R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 326

The President at the Prayer Breakfast

Presidents of the United States are usually awful as theologians. In far too many cases, the closer they get to anything theological, the bigger the mess they make. President Obama seems rather adept at making such messes, but he is hardly the first. The only President of the United States to be baptized while in office was Dwight D. Eisenhower. In remarks made at the Freedoms Forum at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1952, the recently-elected Eisenhower said: “In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

Of recent presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were probably the most theologically literate, and both claimed deep roots as Southern Baptists. In his infamous Playboy interview of 1976, Carter cited Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as influences and Clinton seemed cut from the same theological cloth. Both men have, in their own way, distanced themselves rather clearly from the theological and moral convictions held by Southern Baptists. Ronald Reagan’s evangelical faith seemed to be vague and he rarely attended church services during his eight years in office. George H. W. Bush seemed to be a very conventional mainline Protestant of the old establishment but his son, George W. Bush, may well have been the most clearly evangelical president of the modern age.

President Obama identifies openly with a very liberal version of Christian thinking and reasoning. He cites religious concerns from time to time, but he seems to operate more as a secular cosmopolitan. When he does address religious thoughts openly, as at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, he made a considerable mess.

That he holds to a universalistic understanding of religion is not in doubt. President Obama spoke of faith, of his own “faith journey,” and “professions of faith.” The common denominator in his thinking seems to be faith as a act without any concern for the content or object of that faith. Thus, “part of what I want to touch on today is the degree to which we’ve seen professions of faith used both as an instrument of great good, but also twisted and misused in the name of evil.”

When people do evil in the name of faith, the President asserted, it is because the faith has been perverted or distorted. Any faith can be perverted in this way, Mr. Obama said, and no religion is inherently violent. In his words: “Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments.  And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process.  And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty.  No God condones terror.  No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.”

The fact remains that Western civilization — and much of the world beyond — is directly threatened by a militant form of Islam that has the allegiance of millions of Muslims. While the vast majority of Muslims in the world are not fighters in a jihad against the West, and for that we must be thankful, the fact remains that the President’s own national security authorities directly disagree with the President when he recently said that “99.9 percent” of Muslims do not back Islamic terrorism.

On Islam, President Obama is not the first to sow confusion on the issue. In the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush argued over and over again that America is not at war with Islam. We can understand why a president would say this, and we also need to admit that there us an important element of truth in the statement.

The West is not at war with Islam if that means a war against all Muslims and against all forms of Islam. But, true as that statement may be, we must also be clear that we are facing a great and grave civilizational challenge from millions of Muslims who believe, quite plausibly, that their version of Islam is more faithful to the essence of Islam and the Quran. This understanding of Islam is growing, not receding. It is now drawing thousands of young Muslims from both Europe and North America to join the jihad. We have seen the hopes of a moderating Arab Spring dashed and we have seen the rise of even more brutal and deadly forms of jihad in groups such as the Islamic State. Clearly, there are millions of Muslims who do believe that God condones terror. They celebrate the fact that Muhammad was a warrior, and they understand that it is their responsibility as faithful Muslims to bring the entire world under the rule of Sharia law. Their actions are driven by a theological logic that has roots in the Quran, in the founding of Islam, and in the history of Islamic conquest.

And yet, at virtually every turn, President Obama and his administration remain determined not to mention Islam in any negative light, and even to redefine some acts of terror committed in the name of Islam as “workplace violence.” His refusal to acknowledge the worldview of those who declare themselves to be our enemies is neither intellectually honest nor safe. It is a theological disaster, but it is a foreign policy disaster as well.

In the most controversial portion of his address, President Obama said:

“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

President Obama would not mention Islam by name, but he did bring judgment on the Christian past, with specific reference to the Crusades. At that point a good measure of Christian humility and honesty are called for. The centuries of the Crusades were a brutal epoch in which horrible things were done, often in the name of Christ. The union of medieval Catholicism and the power of kings was disastrous, and there are lasting stains on the Christian conscience from this era. The same is true of the era of slavery and Jim Crow laws in the United States.

But honesty is hard to come by when it comes to distant history, and that is why we should be rigorously critical when it comes to the very real and horrifying reality that terrible acts have been perpetrated in the name of Christianity. At the same time, historical honesty and humility demands that we acknowledge that in the age of armed conflict between Christian kingdoms (as they claimed to be) and Muslim armies, even the stoutest secular critics of Christianity must recognize that our current age would be very different if Muslim armies had won, for example, when the forces of the Ottoman Empire were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683. All those professors of gender studies and post-colonial literature in European universities might well be professors of the Quran, instead.

Even as the West is not at war with Islam, in the sense of being at war with all Muslims, the existential threat to western freedoms and liberties is real, as is the fact that millions of Muslims (and their current governments) offer aid and support to groups clearly involved in jihad. There is reason to believe that groups like the Islamic State are also now understood as a existential threat to any number of Arab regimes and Islamic communities. After all, most of the victims of Islamic terror groups have been fellow Muslims.

Intellectual honesty also demands that we recognize that going back centuries to the era of the Crusades is not really helpful when looking at the fact that the current threat is a resurgent Islam, which understands full well that the modern secular West lacks a worldview that can lead to an adequate response. Secularism and Islam are not evenly matched.

Theological honesty further demands that we acknowledge the vast difference between a theological system centered in Jesus Christ, who told Peter to put away his sword, and one that takes as its central example Mohammed, whose status as a mighty warrior is an issue of enduring Muslim pride. The strategic fact of our current times is that the terrorism feared by the West is deeply rooted in a theological worldview, and that worldview is Islam.

The real problem with President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast was not his reference to Christian history, but his refusal to acknowledge the reality of our current challenge — a refusal growing more dangerous by the day.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.

Image, The Siege of Vienna: The Ottomans Surround the City.

For a thoughtful essay on President Obama and the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, see “Obama the Theologian” by Ross Douthat, which appeared in the Sunday, February 8, 2015 edition of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/opi...

Transcript: The Briefing 02-09-15

The Briefing

February 9, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

It’s Monday, February 9, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Canada supreme court strikes down euthanasia ban in inevitable outgrowth of culture of death

Once again, huge news from across America’s northern border where in Canada that nation’s Supreme Court on Friday struck down laws against so-called physician assisted suicide. This is a huge issue – it’s a massive issue – when we consider that the culture of death is marching forward on the issues of euthanasia and what is at least called physician assisted suicide. And we’re looking at a situation in Canada that is a dramatic reversal because just back in 1993 that very same court upheld the nation’s laws against physician-assisted suicide, claiming at that time that it was in keeping with the Canadian Constitution and of the nation’s humanitarian values.

Courts of this kind of status do not want to reverse themselves directly – at least not very often – because it immediately depreciates the courts prestige. Just back in 1993 not only did this court uphold the nation’s laws against physician-assisted suicide, but so did the vast majority of Canadian doctors – including their official national organization. But now we’re looking at a massive change in the culture that has affected even the dignity and sanctity of human life. And of course it didn’t begin with euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, it began on other issues, most importantly, the issue of abortion.

In one sense what we’re looking at here is the inevitable outgrowth of the culture of death as its logic spreads from abortion at the beginning of life to the end of life issues that are now becoming issues of controversy and changes in law, not only in Canada, but at least in some states, here in the United States of America. Europe has been far ahead of us on this issue – at least in terms of nation such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland – but we’re looking at the fact that Canada more closely emulates Europe in terms of many these cultural and moral patterns rather than United States. Its point of reference on so many these issues would be courts not so much found in Washington and New York City and other American locales, but rather in the capitals of Europe.

And in Europe we’ve seen the development of such things such as euthanasia tourism, especially in nations including Switzerland. We’ve also seen in Belgium and the Netherlands that the so-called slippery slope isn’t a fallacious argument at all, it’s actually demonstrated in what’s been going on in those countries; especially in Belgium, where an argument for physician-assisted suicide began with those who were old and had intractable and interminable disease – diseases that were described as terminal. But now we’re looking at a situation in which the Belgian government has ruled that even children as young as 12 must have access – constitutionally – to physician-assisted suicide.

And we’ve also seen the supposed boundary lines on issues such as suffering and terminal disease constantly renegotiated. In several European nations for instance, mental status is considered just as significant as physical suffering in terms of a terminal disease. And that has now been extended, not only to those who are at the end stages of life, but to those who are in childhood, or at least in the years approaching adolescence. We’re looking at the culture of death finding its ultimate logic in a nation that says it does make sense that a 12-year-old should have the right to demand physician assisted suicide.

As you might imagine, it doesn’t begin there. It didn’t begin there last week in Canada. Instead, the Supreme Court struck down laws against physician-assisted suicide in cases of adults who were diagnosed with “grievous and irremediable” medical concerns. As Ian Austen of the New York Times reports,

“The unanimous decision, which reverses the position taken by the court 22 years ago, came more quickly than expected and might become an issue in federal elections to be held this year.”

In the decision handed down by the court we find these words, and I quote,

“The prohibition on physician-assisted dying infringes the right to life, liberty and security of the person in a manner that is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice,”

Now let’s look very closely at those words because even as decisions by the Canadian High Court are not issued in the name of any justice but rather just in the court, it looks as if this decision were written by Justice George Orwell. We’re looking here at a classic case of doublespeak because again just to read from the decision handed down by the court – remember this is a decision that an individual Canadian has the right to physician-assisted suicide, especially under some conditions – but notice the language. It says the prohibition on physician-assisted suicide infringes on what, “The right to life.” So here you have a right to life that is constitutionally claimed as grounds for a right to death.

The next two words are similarly important. The laws against physician-assisted suicide, said the court, infringe upon Canadians “liberty and security of the person.” It’s really haunting to consider that the issue of security here is being extended to the termination of the physical life of the person involved.

The Canadian Supreme Court decision gives that nation’s parliament one year to come up with effective legislation to guarantee the right that the Canadian court now says it has found – a right that it denied as recently as 1993. But as I stated already, it’s not just the court that shifted its opinion on last two decades, it is also a significant number of Canadian physicians who have now turned their back on the Hippocratic oath and instead, it bought into the worldview of personal autonomy to the extent that they now, at least in very significant numbers, and at least in terms of the voice of some of the Canadian medical associations, are ready to side with physician-assisted suicide.

Several news organizations, by the way, indicated that according to recent polling, 45% of Canadian doctors supported a right to physician-assisted suicide. A couple of things to note there: first of all, that’s just a haunting number under any circumstances, but the second thing is 45% means that 55% do not support physician-assisted suicide. Which tells us that you don’t need a majority in order to make a moral shift of this kind of magnitude, all you need is a significant number; a significant number that allowed the Canadian Supreme Court to claim that it had medical backing for what is basically a very immoral decision.

Finally, on this issue, other words taken from the decision are similarly haunting. Every nation, every jurisdiction that seems to find a way to approve and legalize something like physician-assisted suicide says that it’s going to put boundaries in place so that this new so-called right cannot be abused. Here’s the language from Canada,

“We agree with the trial judge that the risks associated with physician-assisted death can be limited through a carefully designed and monitored system of safeguards,”

That’s the language of the culture of death, and as we know from very sad experience, its boundaries are ever expanding.

2) Congress sets new precedent by inviting Pope to address joint session

Next, another major announcement came down on Friday as well – this time from the United State – where the United States Congress announced that the current pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis I, will address a joint session of Congress on September 24 during his first American visit as Pope. As Siobhan Hughes reports for the Wall Street Journal, Pope Francis plans to address a joint session of Congress, making him the first leader of the Roman Catholic Church to do so.

Speaker of the House, John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said,

“In a time of global upheaval, the Holy Father’s message of compassion and human dignity has moved people of all faiths and backgrounds. We look forward to warmly welcoming Pope Francis to our capital.”

