"It's not WHAT you say, it's HOW you say it"

I don't know why I keep coming back to abortion related posts. I've never considered myself an activist about the topic! For some reason, I just keep reading things that I want to share. This blog post is from the Stand To Reason ministry, and it explores the difference between stating our opinions in a void and considering the impact of the words on those around us. I never want to hurt people when I share my theological, philosophical or comi-cal views on a subject, but it certainly can happen easily.

http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2007/06/why-i-chose.html

"I think part of this second article reveals why it's so hard to change people's minds about abortion after they've experienced one. Consider her reaction to a pro-life statement: When President Bush talked about "defending the life of the innocent," she could only hear him "calling [her] a baby killer.""

"She reacts strongly and fights against it, for she hears every word spoken for the unborn as an accusation against her, personally."

Wow. What a reminder to me to lead my life with a full measure of grace.

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The religion of Global Warming

Global Warming has become, like evolution, a theory that many have taken as cold hard fact, and even adopted it as their own religion. They want to end debate, and move on. However, there are reasons to question those who hysterically claim that we as humans are the cause for warming of the earth. Here is one noted Earth scientist who believes we're actually coming up on a period of significant COOLING.

The middle section of this article is full of data that supports his underlying claims, but I recommend reading the beginning and end of the article at least.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=597d0677-2a05-47b4-b34f-b84068db11f4&p=4

A few pull quotes:

"We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that "the science is settled." At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C."

"The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn't seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don't question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of "stopping global climate change.""

"Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now."

"Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate."

"Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change."

"In some fields the science is indeed "settled." For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all."

"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada."


Of course, none of this means that we shouldn't be about the task of taking care of our world, conserving energy in a reasonable manner and controlling pollution and emissions. This just makes good sense. The worldview perspective in my mind, is that we shouldn't spend enormous resources into trying to lower OR raise the earth's climate by 2C. Who knows what damage we could do by trying to play God and shift the climate up 1 or 2 degrees to where WE think it ought to be. God has the thermostat, let's just try to be good stewards and leave it at that.
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Abortion causing MORE illegitimacy?

Here is an interesting article from the WSJ editorials...

http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010227



Here's the full article text (my comments embedded in italics):

BY JOHN R. LOTT JR. Tuesday, June 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

The abortion debate usually centers on the morality of the act itself. But liberalizing abortion rules from 1969 to 1973 ignited vast social changes in America. With the perennial political debate over abortion again consuming the presidential campaign and the Supreme Court, it might be time to evaluate what Roe v. Wade has meant in practical terms.

(I think it's a huge thesis, not to be overlooked, that abortion laws have "ignited vast social changes in America". Think about the implication of that position for a minute..."vast". Telling, really.)

One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions just didn't start with Roe, or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have abortions when their lives or health were endangered. Doctors in some states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health. Nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977. But many other changes occurred at the same time:

• A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.
• A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.
• A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.
• A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.

Some of this might seem contradictory. Why would both the number of abortions and of out-of-wedlock births go up? If there were more illegitimate births, why were fewer children available for adoption?

As to the first puzzle, part of the answer lies in attitudes to premarital sex. With abortion seen as a backup, women as well as men became less careful in using contraceptives as well as more likely to have premarital sex (emphasis added). There were more unplanned pregnancies. But legal abortion did not mean every unplanned pregnancy led to abortion. After all, just because abortion is legal, does not mean that the decision is an easy one.

(This would be a good place to cite just how difficult the decision is to deal with AFTER the fact. The women who endure the tragedy of this procedure often regret it or deal with psychological ramifications to some degree. It's not something to be taken lightly.)

Many academic studies have shown that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex (again, this fact is granted here), increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion. In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5% of all births in 1965-69 to more than 16% two decades later (1985-1989). For blacks, the numbers soared from 35% to 62%. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion rules, it was nevertheless a key contributing factor.

With legalization and women not forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy, a man might well expect his partner to have an abortion if a sexual encounter results in an unplanned pregnancy. But what happens if the woman refuses? Maybe she is morally opposed to abortion; or perhaps she thought she could have an abortion, but upon becoming pregnant, she decides that she can't go through with it. What happens then?

Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, will likely wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, "I never wanted a baby. It's her choice, so let her raise the baby herself." What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades. The evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended "shotgun" marriages, where men felt obligated to marrying the woman.

