human rights.</p>

<p>At least that’s the way I see it.</p>
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title: Partial-Birth Abortion: Objections and Misunderstandings
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 03/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/partial-birth-abortion-objections-and-misunderstandings
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Objections to a ban on partial-birth abortion fall into three categories: the silly, the false, and the inconsequential. Here are the facts on each one.</em></p>

<p>Suggested defenses of partial-birth abortion usually fall into three categories. First, detractors say the legislation is unnecessary because the procedure is so rare. Second, D&amp;X abortion is a vital medical option necessary to save the life of the mother. Third, the fetus dies even before the abortion takes place, so the procedure is morally benign.</p>

<h2>Objection #1: The Procedure is Very Rare.</h2>

<p>This was one of the first objections raised by Sam Donaldson on a recent broadcast of “This Week with David Brinkley.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> He noted that only about 450 partial-birth abortions are done each year. Only two doctors (Haskell and McMahon) did the procedure, he added, and one of them (McMahon) was now dead. This is the same information quoted in National Abortion Foundation materials.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<p>Haskell and McMahon, however, are not the only doctors using this procedure. The <em>New York Times</em>, November 6, 1995, quoted a gynecologist at a New York teaching hospital who said, “Of course I use it, and I’ve taught it for the last 10 years...So do doctors in other cities.”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> Further, Haskell and McMahon have written on and promoted this technique for years (I quoted earlier from Haskell’s instruction manual).</p>

<p>Even if this objection was true, it hardly seems significant. George Will pointed out that two jumbo jets crashing would result in “only”&nbsp;450 casualties, but who would minimize such a disaster?</p>

<p>This objection turns out to be silliness. If the fetus is nothing more than a blob of tissue, then a million abortions a day have no moral consequence. However, if these abortions kill innocent human children, then why ignore even a single, preventable death?</p>

<p>Another rare occurrence might bring this objection into focus. Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion on demand, there have been five killings of abortion providers. That’s “only”&nbsp;one dead every four and a half years. That was enough, however, to stimulate a barrage of legislation. Why should partial-birth abortion be different?</p>

<h2>Objection #2: D&amp;X Abortions May Save the Life of the Mother.</h2>

<p>The National Abortion Federation literature states unequivocally, “Women seeking later abortions do so for very serious reasons. <strong><em>All</em> abortions taking place in the third trimester are for reasons of serious fetal abnormality or a risk to the life of the woman”</strong><sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup> [emphasis in the original]. They cite as their source the <em>Abortion Fact Book</em> published in 1992 by the Allan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, and the NAF quarterly statistical reports of 1994.</p>

<p>But that’s not what the doctors who’ve performed most of these abortions say.</p>

<p>The <em>American Medical News</em>—the official newspaper of the AMA—documented Dr. Haskell’s forthright admission during a tape-recorded interview. “And I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range...In my particular case, probably 20% [of these abortions] are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective.”<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup></p>

<p>Dr. McMahon voluntarily submitted to the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee a sample of 175 partial-birth abortions he performed. In its official report the committee notes that 22% of the total abortions were for reasons of depression, not protection of the mother’s life.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup></p>

<p>Interestingly, even in the NAF material the reasons cited for why some doctors prefer this procedure have nothing to do with the life of the mother. It “prevents unnecessary bleeding and has a low complication rate. Reaction from the patients is positive [and] they found the surgery less painful and difficult than they expected.”&nbsp;Some families just “want a chance to say good-bye.”<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup></p>

<p>These may all be important considerations, everything being equal, but note that no doctor mentions threat to the mother’s life, even in the pro-abortion material. There’s a reason the doctors don’t emphasize it: there is no threat.</p>

<p>Dr. Pamela Smith, Director of Medical Education in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago, said, “There are absolutely no obstetrical situations encountered in this country which require a partially delivered human fetus to be destroyed to preserve the life of the mother.”<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8">8</a></sup></p>

<p>In fact, breech births after the fashion of D&amp;X are more dangerous. Partial-birth abortion is a variation of a breech-birth technique used by obstetricians to deliver a living child, often a twin.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9">9</a></sup> Ironically, this procedure has been largely replaced by Caesarean section, specifically because a c-section is safer.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10">10</a></sup></p>

<p>There’s a simpler way of dealing with this objection, though. Just ask, “If the law allowed this procedure when it was necessary to protect the mother’s life, would you drop your objection?”&nbsp;It does.</p>

<p>The Senate version of the bill, in Sec. 1531. (a), states, “This paragraph shall not apply to a partial-birth abortion that is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, illness, or injury, provided that no other medical procedure would suffice for that purpose.”</p>

<p>Breech delivery is risky. Standard delivery is the safest. D&amp;X abortion does not protect the life of the mother. When there is an exception, HR 1833 permits a partial-birth abortion.</p>

<h2>Objection #3: The Anesthesia Kills the Baby Before the Abortion Begins.</h2>

<p>Robin Abcarian, defending D&amp;X in her <em>LA Times</em> column, wrote, “[The mother] was given enough anesthesia and analgesic that her baby was dead before he was delivered.”<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11">11</a></sup> A <em>USA Today</em> editorial on November 3, 1995, also claimed, “The fetus dies from an overdose of anesthesia given to its mother.”</p>

