It was actually while reading Carl Sagan about 14 years ago that I came to rethink abortion.
He was basically talking about the miracle of life, and how being born at all means conquering such outstanding, almost unimaginable odds, whether that means wriggling your way toward an egg, racing past millions of other sperm, being in the womb, being comforted by the sound of your mother’s heartbeat; and how we are just stardust, so small and tiny, like granules of sand upon the cosmic beach, and things like that.
Later that night I was drinking with my girlfriend at Milton Lake and wondering at the stripe of moonlight trembling across its glassy face, when I really had a revelation of what he was talking about: That it really was a kind of miracle that I was ever born, and that it was obscene, in a way.
I was actually aware of the past and the future, when I would not be around, and when I wasn’t around, and immediately I thought of the millions who got so close to that miracle-moment of being birthed into this world, beaten almost all of the inestimable odds, defied all of the astronomical maths–so damn close that they had begun to gestate, developed a body, ears, eyes, primitive respiration, and were that close to freedom; within mere months of giggling and playing and learning and being awed by this life, of the wonder of life, but never made it, and would never know anything of the beauty that I was now experiencing at this lake, holding tight my gal, wondering at huge, cosmic questions and metaphysical grandeurs.
And it just seemed unjust to me.
I guess you had to be there, and felt what I felt at that moment. I could never really put it into words.
And so I want to thank Carl Sagan for that moment, for that eye-opening realization of the miraculous, odds-defying journey we all have to take in order to plant our flag in time. Perhaps he believed that we were merely star-stuff, as he often said. But I suspect he too, would rather have appreciated being star-stuff in the form of a living, breathing human, instead of having his blessing crushed, his miracles negated, and lopped away limb by limb in the false darkness of the maternal womb.
I’ve been thinking about what faith really is for over 20 years now. The other night, just being in bed, I received a revelation that furthered my understanding on this topic.
We have been told that faith is so many things. We have been told that it is a spiritual force. We have been told that it is a spiritual law, and that it works much like any physical, natural law. But I’ve never felt that those ideas were quite right. I fear they treat God as a kind of push-button God, who reflexively responds to faith on demand. Somehow, I don’t think that God is like a computer program, where if you punch in the right code, He does what you want Him to do. It reduces God to the status of a tool, and that just can’t be right.
Immediately, a few verses came to mind.
In Ephesians 2:8, the bible states that we are saved by faith, and that it is the “gift of God.” And in Romans 12:3, Paul indicates that a “measure” of faith is assigned to all believers. And in 1 Corinthians 12:9, faith is said to be a spiritual gifting.
Finally, we find that “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
So, why? Why does faith come from hearing the bible?
I realized that faith comes by revelation, through an epiphany, that comes by meditating on the gospel or God’s ways.
Of course. Because the christian walk itself starts with a realization, that we need God and His ways in our lives, or that we are sinful, or that Christ is the messiah.
So, I realized that faith is not some ethereal force or some mechanical spiritual law or principle, but just a gifting of revealed knowledge. It comes through revelation.
And revelation is just a windfall of understanding. It is that “aha” moment of sudden and impactful realization. And it is always personal, always a moment of awakening.
That is why it is critical to hear the Word, to speak the Word, to be around the Word, to think on and meditate on the Word. The Word is your source of personal revelation, which really are just gifts of faith.
When God speaks to you, or reveals something to you, in His own voice and through His own Words, you come to recognize God. You come to develop faith in His voice and in His word by constantly encountering Him over and over. This is how relationships are built. This is how trust and confidence are gained. This is how faith works.
Definition. Victimhood: the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer, especially when you want people to feel sorry for you because of this or use it as an excuse for something.
The truth is, victimology is a lazy play on morality. People think they can use it as a cheat-code to attain righteousness.
If the mantle of victimhood is granted to you gratis, you don’t feel like you have to be persecuted for telling the truth, or doing what is right. Persecution is often imagined, or cooked up. You imagine that you are just born into it. And so, no moral effort has to be made, because a coat of righteousness is already yours, and it was free to claim.
What is really appealing about this racial victimology that we see in play today is that you don’t have to DO ANYTHING in order to suffer persecution. Rather, you are crowned and initiated into a false sense of moral goodness by just being yourself, by just having the wrong skin color or the wrong last name.
Your goodness, and your special place in the moral hierarchy comes directly from something apart from your own moral choices and behaviors. It is almost as if goodness becomes a grace, something that does not have to be earned by actively BEING GOOD.
This is the danger of victimhood. You take the apple in hand, and it is shiny and it looks good for eating. But if you eat it, it becomes part of who you are, and you lose your moral status, exiled from the grace that you assumed was yours all along.
The victim has special rights.
You do not have to be charitable. You do not have to feed the poor.
You do not have to take care of the widowed. No. You are special and unique, and inherit your goodness based on forces you cannot control.
This is a false moral system, much like a religious meme, that is spreading widely in our culture. Victimhood is the lazy person’s path to righteousness. One does not need to be just, because everybody around you is unjust, and your victimhood is a kind of shield that protects and defends you from moral responsibility.
This is really about persecution, and you should know it.
Persecution that is earned by a commitment to goodness, rightness and truth is legitimate persecution. It is true persecution, because one knows in advance that in a world of liars, a truth-teller will never escape suffering. But in a world of liars, the lies we tell ourselves are just as important as the truths we should be committed to.
And we should distinguish one from the other. Too many groups and nationalities and cultures today are erecting worlds of persecution around themselves, in order to shield themselves from moral responsibility. And THAT is a big problem.
This is one of those sayings that is really hard to get a personal revelation of, to actually appreciate in a deep way. I had heard it preached over and over, but just didn’t want to agree with it. I resisted it. I fought it. I argued and wrestled with this premise for months and months.
