So Much Ideology. So Little Faith

I read an article in Christianity Today written by Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, an African-American woman who was writing about the lack of diversity in the line-up of speakers within the conference speaking circuit. Her article I believe was her own response to the furore raised by a previous article written Rachel Held Evans. In the Christianity Today piece, there was a link to the earlier article by Rachel Held Evans. After reading the first article, I decided to read the write-up that had started the trouble. It was probably one of the worst mistakes I have ever made.   

There was nothing particularly wrong with the article itself. It was well written and thoughtful in its nature. The entire article spoke of someone who was afraid to speak so as not to cause division but felt she had to speak for the sake of the faith she professed, I felt the article was a perspective that was needed with regard to issues affecting Christianity in the West. However, when I started reading the comments section, a feeling of depression quickly settled on me. The more comments I read, the more I wondered whether I was reading the comments section of a Christian blog or that of a far left, liberal Democratic Party supporter. The more I read, the more I saw people who said they were atheists agreeing with those who claimed they were Christians in church bashing. There were those who even went as far as describing Christianity as oppressive. (I’m sure those in North Korea would disagree with them on what constitutes oppression).

Critics of marriage point to marriage point to the high divorce rates as evidence of the fact that marriage as a concept has outlived its usefulness. I disagree. Everybody agrees that governance is broken in Washington but does that mean we should abolish democracy? As long as imperfect people are involved, there will be issues. The same with Christianity. As long as the people involved are people and not walking in the spirit, there will be issues. But for people to say Christianity and by extension the Church is oppressive, that worries me. For people to say the bride of Christ, as opposed to the people who say they are Christians, is oppressive says a lot more about them than they might say. The comments were all without grace and all about blaming others. Most worrying however was the replacing of human ideology for faith.

From most of the comments I read, I understood that for the people commenting, the ideologies and traditions of men trumped any articles of faith. In short, it seemed that people who were ideologues and card carrying members of the Democratic Party believed they were better Christians than those who were Republicans. I read a comment from someone railing against the right’s attempt to enact laws that would affect a woman’s reproductive health. By that I take it the person was talking about abortion. Is that what Christianity in the West all about now? The murder of innocent babies? The understanding I got was that there were a lot of people who claimed they were Christians who were viewing Christianity through the prism of their sense of right and wrong instead of viewing their sense of right and wrong through the lens of Christianity.

Jesus said people had made the laws of God of no effect by replacing them with the traditions of men. From the comments I read on Rachel Held Evans blog, a lack of love or unity is the last thing we need to worry about. The book of Jude urges us to earnestly contend for the faith that was once delivered to the saints. How can we earnestly contend for the faith when we refuse to listen or do what God says? How can we earnestly contend for the faith when we are so busy blaming others for all that's wrong with Christianity? How can we earnestly contend for the faith when we think Christianity is some anachronistic cultural phenomenon stuck in the Middle Ages that we need to drag kicking and screaming into the 21^st century. I am always baffled and amused by those who think they know more than the fathers who delivered the faith we profess to us. I’m sure there are those who think they know more than Christ. I’m sure there are those who if they had their way would burn the Bible because the Word of God isn’t politically correct and is what stops Christianity from being truly “progressive”. No, a lack of unity or love is not really what’s wrong with Christianity. The problem at times is the people who think they know what’s wrong with Christianity.   

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers and LOST, BUT FOUND.

DECEPTIO (EXCERPT)

Ever since Jeremiah Walker had been transferred to the Chicago office of the FBI from New Orleans, he had made no secret of the fact that he liked her. So he only liked her, a voice in her head scoffed. Liked? Liked was a lukewarm word, the voice in her head mocked. Well, extremely attracted to her, she revised mentally. And he felt she was attracted to him too, which Camilla didn't deny. He had therefore seen nothing wrong with taking the mutual attraction to the next logical level by having an affair. But while Camilla was willing to admit that she liked him as a friend, she wasn't about to get into a relationship with him. Because they were different.

Camilla had been raised in a strict Mexican Catholic home where good girls did what they were told and said their rosaries or else they would end up in hell. There were also consequences to be faced here on earth. Her parents had died when she was just two; the victims of a gang war on holiday in Mexico to visit relatives and she had been raised by her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother was a no nonsense disciplinarian who didn't take kindly to all the shenanigans that boys and girls got up to when they were unsupervised by adults.

However, while in college, she had truly discovered what it meant to be a Christian and apart from a slight blip, (to be honest, a major blip) along the way, she had held on to her faith in God. And in this crazy, changing world, that meant more to her than anything.

On the other hand, Jeremiah didn't believe in God or “all that nonsense” as he referred to anything that had to do with the mention of salvation, redemption or the like. He had grown up with an abusive father who used to hit his children and their mother. Yet, he had been some kind of leader in his church. When his father had dropped dead from a heart attack, he had left behind everything that reminded him of God.

Camilla had experienced the problems that arose from being involved with someone who did not share her faith and she was not ready to walk down that road again. There was no way anything was going to happen between them. Jeremiah however didn't seem to see things the way she did. He felt she was being unnecessarily difficult and that hopefully she would come round to his way of thinking and that he would be patient till that happened. That meant he would be patient till hell froze over.

“Have you noticed anything suspicious or out of place?” he asked, eating the last piece of his hot dog and wiping his hands.

“No, nothing. And I don’t think that anything will happen. I think the whole threat thing is a hoax,” she replied.

“Are you saying that the senator imagined the threat?” he asked dryly. “Or maybe you think he wrote those letters to himself? He might not be my favorite person in the world but I fail to see what he would gain from that.”

