So, as you know if you’ve been with me on this 624-episode odyssey I like to call Truth in Journalism, you’ve probably noticed that Abortion is a pretty important issue to me. I think it is the greatest moral stain in America’s history. I believe it is a cancer to our national soul. I believe that it upholds and encourages a culture of death. I believe it has heaped an unspeakable and incalculable burden of guilt upon our country. I believe that it is one of the most important causes of mass shootings.
More than what I believe, I know that making mothers murderers is evil. I know that murdering and dismembering babies for profit is evil. I know that any place that tolerates, let alone advocates, such a despicable, ghoulish, demonic evil is a place that is ripe for the judgment of God.
I also see signs that may indicate that there is a Spiritual awakening in this nation. I believe that perhaps God is rousing us out of our Spiritual drunken stupor. Those who have eyes to see cannot unsee what they’ve seen and unlearn what they’ve learned. I believe that God, in His inconceivable mercy, is giving our nation an opportunity to repent. To turn from our wickedness.
Now, many are being awakened to the evils omnipresent in our society. A lot of normals are lookin’ about and see a bunch of psychotics and perverts being given awards by the President; they see mostly peaceful riots that burn down cities; they see the insanity of our society and they realize that something is deeply wrong.
Many see the problem. God is giving them the grace to realize and recognize that something’s wrong.
But not all are rightly diagnosing the problem and not all will come to the correct conclusion.
Because brothers and sisters, we can look at all the problems in our society as individual problems, even breaking them down to individual cases, and of course, we will find manifold causes for these problems. We can look at drug overdoses, and we can look at one person who overdoses and go through her whole biography and see the causes for why she came to such an unhappy end.
But we can also look at large-scale causes—poverty (and yes, poverty can be a contributing factor because drug abuse is primarily caused by despair); physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; absentee fathers; hedonism; lassaiz-faire criminal statues; and we could go on.
And we could compare these causes with the causes of other social and personal evils. And we would find that there was a lot of overlap. Yes, there are a lot of causes for evil in to be enacted in the world. And understanding how to analyze these causes is valuable and is work that needs doing.
I’ve written about this topic before (here and here) and here I’d like to quote me:
To clarify, the Christian position has always been one which tries to recognize the competing realities of Depravity, Enculturation, and Free Will in explaining human behavior. It may be best to recognize that these 3 concepts move from universal to general to individual in their scope. Depravity, of course, affects all of humankind and limits humanity such that sin has corrupted every aspect of personality. How that depravity manifests, however, is determined both environmentally and hereditarily (which I have called Enculturation). A person living in a society that constantly degrades women is more likely to commit acts of violence against women than one raised to treat women with dignity and respect and as the moral equals of men. A person raised in a household where narcotics are constantly abused is more likely to use narcotics than a person raised in an environment without drug abuse. A child of alcoholics is more susceptible to alcoholism than a child of non-alcoholics. A child of people five feet tall is less likely to play NBA basketball than a child of two 7 footers! Nature and Nurture do compound Original Sin and Depravity, by funneling that depravity into specific channels of sinfulness. Lastly, of course, is individual choice, or Free Will. Of course, it must be noted that our Wills can be damaged so that we act in sinful and self-destructive ways absent of any active agency – the stimulus/ response mechanism called addiction or habit. And Christians would agree that addiction and habits can become so strong that only an act of God can restore some kind of volitional Moral Agency. But, on the whole, we do well to recognize that while Depravity and Enculturation both limit us and shape our personality, individuals do make individual choices for which they are individually morally responsible.
Does this mean that people born into poverty are doomed to be drug users or criminals? No. But it does mean that because of how Depravity and Enculturation affect Free Will, that people born into poverty are more likely to engage in violent crime or to abuse illicit drugs. When studying human behavior and systems we must remember a helpful precept: people in groups are highly predictable and people as individuals are highly unpredictable. The statistical predictability of groups is due to Depravity and Enculturation. The statistical unpredictability of individuals is due to Free Will. This concept is fundamental to a Christian Theological Anthropology.
OK, now, I know that that was a mouthful and there was a lot of technical terminology there, but it is important to understand that there are different levels of causation that we can analyze.
