Saturday, June 17, 2017

The Breathtaking Intellectual Shallowness of Our Culture Is Seen In Its Approval of Abortion

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I bought thee roses for Linda

It's 6 PM in Monroe. Tomorrow is Father's Day. I'll be preaching at Redeemer on "Empowering Men for Ministry." In addition, I, and our people, will pray for anyone who would like prayer for physical or emotional healing.

It's hot today, but there is a nice breeze blowing through the tall pine and cottonwood trees in our back yard.

I'm reading Princeton scholar Robert George's brilliant Conscience and Its Enemies. George, who also has taught at Harvard, is a voice of reason in a country of breathtaking intellectual and spiritual shallowness.

He is a Christian theist, as well. I just read this part about abortion. It's worth quoting in its entirety.

"What is centrally and decisively true about human embryos and fetuses is that they are living individuals of the species Homo sapiens—members of the human family—at early stages of their natural development. Each of us was once an embryo, just as each of us was once an adolescent, a child, an infant, and a fetus. Each of us developed from the embryonic into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages of our lives, and into adulthood, with his or her distinctness, unity, and identity fully intact. As modern embryology confirms beyond any possibility of doubt, we were never parts of our mothers; we were, from the beginning, complete, self-integrating organisms that developed to maturity by a gradual, gapless, and self-directed process. Our foundational principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being demands that all members of the human family be respected and protected irrespective not only of race, sex, and ethnicity but also of age, size, location, stage of development, and condition of dependency. To exclude anyone from the law’s protection is to treat him unjustly.
And so it seems to me that justice demands our resolute opposition to the killing of human embryos for biomedical research and to elective abortion. If we would do unto others as we would have them do unto us, then we will insist that law and public policy respect the lives of every member of the human family, including those at what the late Paul Ramsey called the edges of life—the unborn, the severely handicapped, the frail, the elderly."

- Kindle Locations 1468-1479