Camilla shrugged. She also didn't see what he would gain but she wasn't going to say so. “I just think that he’s trying to give Christians a bad name so that the American public can have another excuse for hating us,” she fumed.

“Do you really think people need any excuse to hate Christians?” he asked, his voice mocking. “You persist in believing in a God that doesn't exist, you try ramming your archaic and funny opinions down other people’s throats and you wonder why people seem not to like you,” he said.

It was interesting that on one level he found her faith in God annoying and funny yet he wouldn't mind sleeping with her. Talk about schizophrenia. “It’s so funny that the same people who don’t believe in God can’t just relax in the knowledge that he doesn't exist. They always seem to be trying their best to “kill” a God that doesn't exist,” she said dryly. “A world with over 6 billion people, the majority of whom believe in God in one way or another, and yet the tiny minority who claim they don’t, feel threatened and would want all of us to say that God doesn't exist so that they can go on killing babies and doing all the other crazy things they like doing without their consciences troubling them.”

Jeremiah sighed. “When did this become a discussion about abortion?” he asked, shaking his head.

“It’s a discussion about everything we believe,” she replied heatedly. “You say that the things we believe in, to quote you, are “archaic and funny”, but I thought the constitution guaranteed my right to believe whatever I wanted to believe?”

“As long as you don’t try getting people believe a tissue of lies while trying to pass it off as the truth,” he said.

“And who told you that you had the monopoly on the truth?” she asked. “You wouldn't know what the truth was even if it hit you in the face.”

He sighed again raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I can see that we are not going to agree on anything. There’s work to be done. Why don’t we get back to work and leave the arguments till later.”

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers, http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal.  

Abortion: Murder, the American Way (Part 2)

So, the question then is what is abortion?

I believe that in a society where government distrubutes contraceptives free of charge to girls as young as eleven or twelve and children as young as 15 or less can get abortions,  there is a fundamental problem. One of the fundamental problems with western society is the issue of identity. Thanks to the curriculum being taught in schools, children grow up being taught that they are nothing more than slightly more intelligent chimpanzees. As they grow older, Hollywood then passes across its own message that we are nothing more than dogs with urges. Urges that need to be acted upon. When you couple that with the overriding message of freedom, you have a distressing situation. Government is busy gleefully handing out contraceptives and can't be bothered to tell people that there is another way. Parents on the other hand don't have the moral authority ro tell their children what to do because when they were that age they did the same thing although they are now older and wiser. Which is why more teenage girls are getting pregnant at a younger age because no one tells them there is another way. The only message they are getting is that that they are free to do as they please.

Thanks to the pill, American women seem to no longer think that pregnancies are caused by sex. I really don't know whether they have gone back to the idea that storks bring babies, but thanks to the advance of science, American women now get shocked when nature asserts itself and they get pregant after sleeping with a man. They seem not to realise or want to accept that getting pregnant is a time tested consequence of sleeping with a man.

So back to the question. What then is abortion? If getting pregnant is a consequence of sleeping with someone, then abortion is a reaction to that reality. What liberals say is that abortion is a choice. That is disingenious and quite a blatant lie. When a woman meets a man, she has different choices. She can choose to wait before sleeping with him to find out if they are both ready for commitment so that she is not left holding the baby. Even if a woman were to decide to sleep with a man without knowing if either of them was ready for a commitment, either to themselves or a child, there is still a choice as to what contraceptive to use (of which abortion is not one as explained in my last post). However, from the moment a child is concieved, there can no longer be talk of "choice". Or at least not in the way it is used. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines choice "as an act of choosing between two or more possibilities". When a child has been concieved, there can no longer be talk of choice with regard to contraception because life has already been concieved. There is an inevitability about the situation. The choice that arises at that moment is whether to allow the child to live or to kill it. To dispose of the life created like so much unwated baggage. Just because the parents who unthinkingly decided to create life no longer want the life created because it would cramp their style.

In that case, abortion is no longer about choice. Abortion then is a result of the fact that one person or the two people involved in creating life did not think through their choices before hand before creating life and the consequences of such choices. We live in a society where people nowadays are always trying to evade the consequences of their actions. Abortion is one way women have been evading the consequences of the actions they take. However it is quite sad that the millions of unborn children aborted over the years are the ones who have to pay the price of the fact that their parents didn't think.

Abortion: Murder, the American Way

As the election in America approaches, I have been struck by the genuine hostility between the two major camps in the election, especially the seeming hostility between the two major players. I have also been struck by how much lies are being peddled by the liberal wing in American politics over the issue of abortion.

I have come to understand that the issue of abortion is arguably the single most divisive issue in this election and the liberals are using all kinds of scare tactics to get women voters on their side. Like George Bush’s “War on Terror”, anyone who speaks out against abortion is automatically labelled a misogynist and someone who is waging a “War on Women”. I understand that writing about the issue of abortion might not be too popular but I believe the truth needs to be told.

Abortion: What it is not.

Supporters of a woman’s right to control the reproductive process and the right to determine when she gets pregnant or whether she even gets pregnant or not will tell you that abortion is a form of contraception. This is a lie.

Dictionary.com defines the word contraception as the “deliberate prevention of conception by any of various drugs, techniques or devices.” The etymology of the word contraception tells you that the word itself is made up of two words, “contra” and “conception”. The word contra in the sense in which it is used means “against” while conception in defined as the “act of conceiving”. So in the full sense of the word, contraception, or a contraceptive, is used to stop conception. It is against conception. I’m sure that even the most fanatical supporters of abortion will agree that abortion does not stop conception. The most prominent fact about abortion is the fact that it takes life after the life has been conceived. It is quite clear that abortion is not a method of contraception.

If abortion is then not a method of contraception, what is it?

That is a question we shall seek to answer in subsequent posts.