This is a new story that has a good deal of press attention and is likely to find a good many evangelicals unsure of exactly what to think. As Hughes indicates, there was wide approval from other congressional authorities in terms of the invitation. As she writes,

“The pope’s acceptance drew praise from Catholics and marked a welcome shift in tone from a planned joint session in March, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak.”

Susan Davis of USA Today wrote an article in which she says:

“House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who is also Catholic, said in a statement that she was ‘honored and overjoyed’ that Francis would address Congress. ‘Pope Francis has renewed the faith of Catholics worldwide and inspired a new generation of people, regardless of their religious affiliation, to be instruments of peace,” she said.’

President Obama joined the chorus of those enthusiastically welcoming the Pope to speak to the joint session of Congress.  He said,

“Like so many people around the world, I’ve been touched by his call to relieve suffering and to show justice and mercy and compassion to the most vulnerable,”

He challenges us, says the President,

“… to press on in what he calls our ‘march of living hope.’ And like millions of Americans, I am very much looking forward to welcoming Pope Francis to the United States later this year.”

This is an issue in which evangelicals should think very carefully and so should the rest of Americans because make no mistake, this is a major development. We’re looking at the fact that the Congress of the United States has invited a religious leader in his capacity as a religious leader to address a joint session of Congress. Almost immediately there will be supporters of the appearance who will state that the Pope will not be appearing as the leader the Roman Catholic Church, but rather as the head of the Vatican state.

But the untruth of that statement is made immediately clear in the language of those who did the invitation. The invitation was clearly to the Pope as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. This is the first time that a Roman Catholic Pope will ever have addressed a joint session of Congress and there are good reasons why this has never happened before.

The Vatican claims to be a state with diplomatic privileges, but those privileges were not extended by the United States of America until Pres. Ronald Reagan decided to do so early in his first term as President. One of the interesting things to note in that historical review is that a significant number of evangelicals were very opposed to that decision, even if they were supportive of other actions and goals of the Reagan administration in terms of foreign and domestic policy.

But we also have to note that there were some significant evangelical voices who were for it then, largely because the Pope at the time, Pope John Paul II, was known to be an ally against communism and in the case of the moral revolution, a defender of traditional Christian morality on issues such as the dignity and sanctity of human life and the institution of marriage and biblical standards of sexual morality. The pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI led to no shortage of evangelical double mindedness when it came to the status of the Vatican state as a state. But it’s now apparent that there are a good many people who are beginning to rethink that equation, but apparently not so much in Congress.

Treating the Vatican state as a state is to give a church the status of a foreign power with a foreign-policy. We need to note that the Vatican states approximately 110 acres large – that’s right, 110 acres – and its inhabitants are less than 900 in terms of the claim of citizenship. It is by any measure, the smallest entity recognized as a state on the international scene by both size and its population. Whether or not evangelicals may or may not be in agreement with any Pope’s positions on any number of issues at any given time, it is a very dangerous precedent for the Congress of the United States to welcome him as a head of state. It’s even worse to welcome him as the head of a church.

And let me go back to that language used by the Speaker of the House as he released a statement about the invitation. He said, and remember these words:

“In a time of global upheaval, the Holy Father’s message of compassion and human dignity has moved people of all faiths and backgrounds.”

He refers to the Pope, not as the head of the Vatican state, but as the Holy Father. He’s speaking of course not only as Speaker of the House, but as a Roman Catholic. And speaking as a Roman Catholic he has every right to use that title and to extend any number of privileges, as he may have opportunity, to the Pope. But as Speaker of the House, that’s a very different situation.

And of course there is going to be no small amount of irony on any number of fronts. You’ll remember that I cited House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who infamously is directly at odds with her church on the teachings of the church on any number of issues – including, and especially, issues of the sanctity of human life, including abortion. Just days ago in a press conference Nancy Pelosi said she actually had more credibility to speak to those issues than the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church because, after all, she had endured pregnancies and had given birth.

I spoke of precedence when it came to the decisions of courts – including last Friday the decision by the Canadian Supreme Court – but here again we’re looking squarely in the face at the issue of precedent. This comes now, what comes next. This is a development that will certainly, respectfully, separate some cultural conservatives from one another. But the bare fact remains that when Francis I speaks to this joint session of Congress, he’s not going to be considered by most to be the monarch of the Vatican state, he will be understood to be appearing as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. When someone says otherwise let’s just remember the statement issued by none other than the one who issued the invitation, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

3) Marijuana sellers push for term ‘cannabis’ in attempt for legitimacy

In recent days we’ve remarked several times on the issue of how moral change comes by a change in language, especially the change in language toward something that is recognized as a euphemism – a word that is less morally significant than the word it replaces. That’s what makes an article that appeared last week in USA Today by Trevor Hughes so really, really interesting. As Hughes writes,

“Last December, Denver police reported a major increase in the number of marijuana-related arrests in the city’s schools.”

But he says the number turns out to have been skewed by the fact that some police officers use the,

“…now-archaic ‘marihuana’ spelling.”

Hughes writes, the mix-up over the spelling highlights what turning into a heated debate within the legal and increasingly mainstream marijuana community. As he says, for a variety of reasons, many folks in the legal weed community would like to see marijuana and pot and weed relegated to the scrapheap of pejorative descriptions. And they aren’t shy, he says, about letting him know their feelings. One reader for instance complained that his word choices made him sound ignorant and bias. Their preference is for the word cannabis.

So while for decades now there’s been discussion about the law of the land and the moral issue of marijuana, and while sometimes it has been spelled with the J and sometimes with an H, now they want to spell it ‘cannabis’ in order to avoid any pejorative description of marijuana altogether. They want to band words such as ‘pot,’ they want to ban ‘weed,’ they want to insist upon ‘cannabis’ – believing that that Latin word somehow is going to be more palatable, more respectable,  and make no mistake, its respectability thereafter.

As Trevor Hughes concludes his article,

“But I get where people are coming from. After decades of operating in the shadows, marijuana retailers (we used to call them drug dealers) crave the legitimacy that comes from regulation and public respect. And they want to see the language reflect that marijuana has indeed gone mainstream.”

Now notice a couple of things. He uses the word marijuana, even as he says they’re trying to change the language in order to go mainstream. Elsewhere in his article Hughes says that the preference for the word cannabis is because the so-called ganjapreneurs, that is the new legal marijuana businesses,

“…believe cannabis sounds more positive,”

But it turns out things are more easily suggested than done; especially when it comes to changing the language. For one thing, it turns out that some of the laws legalizing marijuana call it marijuana, which means that it is marijuana – at least legally defined. They would have to change the law in order to change the language to cannabis. And it turns out there’s another problem when it comes to changing the language from marijuana to cannabis, it turns out that the marijuana that people are smoking and putting into so-called edibles,

“…is actually two different strains of cannabis,”

As Hughes says,

“The different strains have different effects, depending on how they’ve been crossbred. And don’t even get me started on the brand names growers give, like Sour Kush or Blue Dream; there’s no regulation of what growers call their products.”

Now leaving his article for moment, let’s remember that it was USA Today that weeks ago ran a groundbreaking article indicating that even where there is a claim to regulation, the regulations are either unclear or unenforceable. One Colorado official by name of Ron Flax said,

“There’s really a landmine out there in terms of the words we use,”

He says he tries to be sensitive in terms of using the language. He started using the term cannabis but as Hughes reports,

“…ran into a hiccup because county regulations and state laws refer to the plant as marijuana or marihuana.”

Hughes then writes,

“If he wants his regulations to be legal, Flax has to call marijuana marijuana.”

Well there is a bit of poetic justice in that we might note and a bit of moral reality as well. We at least should have the courage to call something what it is. And when it comes to a shift from marijuana to cannabis, there’s more than marketing that’s involved. It’s more than a shift from common language to the Latin root.

As this article makes clear, the real craving here, in terms of the shift of language, is for respectability. And remember that as Hughes mentions, these so-called new ganjapreneurs, who are also now legal marijuana marketers, used to be called – he doesn’t beat around the bush – drug dealers. When it comes to matters of morality, changing the word doesn’t change the thing. It doesn’t change the moral reality. But it does indicate a shift in the culture; it indicates a cultural preference for deciding to call something less significant than it was before.

And maybe there is poetry too in the fact that as they are trying to announce this moral shift by demanding a shift in language. There want to go back to the Latin, but dressing it up with the Latin won’t change what marijuana is. And, it won’t change the fact that those who are pressing this moral revolution called it at the time, marijuana. And so thus, do the laws.

4) Incredible spectrum of germs in subway lesson in wonder of God’s Creation

Well, in a still serious but a very odd note, I end with an article that appeared over the weekend on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. How’s this for a headline – On the Subway Scientist Track the City’s Secret Life of Germs. The article is by Robert Lee Hotz and it tells us about a group of scientists who are going swabbing around the subway stations of New York tracking down the so-called secret and very unseen life of germs. As he writes,

“In the process, they uncovered how commuters seed the city subways every day with bacteria from the food they eat, the pets or plants they keep, and their shoes, trash, sneezes and unwashed hands.”

In the subway systems of New York, as test by these scientist,

“The team detected signs of 15,152 types of life-forms. Almost half of the DNA belonged to bacteria—most of them harmless; the scientists said the levels of bacteria they detected pose no public-health problem.”

Now keep that in mind as we also read in this same report that they found in 151 stations bacteria used in mozzarella cheese. At the West 4th station and 12 others, they found the germ that causes meningitis. At the 133rd street station they found DNA from the germ that causes bubonic plague. At the South Ferry station they found species of bacteria that had previously been seen only in Antarctica, where, so far as I know, there is no New York City subway station.

Now let me repeat again, hard as this may be to believe, they say all of this poses no direct public health problem. But as you can understand, that’s pretty hard for most people understand and hard for many people even to believe. And of course we are looking at the fact that these kind of bacteria can cause disease. But there’s no warning here about some incipient outbreak of the bubonic plague or something like that. What’s being looked at here is the fact that well, that we are surrounded by other life forms – bacterial life forms – by the countless millions and billions. And then comes this section of the article,

“This emerging field reflects the growing awareness that the human body swarms with bacteria. Typically, every person is home to about a hundred trillion microbial cells bearing five million different genes, totaling about 5 pounds of micro-organisms per person. Indeed, microbes in and on the body outnumber human cells about 10 to one.”

Furthermore, as you’re beginning your Monday listen to this,

“Every person trails a distinctive collection of microbes, by shedding about 1.5 million microscopic skin cells every hour. Bacteria from a person’s body can colonize a hotel room in less than six hours, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois recently discovered.”

But while you’re pondering how it is that all those bacteria associated with mozzarella cheese found their way from the pizza shop into the subway system, and while you’re being told that we as the human being are being outnumbered by the so-called hundred trillion microbial cells – bearing 5 million different genes supposedly in our body, I have no reason to doubt this, every reason to believe it – as a secular world looks at this with befuddlement and tries to come up with some kind of evolutionary explanation, this is a good opportunity for Christians to go right back to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, right back to the Psalms, whereas David says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Our sovereign loving and holy creator has made us so that we are dependent upon all of these trillions, hundreds of trillions, of microbial things within us, without which many of our biological processes would be impossible. It should remind Christians of the mystery of the gift of life, something that is truly unfathomable. We will never be able to figure ourselves out, neither we, nor our microbes. But I will admit this: I’ll never look at a subway station quite the same way, nor for that matter, a piece of pizza.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the upcoming new release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. The new series begins on Saturday, February 14. Call with your question, in your voice, to 877-505-2058, that’s 877-505-2058.

