R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 361

Transcript: The Briefing 05-12-14

The Briefing

 

 May 12, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, May 12, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

The end of last week brought big news on the same-sex marriage front. That’s not so surprising, but there are some interesting angles on the developments that took place late last week. The first had to do with the state of Kentucky. The governor of the Commonwealth, Steve Beshear, had filed an appeal over against a federal district judge’s ruling that the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was itself unconstitutional. Governor Steve Beshear, however, faced a significant challenge, and that is that the Democratic attorney general of the state, that is, Attorney General Jack Conway, had announced that even though he had previously appealed the decision by the federal district court, he would no longer do so because he himself believes that any ban against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. The Democratic governor of the state Steve Beshear then was required, if he was going to appeal the ban, to go to independent attorneys, and he did so, hiring a law firm out of Ashland, Kentucky. That law firm’s filings for the appeal appeared at the end of last week. The lead attorney for the firm, Leigh Gross Latherow, released a 32-page filing. And in the filing, she makes a very compelling argument. The argument is this (reading from the filing itself):

 

Same-sex couples are materially different from traditional man-woman couples. Only man-woman couples can naturally procreate. Fostering procreation serves a legitimate economic interest that is rationally related to the traditional man-woman marriage model. Thus, same-sex couples are not similarly situated to man-woman couples, and the distinction drawn by Kentucky’s statutes is rationally related to a legitimate interest of Kentucky.

 

That’s a very important legal argument because the successful challenges against the same-sex marriage amendments have argued that there is no rational state basis behind the legislation. Now this law firm representing Kentucky’s governor says there most certainly is and that rational state interest is in fostering the economic development of the state, building the population of the state by procreation, which uniquely emerges from the man-woman bond, which is the very essence of the state’s interest in marriage.

 

There are some aspects of her argument that bear an even closer attention. For instance, when she argues that fostering procreation serves a legitimate economic interest, that is, in the words of the filing, “rationally related to the traditional man-woman marriage model,” she says that in contrast, same-sex couples—and here is some very interesting language—“are not similarly situated to man-woman couples.” That language in the law, being “similarly situated”, is an argument about whether these should be considered equal. Should a man-man couple or woman-woman couple be compared equally as being “similarly situated” with a man-woman couple?

 

Now along comes the governor of Kentucky through this filing to say this is not a commensurate bond. This is not an equal relationship. The state has a legitimate interest in privileging the man-woman bond in marriage because that bond alone can bring about the procreation which is the rational state interest. That language of being similarly situated is a very important issue of language not only for the law, but also for the Christian worldview. That language of being similarly situated points to a basic issue that is important to the Christian worldview and that is that you compare like to like, not like to unlike. And in this respect, marriage in the Scripture is privileged over all other unions precisely because it is the singularly situated union of a man and a woman that fits the model that leads to human flourishing, to the procreation of children, and not only to their procreation, but to their raising and to the furtherance of the civilization itself.

 

Now in a very interesting response to that published in the Louisville Courier-Journal’s coverage, Laura Landenwich, who was one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, that is, the lawyers for the same-sex couples, said that Kentucky’s view “that marriage is designed to procreate the species is offensive.” Now that’s an even more interesting statement. So now you have an attorney for the same-sex couples arguing that any statement that marriage is intended to be associated with procreation as its end and its state privileged purpose is offensive. That’s a very revealing statement; certainly far more revealing than this attorney recognizes because the attorney is saying that procreation actually has nothing to do with the state’s interest in marriage whatsoever. That turns millennia of legal tradition and cultural experience on its head. Now you have her continuing:

 

Most Kentuckians — on both sides of the issue — view marriage as a social partnership, a spiritual bond, a commitment to navigate life together. Children are often a part of that shared journey, but the relationship extends beyond that.

Well now she’s making two contradictory arguments. On the one hand, she’s saying marriage has nothing at all to do with children. It is, as she says, just a social partnership, a spiritual bond, and using her rather poetic language, “a commitment to navigate life together.” And then in her second statement, she admits that perhaps there is a legitimate interest in procreation. She says, “Children are often a part of that shared journey,” but she said that the relationship extends beyond that. She can have one argument; she cannot have both arguments. Either marriage has nothing to do with children—and that’s insanity—or it has something to do with children, but extends beyond that. Of course, marriage extends beyond that. In that respect, she’s right. People on all sides of the argument agree on that. No one who defends the traditional understanding of marriage says that it is only about procreation, but it is certainly about procreation and that has been a civilizational interest from the very beginning. As a matter fact, it is found in the very pages of Scripture, but not only in Scripture, it’s found within the annals of history, of human history, of every generation, of every age and epic.

