Monthly Archives: February 2014

BY ROLLEY HAGGARD

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February 21, 2014 (BreakPoint) – Returning home from a recent business trip, I flew over the city purported to have more churches per square mile than any other in America. As I gazed down sleepily at the numberless steeples checkering the landscape and dimly pondered their equivocal significance, I was suddenly startled awake by a strange transformation occurring before my incredulous eyes: The spires of the church buildings had morphed into so many cruciform chimneys belching skyward an almost palpable, smoke-like darkness.

Only the darkness wasn’t smoke. What I saw ascending to heaven from each sanctuary was praise—the grotesquely incongruous praise of Christians worshiping a God they fancied demanded no remorse and no repentance for doing precious little to stop the extermination of the most vulnerable of His children.

If you’re as old as I am, you will recall: We swore we would never forget the German death camps. We swore we would never let them be rebuilt. We swore we would never let such a monstrously evil thing happen again. Not on our watch. No, not ever.

But, effectively, we did forget the death camps. We let their equivalent be rebuilt in America’s 850 abortion clinics. We let the monstrously evil thing happen again, in spades. History has repeated itself by powers of 10. For where the Nazis had their 6 million victims, we have on our hands the blood of 60 million.

Not a day passes that I don’t ask myself, how, in the name of all that is holy, have we let this happen? How, from week to week, are we able to assemble in houses of worship and, with ostensibly clear consciences, preach and hear sermons and sing songs about the love of God, when we are so fantastically out of touch with what the love of God is all about? What happened to caring for “the least of these”? Where is our love for them?

I know, you’re weary of hearing the now-almost-emptied-of-meaning comparison to Hitler’s systematic extermination of those he considered untermenschen: the “less than humans.” Believe me, I’m weary of drawing the comparison. Not because it doesn’t fit; it does. But because it no longer produces outrage. Witnessing Christian apathy on abortion makes me wonder if Auschwitz enraged us not so much for the depth as for the novelty of its evil. After all, we weren’t accustomed in the 1940s to mass-produced, assembly-line murder. These days we are.

I say “we,” because it is we—Christians—who could bring about a swift end to the abortion holocaust if we really wanted to. But 40-plus years of deafening pulpit silence argues we don’t really want to.

Christians are quick to say they believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, but most do little, practically, to incarnate that belief and help change ours from a culture of death to a culture of life. Most are pro-life in belief but not in action. Most do little to actually help abolish abortion.

Remarking on the failure of the church to do little more than deal with the effects of great evil after the fact, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “We are not simply to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

If we were serious about ending abortion, we could easily drive a spoke into the wheels of the machinery that drives Christian apathy and inaction. I’ve outlined an embarrassingly simple One- Minute Strategy to End Abortion that I believe would work—if only pastors would implement it.

But many American pastors and churchgoers are more offended that responsibility and blame should be laid at their feet than that 3,500 babies a day are being put to death. This, by itself, ought to be a potent wake-up call that there is something horribly wrong with a Christianity more upset by what it considers unfair defamation and wrongly placed blame than it is by the mass extermination of its little neighbors.

But is the blame wrongly placed?

In common jurisprudence, when you have a duty to prevent the commission of a crime but fail to make the effort, you are complicit in its commission. You are what’s known as an accomplice. Christ’s brother James put it this way: “The one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.” We know the right thing to do.

Yet we persist in being willing accomplices to the evil of our age. We could end our silence on abortion, but we don’t want to pay the price for standing up and speaking out on behalf of those who can’t defend themselves. We prefer an “abundant life” Christianity that includes all the blessings but none of the suffering Christ promised His followers they would face if they were true to Him.

We have become expert at devising reasons why we can’t make the abolition of abortion a church priority. So expert, in fact, that if every baby aborted in America were Jewish, we would be the pride of Hitler’s SS for sanctioning their obscene “final solution” with our steadfast refusal to oppose it. What a testimony.

* * *

As my plane touched down on familiar soil, I found myself haunted by the opening words of a contemporary Christian song. I recalled, with no little irony, that it had been the theme song of the recent Missions Conference at my church, my own dear church:

Carry the light
Carry the light
Go and tell the children they are precious in His sight . . .

