4 posts tagged “faith”
The only starting point for the existence of human life is the one that an individual chooses to recognize and deem to be of significance. Though bio-medical science’s capacity to indefinitely preserve life is limited, it is technologically possible to preserve it for an extended period of time.
For various reasons, sperm, egg, body parts, and embryos are preserved based upon the values and choices of those presented with the opportunity and capacity to do so. Thus, some human life forms are preserved and some are allowed to perish.
If a like-thinking religious group, legislative body, or writers of letters to the editor can in the abstract pretend to know at what stage an imagined life is important, then a woman faced with actually dealing with a life and death choice is just as morally fit, capable and prepared by God to know what she should do.
We’ve got disagreements, lots and lots of disagreements: war, wages, immigration, stem cells, abortion, and what have you?
These disagreements, mainly on how we wish to be treated and how we would treat others, reflect a difference of opinion as to the nature of man qua man. By what we do and would have others do we vote for what we are.
As a child in home, neighborhood, school and church I was taught that we humans are inclined to be good. And as I would treat others I could expect others to do the same. I was to accept that I was not perfect, but neither was anyone else; we were all sinners that needed to walk as best we could within our own shoes, and reach out and try to help any stumbling others do the same. That seemed to work well where ever I did roam, and in other places where I heard that it was not working so well, one could find the exceptions that proved the rule. We tended to look for those exceptions within the frailty of our own humanity.
This America--that I have loved, served and benefited from so greatly--has been the place well described by that poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty—the one that suggests that all mankind yearns to breathe free. Along with a lot of other people of my generation, I assumed that our nation’s greatness came from how we would treat others. And since we were brave enough to treat others as we would like to be treated they would do the same.
When I read or am tempted to unleash a hate filled comment, I wonder if my thoughts about my land have simply been delusions, or have they been reflections of the faith that the Founding Fathers had and which grew and grew because of what free people will tend to do. And are the exceptions to people’s tendencies to do good to be found only with those that live beyond the borders of our land?
Was Washington foolish at when he let a defeated Cornwallis and his troops just freely sail away, or should he have put them to the sword? He could have followed the first shot of liberty heard round the world with another blast that let all of the planet’s lessers know that we were the master race of all mankind and destined by might of arms to remain ever so. It might have made George W. Bush’s task much easier, or maybe the place from which we ruled would have long ago ceased to be.
Of course this idea that the sinful children of God can thrive by doing unto others as they would have done unto themselves can at times seem so foolish, but I have though that it is what has truly made this land of ours the home of the brave and land of the free. In the past there have been empires just as mighty and maybe even more so, but their power and certitude never made them as good and as sweet as has this loving land of ours been for me and mine.
To me it is still worth the old college try to love our enemies by doing unto them as we would have done unto us. And what would we rather lose our lives or our souls? Is this not what Sacred Honor is all about?
In the Roman Catholic Church’s hiring of shepherds, schleppers and schlemiels, aside from screening males for employment as night janitors in the novice’s dormitory of nunneries, the practice of starting screening interviews for entry into Holy Orders with a chastity-clad-deal-breaker caveat, NO SEX, may continue to foster some deviations from the straight-and-narrow path as the ordained move down the road of life, or off into a secluded lane or down a dark alley.
This is a real child not an imagined one concocted in the mind of those who would tell a woman what she must consider to be the start of meaningful life. Unlike a glob of cells that has no brain, no feelings and no awareness, this little child’s brain and total being is racked in unimaginable suffering and despair.
It costs much and is very inconvenient to concern oneself about this child and others likewise abandoned. And as these real children suffer, the most hypocritical of pro-lifers prance in demonstration of their great love for children that exist only in their holier-than-thou imaginations.