 

For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-09-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Canada supreme court strikes down euthanasia ban in inevitable outgrowth of culture of death

Canada Court Strikes Down Ban on Aiding Patient Suicide, New York Times (Ian Austen)

Supreme Court rules Canadians have right to doctor-assisted suicide, Globe and Mail (Sean Fine)

2) Congress sets new precedent by inviting Pope to address joint session

Pope Francis to Address Congress Sept. 24, Boehner Says, Wall Street Journal (Siobhan Hughes)

Pope Francis to address Congress, USA Today (Susan Davis)

3) Marijuana sellers push for term ‘cannabis’ in attempt for legitimacy

, USA Today (Trevor Hughes)

4) Incredible spectrum of germs in subway lesson in wonder of God’s Creation

Big Data and Bacteria: Mapping the New York Subway’s DNA, Wall Street Journal (Robert Lee Hotz)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-06-15

The Briefing

 

February 6, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Friday, February 6, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) 6th Circuit ruling on Intervarsity personnel policies major victory for religious liberty

A major victory yesterday for religious liberty when a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Six Circuit seated in Cincinnati ruled that the InterVarsity Christian fellowship had a right to hire and to fire, to establish its personnel policies, on the basis of its theological and scriptural beliefs. A woman who worked for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship sued after the organization – a Christian ministry found on many major college and University campuses – had terminated her because of marital discord and the breakdown of her marriage. This is in accordance with the IVF personnel policies for a Christian ministry that establishes that marital status, in terms of this kind of issue, can be a matter for hiring and firing and for the evaluation of personnel.

The woman sued the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship claiming, nonetheless, that the organization’s policy was in violation of federal law antidiscrimination law. And this is a big issue, not only for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship but for any Christian organization and even by extension, to the local church. But we should be very thankful that the panel of the Six Circuit found that the InterVarsity Christian fellowship was within its constitutional rights as a Christian organization to define its personnel policies for those who have this kind of responsibility in keeping with scriptural and doctrinal principles and moral principles that are clearly established in the InterVarsity Fellowship’s employment policies.

The decision handed down by the panel said this,

“It is undisputed that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is a Christian organization, whose purpose is to advance the understanding and practice of Christianity in colleges and universities.”

That was the most important finding, the finding that just on that basis – the basis that InterVarsity is a Christian organization – it has the constitutional right to establish, especially what would be defined as teachers and leaders of the organization, to establish the personnel policies in keeping with the organization’s Christian beliefs. The Sixth Circuit panel pointed back to a very important Supreme Court ruling in recent years known as Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School. In that decision the Supreme Court ruled that that school had a right to hold its teachers to a certain set of principles that were doctrinally defined and to hire and fire on the basis of those doctrinal convictions.

One of the things we as Christians need to think about when we see a headline like this is what the opposite might have meant. If indeed the court had found against InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and for the woman who sued the organization, it would’ve meant that a Christian organization can’t operate on its own Christian principles in terms of hiring those who will actually teach and the lead those very organizations. The second issue having to do with importance to this religious liberty victory that was handed down yesterday has to do with the definition of minister or of clergy, because that is exactly where the Hosanna-Tabor decision pointed to the most basic reality.

The issue is: is it a religious organization that it has the right to hire those who will be its leaders and teachers on those religious convictions? The first thing the court found, at least this panel of the Sixth Circuit having to do with InterVarsity, was first of all, it is very clearly a Christian ministry. Therefore, it has the right to establish its personnel policies for leaders on the basis of those Christian convictions. The second thing it found was that when it comes to identifying who qualifies for this ministerial exemption, the language of the title really doesn’t matter. You don’t have to call someone a pastor or a rabbi in order for this to be a teaching position in terms of the ministry of a Christian or other religious organization.

In terms of that first issue, we should be very thankful that this panel found that the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship doesn’t have to call itself a church to qualify as a religious organization under these protections. As the panel of the judges wrote,

“…the ministerial exception’s applicability does not turn on its being tied to a specific denominational faith; it applies to multidenominational and nondenominational religious organizations as well.”

That is a very important issue, a very important victory. Secondly, when it comes to what the court should investigate concerning these policies, the panel ruled that it doesn’t have to look for titles such as Rabbi or pastor, but rather should look at the function of the position rather than its title. That too is very important when you think about a Christian college or university. The title might be professor, but the issue would be ‘what is the function?’ Is that function one that implies and involves a teaching responsibility on behalf of the religious organization?

One of the most important sentences in the decision handed down yesterday is this,

“This constitutional protection is not only a personal one; it is a structural one that categorically prohibits federal and state governments from becoming involved in religious leadership disputes.”

That is one of the most important sentences from a judicial decision I have read of late. And it is categorical in terms of its language and its meaning. It states just absolutely plainly that the Constitution prohibits federal and state governments from, and again I quote,

“…becoming involved in religious leadership disputes.”

Now my guess is there are some listeners to The Briefing who are saying, ‘Why is this such big news? Why is this such a big victory? Why the timing now? Why is this so relevant?’ Well just remember that back soon after the first of the year Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote a very pointed essay for that newspaper that appeared in its Sunday op-ed edition in which he claimed that churches should not have the right – and he was speaking mostly of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity – he argued that churches should not have the right even do have the exemptions that we’re talking about here when it comes to hiring clergy. He stated openly that churches are violating federal discrimination laws when they use that kind of discriminatory policy and apply it to those who will be the teachers – the ministers and the clergy – of their denominations.

So what we’re looking at here is not some kind of decision out of the blue that wasn’t necessary. We’re looking at a decision that was crucially necessary in order to confront a major challenge that is not just being faced when it comes to gender or marital status, but what’s going to be faced when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identification. Let’s make the point emphatically clear, if the church is not free to call its own ministry on its own terms, than religious liberty is nullified. And as this court – for which we should be very thankful ruled – if a Christian organization by extension cannot operate on the basis of the same liberty, than religious liberty is therefore again nullified.

And while we’re thinking about just how much common and constitutional sense is embedded in this decision, just remember that the California State University system kicked this organization and others off of its campuses – the largest campus system of any public university in America – because this group discriminates, according to the leadership of that University system, on the basis of religious conviction when it comes to choosing the student leadership of those organizations. Those kinds of decisions, those kinds of actions, indicate that we face no idle threats against religious liberty. But what one Supreme Court justice famously described as ‘a clear and present danger.’

And that’s why we should be so thankful for this decision handed down by the panel of the Sixth Circuit yesterday. This isn’t necessarily the end of the story. The plaintiffs in this case could ask for what’s called an en banc hearing by the entire panel of judges of the Sixth Circuit and they could eventually appeal to the United States Supreme Court. But let’s be thankful that that Hosanna Tabor decision by the Supreme Court is there on the record. The Supreme Court crucially got it right then, we have to hope that it will continue to get it right now – and in the future.

2) Facebook link to depression reveals susceptibility of humans to forget reality

Next, National Public Radio is reporting on something that should have our attention in this digital age, an age increasingly shaped by social media. And we’re not only talking about an age shaped by social media, but generations now increasingly steeped in and formed by exposure to social media. The headline from NPR is this: Does Facebook Cause Depression? Depends On How You Use It. Tajha Chappellet-Lanier writes that it turns out that depression can be directly linked to exposure to Facebook when it comes to something that may have escaped serious attention from researchers before – and that is this: does looking at Facebook and seeing what apparently are the incredibly happy and joy filled lives of one’s associates (or at least connections on Facebook and similar forms of social media), does this lead to a form of envy or a form of depression that simply comes by thinking that everyone else around you is happier than you are? And as it turns out, there’s now a scientific study indicating that depression is directly linked to exposure to Facebook when one looks at those postings on Facebook and other social media sites as if they actually described the lives of those to who we are connected.

The NPR story points back to the study indicating that the particular kind of Facebook exposure that’s been talked about here is “surveillance usage.” That may be a new term for all of us, but it immediately makes sense. There those who look at Facebook in order to do surveillance of their friends and associates; to see what they’re doing, what they’re up to, and at least in part, how happy they are. And one of the things that people who are doing this kind of surveillance on Facebook often don’t take into account is that when people post on Facebook, they’re likely to post only the things they want you see – no it’s actually a stronger reality than that, you can count on the fact they are actually posting only the things they want you to see.

And what they want you to see, according to the study, is that they are happy and busy doing joy filled things, having one thrill after another, when in all likelihood what they’re not showing is the fact that there is a whole lot of their life that is filled with boredom and that they face the same troubles as everybody else, but they’re not posting the troubles on Facebook. One of the things parent should be very aware of is that the younger you go in terms of exposure to Facebook, the more likely it is that children, teenagers, are unable to separate what they see as these postings from the reality of life. They simply assume that the people who are posting such happy pictures and happy stories – which by the way, might not even be true in terms of a lot of what is posted – simply becomes, by reflection, an occasion for them to think about the fun they’re not having. And the joy they are not experiencing. And the pictures they’re not posting.

Margaret Duffy, one of the researchers behind the study, she’s at the University Missouri School of Journalism. She says, and I quote,

“Facebook can be a fun and healthy activity if users take advantage of the site to stay connected with family and old friends and to share interesting and important aspects of their lives,”

That’s hardly worth a study. She has more to say,

“However, if Facebook is used to see how well an acquaintance is doing financially or how happy an old friend is in his relationship—things that cause envy among users—use of the site can lead to feelings of depression.”

That’s basically the theme of the research reported over and over again. A study like this, as is so often the case, probably doesn’t tell us something we didn’t already know or wouldn’t have already been perceived, if we pause to think about the question. But that’s really the issue isn’t it? We probably haven’t paused to think about the question in this sense. Even though we are aware the fact that there are many who are “surveillance users” of Facebook, and many of us may do that from time to time, the reality is that it turns out that is not a very good picture of reality – and that’s the problem. We can confuse social media for reality and that can lead to feelings of depression, or frankly it can lead to feelings of just about anything else. And it points to the fact that when people are presenting themselves on social media, they’re presenting themselves in the way they want to be presented. They are editing their own lives and telling their friends and others what they want them to know, what they want them to see.

From a Christian worldview perspective we come to terms of the fact that envy is itself a sin clearly identified in Scripture. And we also come to terms with the fact that the Scripture grounds our worth, even what the secular world would call our self-esteem – at least in the rightful sense – as that which is rooted in the fact that we are created by a sovereign God who made us for His pleasure and made us in His image. And as Christians we understand who redeemed us by the blood of the Lamb. And when we’re looking at that, we realize that what’s posted on Facebook has no real bearing on our lives whatsoever and certainly by comparison with others. And certainly when we consider just how edited and airbrushed in one sense, what’s presented on social media can often be. But we also understand that as human beings we are susceptible to failing to remember what we should know about ourselves – grounded in the biblical truth. And we are susceptible, all of us, to looking only at Facebook, to, for that matter, a real estate cataloger, or just driving down the street or watching what our friends drive, or watching where they say they go and what they get to do, we can fail to understand what we know to be true.

This is one of those cases where a secular study comes along and says: ‘here something you should of been thinking about, you should’ve know this all along,’ and furthermore, whether you’re a parent or someone that works with young people in particular, those who are especially immersed in social media, this is something to keep in mind. When you think about stumbling blocks in our lives, it turns out this maybe one – especially if Facebook means “surveillance.”

3) Negative effects of tech on longterm learning benefits points to unforeseen costs

Along similar lines, Susan Pinker recently wrote an op-ed piece run in the New York Times in which she asked the question, Can Students Have Too Much Tech? And her answer is yes. As a matter fact, she points to some really interesting research indicating that when it comes to giving children and teenagers more technology, even for what is claimed to be an educational purpose, it often leads to the opposite effect. Often times the children who are given these kinds of technologies do immediately better, something happens in terms of a catalyst for study or for thinking, but over a short amount of time it dissipates and actually can lead into a trend of the negative. They can actually do worse than those who do not have the technology.