Suddenly, I was weeping bitterly for them.

But even more bitterly for the precious children.

LEARN MORE:

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/christians-could-end-abortion-now-but-its-clear-we-dont-really-want-to

In his 1689 “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” the philosopher John Locke wrote that if “we will attentively consider new born children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them.”

He proposed that we think of the newborn’s mind as a white piece of paper, “void of all characters, without any ideas.” Ideas, he posited, including the sense of right and wrong, are the product of the child’s experience.This view, which came to be known as the “blank slate,” dominated the social sciences for the better part of three hundred years, despite accumulating evidence that it didn’t conform to, well, human experience.Now a recent finding from Yale might just put the final nail in the blank slate’s coffin.After a series of experiments over eight years, researchers at Yale’s Infant Cognition Center have concluded that “babies are in fact born with an innate sense of morality, and while parents and society can help develop a belief system in babies, they don’t create one.” Now that is amazing!

The most basic of these experiments involves showing a baby examples of good and bad behavior and observing which behavior the baby prefers. In the experiment, “a gray cat is seen trying to open a big plastic box. The cat tries repeatedly, but he just can’t open the lid all the way.”

Then, a “bunny in a green T-shirt comes along and helps open the box.” That is followed by a bunny in an orange shirt slamming the box before running away.

The baby is then presented with the two bunnies. Eighty percent of the time, the baby chooses the helpful bunny over the mean and unhelpful one. Among three-month-olds, the percentage rises to 87 percent.

Paul Bloom of Yale and the author of “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil,” says the studies demonstrate that babies are born with a “rudimentary sense of justice” that allows them to judge the actions of others.

And even though he adds that this sense is “tragically limited,” the very fact that babies can grasp justice long before they can even speak says a lot about human nature. It also confirms a major claim of the Christian worldview. As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans, the requirements of the law are “written on our hearts,” and when we violate them, our consciences accuse us, even if we have not been tutored in the law.

This aspect of human nature poses serious problems for other worldviews, especially secular materialism. If we’re nothing more than highly-evolved animals whose instincts were selected for survival value, how do we explain this impulse toward justice, especially when it places our survival in danger?

It turns out that this problem leads us back to one of the most vexing questions all worldviews seek to answer: Who is the human person? The secular, materialistic worldview might be able to explain us at our worst: We’re animals, and no one should be surprised when we act like it.  But that view cannot explain why we innately disapprove of such behavior—even from our infancy.

Christianity alone offers a complete picture of humanity—both our depravity and our unshakable sense of morality. Understanding this is the foundation of right thinking and living, and it’s why my BreakPoint co-host, John Stonestreet and theologian T. M. Moore have produced something called “In His Image,” a fantastic new DVD study series that answers the question, “who are we?”

LEARN MORE:

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/02/26/are-babies-born-with-an-innate-sense-of-morality/

BY BEN JOHNSON

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COLUMBUS, OH, February 25, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Ohio Gov. John Kasich presented his annual courage award to three women who were held as sexual slaves for a decade, repeatedly raped, and subjected to beatings that amounted to forced abortions.

Kasich honored Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight this morning.

Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer

The three had been kidnapped by Ariel Castro between 2002 and 2004. He kidnapped Michelle Knight in August 2002, when she was 21. He kidnapped Amanda Berry on April 21, 2003 – one day before her 17th birthday. Gina DeJesus was only 14 in 2004, when Castro kidnapped her as she walked home from middle school.

When they became pregnant, he beat them until they lost the babies they were carrying. Knight, who was kidnapped in 2002, said she lost five children during her captivity. Berry conceived her daughter Jocelyn with Castro during that time.

Castro blamed his actions on his lifelong, compulsive porn use. “My addiction to pornography and my sexual problem has taken a toll on my mind,” he said in court. “I was victim as a child, and it just kept going.”

Castro kept them locked, and sometimes chained, inside a home in a run down part of Cleveland, until last May when they broke out of the door and called 911.

“No one rescued them,” Kasich said at the awards ceremony. “They rescued themselves, first by staying strong and by sticking together, and then by literally breaking out into freedom.”

