Christian Philosophy: Everyone Has a Philosophy. It's The Lens Through Which They View The World and Make Decisions. (28 page)

The eugenics movement in Germany spawned Nazism and resulted in the mass murder of millions of innocent lives, but the eugenics movement in the United States took a different form. The chief proponent of eugenics in the United States was a woman named Margaret Sanger. You may recognize her name: she founded the American Birth Control League in 1928, which later became known as Planned Parenthood. Sanger coined the term “birth control,” and she promoted abortion as a way to kill unwanted babies—it was her idea for purifying the gene pool. Quotes from Sanger’s writings leave no doubt about her motivations for promoting abortion:

• “We desire to stop at its source the disease, poverty and feeble-mindedness and insanity which exist today, for these lower the standards of civilization and make for race deterioration.”
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• “…we would make it a law that children should be brought into the world only when they were welcome, invited, and wanted; that they would arrive with a clean bill of health and heritage; that they would possess healthy, happy, well-mated, and mature parents.”
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• “Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.”
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• “…the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics.” Sanger concludes, “Birth Control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator.”
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Notice that Sanger believed only “well-mated” parents with a clean bill of health and
heritage
should be allowed to have children. Her ideals were blatantly racist. Among the people whom Sanger thought should not be allowed to procreate were the “…diseased, feeble-minded, and [the] pauper element dependent entirely upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”

For Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, birth control and abortion were all about purifying the human race through controlled and selective breeding. She thought of abortion as a propaganda tool to “weed out” the members of society she deemed unworthy of life.

I know abortion is not a fun topic to discuss, but it would be wrong for us to quietly go about our lives, pretending that the horrors of abortion aren’t happening. We have a duty to employ our Christian philosophy and speak out for the unborn children who cannot speak for themselves. All you have to do is look at the procedure for partial-birth abortions, or the criminal conditions that have been found in some late-term abortion clinics, to see that abortion devalues human life and desensitizes society to the violence of murder. If you don’t already know, I’ll describe partial-birth abortion in the least disturbing terms possible. It’s a surgical procedure in which the baby is partially removed from the mother’s womb, then a doctor punctures the baby’s skull and suctions out his or her brain tissue. This is performed on babies 20 weeks old or older.

I don’t care how you look at it, partial-birth abortion is murder. Even the thin legal separation between what constitutes a partial-birth abortion and what meets the criteria for murder reveals the fallacy of the argument that abortion is about choice. Babies don’t become living human beings after exiting their mother’s wombs—they are living people from conception—and the value of human life isn’t determined by age.

In fact, a doctor who performed late term abortions at a clinic in Philadelphia is on trial for seven counts of murder because he performed abortions by inducing labor and killing the babies after they were completely out of the womb. See, it’s a legal abortion to kill the baby as long as the baby’s head is the only body part out of the womb, but if you deliver the rest of the baby’s body before performing the procedure, then it’s murder. What kind of twisted logic says it’s okay to kill a baby in the womb, but it’s first degree murder to kill the same baby two seconds later if he or she is completely out of the mother’s womb?

We all recognize that it’s just as wrong to kill a ten year old as it is to kill a two year old, but abortion supporters try to say that it’s okay to kill a baby depending on how old he or she is, or whether the baby is in or out of the womb. It’s a totally illogical argument. The stage of development has nothing to do with the value of human life. It’s just as wrong to kill a one-day-old baby as it is to perform a partial-birth abortion on a baby while he or she is in the womb, or to kill the baby after it comes out of the womb. Murder is murder, no matter how old the victim is.

It saddens me that 70% of women who have an abortion claim to be Christian at the time of the procedure. As a church, we have failed those women. The only reason I can imagine a Christian supporting abortion is that they don’t know the facts. They have bought into the lie that an unborn child isn’t truly alive. They have no Christian philosophy by which their life is guided.

Scripture and science both prove that unborn babies
are
living human beings. When Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, the medical community hadn’t completed all of the studies we know about today that prove unborn babies are viable human beings, so the Supreme Court decided to rule that a child in the womb had no rights. But we know better: unborn babies are human beings, and they do have rights.

With current statistics showing that 33% of all women will have had an abortion by age 45, I suspect that most people know someone who has had an abortion. God loves every single one of those women, and He has provided forgiveness for anyone who will accept it, so I’m not trying to condemn anyone who has had an abortion. I’m not mad at anyone, and I’m not trying to hurt or slander anyone. I’m just trying to save lives and show people the importance of having a Christian perspective on abortion. In order to do that, we have to speak openly and honestly about it.

