Outer Rim Territories

IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.

Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?

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Everyone knows we live on an overpopulated planet. Too many people (carbon footprints) harm our environment, causing global climate change, a threat to us all. In addition, increasing population means more poverty and starvation. Responsible adults must limit their family size.

What I just wrote is nonsense, of course, but is religion to environmentalists and accepted by many if not most Americans. In spite of such bleak pronouncements, abundant space remains in and on this world for more people. The sun controls our weather more than we thought. Carbon dioxide helps plants grow. Denmark and Japan, two densely populated countries, experience remarkable prosperity in spite of (because of?) their many citizens. Dishonesty, graft, greed, and corruption seem to contribute more to poverty and starvation in developing countries than anything else.

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HT: Robert C. Baker @ Bioethike

YouTube - Investigation of medical lies and manipulation at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.

I stumbled on this terrific quote from Luther on marriage (context is Genesis 24:1-4) File this in the “some things never change” category:

Moreover, especially the dignity of matrimony should impel us to give instruction concerning matrimony in a sober and godly manner. For marriage is not a trifling matter; but it is the most serious and most important matter in the whole world, because it is the source of human society and of the human race. Life in its entirety has nothing that excels it in worth. Therefore one should discuss it with the utmost piety and on the basis of the weightiest arguments and reasons. For in other circumstances it has been dishonored enough by concupiscence of the flesh and by lust.

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Concerning the eternity of God is in his faithfulness, manifest in words and action.

Robert Jenson writes, “the identity of Israel’s God, his difference from other gods, is precisely that Israel’s God is not eternal in the way other gods are, not God in the same way.  That the past guarantees the future is exactly the deity of the gods, but Yahweh always challenges the past and everything guaranteed by it [including, Jenson points out, the past of His own people], from a future that is freedom. . . . Yahweh is eternal [in that] He is faithful.”

Israel needed no grounding in a mythic past, an unalterable tradition, in any notions of fixed substances to guarantee a future.  Israel was instead grounded in midair by the reliable Word of Yahweh, whose continuity was not that of sameness through time but a “personal” continuity of His “words and commitments, by the faithfulness of later acts to the promises made in Yahweh’s earlier acts.”

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Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: Lose Your Faith, Lose Your Reason
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Mollie gets this one spot on correct. Read her assessment of President Obama’s health care rationing and Peter Singer.

The patriotic duty to die » GetReligion

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This one goes in the “Ugh! Why?!?!?” column.

Sex and the Harry Potter movies: Does anyone want this? | PopWatch Blog | EW.com Read more…