The women, he said, “emerged not as victims, but as victors.”

The ceremony praised the women who survived first the sexual and physical assault, then the forced miscarriages, and finally Ariel Castro himself.

After police arrived at the scene last spring, they excavated the area for the bodies of babies Castro had killed in the womb. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty had said he intended to seek the maximum penalty for “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies.”

Castro could have become the first American on death row for killing an unborn child. Instead, he struck a plea bargain that led to Cuyahoga County Judge Michael Russo sentencing him to “no less than 1,000 years” in prison last July.

Two months later, Ariel Castro hanged himself with a bedsheet in his prison cell at the Correctional Reception Center in Orient, Ohio.

The award choice also underscores Gov. Kasich’s pro-life bona fides as he faces re-election in the fall.

Kasich signed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, the Viable Infants Protection Act, in 2011. A law requiring abortion facilities to meet more stringent safety standards and for abortionists to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital has resulted in several abortion facility closures in the Buckeye State. He has moved to defund Planned Parenthood and named Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis to the State Medical Board.

Kasich, who made a brief run for president in 2000 after retiring from the House of Representatives, is considered a dark horse candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

LEARN MORE:

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gov.-john-kasich-presents-award-to-rape-victims-who-were-beaten-until-they

The Jahi McMath tragedy remains ongoing as she continues to be maintained on a ventilator. Her mother has claimed her physical state has improved, but we need not get into that here.

Many in bioethics criticized Jahi’s mother for standing up for her daughter. Now, she has defended herself.

From the LA Times story:

In a letter posted to Facebook, Jahi’s mother, Nailah Winkfield, referred to her critics, saying they helped make her daughter’s experience relevant to people all over the world. “I also want to thank those who felt the need to go public with their opinions about me and my daughter, positive and even negative,” Winkfield wrote. “It is because of you that my daughter’s experience is so relevant and that people all over the world know who Jahi Mcmath is.”

Medical experts and ethicists have criticized the decision to keep Jahi on a ventilator, saying there is absolutely no chance of recovering from brain death. Bioethics experts also took issue with news media coverage that often repeated family assertions that the girl was alive, saying it clouded an issue the public already has difficulty grasping.

Jahi’s mother owes no one an apology.  While I believe that properly determined brain death is dead–and so stated about Jahi’s situation–that doesn’t mean a parent shouldn’t defend her child to the best of her ability.

I also think the judge in this case did a splendid job of balancing the needs of Children’s Hospital to maintain their ethics and the desperate desire of a family to give their baby every possible chance.

Note the cost has been at the family’s own–or contributors’–expense. (For more on my views about the case, see here.)

Jahi’s body has apparently not gone into decline as almost always happens in brain dead cases. It’s too soon for eyebrows to be raised. But if she actually does improve, there will be hell to pay because it will mean she isn’t really dead.

No judgment now. Let’s see how this plays out. But let’s not castigate a mother for loving her daughter enough to take on the Medical Establishment.

LEARN MORE:

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/02/25/jahi-mcmaths-mother-owes-no-apology-for-defending-her-daughters-right-to-live/

BY PETER BAKLINSKI

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AUSTRALIA, February 25, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A famed Australian TV personality known for her beauty and bright personality was found dead Friday, hanging in her apartment. While international mainstream media blames Charlotte Dawson’s death on her depression caused by social media bullying, the woman admits in her autobiography that it was in fact her abortion 15 years ago that introduced her to what she called the “depression bogeyman.”

“When I got home [from the abortion], I felt that something had changed. I felt a shift. Maybe it was hormonal, but I felt the early tinges of what I can now identify as my first experience with depression,” wrote Dawson in her 2012 autobiography Air Kiss & Tell.

Charlotte Dawson in 2012

Australians were shocked to learn of Dawson’s suicide. Only hours before her body was discovered by a real estate agent, Dawson had appeared on a show looking calm, composed, and on top of the world. No foul play is suspected.

Dawson’s is a story of tragic loss, betrayal, and depression. She married Olympic swimmer Scott Miller in 1999, one year before the Summer Olympics in Sydney. The newlyweds were considered to be one of the most glamorous celebrity couples in Sydney at that time.