But there is one ultimate cause for all evil and that is Sin. Sin is the cause of all evil. If no one sinned then no evil would be done in this world.
Therefore, it is necessarily true that if a society becomes more evil that that society has become more sinful. And it is necessarily true that if a society has become more sinful it is because it has become more godless.
In the end Solzhenitsyn was right! In his Templeton Prize acceptance speech he said this:
Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
The whole speech is well worth reading and I hope you will take the time to read it.
But why, you ask, am I spending time talking about this? Because there was an article published recently about issue 1. And that issue was a lie. was a lie. It was an utter deceit and a fabrication. Sure, the author and those she interviewed said things that as individual statements may have been accurate portrayals of reality—quite a few weren’t, but that’s another story—but as a whole the article is a lie. And it’s not a lie because it’s claiming that religious people are pro-abortion. That’s true enough. It’s a lie because it is subtly attempting to use the word “religious” as an equivalent for “righteous.”
And the reality is that no righteous person is pro-abortion because no righteous person is pro-baby-murder. But yes, there are, indeed, lots of religious people who are pro-baby-murder, because there are lots of people who worship demons—some even do so knowingly.
But again, this article is a lie. It makes the claim that religious people are divided over abortion. OK. And? What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? It’s an utterly valueless phrase. People from different religious groups have waged war against each other over the content of their teaching. The author knows that, I’m sure. I would guess that the author of this article has heard about Jihad and the Crusades, about Jewish persecution of early Christians about Islamic persecution of Jews.
She knows that Christians have gone to war against Christians and Muslims against Muslims and Jews against Jews. She knows that right?
I would assume that she knows that, and if she doesn’t she’s an idiot not worthy of the noble professional of journalist. Because, as I’ve said many-a-time, journalism is, indeed, a noble and worthy calling.
And if she knows that religious groups have fought wars against other religious groups and within the same religious groups then she would know that saying “religious people are divided” is an empty phrase. That’s like saying, sports fans disagree about what team to root for; or, foodies argue about the best pizza toppings. It’s true…but it’s vacuous. And the reality is that this article is not meant to be vacuous. It’s meant to convince people of a position. The article makes these claims because the author is hoping that if you read that there are Priests and Pastors and Imams and Rabbis who can’t agree about abortion then there really isn’t a correct religious take. Which is dumb.
But then the dumbness intensifies because it’s clear that she wishes to promote abortion and so she favorably quotes the pro-baby-murder side talking about how bodily-autonomy is the necessary God-given right which undergirds and guarantees all other rights.
Which is weird, ‘cause I remember reading about a group of people in the 1800s saying that the right to own and dispose of property howsoever the owner wished was the fundamental right that guaranteed all other rights—but that’s another sermon for another day.
So the article is written to suggest that religion won’t give you an answer about abortion, so you need to just, you know, accept it because women’s rights—as though that weren’t a religious claim.
Of course, invoking bodily autonomy and women’s rights is a religious claim. If a right isn’t God-given it’s a privilege granted by the state, or an action you take upon yourself. But the only real foundational moral basis for rights is that they be God-given. The author wishes to pull a bait and switch.
She attempts to say, look, monotheism can’t sort out this problem so let’s just follow the teachings of Secular Humanism. It’s intellectually dishonest—or shockingly ignorant—but that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. People are duped by such pedestrian attempts at moral philosophy.
The reality is, tragically, that many, if not most, are convinced by stupid, illogical, and bad arguments because they are either stupid or because they want to be deceived. And it is the duty of Christians to help those who lack the intellectual rigor to see the deceit for themselves, to see it. And it’s the duty of Christians to prophetically proclaim the Word of God to those who choose to believe a lie because they reject Christ.
Religion isn’t righteousness. Religious people ARE divided on Abortion. But the Holy Trinity is not. And righteous people are not. There is only one right side—and that’s God’s side—and that’s the side that sides against killing babies inside, and outside, their mothers.
Let’s stand for righteousness and not let the weak and deceptive lies of the Father of Lies deceive those too weak or too wretched to see the truth for themselves.