 

In Andrew Wolfson’s coverage in The Courier-Journal, he goes back to the federal district court judge—that’s John Heyburn here in Louisville—and cites that in his ruling he rejected the idea that procreation as a legitimate reason for gay marriage bans, saying exclusion of same-sex couples on those grounds, in the judge’s words, “makes just as little sense as excluding postmenopausal heterosexual couples or infertile couples.” Now that’s also nonsense because no one has argued that the procreation of children is the only purpose of marriage; rather, that it is a central state interest in marriage. Furthermore, no sane person has argued that couples—heterosexual couples—presenting their selves for marriage should be required to undergo something like a fertility test. Rather, it’s not the individual couple in mind, but rather the law’s vision of the union, of the man-woman union, as the union that is by its very structure, by its very biological composition, inclined toward the procreation of children. Thus, it receives this kind of civilizational sanction.

 

Wolfson also writes, “The appeal also doesn’t address gay couples who give birth through surrogates or other alternatives.” Well the interesting thing here is that the word procreation actually doesn’t rightly apply to those same-sex unions. By some technological means of biotechnology or surrogacy or other means, that kind of couple may be able somehow to have a child, but the very word have there is uniquely situated as something that has meant something other than what it has meant throughout most of human history until the very recent times when the biotechnological revolution and advanced reproductive technologies have begun to change the very definition of what it means to have a baby. But those technologies have not changed the way we would define procreation; at least not in any sense that human beings would’ve understood for thousands and thousands of years.

 

The other major development came Friday in the state of Arkansas where in that southern state it was not a federal judge who handed down a ruling that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry; rather, it was Polaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza. It was a local circuit court judge who made the ruling, evidently, at least at this point, with statewide affect. As the Associated Press reports:

 

[He] paved the way for the marriages Friday with a ruling that removed a 10-year-old barrier, saying a constitutional amendment overwhelmingly passed by Arkansas voters in 2004 banning gay marriage was “an unconstitutional attempt to narrow the definition of equality.”

 

His ruling also overturned that state’s 1997 law banning gay marriage. The situation in Arkansas, however, today is one of chaos because the judge did not stay his decision as other judges have customarily done. Instead, it has been left up to Arkansas’s 75 County clerks to decide if they would issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. At least one did. In Eureka Springs on Saturday, a deputy county clerk issued a license on Saturday morning to Kristin Seaton and Jennifer Rambo of Fort Smith, Arkansas, who spent the night in their Ford Focus the night before in order to wait for the office to open. They were then almost immediately married, being married through exchanged vows in an impromptu ceremony on a sidewalk outside the courthouse, officiated, according to the Associated Press, by a woman in a rainbow-colored dress. Unlike the attorney general of Kentucky, the attorney general of Arkansas, Dustin McDaniel, announced his intention to appeal to the High Court, that is, to the Supreme Court of Arkansas. He made that announcement late Saturday night, but not before at least 15 same-sex marriage licenses were issued in Northwest Arkansas in Carroll County, as the Associated Press reports, “heralding the arrival of gay marriage in the Bible Belt in the U.S. South.”

 

Shifting to Africa, much attention has rightly been paid to the abduction of over 200 teenage girls from a girl’s school in Nigeria on the 14th of April. The girls are still missing and the leader of Boko Haram, the Islamic insurgency that kidnapped the girls, has said that the girls are going to be sold as wives, sold into sexual slavery. Meanwhile, the international press is continuing to report on the story and the larger story is even more haunting than you might imagine—for the kidnapping of over 200 teenage girls and the killing of almost 100 teenage boys is not scary enough. Here’s something that might be even scarier. When you think of the group of Al Qaeda, it is clear that that group scares most of the world, but one group scares Al Qaeda. That group: Boko Haram. As Adam Nossiter and David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times report, this group is now scaring Al Qaeda. On a web forum hosted by Al Qaeda featuring a picture of Osama bin Laden, one man wrote, “Such news has spread to taint the image of the Mujahedeen.”  Another wrote: “I have brothers from Africa who are in this group. They are like the Quran walking the earth.” In other words, Boko Haram scares Al Qaeda. Other observers are noticing the same thing. Bronwyn Bruton, an Africa scholar at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said:

 

The violence most of the African rebel groups practice makes Al Qaeda look like a bunch of schoolgirls. And Al Qaeda at this point is a brand — and pretty much only a brand — so you have to ask yourself how they are going to deal with the people who are doing things so hideous even the leaders of Al Qaeda are unwilling to condone them.

