The right to life is the basic human right. When it is denied, no other right will ever be recognized. When it is affirmed, and appropriately grounded, all other God-given rights will be recognized and defended in just the way they ought to be.
In order to appropriately ground this right, however, we have to define our terms. We have to acknowledge what we are talking about, and this requires a moral imagination. But a functioning moral imagination is not possible without two things. The first is a fixed natural world, which runs as it does under the governance of God, and the second is a sure Word from the God who has done this for us. We need natural revelation, given to us by God, and we need Scripture to correct our sinful tendencies to veer off from what God has obviously presented to us in the world.

Think of it this way. Every person reading this began his or her existence as a human being as a single cell. One of the largest cells in the human body, it is even visible to the naked eye — about 0.12 mm in diameter. There you are. But even though it is visible, it is still just one cell, and we cannot make out any characteristics yet of William or Sally. But God can. We don’t need to know the details because we know that the details are all there to be known by God.

At the other end of the pregnancy, the child is obviously a child, capable of pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, comfort or discomfort. I have conducted a memorial service for a stillborn infant, and everything about that was right and proper. But even the most ardent pro-lifers do not want to conduct memorial services for fertilized eggs that failed to implant. This is no inconsistency, because the God who requires us to honor and respect human life from conception onward is the same God who designed the means of emotional bonding over time. All of this is in the hands of God, and we are His creatures. We must receive what He gives us, and that includes everything He gives us, and the way He gives it.

The lie that abortion advocates have been told (and have told in turn) is that the unborn child is just “tissue,” with the same visible status as that fertilized egg. Rights are assigned on the basis of what appears to be true to them at a glance, and it is not long before even that cursory glance is dispensed with. But it has to be acknowledged that what pro-aborts say about the entire gestational period is something that certainly looks to be true in the immediate days after conception. However, it only looks that way in a godless universe — though pro-lifers can understand why unbelievers do not see the point of according full human rights to a cluster of sixteen cells.

We do see why they can’t see past what they are seeing with their eyes. But we also know that if they are not able to see the humanity of those sixteen cells, they will also not be able to see the humanity of a dismembered child in a pie plate with commodified legs and liver. They will not be able to see what has grown up into the obvious because they have willfully blinded themselves.

And that blindness began somewhere. So perhaps instead of asking when human life begins, we should rather ask when the moral blindness begins.

They have blinded themselves because they are not willing to receive what God has told them about it. Where has God spoken? God has spoken in two books. In the first, He tells us that a fertilized human egg is fully human. We know this on the basis of natural revelation. We know it the same way we used to know that the egg of a bald eagle in a nest was a member of a protected species. We knew the egg would become an eagle because the egg already was an eagle. The only things requisite are time, nutrition and protection — the same things needed by an eaglet . . . or a newborn baby.

And secondly, the God who has designed this amazingly intricate process of bringing boys and girls created in His image into the world is a God who wrote a book. And in that book, He defines unborn human life as human life, period, stop (Ps. 139:13; Ex. 21:22-23; Luke 1:41).

The moral imagination is axiomatic. It builds upon certain givens. The moral imagination is an exercise of right reason. It is a rational activity, and because our secular age despises moral reasoning, it has lost its moral imagination. If you reject the givens — in this case, natural revelation and special revelation — you will not be able to stop anywhere and say “thus far and no farther.” Without a functioning moral imagination, to suddenly stop and say “no farther” is to be completely capricious and arbitrary. Someone will ask, “why here, why now?” And without axioms from God Himself, such questions are unanswerable. Put another way, secularism is morally bankrupt.

“If that is the imagination, what is the moral imagination? The eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke first coined the term in his great work Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . The moral imagination is the distinctively human power to conceive of men and women as moral beings . . . Modern educators — a breed with which I am all too familiar — have not been good gardeners of the moral life. In their penchant to treat fact as god, event as illusion, individual as datum, person as chimera, norm as relative value, and human nature as social construct, they leave the moral imagination to perish” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, pp. 54-55).