By the way, her article makes a couple things clear. One thing is you can give a teenager or a child a certain form of technology for a certain purpose but that doesn’t mean they use it for that purpose – certainly not only for that purpose. One of the study she cites in this article is one that gave iPads to middle school kids and it turned out they didn’t use them for the purpose for which the school had assigned the iPad. As a matter fact, just a few years ago, one of the goals of several school system was to get a smart tablet or a computer in the hands of virtually every student. And there were schools serving as test sites for this and as it turned out, almost every one of those experiments did not go happily; didn’t go well. That’s one of the reasons why you hear fewer and fewer politicians talking about the goal of getting an iPad in the hands of every student. You can get the iPad in their hands, but that doesn’t mean that any of the appropriate thinking gets into their heads.

Here’s a paragraph from Pinker’s article that should have our attention. She writes,

“If children who spend more time with electronic devices are also more likely to be out of sync with their peers’ behavior and learning by the fourth grade, why would adding more viewing and clicking to their school days be considered a good idea?”

She said we already have enough data to know that adding more technology is actually, in many cases, demonstrably subtracting from the educational experience. And furthermore, one the other point she makes in her article is that the children who rely more and more on technology are separated relationally more and more in the classroom from their peers – and it shows up in their educational performance. As Pinker, a developmental psychologist, writes,

“Technology does have a role in education. But as Randy Yerrick, a professor of education at the University at Buffalo, told me, it is worth the investment only when it’s perfectly suited to the task, in science simulations, for example, or to teach students with learning disabilities.”

You know, from a Christian perspective one of the things that comes out here is the fact that technology always comes with pluses and minuses. It often comes with a great contribution, but it usually comes with unforeseen costs and that shows up in the study as well. Another thing to think about is the fact that we are always looking for a quick fix. We want a fix to a problem and right now in this technological age the instinct of the society around us is to believe that if we just get the right technology in the right hand, we can solve the problem. But when it comes to something as challenging as education – which Christians know is a moral equation, not just a technological equation – when we come to understand that, we realize that we should be very aware that the promise of a quick fix, certainly by technology, is nearly always a false promise.

And when it comes to parents thinking about children and technology, this is yet another reminder of what we need to do in terms of constant discernment and constant vigilance, understanding that there are those who want to get to our children – by any means possible. And this technology often offers one of the primary means whereby the world can go around parents to get to our kids.

4) Exploding houses unforeseen consequence of legal marijuana

Oh, and by the way, a few days ago the New York Times ran another article that is my concluding thought for today. Here’s the headline, Odd Byproduct of Legal Marijuana: Homes That Blow Up; Jack Healy is the reporter. This made the front page of a recent edition of the New York Times. As Healy writes,

“When Colorado legalized marijuana two years ago, nobody was quite ready for the problem of exploding houses.

But that is exactly what firefighters, courts and lawmakers across the state are confronting these days: amateur marijuana alchemists who are turning their kitchens and basements into ‘Breaking Bad’-style laboratories, using flammable chemicals to extract potent drops of a marijuana concentrate commonly called hash oil, and sometimes accidentally blowing up their homes and lighting themselves on fire in the process.”

Healy says it’s not limited to Colorado, it’s just big there because of the recent legalization of so-called recreational marijuana. It’s also happening in Florida and Illinois and California and similar states. He writes,

“…but the blasts are creating a special headache for lawmakers and courts here, the state at the center of legal marijuana.”

Well, here’s what’s really interesting about the article. It turns out that even as the people of Colorado adopted the measure that would legalize recreational marijuana they opened a host of issues the legislation didn’t address. The measure didn’t deal with whether or not it’s legal to turn your house into a marijuana lab, even risking blowing it up – along with damage to your neighbors, not to mention setting yourself on fire.

State representative Michael Foote, a Democrat of northern Colorado said,

“This is uncharted territory. These things come up for the first time, and no one’s dealt with them before.”

Just remember the headline, Odd Byproduct of Legal Marijuana: Homes That Blow Up. You would think someone might’ve thought of this. And according to the New York Times there are plenty of people who say, ‘look, if you’re going to legalize marijuana this is just going to go with it, so deal with it.’ One of those is Robert Corry, identified as a prominent marijuana advocate, he’s also a lawyer. He said,

““There are thousands of people in Colorado who are doing this. I view this as the equivalent of frying turkey for Thanksgiving. Someone spills the oil, and there’s an explosion. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not a felony crime.”

You know Christians must always remember that when we’re tampering with a moral code such as now ongoing, not only with the issue of marriage but also with less significance, the issue of marijuana, there are always issues that are opened up by this kind of moral tampering that simply can’t be foreseen. I’m not actually blaming the people of Colorado for explicitly failing to come up with the problem of blowing up houses when they adopted the legislation, I’m blaming them for having unforeseen the unforeseen. That is to understand what they were doing was tampering with a major moral code that would have to have all kinds of complications by the time it worked out.

As we’ve discussed already on The Briefing this has led to the fact that there are no food standards when it comes to so-called edibles. Meaning that even as most of the food in the grocery stores is very carefully monitored when it comes anything that has anything to do with marijuana, they don’t have any standard yet that are applicable. And furthermore, they’re not even sure how to tackle the problem. When it comes to trying to keep marijuana out of the hands of young people, it turns out that you can pass a law that says they can’t have it, but at present all sides in this controversy acknowledge that the first time a teenager in Colorado smokes is actually now far more likely that that cigarette is marijuana, not tobacco.

Well when it comes to blowing up houses, you would think that this just might get the legislature’s attention. But it’s not clear that it will, nor the people who are in danger of blowing themselves up. One of the individuals mentioned in the story is a Mr. Paul Mannaioni, according to the Times Mr. Mannaioni, age 24, was charged with committing fourth degree arson and manufacturing marijuana after explosions ripped through a marijuana cooperative in Denver that was filled with cannabis plants and littered with boxes of butane, burners, pressure cookers, metal pipes, and other equipment commonly used in butane hash oil extractions. Mr. Mannaioni was seriously injured in the explosion for which he has been charged. He pleaded, nonetheless, not guilty and according to the Times,

“…declined to discuss the details of the explosion”

And I promise you, I am not making it up when the New York Times quotes this man as saying,

““I was blown away that they even charged us,”

Well, all I can say in conclusion as the week comes to an end is that I’m blown away that he was blown away that he got in trouble for blowing a lot away.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question, in your voice, to 877-505-2058, that’s 877-505-2058.

 

For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-06-15

Podcast Transcript

1) 6th Circuit ruling on Intervarsity personnel policies major victory for religious liberty

A Key Victory for Religious Freedom: Yes, Religious Employers Can Hire (and Fire) for Religious Reasons, National Review Online (David French)

2) Facebook link to depression reveals susceptibility of humans to forget reality

Does Facebook Cause Depression? Depends On How You Use It, NPR (Tajha Chappellet-Lanier, Elise Hu)

3) Negative effects of tech on longterm learning benefits points to unforeseen costs

Can Students Have Too Much Tech?, New York Times (Susan Pinker)

4) Exploding houses unforeseen consequence of legal marijuana

Odd Byproduct of Legal Marijuana: Homes That Blow Up, New York Times (Jack Healy)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-05-15

The Briefing

 

February 5, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Thursday, February 5, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Aggressive abortionist reactions to new abortion ban proposals exposes shocking worldview

On The Briefing we don’t get to discuss just those issues that are easy to discuss. When it comes to the most fundamental issues of the Christian worldview, fundamental biblical truths – especially a truth like the dignity and sanctity of every single human life. Those issues, especially when they appear in the form of a new argument, demand our attention. As much as it may be difficult to talk about this essay – the essay that will be the focus of our concern, as much as it is horrifying to address head on the arguments made in this essay.

The article comes from the liberal website ThinkProgress; it’s by Tara Culp-Ressler and it is entitled The Next Antiabortion Strategy Lurking Around the Corner. Writing in the essay the author says,

“In what could represent their next major effort to dismantle the protections under Roe v. Wade, abortion opponents are laying the groundwork for a new attack on reproductive rights that borrows a page out of their old playbook.”

This is a very important essay. It is a horrifying essay. Culp-Ressler writes,

“Several pieces of similar legislation emerging on a state level could be the beginning of a national trend. The measures are cloaked in emotional language about ‘fetal dismemberment’ that’s reminiscent of the pro-life community’s successful push to enact the country’s first national abortion ban.”

What’s she talking about? That’s the partial-birth abortion ban that was adopted by Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush, and eventually upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. And it came only after majorities in both houses of Congress came to the conclusion that what was represented in terms of the partial-birth abortion was something so horrifying that it simply couldn’t be legal.

Because it’s absolutely necessary, let me remind you that a partial-birth abortion was one in which a nearly fully formed baby – indeed in many cases a fully formed baby – just hours indeed or minutes before it might otherwise be born, was born in every way except for its head in order that the abortion would take place then and that the baby would be killed. As Sen. Moynihan said – and he was a liberal Democrat himself – we’re not talking about something that’s almost the intentional murder of a child, we’re talking about the murder of a child.

The argument made in this essay was that the partial-birth abortion ban was itself an insidious assault upon a woman’s reproductive choice. The actual implication of this article is that the baby, even up to the point where it is minutes before being born at full term, is not a person who deserves any kind of standing what so ever. The author of this essay makes very clear that at least in physical terms she understand exactly what a partial-birth abortion is; it is a process that allows the birth canal to expand in order

“…to allow an entire fetus to pass through,”

She does acknowledge exactly what the process is. What she doesn’t acknowledge is that the child is actually a human being, a human person.

Looking back with lament to the partial-birth abortion ban act of 2003, she then writes about what she describes as the current challenge of new legislation and she quote Dr. Anne Davis, identified as consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB/GYN who does abortions, she told the website,

“This is a familiar tactic, similar to the other types of bans we’ve seen. It seems the strategy is to take language that provokes emotional responses and then to argue that, because there’s an emotional reaction to something, it should be illegal.”

Now remember, what we’re talking about here is what’s being described as an emotional reaction to something, and that something is the murder of a child. Culp-Ressler then writes,

“This time around, the legislation is a little more detailed, providing a graphic definition for ‘dismemberment abortion.’”

As important as this issue is, as crucial as it is that we discuss it, I simply can’t describe the process as it is described in this article. But what we need to come to terms with is the fact that the D&E or Dilation and Extraction form of abortion that is being addressed here is a form of abortion that tears the unborn child apart in the womb before it is removed. And as hard as it is to hear or to speak about such things, just imagine this sentence from her essay:

“This type of abortion, which takes about 30 minutes to perform, has become the standard practice for terminating a pregnancy after 12 weeks.”

Back when the partial-birth abortion ban act was being discussed, we were told that it was a very rare procedure – that there were very few third trimester abortions. And in terms of the larger picture of abortion, very few actually do take place in the third trimester. But there are many in the second trimester and this particular essay points to the fact that what’s happening in terms of the majority of abortions that take place between the third and six months of pregnancy, in that middle trimester as it’s described, the standard practice is indeed the tearing apart of the child.