 

“Boko Haram,” writes The New York Times, “is in many ways an awkward ally for any of them.” Even more frightening is what appears later in the report, where scholars say “Boko Haram now represents a growing challenge to Al Qaeda as it seeks to cultivate more such affiliates among loosely Muslim or Islamist insurgencies across Africa, almost all of them even more brutally violent” than the most violent wings of Al Qaeda.

 

At the same time, Rick Gladstone of The New York Times very helpfully reports on the “Real Threat in a Known Market for Children.” Gladstone writes:

 

When the leader of the Boko Haram extremist group threatened to sell hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian girls “in the market” in a rambling online video posted this week, he was not necessarily making an irrational boast.

 

Doing just that is entirely possible in parts of Nigeria and elsewhere in the developing world, human rights investigators and researchers of child trafficking, sexual slavery and forced marriage said. However egregious it may sound, in some areas the buying and selling of women and children, particularly young girls, has long been an underlying problem.

 

Benjamin Lawrence, a scholar at the Rochester Institute of Technology—he spent much of his academic career tracing this kind of sex slavery—said, “It’s very well documented. There has never been a period of time when child slavery didn’t take place.” He said if he were to visit any number of West African countries, “I would have no difficulty within a number of hours in finding a place to procure children.”

 

Susan Bissell, a child rights advocate internationally, said that there were at least 1.2 million known cases annually of child trafficking globally, and she says that’s a gross understatement because of situations in this context, it’s totally clandestine. She also said that for every 800 victims, one person is convicted. That’s out of 800: one conviction. “A powerful indicator,” writes The New York Times, “of why traffickers often operate with impunity.” Groups like Boko Haram, she said, “are functioning in a part of the country where there just doesn’t seem to be any rules.”

 

One other very ominous indication in this report is that 230 million worldwide, at least almost a quarter of a billion children do not have birth certificates, and this makes them in legal terms virtually impossible to trace. Susan Bissell, speaking again, said, “This is 2014, and we have the technological capacity and we’re interconnected, and yet we just can’t seem to protect our children.”

 

So as you hug your own children tonight and put them in bed, be thankful for the fact that you know where they are and who they are, and, furthermore, that someone else knows where they are and who they. Just imagine how horrifying it would be to have parents whose children are not in their beds, who were abducted or murdered in their schools, and, furthermore, some of them now threatened to be sold into slavery and no one knows where they are. No one knows how to prove who they are. No one knows how to track where they go. When you look at this you realize just how vulnerable so many people in this world still are.

 

Coming back to the United States, one of the most shocking cultural developments of the year 1968 was the release of a film by director Roman Polanski. The film was known as “Rosemary’s Baby.” It became a cultural milestone in the moral transformations of the 1960s. The movie was about a young couple, an American couple, transplanted to Paris where the woman, the wife in the couple, was raped by Satan and became pregnant. Now that very plot would be shocking enough, but the actual way that it was depicted in the movie went far beyond where most Americans had ever believed a mass-market film could go. It started to redefine American cinema and, of course, it led to a stream of imitators and those who would take the genre far further. But now NBC television is out with a miniseries also of “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’s a remake of Polanski’s 1968 film, and as Rachel Donadio of The New York Times reports, “The new version is far gorier, but also aims to be more psychologically complex.” And in the time period between 1968 and 2014, this tells a great deal about ourselves. For instance, this new NBC television version is advertised as being postfeminist, implying that the 1968 Roman Polanski film was pre-feminist. As Rachel Donadio reports,

 

Mr. Polanski’s version was made [in the words of the new director, Polish-born director Agnieszka Holland] “before the feminist revolution, really.” She was sitting in her trailer during a break in the filming. Back then, Rosemary “was in some ways a victim — to the men’s world, to the world of power and Satan,” she said. “My Rosemary is much more willful and stronger.” But she added that Rosemary remains a victim to the nature of motherhood, “dependent on the people who decide, instead of her, what to do with her body.”