<p>Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Il.), Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, and Ellen Goodman in her widely syndicated column all made the same claim. Most depend on a statement Dr. McMahon made in a written submission to the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee on June 23, 1995.<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12">12</a></sup></p>

<p>Such misinformation sent a shock wave through the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA). Dr. Norig Ellison, president of the 32,000 member organization, took heated exception with the claim before the Senate Judiciary Committee, November 17, 1995.</p>

<p>Dr. Ellison said McMahon’s statement is “entirely inaccurate.”&nbsp;He added, “I have not spoken with one anesthesiologist who agrees with Dr. McMahon’s conclusion, and in my judgment, it is contrary to scientific fact. It simply must not be allowed to stand.”<sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13">13</a></sup></p>

<p>Dr. Haskell knows from personal experience that the child is often alive during this procedure. Because of the misinformation circulating on this question, <em>American Medical News</em> has released a transcript of a taped conversation with him from 1993.</p>

<p><em>AMNews</em>: Let’s talk first about whether or not the fetus is dead beforehand...</p>

<p>Haskell: No, it’s not. No, it’s really not...In my case, probably about a third of those are definitely are [sic] dead before I actually start to remove the fetus. And probably the other two-thirds are not.”<sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14">14</a></sup></p>

<p>Not only is the pro-abortion claim false; even if true it’s irrelevant to this legislation. In Sec. 1531. (a) (1) the legislation specifically defines a partial-birth abortion as, “an abortion in which the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a <em>living</em> fetus before killing the fetus and completing the delivery”&nbsp;[emphasis added].</p>

<p>If the child is dead before delivery begins, then the abortion does not fall under the restrictions of this bill, so the point is moot. Simply put, if the child is dead, then the law does not apply. The procedure is allowed.</p>

<h2>Silly, False, and Inconsequential</h2>

<p>Let’s review the objections. The first one, that the procedure is extremely rare, is silly. Further, if it’s so rare, then why object to the ban? Other abortion procedures unchallenged by this law can accomplish the same end.</p>

<p>The second one, that this kind of abortion protects the life of the mother, fails on two counts. One, the amended bill provides for D&amp;X when it’s the only thing that will save the mother. Two, such a circumstance almost never occurs. Other forms of legal abortion are safer. The breech birth required in a partial-birth abortion is much more dangerous for women than a normal birth. Ask any obstetrician.</p>

<p>The third one, that the baby is dead before the delivery, is inconsequential. If this was true (which it isn’t, in most cases), then the legislation simply wouldn’t apply.</p>

<p>Every objection to a ban on partial-birth abortion fails completely. Then why the vigorous resistance by pro-abortionists? Because there’s more at stake here than meets the eye. Partial-birth abortion is not just about abortion; it’s about much more.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Dec. 10, 1995. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">National Abortion Federation, “Later Abortions: Questions and Answers,”&nbsp;<em>The Abortion Rights Activist</em>, p. 2. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Cited in Douglas Johnson, “Facts on Partial-Birth Abortion,”&nbsp;NRLC, Nov. 29, 1995, p. 3. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">NAF, “Later Abortions: Questions and Answers,”&nbsp;p. 1. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">Statistic noted in Diane M. Gianelli, “Outlawing Abortion Method,”&nbsp;<em>American Medical News</em>, AMA, Nov. 20, 1995, p. 70. Actual quote taken from <em>American Medical News</em> audio tape transcript, on file with Barbara Bolsen, <em>AMN</em> Editor. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">NRLC brief, “Senate Hearing Explodes Pro-Abortion Misinformation About Partial-Birth Abortions,”&nbsp;Nov. 28, 1995, p. 5; and “Facts on Partial-Birth Abortion,”&nbsp;NRLC, Nov. 29, 1995, p. 4. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7">NAF, “Later Abortions: Questions and Answers,”&nbsp;p. 2. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:8">Gianelli, p. 3. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:8">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:9">“Why, if it’s dangerous to the mother’s health to do this when your intent is to deliver the baby alive, that this should suddenly become...the safe method when your intention is to kill the baby?”&nbsp;Dr. Pamela Smith, testimony to Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, cited in Johnson, p. 11. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:9">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:10">See <em>Williams Obstetrics</em>, the most widely used textbook used to train obstetricians, p. 520-21, 865-66. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:10">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:11">Robin Abcarian, “Lifesaving Option or Criminal Conduct?,”&nbsp;<em>LA Times</em>, Nov. 26, 1995, p. E-1. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:11">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:12">Diane M. Gianelli, “Anesthesiologists Question Claims in Abortion Debate,”&nbsp;<em>American Medical News</em>, AMA, Jan. 1, 1996, p. 4; also, NRLC brief, “Senate Hearing Explodes Pro-Abortion Misinformation About Partial-Birth Abortions,”&nbsp;Nov. 28, 1995, p. 3. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:12">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:13">Statement of Norig Ellison, M.D., before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Nov. 17, 1995. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:13">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:14">Quote taken from <em>American Medical News</em> audio tape transcript, on file with Barbara Bolsen, <em>AMN</em> Editor. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:14">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
</div>

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