Monday, May 13, 2013

Psalm 19: General Revelation and Special Revelation

Psalm 19 is fairly well known for its two sections. The first part is about how Creation reveals the existence and nature of God. This is referred to as "General Revelation". The second revels in the wisdom of God's Law. This is called Special Revelation, because God has revealed things not otherwise knowable. The two sections are generally considered separately, each for the point made in that section. But the two sections are part of a single, unified, composition.
This might seem odd, almost as if two disparate topics got spliced together, but I think God is trying to tell us something about both kinds of revelation. General Revelation, Creation, shows much about God - what kind of God could and would create something of the scale of the universe. But that isn't very clear or detailed. Special Revelation, God's word, is what General Revelation is not and cannot be - specific, clear, and detailed. But God gave mankind General Revelation, Creation, to enrich what His word tells us.

Quick (?) Thoughts on the Book of Job

As the title suggests, I've been reading in Job. I won't claim any profound discoveries. Job is a multi-person debate about why Job has lost almost everything. Readers are told what happened, but Job and his friends did not know. Job's three friends held to a simplistic doctrinaire view of God: God is just, therefore good people will not suffer. Consequently, they argued, Job must have sinned. Job asserted that he had not, and part way into the debate started to say that he wished he could assert his innocence before God, face to face. Near the end of the debate, a younger man interposed to chew on Job's other friends for their failure to show that Job had sinned, and on Job for not glorifying God as truly just. At that point, God interrupted the young man, to reprove Job for speaking far beyond his knowledge and understanding, and to reprove his friends for wrongly accusing Job.
Two sources of Job's suffering were things God specifically permitted Satan to do: take away everything Job had, things and family; take away Job's health. God's purposes for doing so are not explicitly explained. My speculation is that God used the whole process to fine-tune Job's relationship with Him and to teach Job that there are things relevant to his life that Job won't ever understand, and that that is OK. The third source of suffering, however, was not necessarily brought on by Satan. There is no mention of Satan stirring up either Job's wife or his friends.
All this should be instructive to the reader. And it's almost as if God anticipated the classic "problem of pain" and gave the Book of Job as His answer. First, life isn't simple, and no one is guaranteed a life of ease, not even "good" people. Second, one source of things we perceive as painful is God working in our lives. Third, some sources of pain are just sinful humans and/or a sin-corrupted natural world being what they are. This, also, God often allows. In all this, we usually will not "understand" why while it is happening (if ever). We simply must trust God and rely on Him in all things.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Gosnellian Ruminations

This is adapted from a discussion forum post I wrote this morning. It references this Wall Street Journal opinion article written by James Taranto: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324030704578422883948238160.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion.

Learning what Kermit Gosnell did all but forces people to think on what Gosnell was doing. Gosnell killed babies who were right around the age where they could survive, with aid, outside of the uterus (the court will decide whether several of those he killed were, indeed, viable). That thinking process is a Pandora's box for some one who is vaguely Pro-"Choice". Not all abortionists do late-term abortions, but Gosnell was not alone, either. George Tiller and Leo Carhart also did/do late-term abortions. The whole "outlier" argument - whether regarding late-term abortions or abortuary filth is simply a hastily improvised falsehood to mollify the willfully ignorant.

As soon as the concept of viability comes under consideration, its arbitrariness becomes evident. First, the point of viability is not fixed, and has moved earlier and earlier as medical knowledge and capabilities have grown. If one thinks just a half step further, the question arises: does any transformative process happen when a baby becomes viable that takes it from non-human to human? The answer is, "No!", and that question leads, if the reasoner allows herself/himself to go "there", to the question of what makes something some one, a human being. This is the "there" to which Taranto (and, apparently, Simon and his wife) have come. Without articulating it to this degree of detail, they realized that, whether zygote or senescent adult, both are genetically a unique human being in different stages of the continuous process that, if not interrupted, starts at the point when the chromosomes from the egg and the sperm become a full set, and ends in old age when the body's vital functions break down to the point that the body can no longer sustain life.

Taranto stops, at least in this article, at this point. He points out that fully realizing and acknowledging all this is basically fatal to the Pro-"Choice" position - for those who value human life more than their hamburger (or tofu burger) or their kitty, at least. But he also labels as "monstrous" the implication of the full Pro-Life position, that women in the uncommon position of being pregnant from rape or incest would have to carry that child for nine months and then face the choice of keeping and raising that child or giving him/her up for adoption. I'm sure Taranto knows this, but it may come as a "surprise" to Pro-"Choice" people who advance those facts as an objection: Pro-Life people are quite aware of those potential pains (not every woman so situated is going to view that process and that choice as painful). Being human is fraught with choices in which all options are to one degree or another painful or entail the risk of pain. The rational approach is to choose the option(s) in which the pain or evil is least serious. The bottom line, using this reasoning, is that killing a human being who has done no wrong and poses almost no threat (including the long-term psychological consequences of that choice) is a far greater evil than nine months of an involuntary pregnancy and a keep-or-adopt-out choice (
including the long-term psychological consequences of that process and choice).

Though Pro-Abortion and Pro-"Choice" people may deny or try to ignore it, the past 4 decades have shown that accepting the killing of an innocent and harmless human being as a "right" has done great harm to our society, and put our society onto a slippery slope that leads to killing infants and the aged when they become inconvenient. The US is pretty far down that slope!