 

In other words, this is an undisguised attack upon motherhood. Just in case you wondered if that were true, Donadio goes on to report:

 

In her rendering, Ms. Holland said, she used Rosemary to explore “how complex and complicated motherhood is, and pregnancy, and how difficult it is for women to accept this growing thing inside her body.” She continued, “The notion of postnatal and prenatal depression, and the feeling that you don’t own yourself anymore, that you’re not yourself anymore, it’s a quite important subject of ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’”

 

And this is being brought mass-market to America not just on the widescreen as it was in 1968, but to the television screen in 2014.

 

And in a further reference to how far we have now come and where America now is morally speaking—and also France—Ms. Holland said that the producers of the series wanted it to be even sexier than it will be. But Ms. Holland reminded them, says Donadio, that while disemboweling and other varieties of graphic violence are permitted on primetime American television, female nudity is not. “It tells you something about the country,” she said. Well it tells you something about France where it would be allowed, and it tells you something about this country where almost anything else is allowed.

 

Evidently this new NBC series is so important that The New York Times offered not one, but two major full-length essay reviews in successive editions of the paper. The film critic Alessandra Stanley, writing for The New York Times, says that even as “Rosemary’s Baby” was shocking in 1968, “black magic is all over the place and now almost humdrum.” In other words, it might not be so shocking in the year 2014.

 

Perhaps the most insightful statement made about the series appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition, where Nancy DeWolf Smith wrote, “So much has happened since [she means since 1968], in our lives and in the world at large, that there is hardly anything left to offend against or desecrate.” She spoke about Rosemary as the victim of this sexual attack and pregnancy in the original movie. She says that back when people watched it in 1968, it was shocking and people sympathized with Rosemary. She says this, however, now “today, it’s harder to feel much of anything.”

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, we have to recognize that even as Hollywood is trying repeatedly to say something to us; Hollywood also says something about us. And the coverage about “Rosemary’s Baby,” both the movie from 1968 that was so shocking to American morality and the miniseries that is now going to be on NBC, which is even gorier and more explicit, but is expected to be somewhat humdrum because of how the society has changed, Hollywood is now telling us that we are a very different society than we were in 1968. We’re a society in which it is difficult to shock. As Nancy DeWolf Smith said, “So much has happened that there is hardly anything left to offend against or desecrate.” That’s a horrifying indictment of a culture. But it’s not just about any culture, it’s about our culture. Our society is now, even in the view of a secular movie analyst, so far from the world of 1968 that it’s almost impossible to find anything that would be considered sacrilegious, anything that would offend, anything that would shock, morally, sexually, or otherwise. Perhaps the most positive proof of that indictment is the fact that this is not now a movie one would have to buy a ticket to see in a movie theater and somewhat infamously so. Now it’s broadcast in prime time on NBC. If anything speaks to the current situation of our culture, perhaps this one fact says it all.

 

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

Genesis 16:1-16

The Briefing 05-12-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Same sex marriage ban in Kentucky defended on basis of state’s interest in procreation

GREGORY BOURKE, et al. v. STEVE BESHEAR, in his official capacity as Governor of Kentucky

DEFENDANT/APPELLANT and JACK CONWAY, in his official capacity as Attorney General of Kentucky

DEFENDANT/APPELLEE

Beshear lawyers say gay marriage threatens Kentucky birth rates, Louisville Courier-Journal (Andrew Wolfson)

2) Arkansas same sex marriage ban struck down by local circuit judge

Arkansas to appeal same-sex marriage ruling, USA Today (AP)

3) Predatory Boko Haram intimidates even Al Qaeda

Abduction of Girls an Act Not Even Al Qaeda Can Condone, New York Times (Adam Nossiter and David D. Kirkpatrick)

Real Threat in a Known Market for Children, New York Times (Rick Gladstone)

4) NBC remake of Rosemary’s Baby reveals dulling of society’s sensibilities

Bedeviled Anew by a Pregnancy, New York Times (Rachel Donadio)

Wanting a Child in the Worst Way, New York Times (Alessandra Stanley)

There’s Something About Rosemary, Wall Street Journal (Nancy DeWolf Smith)

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 05-10-14

1) Should Christians use the term ‘Easter’?

2) Is public schooling an option for Christian families?

3) Should Christian beliefs about homosexuality influence political decisions?