I must admit to you that at this point I’m having an excruciating difficulty knowing how to discuss this. But I simply can’t live with my conscience if I don’t discuss it. Even among those who are pro-life, one of the difficulties is actually coming to terms with what an abortion is – to remind ourselves of why this particular issue is unavoidable; why our engagement with this issue as believing Christians isn’t just something that is an elective application of worldview thinking, but rather is an urgent moral cause that should summon our attention and everything within us. But the clash of worldviews that is evident here is one we simply have to heed; we simply have to understand it. Because in this essay there’s a doctor cited, that is Dr. David Grimes, a clinical professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, he is also an abortion provider, he told the website,

“The language is so vague…”

Speaking of the legislation – and by the way it’s not vague, it’s overly specific. So specific I can’t read it on this program. Even as it is a piece of legislation, actually now proposed in the state of South Dakota. I can’t read it to you. This doctor says,

“The language is so vague that this would be impossible to enforce,”

And then he says,

“It reveals a lack of knowledge of the procedures that the bill proposes to outlaw.”

But as this essay makes clear, the problem really isn’t a lack of awareness of what’s going on in these procedures, but in all too unavoidable awareness. And in terms of how this has become standard procedure Culp-Ressler writes,

“This is the method of second-trimester abortion that researchers from the World Health Organization endorse, and it’s now preferred by the vast majority of U.S. patients having midtrimester terminations because it’s a simple outpatient procedure with a low risk of complications.”

Except, of course, for the unborn child who is destroyed. One dimension of the importance of this essay is how the actuality of what’s going on here isn’t really denied; it’s just dismissed as being in anyway morally meaningful. In one of the most chilling sentences in this essay the author writes about the partial-birth abortion ban act writing,

“The conversation shifted away from women who need abortion care and toward ‘unborn babies’…”

The words unborn babies are put in quotation marks, as if there actually is no such thing. As if this is simply some kind of invented category. And then she continues,

“…toward ‘unborn babies’ being brutally ripped from the womb.”

She then says that due to that kind of framing, and by that she means, that kind of rhetorical argument, eventually the bans on partial birth abortions were passed. Not only be several states, but eventually by congress.

At some point we have to acknowledge that here we are facing not only the culture of death and not only an argument that is insidiously evil, but we’re also looking at an argument that simply won’t work. Because when you’re thinking about an unborn child, when you’re thinking about that unborn baby, there is no doubt that the woman, in general terms, who is carrying a child refers to that child as a baby. And remember that we’re talking here about a child that might be moments from being otherwise a healthy born child. But we’ve now reached the point that we have arguments being made in public in which you have very recognized academic and cultural leaders who are describing that unborn baby as if it’s just a term of art, as if it somehow just propaganda to refer to the unborn child as an unborn baby. So far as these pro-abortion advocates are concerned, there is no baby until they say there is a baby. And at that point it’s going to be in a bassinet or a cradle, nowhere in the womb.

We must always pay careful moral attention to language and here the positive language is reserved for “abortion care.” But of course we’re not talking about anything that would normally be described as care, we’re talking about a procedure to eliminate, to terminate, the life within. A lot of these arguments have been around for a long time. But it is very interesting that now that these new forms of legislation are being proposed in several states there is an aggressiveness coming from the pro-abortion argument side in which they are now making arguments that seemingly defy moral imagination. And what’s truly frightening about what’s revealed in this essay is that the writer seems to have no moral hesitation whatsoever in making these arguments – nor do any of the authorities cited in her essay. This makes perfect sense to them according to their worldview; it makes perfect sense to put the words unborn baby in quotation marks. It makes sense to talk about the termination of life simply as abortion care.

When we’re dealing with the abortion issue, whether it’s in the form of some kind of moral debate or personal conversation or when we’re looking at the political debate unfolding, we need to recognize what is at stake: nothing less than the dignity and sanctity of every single human life at every point of development. What’s at stake is the Imago Dei; that is the very clear biblical affirmation that every single human being, in every condition at every point of development, is fully made in the image of God. When David speaks of himself in the Psalms in terms of the Lord knitting him together in his mother’s womb and knowing him before anyone else knew that he existed, he did not put himself in quotation marks. He knew himself to be a person. He knew himself to have been made in the image of God. He knew himself to matter.

And in terms of politics, this matters more than most other issues that gain the headlines. Just a few days ago House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat of California, would not directly answer the question asker as to whether or not a child at 20 weeks of pregnancy is a human being. Her response,

“You know what, what we’re talking about on the floor of the House is something that says politicians should determine what effects the health of a woman, her life, her health, and the rest. I don’t think it’s up to politicians to do that. And that’s why we are very overwhelmingly opposing what is going on on the floor of the House.”

Echoing the logic found in that ThinkProgress essay, representative Pelosi said,

“You know it is really interesting that you would come to these meetings to talk about it.”

The ‘it’ being the unborn child. She went on to say,

“The fact is is what we have said: The life and the health of the mother is what is preeminent in when a decision is made about a woman’s reproductive health. It isn’t an ideological fight, it is a personal health issue.”

That’s the kind of moral dodge that we’re now growing more and more accustomed to in terms of politicians. But we need to track that back to the worldview that stands behind it. We need to understand that, as is the case in so many other issues, when it comes of the sanctity and dignity of human life there really isn’t an array of positions, there really isn’t a middle position or a third way. What we’re really looking at here is that either that unborn child is a human being made in the image of God or it is simply tissue that doesn’t matter. There really is no secular argument that seems to have any traction in pointing to the importance of that unborn child unless that unborn child is made in the image of God. Once everything is reduced simply to the moral agency of the mother, and the baby disappears, inevitably you end up with the kind of argument that appeared at ThinkProgress.

And this gets right to the heart of the Christian conscience. We must know, we must always know, that the elimination of the baby, the eclipse of the baby from the equation, is the one thing that must never happen – ever. The moment he or she becomes unimportant to the conversation then so eventually will the disabled, so eventually will be aged, so well anyone who doesn’t meet our expectation of what it means to be a human person if we get to set that expectation in terms of our own calculation by means of some secular worldview. I’ll admit, in history of doing The Briefing this is the most difficult essay to discuss. I would like to have found some way to have avoided it – I couldn’t. This is the challenge we now face and face it we must.

2) 8-year-old French boy’s support of terrorists displays formative influence of worldview of the home

Next, talking about children, I want to talk about a story that appeared in several national and international news sources in recent days. It has to do, as the Wall Street Journal reports, with the fact that French police questioned a French citizen after that individual allegedly made comments in support of terrorists. Parts, says the paper,

“…of a controversial crackdown on extremist propaganda in the wake of this month’s deadly attacks in the capital.”

You might wonder why the interrogation of one individual in France would lead to this kind of headline grabbing attention. The next paragraph from the Wall Street Journal article will make it clear.

“Police in the French city of Nice said Thursday that they have questioned a boy and his father to determine how the boy picked up what they describe as ‘alarming statements’ in support of the gunmen who killed 12 people in a terrorist attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7.”

We’re talking about the interrogation of an eight-year-old boy. According to Sam Schechner and Inti Landauro writing for the Wall Street Journal,

“‘I’m with the terrorists,’ the boy—identified only as Ahmed—said in class discussions, according to Sefen Guez Guez, a lawyer for the family. He says the boy didn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘terrorist’ and described the decision to refer him to police as ‘total insanity.’”

However, most frighteningly, as the article unfolds, it appears that the police had a very legitimate concern. The Journal reports,

“The investigation into the circumstances surrounding the boy’s alleged remarks, which police say is continuing, underscores the challenge France faces in balancing free speech with combating terrorism.”

They go on to say that the French schools have been particular battlegrounds:

“After the attacks this month, France’s education ministry directed teachers to report any ‘behavior challenging the values of the Republic’ to school officials.”

You’ll recall recently on The Briefing we discussed the fact that the French government was spending a lot of money, supposedly, to train teachers in how to train students in secularism. The reason I raise this article is because it demonstrates a couple of things of fundamental importance to us.

The first thing is quite obvious: what a child hears at home eventually the child says on his own. The press coverage on this particular issue is made that clear. As the Journal reports,

“When Ahmed’s father was summoned to the school to discuss his son’s behavior, French education-ministry officials said, the father responded with violent threats, leading the school to alert police.”

While the French are giving attention to how the elementary schools in that country frame the worldview of students seeking to ground those students in the worldview of secularism, the fact is that the worldview of the home is far more formative in the life of a child than the worldview of the school. And even if the French may be trying to invest a great deal of money in training teachers to inculcate secularism in the students, the reality is that the family is going to overcome what takes place in the schools. And once again we have to note that secularism as a worldview is just rather defenseless and weak over against any form of theism – in particular, the kind of theism that is represented by the Muslim beliefs of this French family.

While France has been doing its very by national determination over the course of the last 200+ years to eradicate the public influence of Christianity, the vacuum that was left behind hasn’t been filled by the secularism the French had hoped. Rather, increasingly, neighborhood by neighborhood, headline by headline, what we’re seeing is that Islam is now overtaking secularism in terms of potency and in terms of the battle for the young – especially when it comes to the young that is represented by this eight-year-old boy who came to the attention of French authorities.

According to the coverage of the same account in the New York Times, the boy said to his schoolteacher

“We must kill the French. I am with the terrorists. Muslims have done well. The journalists deserved to die,”

One other aspect of this story is to understand that this eight-year-old boy didn’t come with a very unformed argument, he came with a very specific well-formed argument. He seemed to know exactly what he was asserting; he seemed to know exactly what he was saying. That makes this story all the more concerning. You put all this together and you realize that we are continually involved in a battle for the minds of every single individual. And dare not leave out the youngest among us. Here we’re talking about an eight year old boy and the fact that French authorities now know they must take him, his statement, his worldview, and his threats, seriously – they simply have to. And though it’s not acknowledged in the article, it does seem that there is some resignation to the fact that they can’t overcome this kind of argument with nothing but secularism.

3) Vague details of new top spy example of dangers and necessities of fallen world

Finally, another article that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal and it points to what it means to live in such a dangerous age and to live in such a dangerous time. The article by Damian Paletta is entitled CIA Taps Undercover ‘Spider’ as Its Top Spy. This article seems like something that would’ve come out of a James Bond movie or something written as a historical fictional thriller, but as Damian Paletta reports,

“The Central Intelligence Agency has selected a new top spy, tapping an undercover veteran who played a central role in developing personal relationships with Afghan leaders after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.”

Now what makes this article really interesting is how this top spy for America is now identified – simply by one name, ‘spider.’ As Journal reports,

“He remains undercover and is known within the agency as ‘Spider,’ a U.S. official said. His new role will be director of the National Clandestine Service, a position that effectively makes him responsible for all the CIA’s spying activities.”

According to the Journal,

“The CIA wouldn’t reveal any information about the new NCS chief. A spokesman said the agency had elevated ‘one of the CIA’s most gifted and versatile leaders.’”

According to the article,

“Spider is succeeding another agency veteran who the agency won’t identify. He is likely to be based at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.”

An article like this can quickly pass by without our understanding what’s really being revealed here. We’re living in a world in which it seems to make sense that we would have an individual, assigned this kind of responsibility, that is reported in the international media – so long as the agent is described only by one name – ‘Spider.’

We’re living in a world in which a government like United States can’t operate in the blind. It has to have some means of gaining information and were living in an age in which that information can make the difference between life and death, and very quickly. We’re living in a world in which the preservation of liberties requires individuals assigned by our government to do things that no one else would be either signed a do, or allowed to do. We’re looking at the fact that in a fallen world very dark things happen. So dark that here we have an announcement made in nothing less than the Wall Street Journal about the appointment of America’s new top spy, identified as the one who will be head of the National Clandestine Service. And that clandestine part is really important because all we know about this person, who is now the top spy for the United States, is that his name is ‘spider.’

You didn’t watch that in a fictional television series, you didn’t just read that in terms of the fictional narrative. This is the Wall Street Journal; this is real life. And of course in a fallen world like this one, one other thing is very clear: out there you can be sure are other spiders.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the upcoming new release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition; the new series beings Saturday, February 14. Call with your question, in your voice, to 877-505-2058, that’s 877-505-2058.