(This is a shameful sub-plot to the abortion debate, that men have abdicated any responsibility to fathering, and more so that our society has allowed this. The breakdown of the nuclear family as seen in the absence of positive male role models, especially real "Dads", is in my view one of the key elements of degradation to our culture.)

What has happened to these babies of reluctant fathers? The mothers often end up raising the child on their own. Even as abortion has led to more out-of-wedlock births, it has also dramatically reduced adoptions of children born in America by two-parent families. Before Roe, when abortion was much more difficult, women who would have chosen an abortion but were unable to get one turned to adoption as their backup. After Roe, women who turned down an abortion were also the type who wanted to keep the child.

(I'm sure someone takes this to make the argument "well at least if a child is born, it's one that is wanted by the parents, thus reducing the number of orphans in America". I personally, find this irrelevant to the decision to terminate the unwanted child. The decision should come before the life is conceived.)

But all these changes--rising out-of-wedlock births, plummeting adoption rates, and the end of shotgun marriages--meant one thing: more single parent families. With work and other demands on their time, single parents, no matter how "wanted" their child may be, tend to devote less attention to their children than do married couples; after all, it's difficult for one person to spend as much time with a child as two people can.

From the beginning of the abortion debate, those favoring abortion have pointed to the social costs of "unwanted" children who simply won't get the attention of "wanted" ones. But there is a trade-off that has long been neglected. Abortion may eliminate "unwanted" children, but it increases out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood. Unfortunately, the social consequences of illegitimacy dominated.

Children born after liberalized abortion rules have suffered a series of problems from problems at school to more crime. The saddest fact is that it is the most vulnerable in society, poor blacks, who have suffered the most from these changes.

Liberalized abortion might have made life easier for many, but like sex itself sometimes, it has had many unintended consequences.

(Although this is widespread, the impacts can definitely be seen clearly in the black community: single-parent dominance, absent fathers, unsupervised children who turn to crime, etc. The same is true of all demographics. Is this only the fault of abortion? No, but the mindset of our culture changed when abortion became widely accepted after Roe. That mindset is one that offers sex without consequence or responsibility - and it has damaged our society greatly.)



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Not as simple as we think...

When it comes to issues like abortion, most people (like myself), know how they stand on the issue. It's not a new issue! And we occasionally pay attention to the latest court decisions that seem to direct the course of the national debate. One of the things that I'm realizing, however, is that it isn't as simple as being "pro-life" or "pro-choice" all the time.

I'm sure there are people who are 100% consistent on the issue, however most of us want to balance the issue with other considerations. That makes the debate less of a two-sided debate, and more of a continous spectrum on which many of us find ourselves leaning one side or another.

Here's an example:

See the video here

Read the article here

Appeals court decision here

One of my co-workers (perhaps you've seen this news lately, it's national and is going to the Texas Supreme Court possibly the US Supreme Court one day) is currently in a dispute with his ex-wife over what to do with 3 frozen embryos that they had fertilized at the local test-tube lab before they divorced. ASIDE: Now, before we go too much further with this, I will say that I wonder if we as a human race should be messing with this at all? Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. And I'll demonstrate why and backup this point later. I need to say also that I have great compassion on those who are having fertility issues, and I just can't imagine how tough that is. But I don't think my NOT having fertility issues exempts me from entering the debate and expressing my opinion on the matter.

Note: I'm not gossiping about my co-worker since this is on CNN.

So anyway....the couple agreed during their marriage that IF they were to divorce, the embryos would be destroyed. That was their mutually agreed to plan. Well, unfortunately, that's what happened, they divorced. However, the wife changed her mind about the embryos and decided she still wanted to preserve them (some may say "rescue them". In any case, she didn't stick to the contract).

So where do you side if you're the judge? Are you pro-life EVEN if the legal terms of the contract were perfectly clear and contrary (in my view)? Is it more important to uphold the terms of contracts (which seems to be lost in our culture) or to always protect the unborn life? Well, BOTH are important really.

This is where I do feel some compassion on judges and politicians which may be forced to vote or render decisions contrary to their own beliefs at times, and always to make tough decisions. It also explains why lobbying groups on both sides keep track of judicial decisions and lawmaker's votes and rate them on a percentage basis on HOW MUCH they are pro-life or pro-choice (e.g. 99% or 40%).