2014 Boyce College Commencement Charge from the President

2014 Boyce College Commencement Charge from the President

Delivered at Alumni Chapel at Southern Seminary. For more information, please visit sbts.edu

2014 Boyce College Commencement Charge from the President

2014 Boyce College Commencement Charge from the President

Delivered at Alumni Chapel at Southern Seminary. For more information, please visit sbts.edu

Transcript: The Briefing 05-09-14

The Briefing

May 9, 2014

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

It’s Friday, May 9, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

None of us is unbiased. It is impossible for anyone of us to think in purely objective terms. That’s a very important insight of the Christian worldview. It’s rooted in a couple of very clear Christian affirmations. The first of these is the reality of human sin. Sin affects our thinking. The fall has corrupted our thinking so that none of us is as objective as we would like to think ourselves to be, or even as we might try to be. It is important to be intellectually faithful and intellectually honest but we are never able to be totally objective. The second Christian insight drawn from Scripture affirms the first, and that is that one of the realities of being human is that every single one of us thinks out of a limited set of intellectual principles and operations. We call that a worldview. Our decisions are made out of those worldviews. Our moral judgments are made out of a worldview. Every one of us has one whether we recognize it or not. This points to the importance for Christians of developing, in faithfulness to Christ in obedience to Scripture, a truly Christian worldview; a worldview that is consistent with Scripture, and consistent with the totality of Christian truth. But the reality is, that around us is a great deal of confusion about how intellectual bias operates. There’s even the denial the intellectual bias is real or at least is necessary.

Recent evidence has come along to prove this point that the Bible teaches emphatically. One comes from Gregory Mankiw, an economist writing in the economic view column at The New York Times. He’s writing about the work of another economist, Matthew Gentzkow; he teaches at University of Chicago, and he’s just received the John Bates Clark medal by the American Economic Association. That’s the award given by economists to the best economist under the age of 40. He’s been doing some interesting research. He’s been asking a very interesting question. Looking at the media and the political and ethical bias of the media, looking at various media sources some of them categorized on the left, that is in a liberal direction, some on the right, in the conservative direction, the assumption by federal government, under the regulatory agencies, is that the ownership of these media outlets determines the political slant or the moral slant, the worldview slant we might say. So, this particular economist decided to find out if this was true and, even as he and a colleague put together a measure to evaluate how liberal or conservative the media outlet was, the determination was that the ownership really wasn’t the big issue. As a matter fact they came to a rather stunning and surprising analysis, and that is that these media outlets, in terms of their political bias, the bias is really determined by the people to whom they’re trying to broadcast or the people to whom they’re trying to sell newspapers. It’s the market that appears to determine the political bias. Another key insight is this, as Mankiw writes,

If a paper serve the liberal community is likely to lean left and if it serves a conservative

community is likely to lean right.

Now that leads to some very interesting observations. First of all, here you have one economist writing about another economist in a media outlet, one of the most influential in all the world, known as The New York Times. And here you have the affirmation that there is no such thing as objectivity. As a matter fact, you have the very clear affirmation that there is such a thing as media bias. That’s an achievement of sorts, but then you also have the very interesting observation that is reported in this research and that is that religiosity also plays a role in the story. It turns out that the more churchgoing a community is the more conservative its paper is. Now this research didn’t try to answer the question why, but the Bible helps us understand why. Those who attend church, presumably, are those who are more likely to believe in a revealed truth and in the authority behind that revealed truth, in a God who would reveal himself in the Bible and that God would then set forth teachings that are to be obeyed, not merely taken into consideration. And so it comes as no surprise to find out that the worldview of the community is indicated, at least in part, by whether or not the residents of that community weekly go to church.

But while we’re talking about media bias, this week’s issue of The Atlantic is out with a report saying that journalists are generally, by their own self-analysis, miserable, liberal, overeducated, underpaid and middle-aged men. The report is by Derek Thompson. He’s talking about a research report done on American journalists.

The most important issue for our consideration is this: like the rest of the country journalist feel more comfortable identifying themselves as independents rather than identifying with either political party.

But listen to the next sentence.

But among journalists who do align with one of the two major parties four in five said they’re Democrats.

In other words, those journalists who do identify in a partisan way four of the five of them identify with the Democratic Party. Now if you look at the major media outlets in this country, whether these media outlets are television broadcasting, radio or newspapers, you don’t have to have this report to know that pattern. As a matter fact four out of five sounds like something of an understatement.