Dawson soon became pregnant with her first, and as it turns out, only child.

“I knew I was pregnant; I didn’t have to have the test, I could just feel it. It was the most brilliant but terrifying feeling and the test did, as expected, confirm it,” she wrote in her autobiography. “We were going to have a baby. I was actually going to be a mother. If there had been room to have butterflies in my stomach, I figure I could have managed that as well, such was my ability to multi-task.”

But Dawson’s husband Miller was not supportive of the pregnancy because the upcoming Summer Olympics would conflict with the due date.

“I could sense some hesitation in Scott. My due date would clash with the 2000 Olympic Games and this was very concerning. Everything Scott had done was leading up to this moment and nothing could stand in his way, so it was decided that we would terminate the child and try again later.”

“Who needed a developing foetus when a gold medal was on offer, eh?” Dawson wrote.

But Dawson could not reconcile the decision to abort with her inner self. She knew that somehow she was not being true to herself as a woman and mother who was carrying a new life within.

“Inside I was in total turmoil. I wanted the baby. How long would we have to wait? Were there even any guarantees that I would fall pregnant again? Of course, I accepted without question that the Olympics was Scott’s number-one priority — I had been told that by him and a number of other interested and invested parties.”

Things went from bad to worse for Dawson when her husband refused to stay with her in the abortion clinic.

“Scott accompanied me to a local clinic, but he couldn’t cope with the atmosphere so he left me there alone. I was struggling with the decision and trying not to appear emotional or distressed about it so that Scott could maintain his focus. I was trying to train myself to think of my baby as an inconvenience, like a sneeze in a news broadcast. It was difficult.”

In the abortion clinic, Dawson began to experience a difficult mix of emotions.

“I then had to reconcile myself to the personal responsibility of having a termination. Should I be feeling guilt and shame? I was challenging my idea that motherhood was an uncomplicated and blissful time, especially for newlyweds,” she wrote.

“I considered the possibility that I might end up being a childless woman, which was a frustrating and demoralizing prospect for me, as I very much wanted to be a mother. What if I couldn’t have another child? What if I’d blown my only chance of motherhood by sacrificing this one?”

Abortion for Dawson was not the liberating self-fulfilling experience that abortion advocates said it would be. Having lost her baby to abortion, she tried to focus on what she still had.

“It was a horrible, sad time for me, but I had to keep reminding myself of what I had. I had a husband, and we were building a life and a home together.”

Dawson and Scott Miller

“I wanted our baby, but I felt greedy, like I already had too much, that the termination was a compromise I should make,” she wrote.

“As brave as I was trying to be, and as much as I tried to reassure myself that we were doing the right thing, it was still a gut-wrenching time.”

It was not until Dawson returned home from the abortion clinic that the gravity of what she had just done came crashing down on her.

“When I got home, I felt that something had changed. I felt a shift. Maybe it was hormonal, but I felt the early tinges of what I can now identify as my first experience with depression.”

“I should have bought a couch especially for the depression bogeyman right then and there. If I had known he was going to visit so often, I would have at least have had somewhere for him to sit, the bastard,” she wrote.

Dawson’s sacrifice of her only child for the sake of her husband’s Olympic career did not pay off. Sex tapes emerged around this time of Miller being filmed committing adultery with a female swimmer. He was also caught on tape doping to enhance his performance.

He did not even make the team for the Sydney Olympics.

The news of her husband’s betrayal added even more devastation to the already shattered Dawson.

“If I’d started to feel pangs of depression after the termination, the shock of receiving this news barely six months into my marriage was too much to bear. Something inside me completely broke that Sunday, something that is beyond repair, something that has never come back,” she wrote.

“I was a broken mess. I had to pretend that nothing was wrong at work and at social functions while people were whispering behind my back…”

“It was around this time that I learned the gentle art of drowning sorrow with bucket loads of wine.”

Advocate for life Jill Stanek called Dawson’s story a “tragedy.”

“And abortion proponents share the blame. They, of course, push for easy access to abortion, deemphasizing its after-affects to the point they absolutely refuse to acknowledge post-abortion depression, which further incapacitates those actually living through it,” she wrote on her blog.