So here are my brief thoughts on both sides:

Man-for: He should have the right to remove consent and to NOT bear any children to anyone or to his ex-wife. Also, the contract was clear that in the event of divorce they’d be destroyed.

Man-against: He’s calling for them to be destroyed per the contract, which obviously I’m against as a pro-life believer.

Woman-for: She’s taking the pro-life stand, and I understand these are her children (embryos) too and she wants them preserved.

Woman-against: She can still have embryos formed with another sperm donor, why force her ex-husband to have children with her? I know he doesn't have to be legally responsible, nevertheless, they would be HIS children and that should require his consent shouldn't it? Also, she’s breaking the clear agreement in the contract.

So here are two bottom lines that are quite counter-cultural, but that I believe reflect my views on this situation from the "Christian worldview" perspective:

1. Artificially creating embryos leads to decisions about life that perhaps we were never supposed to be allowed to make.
2. Divorce destroys the lives of all involved (quite literally), and is too widely accepted in our culture.

I understand I'm stepping on a lot of toes by suggesting we shouldn't be doing this fertility stuff. I just can't stop the thought in my head that sometimes these medical procedures get us into tough ethical and spirtual debates that perhaps we weren't meant to be debating. I want you to know, if you disagree with me, that I don't want to sound like some cold-hearted guy who's completely detached from the ramifications of this. And I want everyone who wants to have a child to have one (or a bunch!). In fact, I'd be hard pressed not to consider the option myself if faced with the difficulties of conception. However, I'm trying to look at this from a "best-case" scenario and a 30,000 foot level. The truth is that thousands and thousands of embryos are being destroyed, and I am of the belief that they are human lives.

So, now, you're the judge. How do you rule?

Brad



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hitchens is not Great

Christopher Hitchens is the author of a new book entitled "god is not Great". The book is thoroughly critiqued by Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts who also debated Hitchens personally. Because the debate was on a radio program, Pastor Roberts decided to write a blog series capturing more detailed discussion...

http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/godisnotgreat.htm

A few quotes from the blog series (although I recommend reading it)

The bad news for Christopher Hitchens is that he gets a low mark for accuracy when it comes to his statements about the New Testament and New Testament scholarship. In fact, I found fifteen factual errors in this material. I also identified sixteen statements that show what I consider to be a substantial misunderstanding or distortion of the evidence, even though a few scholars might agree with Hitchens. That's why I distinguish between factual errors and misunderstandings/distortions, in an effort to be clear and fair.

If my evaluation is anywhere near correct, this does not reflect well upon god is not Great, since the New Testament material comprises only about 6% of the whole book. How many other errors fill the pages of this book? I'll let suitable experts answer this question. But the obvious implication of what I discovered is that Christopher Hitchens is not a reliable reporter of facts, probably because has not done his homework adequately. He is, after all, a brilliant man with an inquisitive and well-tuned mind. Given my evaluation of his errors in the field I know best, however, I'm inclined to question his statements of "fact" concerning many other things. And my disbelief is not a belief. It's a reasonable conclusion based on the facts of Hitchens's numerous mistakes and misstatements.

Also, one of the specific points of debate:

As I read god is not Great, and as I've read other things Christopher Hitchens has written, it's obvious to me that he has a good bit of familiarity with the New Testament Gospels. I'd even be willing to bet that he knows the Gospels better than many Christians. Thus I am at a loss for why he would say that they "cannot agree on anything of importance." Even allowing for a good bit of polemical freedom, such a statement is so plainly wrong that it cannot but undermine the reader's confidence in Hitchens's reliability.

If would be perfectly fair for Hitchens to have said, "The Gospels agree on many things about Jesus, most of which are fictions, and all of which are rubbish." Of course I'd beg to differ with the stuff that comes after "Jesus," but at least it would be a fair point for him to have made. But it just isn't right for Hitchens to say that the four Gospels "cannot agree on anything of importance."

Read on!
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Awesome

Here are some pictures I received in an email forward that are interesting.

Perhaps you've seen these before?

Of course, the purpose of this is to show the relative size of the planets and stars we are near, however what it doesn't give us a feel for is the scale of distance between them, and that I believe is just as humbling when attempting to comprehend something that far away (and calling it "near", relatively speaking). The universe truly is awesome. There's no other word for it.







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