But it’s not only journalists who are bias it is also justices of the United States Supreme Court. This Tuesday’s edition of The New York Times had an article by Adam Liptak, a very keen observer of the nation’s highest court. The headline “For Justices, Free Speech Often Means ‘Speech I Agree With.’” Now this is a very thorough article but what it comes down to is this: when you consider free speech cases before the United States Supreme Court, and you consider the very well identified justices on the right and on the left, those who are conservative and those who are liberal, it comes down to this: the research indicates that the justices generally rule in favor of free speech when they agree with the speech; when the speech aligns with their own political Persuasion. A group of law professors and researchers produced the study and as The New York Times reports the study states,

While liberal justices are overall more supportive of free speech claims than conservative justices, the votes of both liberal and conservative justices tend to reflect their preferences for the ideological groupings of the speaker.

As Liptak reports, social science calls this kind of thing in-group bias. The impact of such bias on judicial behavior has not been explored in much detail, though earlier studies found that female appeals court judges are more likely to vote for plaintiffs in sexual harassment and sex discrimination suits. The report is rather lengthy but it’s also conclusive. It demonstrates, beyond the shadow of any kind of reasonable doubt, that justices of the nation’s highest court do tend to rule in accord with their own political convictions and views. Now, who’s shocked by that? Well, The New York Times doesn’t appear to be shocked by it as it offers this report, and the professors that did the report don’t appear to be shocked by it when they report on their study. And, I’m not shocked by it as I read this newspaper report on the research report undertaken by the law professors. Why? Because I, who have my own bias, reading about others who have their own bias, am ready to be convinced the bias matters and so should you. So, what should Christians do with this? It throws us back on our understanding of what the Reformers called sola Scriptura. At the end of the day, we have to be corrected by something. We’ll be corrected by public opinion. We’ll be corrected by our neighbor, or we may be corrected by someone who just is in agreement with their own value system. But what’s important for Christians is to have our thought process, our judgments, our decisions corrected by Scripture, instructed by Scripture, in order that we would be obedient to Scripture, and we seek to be obedient to Scripture, in order that we might be obedient to Christ. It really is important for all of us to understand that no one is totally objective and perhaps the most dangerous person is the one who thinks he or she is actually objective and unbiased. The responsibility to Christians is to make sure as Scripture says, “that we bring every thought captive to Christ.”

We should note that only some of that research we just discussed was undertaken by economists and most Americans find the research produced by economists to be of little value and little interest. As a matter of fact, the discipline is known in the academic world as quote “the dismal science” because people generally either go to sleep or get aggravated by economic reports. And yet the field of economics, from a Christian worldview perspective, is one of the most important and vital intellectual endeavors of all. It’s one of the most important parts of the research university, one most important issue that we can track. Why? Because as Christians we understand what the Bible teaches clearly, and that is that even as we are made in God’s image we are economic creatures. We are inescapably economic creatures and what the Christian understands, as informed by Scripture, is that our economic lives, our economic choices indicate exactly what we believe. In other words, we will demonstrate our convictions with how we handle currency, how we handle wealth, how we handle money. But one of the reasons why many people simply find economics the dismal science and try to stay away from it is because it appears to be so statistical on the one hand and abstract on the other. What in the world does this have to do with my life?

That leads me to reflect upon the fact that this week Gary Becker, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, died at age 83. He was a Nobel Laureate. He also had been awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom. Why is he so important? It is because Gary Becker pioneered a science of economics that was brought down to human scale. He believed that the most important issue economically, wasn’t money, but what he called human capital. He believed that the real wealth of a civilization or culture wasn’t in its assets measured by energy, resources, and currency and gold, but rather whether or not its population, the people who made the community or the nation, were increasing in terms of their ability to flourish and to function economically and otherwise. He suggested that the wise government is the government that invests in its people; the government that removes obstacles and structures that would impede human learning, human capital, and human development. He argued that the societies that tried to coerce the human spirit, totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union in the 20 century, basically destroyed themselves by destroying their own human capital, by creating disincentives and by so devaluing human beings, filling them in gulags and executing them as extreme examples, the same thing is found, of course, in the communist revolution in China under Mao, that there was no investment in the people and thus the society eventually failed to flourish. Gary Becker understood that if individuals flourish, the society will flourish, but he also understood something else that was revolutionary during the 1960s and 1970s. He understood that the most basic unit for understanding how societies build human capital is not the individual but the family. In other words, Gary Becker, the economist, pointed to the centrality of the family in human society. He made very clear that if you are trying to build human capital you’re going to have to build the family. He also understood that, economically speaking, when a society begins to change, it’s going to show up most clearly in changes in family life. For instance, the entry of women into the workforce, the fact that Americans after the 1960s began having fewer children, he said those are moral choices but they’re going to impact the economy and furthermore it’s because changes in the economy have impacted the way people live, and if we’re not careful they will impact the family, and if we’re not watchful it will impact the family with damage and that will fail to build human capital. Gary Becker and his colleague Milton Friedman of University of Chicago helped to reshape American economics in the 20th century, generally and more libertarian and in a more conservative direction. Gary Becker was intellectually productive, writing a column for BusinessWeek and in a blog right up to the last weeks of his life. But the key insight in his academic contribution is one that should be very important for the Christian worldview. A society that will last is a society that builds human capital, and you build human capital, not just by trying to build individual capital, but family capital. And a society that doesn’t honor the family is actually destroying itself.