 

For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-05-15

1) Aggressive abortionist reactions to new abortion ban proposals exposes shocking worldview

The Next Anti-Abortion Strategy Lurking Around The Corner, ThinkProgress (Tara Culp-Ressler)

2) 8-year-old French boy’s support of terrorists displays formative influence of worldview of the home

French Police Question 8-Year-Old Over Remarks on Terror Attacks, Wall Street Journal (Sam Schechner and Inti Landauro)

French Police Question Boy, 8, After Remarks on Paris Attacks, New York Times (Maïa de la Baume and Dan Bilefsky)

3) Vague details of new top spy example of dangers and necessities of fallen world

CIA Taps Undercover ‘Spider’ as Its Top Spy, Wall Street Journal (Damian Paletta)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-04-15

The Briefing

 

February 4, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Wednesday, February 4, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Islamic State execution of Jordanian hostage reveals moral asymmetry in fight against evil

The very idea of terror is to create an act that is so horrifying, so barbaric, and so repulsive, that people will decide to make political change because of the very nature of the terroristic threat. One of the realities we now face in terms of the current reality of terrorism is that certain terrorist groups have so escalated the barbarism that it’s almost impossible to imagine just what might come next.

The latest example of this came yesterday when the nation of Jordan responded to the apparent execution of one of its captured pilots by the Islamic State. In this case, it was an execution by being burned alive. The act itself is simply so repulsive, so horrifying, that it’s hard to imagine that even a group like the Islamic State could come up with something more evil to follow this evil. But even as intelligence agencies are trying to do their very best to verify and validify the video that was released by the Islamic State, the reality is almost everyone worldwide is assuming this is all too real. And that includes the nation of Jordan.

One of the defense agency spokespersons for the Jordanian government, Col. Mamdouh al Ameri, said,

“The revenge will be as big as the calamity that has hit Jordan,”

But that raises a different issue in terms of the moral issue of terrorism. The nations that are affected by this kind of terrorism, in this case the nation of Jordan, that nation cannot, in terms of its own morality, respond in kind. It simply can’t respond with an identical act in order to answer this act of evil. A government spokesman said that the Jordanian government would deliver “a strong earthshaking and decisive response” but no one knows exactly what that might be.

One of the things that became very clear in the first decade of the 20th century is what some defense analyst in the United States called asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is the distinction between a state that is a government on the one hand, and a terrorist organization, without a state, on the other. There of courses is an asymmetry of legitimacy and asymmetry of authority, but there is also an asymmetry of morality.

From a Christian worldview perspective one of the hardest things to imagine is how indeed the civilized world, as we know it, can respond to such an uncivilized act. Even as we say that we know that’s a euphemism; it’s an understatement. And we’re becoming more and more accustomed to this kind of understatement. One came yesterday from US President Barack Obama who said of those who committed this almost unspeakable act “whatever ideology they’re operating off of, it’s bankrupt.”

One of the things we’ve been noting is this President and his administration’s reluctance to deal with the actuality of this kind of terror in terms of the evil – the necessary moral judgment of evil that can only be the appropriate response. The President did speak of the video as revealing “viciousness and barbarity,” of the Islamic State militants. But he doesn’t even refer to them as the Islamic State, preferring most of the time to refer to them as ISIS – by their acronym. But the bigger problem here is the use of the language of moral bankruptcy. Moral bankruptcy is simply not an adequate moral judgment on the kind of worldview that would lead to the video that was released by the Islamic State yesterday.

There’s something woefully inadequate about that moral judgment, and not only inadequate, there’s something morally dangerous about that kind of moral understatement. Because if we don’t call things by their proper name, we are really in big trouble as a civilization – because the refusal to call things by their proper name sets up a moral change in the culture, a moral restatement of the calculus. It becomes something different simply because we are reluctant to state what it is. We have seen that in terms as we have said, of the euphemism when it comes to many sins – whether it’s adultery or abortion.

But one of the most frightening aspects of this particular story is what we’re noticing as, not only the defining of terrorism down and the defining of evil in terms of something else, but the fact that there is a desensitization that simply creaks into this equation. As more and more casualties of these terrorist groups pileup, there is almost an involuntary loss of the sensitivity to every one of these acts, to every one of these videos, to every one of these deaths – and yet we know that’s morally wrong. But we’re living in a world that right now is giving us information overload when it comes to atrocities. And what you have is an escalation in terms of the terroristic atrocities to the point that terrorist group such as the Islamic State are having to come up with newer and more barbarous forms of barbarism; newer and even more evil forms of evil.

Which reminds me of what the apostle Paul speaks of in Romans 1 when in his catalog of the ills – the sins of humanity – in his catalog of what human sinfulness looks like, he describes human beings as inventors of evil things. Tragically, horrifyingly enough, that wasn’t just true of those alive when Paul wrote that letter to the Romans, it’s all too evident in the news that broke from the nation of Jordan just yesterday.

2) UK authorizes three parent embryo fertilization, neglects ethical challenges of research 

Next, a major story coming out of United Kingdom when it comes to bioethics, that is the ethics of life. As The Guardian their reports,

“[The House of Commons has now] …voted in favour of making Britain the first country in the world to permit IVF babies to be created using biological material from three different people to help prevent serious genetic diseases.”

That according to Rowena Mason and Hannah Devlin writing for The Guardian. As they report,

“In a historic [vote], the House of Commons voted by 382 to 128 – a majority of 254 – to allow mitochondrial donation through a controversial amendment to the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. They approved the regulation in spite of some critics warning it was a step towards creating ‘three-parent’ designer babies.”

Now you’ll notice something very interesting in that paragraph. It says that the House of Commons approved the regulation, again I quote,

“…in spite of some critics warning it was a step toward creating three parent designer babies.”

What we need to note is that’s not just something being said by critics, that is actually something being acknowledged by the proponents of this legislation, because by any genetic measure this does create babies which will have three genetic parents.

The measure was backed by Britain’s Tory government – one of the things for us to remember of course is that anything that is backed by the government by a binding vote has to pass in House of Commons simply because you only gain the government authority there by having majority in the House of Commons – so when you have the British Prime Minister putting forth legislation it’s legislation that virtually can’t lose. And in this case, the government’s legislation did pass – and historically so yesterday.

There is an issue here when it comes to these mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria include genetic information that is usually found in the cell wall and that becomes very important in in vitro fertilization. The possibility that arises that one could take the cell wall from one woman and the genetic material inside the cell from another woman when one is involved in the process of in vitro fertilization. There is no doubt that these mitochondrial diseases are real and it would aid human flourishing if these diseases were to be eradicated. The real problem when it comes to so many of these issues is the question of whether or not the actual technology or the mechanism being proposed brings bigger moral problems than the problem it is seeking to solve.

One of the big lessons from the action in the United Kingdom yesterday is that the House of Commons seems to have confused the issue, even in terms of what actually is being dealt with in the legislation. Some conservative members of the House of Commons are very clear to say this is not just a step toward genetic manipulation; this is by its very definition genetic manipulation. There is no other moral category for it. Furthermore, there is the reality that this would be a child that will be born with three genetic parents – two in the main, providing most of the genetic information, but the donor of the new mitochondrial information would also be a genetic donor and would also be in that sense a genetic parent.

And what is also not recognized by many in looking at this proposal is that this change in the genetic information would not only be passed on to the child that is the product of in vitro fertilization, but to every child born to that child and to every descendent thereafter. This would create something new in terms of human experience – not new in the last 10 years, not new in the last generation, but new in terms of humanity. And that would be a human being whose genetic information is drawn not from two but from more than two human individuals – otherwise, previously in human experience, known as parents.

American Christians looking at this need to recognize something further. There’s a very interesting news aspect of this story because almost universally the story is being reported as the United Kingdom – that is Britain – becoming the very first nation to authorize or to legalize this kind of technology. And it is, so far as one can tell, it’s the very first country to authorize it. But one of the things we need to note is that just because one country has made something legal doesn’t mean that it’s actually illegal elsewhere.

In the United States of America most American Christians are unaware of the fact that there are virtually no laws what so ever limiting any kind of genetic experimentation. There’s not a law in terms of any kind of binding legislation against even something like human cloning. That’s why in much of Europe the United States is known as not only the home of the Wild Wild West, but as itself, the Wild Wild West of genetic technologies and human reproductive technologies. So in United States right now there is no law against what was just made legal by the British government in the United Kingdom. That doesn’t mean however that Americans can be involved in this technology, not so much because of legislation, but because of the bureaucratic power of group such as the Food and Drug Administration, which at this point has to approve any kind of medical treatment of this sort. But one of the things we need to note is that there are no inherent limitations on the kind of experimentation that might take place in America laboratories, at least by legislation.

The United Kingdom has something that the United States doesn’t have and that is a human embryology of fertilization authority: an official legal agency, in effect, a government agency dealing with these kinds of questions. In the United States there isn’t even at this point a moral consensus to have such an authority. And one of the big problems that would then be faced is if we did have the moral consensus to create such an authority, there wouldn’t be – there isn’t at least to this point – a moral consensus about the kinds of decisions that kind of authority would make.

Back during administration of George W. Bush as President of the United States, a presidential commission was authorized and it served trying to answer these questions. But that commission was virtually overlooked and neglected by Congress. And what we have in the United States Congress right now is a lack of consensus, not only what comes to matters economic and political, but biomedical as well; even issues of life and death. Just consider the issue of abortion. A society that doesn’t have common mind on the eve of abortion is going be hard-pressed to come up with anything like a common mind when it comes to something as complicated as mitochondrial DNA.

3) Conservative and liberal definitions of right and wrong shows moral influence of worldview

While we’re thinking about the importance of worldview, a couple stories appeared simultaneously in the New York Times over the weekend in the Sunday edition of that paper. One was entitled, The Myth of the Harmless Wrong. It’s by Kurt Gray, who was an assistant professor of psychology at the University North Carolina Chapel Hill. He’s arguing that there really is the myth of the so-called victimless crime. Now it’s a very complicated article to try and get down to the simplicity of the article. He’s arguing that both liberals and conservatives actually follow the same kind of logical reasoning. He refers to it as dyadic completion – which is to say it’s a moral equation in which you have an act on the one hand and its perceived victim on the other. The act only takes on moral meaning – whether you are a liberal or conservative according to the scholar – if there is a victim to the act; if there is indeed a victim to what might be called the crime or the wrong.

One of the interesting points made by Prof. Gray is that if you’re talking about a moral equation, harm really is a very important category. Because when you’re pointing out why something is wrong, the moral reflexes is to say it’s wrong because these people are harmed by the action; this person is harmed by what you propose to do. And of course in terms of most moral issues, that works pretty well because we can point immediately from the act to the harm.

There are several really fascinating things in this article by Prof. Gray that appeared again in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. As he writes,

“Victims — like beauty — are often in the eye of the beholder. In a series of recent studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we found that all our participants, liberals and conservatives alike, genuinely perceived victims in acts that they considered to be immoral. Even ostensibly ‘victimless’ behaviors like necrophilia were seen to involve injured parties.”

That’s when Professor Gray says that both liberals and conservatives are involved in this dyadic completion. He says whether liberal or conservative, people understand immorality through a universal template – a dyad of perpetrator and victim.

Now given the fact that Professor Gray is writing in the New York Times, he knows he’s writing primarily to the left. That’s very explicit in his article. He says to those on the political and the moral left, ‘look, when conservatives talk about same-sex marriage or something like pornography, and they talk about victims, it is because they really believe those victims exist’ and on the other hand he says when liberals also talk about acts they considered to be wrong, they usually speak in terms of the same kind of victims. And it’s just a different sort of moral conclusion, he says, reached by the very same form of reasoning – this dyadic completion.