Kevin Burke, cofounder of Rachael’s Vineyard ministries, told LifeSiteNews.com that abortion ideology led Dawson to “deny her heart.”

“I think what’s so glaring here is that supposedly a woman’s ‘right to choose’ is the highest tenet of feminism. You see in Dawson’s story how abortion — particularly in this situation — led her to deny her heart, what was best for her emotionally. She did not have a voice in the decision.”

“Abortion put her in a position where she sacrificed what was best for her as a woman and mother to her husband’s career,” he said.

Burke, who has worked in the post-abortion healing ministry for 15 years, said a story like Dawson’s is very common for women who choose abortion. “They feel a tremendous amount of pressure if their pregnancy is not accepted by the husband. They fear the resentment.”

Burke believes that if just one person had reached out to Dawson and affirmed and supported her in her desire to keep her child, things may have ended differently.

“Look at the possibilities for her life and how things would have been different [had she received support for her pregnancy]. She would have had a child. She would not have had the depression. It very well could have challenged [Charlotte and Scott] to grow as a couple.”

“Abortion just attacks all those things,” he said.

Burke said a link does indeed exist between abortion and depression, a link that has been verified by numerous scientific studies.

• A 2012 study of post-abortive women in China titled The Impact of Prior Abortion on Anxiety and Depression Symptoms During a Subsequent Pregnancy: Data From a Population-Based Cohort Study in China found a high correlation between induced abortion and depression among pregnant women.
• A 2008 study by the University of Oslo in Norway titled Abortion and depression: A population-based longitudinal study of young women found that young adult women who have had abortions are more likely to become depressed.
• A 2003 study published in the Medical Science Monitor titled Depression associated with abortion and childbirth: a long-term analysis of the NLSY cohort found that women with a history of abortion are at a significantly higher risk of experiencing clinical depression compared to women who give birth.

Burke suggested that abortion causes trauma in women because deep down inside, the woman knows that she is ending the life of another person, a person who is her very own child.

“At the heart of [a woman’s] post-abortion pain is [the knowledge] that she participated in the death of her child. She grieves the loss of that child. A mother’s heart is deeply wounded by her role in the death of her child,” he said.

Burke said that many woman deal with the loss and grief by “acting out,” whether it be through drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, all of which he said are futile attempts to deaden the pain. He pointed to Dawson’s alcohol abuse with wine as a “very common abortion-coping mechanism.”

“The way you come out of that is not to deny that pain, but to find a space where you can repent and grieve that loss.”

Rachel’s Vineyard, which Burke helped to launch with his wife Theresa, is a groundbreaking organization offering just such a “space” where women go on a weekend retreat to find healing from their abortion.

“The program is an opportunity to examine your abortion experience, identify the ways that the loss has impacted you in the past and present, and helps to acknowledge any unresolved feelings that many individuals struggle with after abortion,” states the organization’s website.

Burke said that Charlotte Dawson’s story does not need to be repeated. The one word that comes to his mind to describe her abandonment is “criminal.”

“It’s criminal that women are not given sufficient information, when they’re making these decisions, to understand the full consequences of their ‘choice,’” he said.

“It’s criminal that mainstream media wants to frame this as a ‘cyber-bullying’ episode — and that’s an element of her case — but the core issue is her abortion loss. It’s criminal because if it was any other issue, such as sexual abuse, her sexual identity she may have been struggling with, if it was an issue of abuse by her husband, you could be assured that there would be conversations about this across mainstream media that would focus on this causative effect and educate people on the matter.”

“But when it comes to abortion, ‘abortion rights’ is more important than the health of women and even the lives of women. Mainstream media is carrying on a dirty war for the abortion industry. They’re covering up for pro-abortion forces and that’s criminal.”

While mainstream media may be willing to overlook the abortion-depression connection, Dawson herself did not mince words about how her ‘choice’ devastated her.

“I was just a depressed mess,” she wrote. “I was single, damaged and miserable.”

LEARN MORE:

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/aussie-celebrity-admitted-before-committing-suicide-that-her-abortion-cause