Speaking of economic factors, our economic choices do indicate our moral values. Or, you might say, our moral values reflect in our economic choices. This is reflected in another very important article, this one from several days ago, also in The New York Times. The writer is Stanley Luxemberg. The headline is this “Welcoming Love at an Older Age, but Not Necessarily Marriage.” It’s about a new phenomenon, at least in terms of the number of individuals involved. A skyrocketing number of older Americans, including elderly Americans, are deciding, as heterosexual couples, to cohabitate rather than to get married and they are clearly doing so because of economic considerations. As Luxemberg writes,

Americans have long been retreating from marriage. While more people of all ages are living together, the growth of unmarried couples is fastest among the oldest segment of the population. In 2010, 2.8 million people aged 50 and over cohabited, up from 1.2 million in 2000.

In other words, a spectacular more than doubling in just a decade of Americans over age 50 who are cohabiting. Luxemberg writes,

For many, the decision to remain single is a matter of money. A partner who remarries stands to lose alimony, Social Security or a survivor’s pension. Young people may be eager to marry for love, but older couples are more practical and worry about paying the bills.

That was said by Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Susan Brown, a professor of sociology Bowling Green State University, who studies cohabitation, says that for young people living together tends to be a transitory arrangement that eventually leads to marriage but for these older Americans this is cohabitation for the rest of their lives, without marriage actually being on the horizon. Stanley Luxemberg, writing for The New York Times, is wise enough to understand this is a major change in how human beings relate to one another. And, the retreat from marriage, which began in certain sectors of the society, certainly not amongst the oldest, is now fastest-growing among those were 50 older and as you look at the age span, is growing even faster among those who are 60 and 65 and older. Luxemberg’s article deals with the fact that many of these older Americans consider themselves religious and at previous points in their lives they would never have considered cohabiting with someone of the opposite sex. They would’ve never considered living together without benefit of marriage. So, what is changed? Well, their economic situation might’ve changed, but as this article makes very clear their moral values had to change before they made these economic decisions. The money decision is the primary issue here. The financial complications certainly present the opportunity for a moral change to be revealed but the moral change has to come first. There is no way that someone who is truly holding to a biblical understanding of morality could come to the end of life and all the sudden say ‘You know, I guess I never really did believe in that. Now, these economic considerations mean that I can cohabit with another person. I can live with someone of the opposite sex and feel no guilt about it.’ No, the reality is that the economic decisions prove that the moral decisions have already been made. The moral change has already taken place. This article in The New York Times is proof positive of the fact that secularization is having a radical effect in this culture, and it also points out that the death of cultural Christianity, which many people think is happening mostly among the young, has also happened among those who are older. And, as common sense tells us, it had to happen there first and just maybe what happened amongst older Americans is reflected in what’s now taking place among younger Americans. Common sense says it can’t go the other way and it’s not only common sense its simple chronology. Luxemberg concludes his article by making clear that this is an ongoing pattern. It’s not going to change anytime soon. More and more Americans are deciding to live together. Marriage is receding in the horizon, but what’s most interesting from this article and rather heartbreaking, as a matter fact, is the fact that for an increasing number of older Americans, a skyrocketing number of older Americans, the morality they said they held to before has been discarded because of economic considerations right now.

