This is not primarily a political blog, and though politics is one of my great passions, I’m trying hard to stay away from a large amount of political discourse on a website devoted to all things Christian (of course, politics falls under the realm of Christian-thought).

I’ve been recently reading Ron Paul’s new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto and really been enjoying it. For those who don’t know, Dr. Paul is a Republican candidate for the Presidential nomination; which, of course, is fairly unattainable at this point. He is a staunch “old school” Republican and values such things as: individual liberty, small and decentralized government, a foreign policy of non-intervention, and drastic cuts to federal spending so as to produce a budget surplus rather than budget deficit every year.

Last night while reading I came across a few brief words on the topic of abortion. Dr. Paul is opposed to the federal government mandating laws on abortion and believes such decisions should be made at the local and state level.

One of the most contentious issues in our public life over the past three and a half decades has been abortion. As a physician, and in particular as an obstetrician who has delivered over 4,000 babies, I have always had a special interest in the subject of abortion…

…I have heard the arguments in favor of abortion many times, and they have always disturbed me deeply.  A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a “parasite” that the woman has the right to expel from her body.  But the same argument justifies outright infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant outside the womb: newborns require even more attention and care, and in that sense are even more “parasitic.”

If we can be so callous as to refer to a growing child in a mother’s womb as a parasite, I fear for our country’s future all the more.  Whether it is war or abortion, we conceal the reality of violent acts through linguistic contrivances meant to devalue human lives we find inconvenient.  Dead civilians become “collateral damage,” are ignored altogether, or are rationalized away on the Leninist grounds that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. (The apostle Paul, on the other hand, condemned the idea that we should do evil that good may come.)  People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing.  They do not ask her how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite.  But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted.  In both cases, we try to make human life into something less than human, simply according to our will.

What is God’s relationship to time? In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes God as an author writing a story. Lewis pictures God as able to step away from his book (our universe) and deal with the events of the story while time stands still in the book. He uses this illustration to seek an answer to the question, “how does God have time to answer millions of prayers at the same time?”

This explanation of God’s relationship to time seems a bit too much like Santa Claus to me. Rather than proposing that God steps into and out of time in some sort of fairy-tale way, it seems to me that a proper view of God’s sovereignty necessitates that we accept that God can adequately uphold our universe and address all of our needs simultaneously.

Clearly God is supreme over time and could stop and start time without our knowing it, but I think it’s an unnecessary weakening of his supremacy to say that He does.

I’m currently reading through Elaine Scarry’s excellent book On Beauty and Being Just. I came across the following passage, which I found relevant to our current discussion of Liturgy. Now, Scarry is not, as far as I know, a Christian, nor was she referring to liturgy; but God, in his abundant common grace, has made the world in such a way that all truth is His truth. So, Scarry writes:

You are about to be in the presence of something life-giving, lifesaving, something that deserves from you a posture of reverence or petition. It is not clear whether you should throw yourself on your knees before it or keep your distance from it, but you had better figure out the right answer because this is not an occasion for carelessness or for leaving your own postures wholly to chance.”

Another quote that comes to mind is this on from Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk:

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourist on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
…
One the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?…It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should strap us to our pews.”

Discuss.

Previously, I wrote that I found Lewis’ rendering of the Moral Argument for the Existence of God compelling. Obviously, however, there are some difficulties and objections that need to be raised. The first objection is that there is no absolute standard of right and wrong because different peoples and cultures have historically defined right and wrong in different ways.

I know that some people say the idea of a … decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference.

Essentially, Lewis argues that differences between cultures are largely insignificant when looking at their big-picture systems of morality. Take for example, that while not all cultures have agreed on how many wifes a man should have, it is universally agreed upon that I cannot just go out and take another man’s wife for myself simply because I wanted to (and if I tried to I’d be in for trouble with the husband, brothers-in-law, fathers, etc.).

There are of course some difficulties even with this argument, because there will always be a “what if” exception. Anytime we start talking in universals (”universally agreed upon that…”) we are setting ourselves up for, “yes…but what about such-and-such murderous, bloodthirsty individual who appears to lack any moral compass whatsoever.” To this I would respond that our near universal condemnation of such individuals show them to be at odds with our human experience of right and wrong. Even if we grant that these individuals don’t believe what they are doing is wrong, we can safely say that everybody else does; and in our world of uncertainty this is, to me, quite convincing.

Recently I’ve been enjoying another study through one of the classic 20th-century works on Christianity (courtesy of my church’s Men’s Ministry). I find C.S. Lewis’ rendering of the Moral Argument for the Existence of God to be clear, concise, and convincing.

In the opening chapter of his well-known work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes:

Every one has heard people quarrelling…They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’

I think we can all agree that this is true. He continues in the next paragraph:

…what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about.

I think we can all agree that this is true too. Lewis goes on to argue that this standard we all allude to in our quarrels indicates there is a God of the universe who cares about right and wrong, and that this God’s standard of right and wrong is somehow impressed firmly in our brains to the extent that we cannot shed it’s power or influence in our daily thinking (and arguing).

Continue reading part 2.