So why are we talking about it today on The Briefing? It’s because this Professor really does get to something of vital importance. He writes this,

“Liberals and conservatives may disagree on specific issues, but fundamentally they have the same moral mind. Both demonstrate dyadic completion. Conservatives may see immorality and harm in homosexuality and gun control, and liberals may see immorality and harm in religion in schools and genetically modified foods.”

So it really is interesting that here you have a writer, an academic, writing in the New York Times in the op-ed piece that appeared in Sunday, suggesting that worldview matters hugely. The liberal and conservative worldviews may have a similar structure but there’s a different input and there’s a different output, simply because of that worldview itself. When it comes to moral issues, he says, ‘Look, both Liberals and Conservatives believe that the things that they believe are wrong have very real victim,’ and here is he is clearly writing to the left saying, ‘look, when people on the right say that they believe these things cause harm, they really believe they do cause harm.’

And when it comes to an issue like same-sex marriage, the redefinition of marriage itself, one of the very key insights in this article is that when those who defend a traditional understanding of marriage – that is the understanding of marriage that has pertained through human history for over two millennia, that definition of marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman – there is an understanding of a harm that will come to society and the members of society by that redefinition of marriage. And that gets to this issue; that harm is not something you can always draw a direct line from in terms of ‘a’ to ‘b.’ You can’t simply point to a future individual and say that individual is going to suffer this measurable harm. It is the point that in society at large this will lead to an entire array of cultural restructurings of the breakdown of the family, of the fracturing of relationships, of the confusions of gender that can only lead to harm.

And that’s where, at least in part, liberals ought to recognize some of their own reasoning when it comes to other structural issues of injustice or economic morality. Because they too aren’t able to point directly to individual harm but what they say will be the necessary harm of such a policy. But what we see here is what is affirmed again and again, in terms of the importance of thinking through a consistently Christian worldview, because that worldview is going to determine how you define moral acts, how you understand what morality is, how you would define harm and what will cause that harm.

4) Judges more conservative than lawyers, study a commendation of democratic separation of powers

Add to that that other article that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times; it is entitled Why Judges Tilt to the Right. Your first question may be, ‘They do?’ Well, as it turns out, what’s being discussed here is the contrast between the worldview of lawyers and the worldview of judges. And in terms of empirical research, it turns out that lawyers are significantly, as a group, to the left – that is more liberal of those who serve as judges. And that leads to an interesting question; that question is: why?

The article is by Adam Liptak, veteran legal reporter for the New York Times, and he points out something that most of us probably knew ahead of time and that is that the legal profession tilts left; tilts hugely left. Citing a significant recent study, Liptak writes,

“Every subgroup of practicing lawyers examined by the study was more liberal than the general population. Public defenders and government lawyers generally were particularly liberal, as were women and the graduates of top law schools. But prosecutors and law firm partners were pretty liberal, too.”

And then when it comes law professors, even more liberal. As he writes,

“Law professors, too, are quite likely to lean left, a finding that matched those in earlier studies. Indeed, when Professor Posner and a colleague, Adam S. Chilton, tried to assess whether the liberal tilt of the legal academy affected its scholarship, they had a hard time finding law professors at the top 14 law schools who had contributed more to Republican candidates than to Democratic ones.”

This gets back to two other stories that have alarmed us of late; one was one that appeared about in October of last year indicating that on a recent college campus they had tried to measure the effect of pornography on young men by measuring against young men who hadn’t been exposed to pornography – only the study failed because they couldn’t find any. And then another study from the Pacific Northwest came out saying that they were trying to measure among elderly women the effect of marijuana use and they had a hard time finding elderly women in one community who hadn’t – at least at some point in their lives – smoked marijuana.

The study that Adam Liptak cites here has been replicated over and over again, especially in the four last presidential cycles where when it comes to Ivy League faculties as a whole – indeed when it comes to the largest 25 universities in America as a whole – when you look at the contributions made politically by faculty members, they not only tilt left – that is to say they tilt Democratic – they tilt overwhelmingly in that direction. So much so that one is hard-pressed in some departments to find a single individual who made a contribution to a Republican candidate.

And what we’re looking at here is a very clear financial and traceable indication of the kind of ideological bias that Adam Liptak is talking about. But he’s talking about the difference between lawyers and judges which gets to the point: why would judges be more conservative than lawyers? His answer is, because lawyers don’t always get to choose the judges. That’s an important insight. In much of Europe lawyers do choose the judges. It’s not a political process, the government in terms of elected representatives has very little to do with naming judges in some countries. But in the United States it’s different and was intended to be that way by the framers of the Constitution.

Eric Posner – whose father is a very famous federal judge himself – points out that this could be seen as a flaw in the system. But as Professor Posner told Adam Liptak, an equally powerful case could be made for viewing courts as politicized if they failed to reflect the ideology of people generally. He said,

“On this view we should congratulate rather than condemn Republicans for bringing much-needed ideological balance to the judiciary.”

One thing to look at here is the impact, as we’ve discussed over and over again, of the educational environment upon those who are produced by that educational institution. That’s why it’s so important to recognize that the worldview that gets inculcated on the college and University campus inevitably, eventually rules the culture. And when it comes to law schools, as this evidence indicates, they’re often even to the left of the rest of the University campus.

So when we think about the courts as they are today – indeed I think millions of Americans no doubt will be shocked by the headline of this story suggesting the judges tilt to the right – the comparison is with two different issues. Number one: where the court would be if the lawyers chose them. And secondly: where the courts now are when it comes to much of Europe. And it shows once again the wisdom of the framers of the United States Constitution with the separation of powers and their trust in elected representatives. When it comes to the highest and most responsible lawyers, lawyers who will sit on the federal courts and lawyers who will set ultimately on Supreme Court of the United States, they didn’t leave the people out. By their elected representatives, the people have a voice. And so the story, which perhaps more than anything else in recent times, affirms just why that decision was so wise and why even today it’s so important.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the resumption of the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. The first new edition will come out in the new series on February 14. Call with your question, in your voice, to 877-505-2058 that’s 877-505-2058.

For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-04-15

1) Islamic State execution of Jordanian hostage reveals moral asymmetry in fight against evil

Islamic State video purports to show Jordanian pilot burnt alive, Reuters (Staff)

Obama decries hateful ideology after Jordanian pilot’s death, Washington Post (AP)

2) UK authorizes three parent embryo fertilization, neglects ethical challenges of research 

MPs vote in favour of ‘three-person embryo’ law, The Guardian (Rowena Mason and Hannah Devlin)

How a baby can have three parents, The Economist

3) Conservative and liberal definitions of right and wrong shows moral influence of worldview

The Myth of the Harmless Wrong, New York Times (Kurt Gray)

4) Judges more conservative than lawyers, study a commendation of democratic separation of powers

Why Judges Tilt to the Right, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 02-03-15

The Briefing

 

February 3, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Tuesday, February 3, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Obama budget proposal reveals worldview and philosophy of government

President Obama yesterday presented a budget. As Julie Hirschfield Davis of the New York Times reports, it is more a utopian vision than a pragmatic blueprint – and that’s really saying something considering that’s coming from the New York Times. As Davis explains,

“It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class.”

Actually, those last words are something of a questionable statement. But certainly that’s the point that President Obama was seeking to make in terms of releasing his budget. His budget was a $4 trillion blockbuster, and indeed it does bust the budget.

Every Christian couple knows that when setting a family budget you’re making a very important worldview statement. You really find out what you believe when you make your spending priorities. Sometimes, in all honesty, you see it in retrospect when you see where your money has gone. There you have a revelation of your actual priorities, the priorities that reveal something of an economic x-ray of your own worldview priorities as well.

The same thing is true of the national government; its philosophy of governing shows forth in its budget, its priorities are very clear in what is budgeted. The vast majority of the United States budget is not discretionary at all. For the better part of the last half of the 20th century and now into the 21st century, most of the budget is established by mandated payments on the national debt and even more importantly, payments for various entitlement programs.

The actual discretionary portion of the budget is very small and that’s exactly what President Obama seems to be very frustrated by. He is seeking to overcome what he called “mindless austerity” in terms of the kinds of budget caps that have been placed by Congress in recent years, and he’s called for a rather significant increase in spending. And even as the New York Times said, it is indeed “more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint.”

Again, taking the example to the family, sometimes a proposed budget is a way of starting a discussion, maybe even prompting an argument, and that’s exactly true in the political context of Congress. President Obama is clearly intending to start an argument and it’s an argument he really doesn’t have with Congress as much as, like many other Presidents, the President is actually starting an argument that he hopes will win the hearts and minds of the American people.

It is very interesting that he used this expression of “mindless austerity” in terms of previous budget caps just days after the Greek people elected a far left government precisely in opposition to financial austerity. But let’s look at that phrase for just a moment: “mindless austerity.” In terms of the American budget, not to mention the Greece, but in terms of the US government’s budget, what does that ‘mindless austerity’ mean? It means slowing down our failure to pay the obligations of the future. In other words that ‘mindless austerity’ is nowhere close, regardless of what either party claims, to meaning that the United States government is spending only what it takes in. That hasn’t been true for a very long time. We are shifting a massive debt to our own children and grandchildren. The real question, regardless of which party is making the argument, is exactly how much of that debt is to be increased, handed off to our children and grandchildren?

A couple of footnotes in terms of this particular story – there is a wide bipartisan appeal to shifting the corporate tax code in some way; modifying it. The essential issue in the corporate tax code is that there is an enormous incentive right now to American corporations keeping their cash offshore – outside the United States – so that it is not taxed at the levels of the United States in terms of corporate taxation. Now what we’re looking at is a world situation in which even if governments may keep corporations captive, they can’t keep capital captive. The capital will flow to where there is least resistance and greatest opportunity for profit. And that’s the real danger to the United States in terms of our corporate tax code.

That very high rate of corporate taxation is now leading to many corporations keeping the money offshore. President Obama is threatening, or promising – proposing you might say – a massive one-time corporate tax. And yet it’s almost surely dead on arrival in Congress and there is a good chance that President Obama’s really counting on that – which is another part of the lesson to be learned here. Sometimes the argument is to be overheard rather than heard. Sometimes, when you’re looking at something like this, it really isn’t an effort on the part of President Obama to get a budget through Congress. Sometimes it’s an effort to make a political statement, and in this case – once again, it’s very telling that even the New York Times knows that – this is a utopian statement rather than a very serious presidential budgetary proposal.

But the other footnote here is also important. In terms of this kind of political dynamic, it often really doesn’t matter all that much what the President says or what, in response, congressional leaders might say. What matters in the greatest sense is what happens behind closed doors. And in those closed door discussions there’s likely to be a very long process of working out what eventually might be expected to be a proposal that will meet with some kind of agreement by the White House and Republican leaders in both houses of Congress.

But make no mistake, even as there is politics going down here on both sides, the reality is there is a worldview issue being hammered out here as well – just like for our family budget or a church budget, the budget of the United States reflects its priorities and also reflects its understanding of the future and its commitment to – or lack of commitment to – any kind of financial responsibility. Perhaps more pressing it also indicates whether we’re willing to pay our bills or to shift those cost to our children and grandchildren. It’s been the shifting to future generations that’s been the practice of recent years, and if that pattern holds, it is really setting up our children and our descendants beyond for a financial disaster.