Socially, abortion causes a tremendous loss of human potential in our societies. Worldwide, approximately 125,000 abortions are performed every day—that’s more than 42 million abortions every year.
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To put that number in perspective, the most babies that have ever been born in the United States in one year is 4.3 million,
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which would mean that for every infant born in the U.S., at least another 10 babies around the world are killed by abortion. Imagine how much potential has been eliminated from our midst. We’ll never know how many innovators and leaders have been killed by abortion; how many Martin Luther King, Jrs or Billy Grahams were never given the chance to make our world a better place. Additionally, the effect of abortion on women’s health has been awful. Look at these facts:

• Having an abortion can triple a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer later in life.
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• A study in England found an 80% increase in the rate of breast cancer since 1971, when the number of abortions rose from 18,000 to nearly 200,000 a year.
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• Women who have abortions are 30% more likely to develop a mental illness.
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• Women who have an abortion are three times as likely to develop drug or alcohol addiction.
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• Women with a history of induced abortion are at a significantly higher risk for psychiatric problems, adjustment disorders, bipolar disorder, depressive psychosis, neurotic depression, schizophrenia, parenting difficulties, and death from various violent and natural causes.
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The health risks associated with abortion are astonishing. There are more risks than I have listed here, but I think this list is long enough for us to see the wide range of dangers associated with abortion. The point is that abortion isn’t only wrong from a religious or moral standpoint—it’s wrong from every way you can look at it.

In the World, but Not of It

T
he secular world has basically beat the body of Christ back into the four walls of the church. You can have religious opinions—as long as you keep them to yourself. They don’t want Christians saying anything publicly about God or morality, but Christians have as much a right to free speech as anybody. It’s okay for Christians to have a philosophy that guides our opinions on current issues, and it’s okay for us to express those opinions.

We looked at homosexuality, abortion, and creation from a Christian perspective. We could keep going and discuss a Christian philosophy for marriage, raising children, work ethic, managing money, and every other topic you can think of. Although Scripture has guidance for every situation imaginable, it isn’t practical for me to try to present a Christian philosophy for all of them in this book. Instead, I have tried to help establish a way of thinking that will allow you to form a Christian philosophy on your own—regardless of what situation you may be facing.

The world is heading in a different direction than God, so we can’t just adopt the popular opinions and beliefs of society. As Christians, we are separate from the world. Our born-again spirits set us apart, and there should be a noticeable difference in the lives and opinions of people who have the life of God in them versus people who have only physical life.

People who have a relationship with God should be different from the world—which represents people who are separated from God. Scripture says that we are in the world, be we are not
of
the world (John 15:19). The Word of God shows us that we live in a hostile environment, and it warns us not to get too comfortable with the world’s way of doing things. For example, it tells us:

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

2 Corinthians 6:14

This scripture is almost always applied toward marriage and the idea that Christians shouldn’t marry unbelievers, which is true, but it isn’t limited to that. It also applies to business dealings, friends, and other important relationships in your life. I’m not suggesting Christians should avoid all dealings with unbelievers, but we do need to be careful not to allow the world to influence us.

The world is not embracing Christianity. Jesus plainly told believers that they would be rejected by the world just as He was. Another scripture says that all who live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12), so the only way to escape persecution from the world is to go with the flow of society. Once you start following God, then you are going to be living contrary to the tendencies of the world, and you will experience opposition at times. Being a Christian is more like swimming upstream than floating along with all of the trends and opinions of society. Even a dead fish can float downstream. It takes backbone to swim against the current.

If you are watching the same television shows and movies as unbelievers, reading the same books and magazines, then you are going to experience some of the same results in your life. When you put garbage in, you’re going to get garbage out. Yet the average Christian is fully identified with the world. They pipe the same junk into their lives, and they are living the way the world lives. Scripture says that you will be the way you think in your heart (Proverbs 23:7), which means that thinking like the world will make you look like the world. You may be born again in your spirit, but your life is going to go the way of your dominant thoughts. Scripture says,

For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

Romans 8:6

It doesn’t say that being carnally minded tends toward death, or will lead to death for certain types of people. No, it says to be carnally minded is death; they are the same thing. To be spiritually minded, on the other hand, is to be focused on the Word of God. Spiritually minded people are not pressed into the mold of this world; they don’t take in all of the same junk through the media, and they don’t think like the world.