Friday, August 6, 2010

I am inclined to think that the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes of belief

I do believe I could just about alienate everyone with my doubts and conclusions about religion, the law, politics and on down the line. I am sure I just got through alienating many Christian blogger friends by expressing my doubts about the divinity of Christ, but I have expressed that doubt any number of times in my life and sooner or later I was going to get to a point of expressing this doubt in my blog in the interests of being honest, among other reasons. On the other hand I have alienated any number of democrats and other pro choice people by my opposition to legalized abortion, but I have held those views since 1973 and in the interests of being honest and in promoting my views I have come out in both my blog and my videos with my stand.
I have long been a registered democrat, before Roe vs Wade, but very time I read a democrat's pro choice views defending abortion rights, I feel something is now missing that is very important to mankind's survival which is respect for life. I loved the democratic party at one time for its battle to bring equal rights to minorities. I was proud that democratic presidents did fight for their civil rights. That was respect for the sacredness of life, black, white, Indian or Hispanic.
I also think that religions that have promoted the view that life is sacred have served mankind. The Mormons taught me that abortion is wrong. They are very strong in this belief. I believe that bad logic can creep into any system of beliefs or any country's laws or any political party's platform. We have to be watching out all the time for some way that reality has been distorted or something that is bad for people has been championed or turned into law.
If beliefs that aren't well grounded in reality creep into religion it is incredibly difficult to correct them either from the outside or the inside.
For example had not the government insisted that the Mormons had to give up polygamy when Utah became a state we would undoubtedly have so many polygamists that the whole country would be set back years in trying to react, which is what I think people in the government anticipated. As it is, Utah allowed the FLDS to continue with polygamous behaviors, probably because the main church still had the law of polygamy on the books just not practicing and it was too hard for Mormons to go against polygamy in their own state and effectively contain the practice. Nor did the Federal government try to chase down the remaining polygamists in Utah and other places. As long as the numbers remained fairly small, and the main much larger branch of Mormons gave up the practice, they no longer reacted.
I think the reason churches have an incredibly hard time changing their policies is because if the practice in question was claimed to have come about through divine revelation directly from God to the prophet, how could it be explained that God had changed his mind without the church losing credibility and authority?
The Catholics have also had incredible problems in changing any of their policies for the same reason I think. They have come up with a terrible pedofile priest problem because it has been impossible for them to change the law that priests cannot marry. They just keep trying to make the celibate priest policy work. In the meantime the number of Catholics who have surfaced claiming molestation by priests has given the Church a black eye it may never recover from if changes are not made. But on the other hand, the Catholic Church has fought abortion since the third century and they have again and again affirmed their belief that life is sacred from conception to birth.
My view of why the Supreme Court exceeded its authority by establishing legalized abortion when most of the states had never allowed it all these years, is because some people on that court were influenced by the legalizing of abortion in communist countries and may have thought that the poor who could not afford all the children they were having might avail themselves of this relief in our country, but we have to remember that the communist takeover did terrible damage to the Chinese infrastructure just as it did in Russia. I have read a number of memoirs by people who were living at the time of the revolutions and it is mind boggling what happened, especially in China. I would say the communist takeover set China back into the dark ages with all the destruction they did. And millions of Chinese lost their lives, so it is not surprising that the brutal practice of abortion and only one child could have seemed like the only solution in a country that could no longer support any excess because of the destruction done to it.
Read Pearl Buck, the Novel prize winning novelist and writer to know what China was like before the revolution. She lived there as the daughter of missionaries and she learned Chinese and mixed and mingled with the Chinese to an extraordinary degree, so she is a credible historian about that time in China's history. Another memoir I read, "Wild Swans" tells about what happened in the revolution to beautiful ancient China that would just break your heart. I just could not get that book off my mind for weeks after I read it.
But legalizing abortion without giving the people any say about it, any chance to debate the question, any opportunity to stop it, was you might say a takeover of communist style thinking, and any democrat who says to the contrary has not done their homework, they have not read enough history about the proponents of legalized abortion, nor do they show sufficient indignation and alarm about the way it was done here in this country, nor are they addressing the fact that it is a violent solution and that the country is no longer thinking that life is as sacred as they once did before it was passed into law.
With over a million abortions a year America has lost her innocence. And will not get it back until they figure out how they overturn such a law and figure out what to do with the children that result because of it. Once people get used to such deaths among them, it does not take long for them to harden their hearts.
So I have certainly not given up my belief that I should heed the call from God if he thinks I can do something about a serious problem. I did not welcome this job, but in my heart of hearts, I thought well, I am in a position to protest and keep protesting, and not give up, so I am one of the people who should tackle this problem. I believe God does ask very hard things of us. I think all the great prophets and leaders asks the same of those they are leading if they are obeying the commandments of God.
I would say that Christians need to put first things first and save lives. Figure out how to save lives. I do not think whether we believe Jesus is of divine birth or not makes our task of overturning a law that takes the lives of the innocent unborn easier.
I feel I have to be a good fighter in that fight, because it is an important one. I cannot be a slacker. I cannot lose sight of the goal. Millions of innocent must depend on this fight to save their lives. Many more will die before we can possibly hope to change the law. Right now those million lives lost every year is the biggest problem in our country I see that needs to be fixed! It will really take a lot of faith in God's law, Thou Shalt Not Kill, to believe that we need to go forth and try to stop people from doing it. It will take a very strong belief in the sacredness of life.

1 comment:

Gerry said...

In reference to Amrita's comment on a preceding blog entry, that God's law is written in all our hearts, I would say that polygamy was one law the Mormon Church embraced that was not written on the hearts of the women, for example, who had a great deal of trouble accepting the inequality expressed in the right of the men to have 7 wives while the women had to be able to accept sharing one husband with so many wives. I also think that the many children that come from such unions questioned whether this was a practice that served their best interests. I do not think any former polygamous wife was going to fight for the return to polygamy. Many were probably relieved the US government stepped in and ended the practice. So here was an example of a church possibly going astray in their interpretation of what was God's law when it comes to marriage. If women were not equal under this law, the prophet who had the revelation introducing it was going to be seen as perhaps deceived as to what constitutes God's law. So every direction a church might take is going to come under scrutiny to try to determine whether it is a good direction or whether it is a violation in some way of God's law which would require it serving all the people well who are affected by it.


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