So then, take the wonderful phrase “right to life.” In order to make any sense of it, we have to know what rights are, and we have to know what life is. Neither one is capable of springing autonomously, full-grown, from inorganic matter. Both of them, in order to be seen for what they are, must be seen with the eye of a moral imagination. That moral imagination must begin with axioms from the Creator in order to function at all. Rights are therefore a gift, just like life is. Life is a grace from the hand of a loving Father, just like our rights are. Rights are no more self-evident than life is. What is self-evident is that God has given both to us as an undeserved grace.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps. 111:10). The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (Prov. 1:7). The fear of the Lord is to hate evil (Prov. 8:13). The fear of the Lord is to have a moral imagination.

The post Moral Imagination and the Right to Life appeared first on Blog & Mablog.

BCB's Danny Rockett parodies the Beatles classic "Yesterday" to welcome Jon Lester to the North Side.

I usually wake up a few times during the night, with last night being no exception. Tossing and turning, I reached for my phone at 4 a.m. and saw a text from my buddy Lyle, "Cubs sign 3 time All-Star LHP Jon Lester." I was so excited, instead of trying to fall back asleep, I started favoriting and retweeting tweets for about an hour. Eventually, I drifted back to finish my dreams, all that much sweeter knowing Jon Lester is playing for the Chicago Cubs.

Paul McCartney said he wrote the song "Yesterday" in a dream, and when he woke up the song was right there for him to write down. So it was with me this morning when I awoke inspired to write "Lesterday."

"Lesterday"

Lesterday, the World Series seemed so far away

Now I can’t wait for opening day

2015 starts Lesterday

Suddenly the Cubs have an ace who’s a lefty

Can’t wait to watch him pitch at Wrigley

Jon Lester is a Cubby

Thank you to Theo!

Cause you got Jon Lester paid

We’ll remember you

When the Cubs go all the way!

Lesterday, we told MLB we came to play

Plus we stole Joe Maddon from the Rays

And last year we ripped off the A’s

Cubs are spending dough

Montero, behind the plate

It’s been six long years

since the playoffs in 08

Lesterday, the Cubs could be in a pennant race

The damn Cardinals in second place

Oh I believe in Lesterday

Tony Gwynn, the Padres legend and eight-time NL batting champion, passed away today at age 54 following a battle with cancer.  Gwynn is survived by his wife Alicia and his children Anisha and Tony Jr., who plays for the Phillies.  (Just yesterday, CSNPhilly.com’s Jim Salisbury wrote a touching Father’s Day piece on the relationship between the Gwynn men.)

The elder Gwynn was drafted by the Padres out of San Diego State in the third round of the 1981 draft and he went on to spend his entire 20-year career with the Friars.  Gwynn quickly established himself as one of baseball’s best hitters and was the model of consistency over his career, finishing with a .338/.388/.459 slash line, 3141 hits (19th all-time), 135 homers and 319 stolen bases.  Gwynn twice led the Padres to the NL pennant, and also collected 15 All-Star Game appearances, seven Silver Slugger Awards and five Gold Gloves.

After retiring, Gwynn remained in the game as both a part-time broadcaster and the head baseball coach at San Diego State.  Gwynn was a shoo-in for Cooperstown and garnered one of the highest vote totals in history (532 of 545 votes) for a first-time inductee when he entered the Hall Of Fame in 2007.

We at MLBTR all loved watching Gwynn play and greatly admired a man who by all accounts was one of baseball’s true gentlemen.  We send our condolences to Gwynn’s family and many friends and teammates.

I don’t know.

I don’t know how else to explain this. Can I really formulate an argument that will explain why we shouldn’t murder disabled children? If you don’t immediately recognize the eugenic slaughter of handicapped babies as something severely troubling, I’m not sure that I can offer any insights to help you understand.

You see, this is the problem. This is why we can’t come to any agreements. This is why our arguments are fruitless. They don’t have to be — arguing could be a rather worthwhile activity. But a constructive argument, or debate, or dialogue, or whatever you want to call it, requires both parties to have some shared concept of right vs wrong and fact vs fiction. Without that, neither side can appeal to the other, because they both exist in entirely different universes.