But I think I am starting to turn toward it with an attitude of acceptance.
Here’s why.
Jesus died for the world. For everybody.
“For God so loved THE WORLD,” and all of that.
He didn’t just die for you, or for me, or the church, or his disciples. He died for the world.
Yes. That same world whose influence we are commanded to protect our souls against. That world.
To make the point more emphatic, in that famous verse in the third chapter of the gospel of John, it goes on to say that “whosoever believeth in him has eternal life.”
Whosoever. Which means that person who dogged us, who betrayed us, who screwed us over. Yes. That whosoever.
But let’s switch this up. Let’s imagine that God hates a man.
Let’s imagine that God thinks of this man and it just burns him up to do so. Just the thought of this man makes him irate, causes him to lose sleep, and will ruin his whole day.
Sounds absolutely ridiculous, right?
God does not respect any man enough to hate on him.
If he did, we would certainly look suspiciously on God.
And yet, as followers of God and His ways, we instinctively assume it is okay to hate people. We automatically assume that it is okay to hate ANYONE.
But, this is probably not so. It is not okay.
So, if you hate just one, you have no love in your heart for anybody.
The idea is not so crazy.
I had a realization many years ago that all of us were like branches on the same genetic tree. It is said that we share 99.8% of the same genetic material.
From a scientific perspective, we are all clones.
The physical differences between two people are marginal.
In some ways, to hate someone else is to hate yourself. You hate someone who is almost genetically identical to you.
Think about that for a second.
Let me add one more point.
Jesus didn’t just teach that we were all sinners. Jesus didn’t just teach that we were all imperfect.
Jesus taught that we were all pretty much in open rebellion against God and His ways.
Jesus taught that if you looked upon a woman with lust in your heart, you already committed adultery. You are an adulterer, worthy of death.
If you look at a person with violent hatred in your heart, you have already committed murder. You are a murderer.
Paul went as far as to say that it is not our job to judge those outside of the church, at all.
Finally, we have all heard the phrase: “hate the sin, but not the sinner.“
Probably better to hate your own sin, I say.
You cannot hate another’s sin and not hate your own.
You cannot hate one sinner without hating them all.
Hatred for one’s neighbor is as good as hating yourself. Scientifically. Biologically. And spiritually. That’s why Jesus commanded us to not only love our neighbor, but our enemies, as well. Because, as we all know, our greatest enemy is always ourselves.
If there is one thing that any society cannot afford to lose, it is faith, and people of faith. Faith is the glue that holds together a free and safe society. Without faith, there cannot be freedom.
What is it that all communist and extremist socialist societies need, more than anything else?
They need a citizenry that will comply and conform to cultural conventions set by the state apparatus. They need a robotic, workaday citizenry, who are willing to silently and internally groan at the authoritarian government structure, but hold back on outrage, on rebellion, on putting their lives at risk in order to bring change.
Years ago, there was a horrific story that came out of Communist, authoritarian China. An infant had crawled out from the sidewalk and into the road and had subsequently been struck by a car.
Video shows one good citizen after another walk by the dying, injured infant, stop and look, and then push on. Cars slowed down and people gawked, but nobody stopped, nobody helped.
The fact is, that once you can successfully remove religious faith from a society, and replace it with servile obedience to the god-like state, you won’t have to worry about the people stepping out of line. There will be no bravery. There will only be cowed drones.
You see, the thing about faith in God, or even in what is right and what is wrong, is that it becomes more important than yourself, and your own well-being. You begin to realize, as a man or woman of faith, that doing what is right is more important than preserving one’s body and health and life.
In fact, the older that you get, as you look back on your life and the decisions made in it, you begin to realize that doing the right thing was the only thing that mattered. You realize that you are not defined by your gender, your race, your culture, your relationships, or anything else but your sense of right and wrong. In fact, I will go so far as to say that being a man is just being a person who knows what is right, and puts that above all else.
You cannot have a safe and free society without people willing to die for what is right. You cannot have freedom from tyranny and authoritarianism without a populace that is willing to die for what is right.
This is the rather obvious reason, historically, that communist and socialist countries crack down on the church as their first order of business. It is not religion that they are afraid of, per se, but faith. They know that to accomplish their social objectives by force, they cannot have people willing to put their own lives and social standing in jeopardy for what is right. They cannot have a society of do-gooders; the kind of people who will see a bleeding, dying, mortally-injured child in the street and stop to help, despite the social risk, because they that is the right thing to do, persecution be damned.
No. ‘The good’ must be viewed as a distribution from the government. The government must be seen as the source of distributed goodness, as it were. Individual, personal charity must replaced by a willingness to pay higher taxes, to sacrifice their lot for the greater societal good.
Conform. Pay your dues. Don’t make a stir. Be a good citizen by viewing yourself, not as an independent agent of goodness, but merely as a small contributor to the overall ocean of positive change enacted by the authorities.
Faith in God, and especially a God that is always watching, is replaced by a constant surveillance by your fellow citizens, neighbor, police and digital overlords.
Therefore, faith in a personal God, and His watchful eye, must be replaced by obedience to the equally ever present observation station of the supreme authority of the government. That is how it works.
It is not faith that they are after, even, but a belief that if you resist, if you step out of line, you will be caught, and ostracized, exiled, and punished in this present time. You will be canceled, shut up, censored, banned from communal activities, even re-educated.
Faith is the driver of freedom. A self-determinate person, who is willing to do good, or do the right thing, is the greatest danger to authoritarianism. Faith is more than just the glue, but the very fabric of freedom woven into a free societal superstructure. Without freedom, faith is replaced by cowardice, by fear, by fretful conformity to societal rules and obligations. True faith is a personal commitment to risk in the face of overwhelming societal dangers. It always was, and always will be– just that.
