The death of a child (2)
Some things are worth dying for! I don't say life is to be despised, only that there are some things more important than going on living biologically. Illustrate it for yourself how you will; I'm sure there are people for whom and situations in which choosing death would not only make sense, it would be a glad choice.
Now taking someone's life; that's a whole different thing. I don't say that taking someone's life would never, under any circumstances be a right thing to do. I'm not able to say that, but setting aside "utterly exceptional" situations (if there are such things—and I presently think there are), there's something profoundly sinister about the way we routinely kill the unborn, the developing human child, to make "a better world". Some of us do it to make our world more pleasant, more convenient, more trouble free. Medical people and scientists do it (we're assured) to make a "better" world for everyone. "Better"? Hmmm. Is a world that is built on the routine killing of developing humans a world worth having? Is a world that is built on the use of growing humans as spare parts worth building much less bragging about? Is a world like that a "better" world?
I'm not thinking I can persuade anyone to be satisfied with my own moral protest against the "let's rid the world of disease and death for the future by taking and cheapening and exploiting human life in the present." The lengths to which some are willing to go to get that better world is disturbing. Did I not read some years ago of the work of a Finnish bio-chemist, who decapitated live, aborted "foetuses" and attached the heads to various instruments and contrivances to observe and learn? And was he not the one who with abrupt candour said something to the effect that, "People never truly believed the foetuses were humans or they wouldn't have allowed us to flush them down the toilet"?
Aborting developing humans because they don't suit our taste in gender or physical condition or their arrival time is sickening! I heard one of the presenters on one of our UK television talk shows blithely remark, "I just wasn't ready to have a baby so it gave me no grief at all to terminate the pregnancy." It wasn't just what she said but her tone as well. It was so matter of fact, such a "yes-it-is-a-rather-nicely-done-ham-pass-me-that-salt-please" tone. It reminded me of the kind of society we have become when a person could speak so off-handedly about such a matter.
But if all that galls me, there's something that galls me profoundly more. The procured death of a developing child is an outrage but the doctrine that says God created that developing child—the one we're killing—only to damn it eternally, that is degenerate and is itself a part of the universal depravity we see in the world.
What if in the name of God we were raging against the powers that be on behalf of the developing child that they were killing and God had ordained that very baby to eternal torture because of something it inherited or something it was alleged to have actually done (in Adam) before ever it existed?
One writer that I both enjoy and admire, who strikes me as a humble and open man in search of truth, is nevertheless so locked in to a version of predestination and election that he says he's unable to assure people that their babies that die do not end up in hell because, he says, the scriptures don't give him the right to assure them of that. He isn't alone in this (numerous creeds will not commit to infant salvation). Augustine and Calvin, of course, made it clear that non-elect infants suffer eternal damnation. Numerous others even in this day hold the same view.
It just seems to me that to rage against those who butcher a well-developed baby in the womb while believing that God might even be capable of sending that baby to eternal conscious torment simply because he wills it is utterly bizarre.
Ideas and doctrines have consequences!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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