So, me personally, I’m livin’ over here in a world where it’s never OK to execute a disabled baby, or any baby, for any reason. In fact, in my universe — a universe we might call “reality” — the murder of children could be, without hyperbole, classified as THE worst thing. It is the worst of all that is bad. It is the lowest of low. It is the ugliest of ugly. It is the Pinnacle of Wrong. If it isn’t wrong to kill children, then it can not be wrong to do anything else.

Let me say that again, because it’s a crucial point:

If it isn’t wrong to kill children, then it can not be wrong to do anything else.

Literally anything else.

Slavery? Genocide? How can they be condemned? Of what sort of moral standard have they fallen short? If the bar has sunken low enough so that infanticide can leap above it, then I doubt that any atrocity could find a way to limbo underneath.

Believe it or not, even politically incorrect comments about homosexuality have to be excused if we are to believe that baby killing is a moral act.

I’m often told that I need to be more understanding on this topic, but this is an unfair request. There are people — millions of them, in fact — who think it should be legal to murder babies, but then illegal to, say, pay a fast food worker less than minimum wage, or refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. How could I possibly understand this mentality? How could I wrap my head around the thought process that leads one to conclude that the latter cases are so atrocious — so dehumanizing — that they ought to be outlawed, but the former case is so acceptable that it ought to be vigorously defended, and even funded, by the federal government?

Understanding? No. I do not understand. I do not. And I hope that I never do. CS Lewis wrote about the Abolition of Man, and reading his book is the closest I can come to understanding a society that has devolved into this kind of murderous insanity. He wrote:

“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or ideologies all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.”

We have arbitrarily wrenched certain values from the One Source of all values, and they have now swollen to madness in their isolation.

I say all of this because my initial intention was to sit down and write about the couple in Washington who just won a 50 million dollar “wrongful birth” settlement. Brock and Rhea Wuth sued a hospital because their son was born severely disabled. No, they were not alleging that the hospital caused the disability; they alleged that the hospital (and a lab testing facility) did not run the correct tests that would have detected the genetic defects while the child was still in the womb. Had they been given the correct tests, they would have known that the baby was “defective,” “defected,” and then killed it. Tragically, they were robbed of the opportunity to abort their son, so the hospital must pay for the son’s care — for the rest of his life.

Oh, but don’t judge them: they still “love” their child. They wish he was dead, they wish they had killed him, but they still “love” him. Make no judgments. Offer no stern words. They sued a hospital for not giving them the chance to kill their child, but do not think yourself qualified to condemn such a thing.

Or that’s what I’ve been told, anyway.

So I sat down and intended to write about this case. I was going to explore all of the angles. I was going to point out, as a secondary issue, how these “wrongful birth lawsuits” (this one is hardly the first) will serve to make it even more expensive to have a baby at a hospital. Think of the liability issues involved if medical establishments can now be sued for not killing your baby. I was going to explain how this story is an inevitable side effect of the death cult philosophy which tells us that human life is worthless, and a parent’s right to convenience and comfort can trump a child’s right to the life God gave it. I was going to point out how the Nazis also murdered the disabled for the same reason we do: to rid society of those who might be considered a “burden.”

Here’s an excerpt from Hitler’s Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring:

Since the National Revolution public opinion has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of demographic policy and the continuing decline in the birthrate. However, it is not only the decline in population which is a cause for serious concern but equally the increasingly evident genetic composition of our people. Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community.

I was going to say that abortion apologists have, in more than one way, aligned themselves with one of the most wicked political regimes in the history of mankind.

I was going to explain why this is not a good thing.

I was going to explain why disabled children shouldn’t be murdered.

I was going to explain why all children, disabled or not, should be protected.

I was going to, but I can’t. These facts are self evident, and I can’t explain a self evident fact. I’m not that good.

If you don’t understand, I can’t make you. All I can do is pray for your soul.

And I will. I promise.

**********

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