2) Father of the Pill, who enabled division between sex and procreation, dies

From time to time I’ve remarked that some of the most important articles that appear in newspapers are not new stories but obituaries. One of the obituaries that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times is this: Carl Djerassi, 91, a Creator of the Birth Control Pill, Dies. Many people reading these obituaries, especially in a newspaper of record such as the New York Times, are not familiar with the fact that these obituaries are largely written in advance – they have to be. It would be virtually impossible in just a quick matter of days to accumulate the amount of information and reflection that is necessary for this kind of obituary. Instead what you have are vaults, effectively, of obituaries that are written in advance and then finished when the occasion arises. And that tells you something, it tells you that an obituary of this size, published in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, indicates that long before Dr. Dejerassi died the editors of the Times had decided his would be a death worth noting.

Robert D. McFadden writing for the Times tells us,

“Carl Djerassi, an eminent chemist who 63 years ago synthesized a hormone that changed the world by creating the key ingredient for the oral contraceptive known as ‘the Pill,’ died on Friday at his home in San Francisco. He was 91.”

Dr. Djerassi, as McFadden reports,

“…arrived in America as World War II engulfed Europe, [he was] a 16-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who, with his mother, lost their last $20 to a swindling New York cabdriver. He [later] wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt [the First Lady of the United States], asking for assistance, and obtained a college scholarship.

As McFadden says,

“It was a little help that made a big difference.”

We have observed, as necessary, from time to time the fact that it was the development of the oral contraceptive known as the Pill that became the technological catalyst for the sexual revolution. You couldn’t have that revolution without that little pill. And as McFadden writes about Dr. Djerassi, he obtained a patent on the very first antihistamine but he’s more famous for the fact that his work on the science of birth control is, as McFadden says,

“…helped engender enormous controversies and social changes, altering sexual and reproductive practices, family economics and the working lives of millions of women around the world.”

Now by any honest estimation it is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Pill. Not so much medically and technologically as morally and in terms of social change.

In another interesting twist on how the Pill as we know it, the oral contraceptive came to be, is the fact that there have been people who been hoping for such a pill for a very long time and yet as is so often the case, it wasn’t a search for the Pill that led to the Pill – rather it was a search for fertility drugs that eventually led to the opposite effect; it was the search for fertility drug, an interest in what was believed to be a fertility drug, that led to the oral contraceptive.

As McFadden writes,

“Scientists had long known that high levels of estrogen and progesterone inhibited ovulation. But synthesizing them from animal or plant extracts had proved expensive and ineffective for use as oral contraceptives.”

He goes on to write,

“The synthesis by Dr. Djerassi and his colleagues, Dr. George Rosenkranz and the student, Luis E. Miramontes, was economical and effective for oral use. All three names went on the patent.”

Then he writes,

“At first, the team deemed it a breakthrough for fertility, not birth control. While its significance as a pregnancy inhibitor was soon recognized, five years of trials were needed to demonstrate its relative safety and effectiveness. Even then, drug companies were reluctant to market the Pill, fearing boycotts of their products by religious groups and others opposed to birth control.”

One other footnote in terms of how the oral contraceptive came to be so much a part of American culture: when it was first released for medical use it was authorized for use and prescription only for married women – claimed to be intended only for married women. And when the decision was handed down by the Supreme Court the decision known as Griswold in the 1960s, striking down any law against availability for the oral contraceptive, it struck down only those laws restricting availability of the Pill to married women. It took a subsequent Supreme Court decision sometime later to include all women in terms of its sweeping judgment.

The obituary of Dr. Carl Djerassi gets to the point of just how transformative the Pill was in terms of the moral equation when McFadden writes,

“Use of the Pill spread rapidly, producing vast economic and social effects. It gave women unprecedented control over fertility, separating sex from procreation. It let couples plan pregnancies and regulate family size, and women plan educations and careers. It also generated debates over promiscuity and the morality of birth control.”

Now that’s a very revealing statement. It’s a really accurate statement. The New York Times deserves credit for getting the point of the obituary of Dr. Carl Djerassi as it relates to the history of the Pill and its effect. You’ll notice a couple of expressions in this obituary that are not commonly acknowledged by the secular press or for that matter the secular culture. One thing is, and to cite the exact words again, it separated sex from procreation. That is exactly the point. That separation had not actually been effective for humanity from the very origins of humanity and Adam and Eve in the Garden all the way down to the 1960s. Which raises another point that should be emphatically clear in this obituary – we’re talking about a fairly recent moral revolution. We’re talking about a moral revolution that is younger than I am. And even as that benchmark loses its cogency year-by-year, the reality is we’re talking about something that is barely a half a century old and yet people alive today, thinking of the Pill as just a part of the sociological furniture around us, failed to understand that this massive revolutionary transformation is – at least in most cases – younger than their grandparents, if not their parents.

So once again an obituary tells us something of our own times, the passing of Dr. Carl Djerassi last Friday and his obituary that appeared over the weekend in the New York Times tells us that a moral transformation, a revolution that has been underway for some time, was tremendously accelerated by this technological advance. A technological advance that was first considered to be a boost to fertility, not to the avoidance of children, but as the article says, did separate for the first time in human history effectively, sex from procreation. And as for the impact of that, it is impossible to calculate.

3) Houston woman’s ‘self-marriage’ reveals irrationality of society without definition of marriage

Milestones of the moral revolution seem to be occurring at rapid speed and frankly all around us – even in some unexpected places, in some unexpected ways. Here’s a headline that first appears to be something like clickbait on a comedy website; the headline, Houston woman marries herself in elaborate ceremony. But this isn’t a comedy website, it’s the Houston Chronicle; the newspaper of record of Houston, Texas. Reporter Craig Hlavaty reports in the January 26 edition of that paper,

“A woman who vowed that she would marry herself if she didn’t find love by the time she turned 40, actually married herself earlier this month in a lavish ceremony here in Houston, according to reports.”

Now, one of the first things we need to say in response to that sentence is: once again, just because someone calls something marriage doesn’t make it marriage – in particular what we would think would be the universally ludicrous idea of marrying oneself. But as much as this story, at least in terms of his headline, might appear to be something marginal that we could ignore the actual content of the article says it’s probably not.

Houston Chronicle reports,

“Yasmin Eleby married herself at the Houston Museum of African American Culture on January 3 in a lavish ceremony with10 bridesmaids in attendance, plus family and other guests on hand to celebrate the event.”

So we have a massive pseudo-wedding in which a woman is marrying herself. The actual expectation of this woman in terms of what that is supposed to mean is never made clear anywhere in the article, which once again, appeared in Houston Chronicle. The newspaper considered this story newsworthy, otherwise it wouldn’t have sent a reporter and it wouldn’t have reported it. But the newspaper itself seems to lack any understanding of exactly what to do with this story.

I think the most important paragraph is probably this:

“According to John Guess Jr., the CEO of the complex [that is the Houston Museum of African American Culture], the event was very much in line with the forward thinking normally found at the HMAAC, which welcomes and invites people of all sexual orientations to enjoy and rent the facility. The surrounding community, Guess Jr. says, has fully embraced the HMAAC.”

What in the world does that mean? Again, this is a major American newspaper putting its own reputation on the line by running this as a serious new story – which it intends it to be. And horrifyingly enough, apparently it is.

So when you think about the moral revolution and exactly where it’s headed, just keep in mind the CEO of this Museum in Houston that says that this woman marrying herself in this elaborate ceremony on the grounds of this institution  “is very much in line with the forward thinking normally found that the institution” and then consider what in the world it would mean for him to say that it’s a demonstration of the fact that the museum “welcomes and invites people of all sexual orientations to enjoy and rent the facility.” Does this now represent some new sexual orientation? If so, what would it be? It’s certainly not named in the article.

My purpose in raising this article is certainly not to be salacious and it’s not frankly just to point at this woman and the very odd spectacle of her marrying herself, at least in her own mind, it’s not just to point to this as an indication of the cultural confusion around us, it is to point to something that’s even far deeper. Here you have a situation in which no one present seems to have thought there was necessarily anything wrong with what was going on. As a matter of fact, from the woman and her family members, to those who served as her bridesmaids, to the director of the facility, they seem to think that this is just the next thing to celebrate.

What this really demonstrates is that once a society is lost a stable definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, there is nothing that becomes incomprehensible. There is nothing that then appears to be irrational. There’s nothing that won’t be, at some point, on the list of the next thing to be celebrated in terms of a forward thinking institution – such as this director claims that his Museum in Houston certainly is: forward thinking, so forward thinking as to embrace this because they embrace all sexual orientations. Whatever we might ask this supposedly sexual orientation is.

And just to put this in context, imagine that you had heard about this story two or three years ago. If you can imagine back that long in moral terms. You probably would’ve thought that such an article would’ve appeared on a tabloid or something that was openly satirical – not to be taken as real. But in this case, you know it’s real, you know it has the ring of truth – not just because it appeared in Houston Chronicle, but because it absolutely makes sense given the trajectory of our times.

4) Impact of  24/7 economy on family structures cannot be ignored

Finally when it comes to the massive changes experienced by the family, most of them devastating at least in part in recent years, it’s important to recognize that there are legitimate arguments brought by both the left and the right in terms of what has happened to the family and why. One of the strongest arguments made by conservatives is that eventually, culture determines the shape of the family. A series of personal disciplines and moral choices eventually creates the reality of the family. One of the very cogent arguments made by the left is that you cannot take economics out of the picture. That vast economic disruption inevitably affects the family.

One of the most important issues for America’s future is establishing a conversation that allows both of these arguments to be made in a rational context in which the arguments can be made and in which these issues can be debated with the family, with strengthening the family, as a common concern. One of the arguments made by the left is that the disruption of a market economy has led to damages to the family that involve the fact that marriage has largely been marginalized by its lack of economic importance in this period of economic transformation. And furthermore, that the family’s been weekend by an economy that threatens to pull parents away from children and eventually, all family members apart from each other.

Anyone really concerned about the family and children has to look seriously at those arguments as well. All you have to do is look at an article that appeared in the weekend edition of the Financial Times from London to understand that there is an argument to be made; that there are certain economic forces in this society that really are tearing the family apart. In the businesslike section of the weekend edition of the Financial Times, there is a headline: Night at the Nursery that Stays Open. It is by Emma Jacobs and it’s about a childcare facility in London that offers 24 hour childcare. It shows as the picture for the article 3 rather adorable preschoolers who are brushing their teeth before being put to bed – but not at home with their parents, but rather in a day care facility in London.

As Jacob writes,

“It is 6.30pm on Friday night. As millions down their proverbial tools, don their glad rags or slump in front of the television, in a Victorian house in Catford, southeast London, they are gearing up to work. Here, amid the brightly coloured building blocks and finger paints, Maria Quiroga, the manager of Baytree House nursery, is shepherding a trio of three-year-olds into the bathroom to brush their teeth. Upstairs, toddler-sized beds are made, story books chosen.”

She goes on to write,

“These children have been dropped off by their night-working parents. The nursery offers 24-hour childcare, seven days a week, in response to shifting working patterns. While standard childcare hours tend to be 7am to 7pm, or more typically, 8am to 6pm, this nursery wants to accommodate parents’ hours by taking children at 6am and allowing pickups as late as midnight. In a few cases, as with the children being cajoled into bed tonight, they sleep overnight on the premises.”

Now in terms of the picture here we know in our hearts it’s not good. This isn’t the way it should be. We really do know that these children belong at home with their parents. We can be thankful that at least right now they have a warm bed and a safe place. But we know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

Quite honestly we’ve all come to depend upon that 24/7 economy and for one thing there is good many seminary students able to find employment at odd hours precisely because of that economy and employers willing to hire them for those late-night shifts. Perhaps we ought to remember that sometimes when we order something in the middle the night, just taking for granted that 24/7 economy, we should reflect at least on the fact it does come with real costs.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. We’re glad to announce the resumption of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition, the first new edition will come out February 14, that’s a Saturday morning. Remember to call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m looking forward to resuming the program of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition.

For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.