Saturday, January 24, 2009

Hope versus Fear



I’ve had a hard time this week dealing with our new president’s first actions in office. With the stroke of his pen, President Obama ushered in the use of federal funds for abortions in other countries. So now our tax money, like it or not, goes toward women across the world killing the life that is within them.

For a long time I grappled with what science and faith topic I could elaborate on that might explain why abortion really is murder. In my previous blogs, I’ve talked about the fact that a person has all the DNA they’ll need to become a unique individual from the time of conception. This is a scientific fact. It has absolutely nothing to do with religion. I even used the Scientific Method to discuss whether the preborn child is human. See: http://lorettaoakes.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html

In today’s society, there is no excuse for ignorance on this subject. The plethora of information on the formation of the fetus from conception to birth is all over the internet, churches, and science books. So what’s the real problem?

Fear.

The Webster Dictionary describes fear as:
To feel a painful apprehension of; to be afraid of; to consider or expect with emotion of alarm or solicitude.
http://www.webster-dictionary.net/definition/fear

So why do I say the real problem with abortion is fear?

The hard-core feminists who push abortion as a right are truly fearful. They fear that if the abortion debate is removed, they will have no platform on which to exist. There will be no reason for feminists to exist if the topic of abortion is obsolete. It isn’t that they don’t understand that the fetus growing inside a mother’s womb isn’t human. They do! It’s that if they admit that abortion is wrong, no other feminist arguments exist. They are afraid that their reason to exist will cease to exist.

Let’s look at something feminist Camille Paglia recently stated in Salon.

“But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index3.html

Here is a grown educated feminist actually stating that abortion is murder.
So what are we supposed to take away from this? Two things: People know abortion is wrong, and people believe they are in control.

Even though people know abortion is wrong, they are fearful of losing what they perceive to be a freedom: the freedom to do what they want with their bodies. Ms. Paglia loses rational thought when she says that a baby is the mother’s biological process. The developing child has its own biological processes. Even from conception, that child sends its own personal messages to the mother’s body in the form of lymphocytes and later stem cells. Literally the two are mingled. For more info see:
http://lorettaoakes.blogspot.com/2008/04/inheriting-traits-from-our-children.html

If two humans are mingled together, where does one leave off and the other begin? An abortionist may scrape the developing child from a mother’s womb, but does he go in remove all the stem cells that baby has given her mother? No, and what Ms. Paglia has failed to comprehend is how that mother has and will continue to grieve that loss emotionally, spiritually and physically. That child is forever a part of her—literally! No amount of scraping will take that away.

The feminist argument is based on a false hope: the hope that a woman maintains her own life—that she’s in control. No one is control of his or her life, we all live on borrowed time.

Fear drives control. Yet control is a façade. It doesn’t matter if you are an atheist as Ms. Paglia, or a devout Christian, we all have to admit that sooner or later we are not in control—even of our own lives. Yet that is what drives feminism. Control. Therefore, to admit a lack of control would mean they would have to change their mantra. It would leave them with nothing left to grasp, but the unimaginable. God.

Letting go is feminism’s Achilles heel.

That’s what makes this last week so sad. Signing the agreement to allow money to flow to other countries for abortion only fuels the façade of control. While President Barack Obama’s campaign ran on tag line, “Hope”, really all he fueled this week was the continuation of fear. And when we live in fear, we have lost hope.

(Thank you to my dear friend, Jane, who guided my thoughts for this post.)

Below is a link to an interesting way to talk to people about abortion. I hope you will follow up on it.


http://listen.family.org/miscdaily/A000001766.cfm

Monday, January 12, 2009

Blessings in Review




We’ve made it through the holidays! I hope your Christmas season was truly blessed with quiet moments of divine reflection and a hope for the future.

It has been a rollercoaster for me. Emotions from the extreme joy with our kids during Christmas, to the emotion of sheer sadness at learning that one of my dear friends is battling a type of bone marrow cancer, have taken me to both extremes. Some days it’s left me speechless, some days I’ve cried. During the holidays, another dear friend’s husband was in a motorcycle accident. He is still struggling to recover.

All of these things really played havoc on my mind as I tried to focus on the season. Then a mixed blessing happened. A friend of mine dealing with dystonia (an early form of Parkinson’s) asked me why it had to happen to her. She is Jewish in her traditional thinking , but she is not a practicing Jew. Therefore she has a different concept of salvation.

I sat down with her and we talked for a long time. I don’t know that I was able to help her much, except to listen and share my faith with her, but she helped me a great deal. I realized what a great blessing my Christian heritage provides. It gives me hope, day after day. I know that this life is not the end of everything. I know that God has created me in His image and that I will have eternal life. I know that God’s own Son, came down from heaven, lived a human life and opened the gates of heaven all to enter. I realized just how vast my God is.

After considering this, I heard a song that mentioned the following (if anyone knows the author, please help me out): “my God is not the sun or the moon, but the One who created them; my God is not the earth and what it provides, but the One who created it.” I’ve paraphrased here, but the theme is what is important.

Each day heralds a unique sunrise and sunset. Everyday provides me with a new opportunity to do better than the day before. I can assess my actions, make improvements and do things better. Each day is a blessing rich with time with my kids, my husband and my family.

I may be rushing around like a chicken with my head cut off being taxi-mom or whatever, but I’m rushing around with my kids, having pleasant conversations and sharing each other’s company. I’m having just a few quiet moments with my husband, laughing and talking about the day’s events.

I’m praying very hard for my friends and their trials, and I hope you will too. But in the end, I hope you will see what a gift time is for us all. One of my favorite quotes comes from Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf says to Frodo, “That is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

I hope you will share some time with me this year as I explore new and interesting topics of creation and how the Lord is ever present in our lives. I look forward to a new year full of surprises, good and bad, and I look forward to having fun on this rollercoaster of life. Thanks for spending a few moments with me.