Finally, while even talking about the media, thinking in terms of rather critical analysis in terms of bias, we also need to recognize the importance of the media in the world culture. Just consider the pictures of people now holding up signs of white paper with the hashtag “Bring Back our Girls.” It refers, of course, to the abduction by Boko Haram in Nigeria of now considered be over 300 teenage girls they’re threatening to sell into sex slavery and to sell off as wives. Why the media interest? Well, just about everyone in the world knows this is a horrible situation and something should be done about it. Why are we talking about it? Well, the news had to get to us. Somehow we had to find out about this, and as we found out about it we are presented with an opportunity, no, even obligation, for moral judgment and that moral judgment is now going viral. All around the world are people who are saying something must be done. We need to recognize the power the media in our society can sometimes be used for ill, but it can sometimes be used for good. So as we go into this weekend, let’s pray these girls indeed are found, that they’re released, that they’re rescued and returned to their families.

Yesterday we talked about the viral video done by Emily Letts about her own abortion. You’ll find my article analysis at albertmohler.com. It’s entitled “I Feel Super Great about Having an Abortion: The Culture of Death Goes Viral.” That’s at albertmohler.com.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the 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 before 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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-09-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Reports on media and Supreme Court evidence there is no true intellectual objectivity

Media Slant: A Question of Cause and Effect, New York Times (N. Gregory Mankiw)

Report: Journalists Are Miserable, Liberal, Over-Educated, Under-Paid, Middle-Aged Men, The Atlantic (Derek Thompson)

For Justices, Free Speech Often Means ‘Speech I Agree With’, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

2) Gary Becker, who articulated significance of family for economy, dies

Gary Becker, an economist who changed economics, Washington Post (Catherine Rampbell)

Gary Becker, 83, Nobel Laureate, Dies; Applied Economics to Everyday Life, New York Times (Robert D. Hershey, Jr)

The Wisdom of Gary Becker, Wall Street Journal

3) Cohabitation of the elderly indicates economic choices reflect moral values

Welcoming Love at an Older Age, but Not Necessarily Marriage, New York Times (Stanley Luxemberg)

4) Media assist spread of  moral outrage over Boko Haram kidnappings

How our girls are bringing Nigeria back, Washington Post (Uzodinma Iweala)

Hey Boko Haram, pick up a Quran and bring back our girls, CNN (Arsalan Iftikhar)

#BringBackOurGirls. And bring back our country, President Jonathan, The Guardian (Chibundu Onuzo)

5) The culture of death goes viral

“I Feel Super Great About Having an Abortion” — The Culture of Death Goes Viral, AlbertMohler.com (R Albert Mohler, Jr.)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 05-08-14

The Briefing

 

 May 8, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, May 8, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Emily Letts is a 25-year-old abortion counselor at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey. She lives in Philadelphia. She is now becoming very well known in America because of a video; a video that she arranged to make herself. And the video is about her own abortion. Emily Letts, an abortion counselor and she’s also, as she identifies in interviews, a sex educator, decided to educate America about what she called “a happy abortion story,” and she decided to film her own abortion in order to make the point. She’s worked for about the past year at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center, counseling women who were undergoing abortions. She stated in numerous interviews that her original intention was to be interested in birth. She says she has a fascination with birth. She has a friend who was a doula, or birth counselor. But she decided not to become a birth counselor, but an abortion counselor. And as she discovered herself about a year into her experience there at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center, herself pregnant, she decided that she would have an abortion. She would have an abortion and she would have it filmed in order to present, as she has said, “a happy abortion story.” And the most macabre sense of this entire story is this: she really does believe that it is a happy story. She’s quite proud of it. In interviews, she has said that viewing her own video, it just makes her happy to see it. One of her main concerns, she says, is to help women overcome the stigma of abortion. In an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, she says there are women who experience remorse after an abortion. She says:

 

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

 

Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.

 

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.

 

 

The word guilt used in this context is very important. The secular world and the Christian understanding have an absolute collision over the issue of what guilt is, how guilt functions, and what it should teach us. As a matter of fact, the secular world, especially over the past 150 years, has been at war with the very notion of guilt, and sometimes it’s been at war with itself. The psychiatric and moral revolution represented by figures such as Sigmund Freud, suggested to the Western world and shaped the Western worldview into understanding that the whole issue of guilt is an allusion. It’s a matter of self-loathing. It’s the imposition of a morality that modern, progressive, secular people need obviously to overcome. Guilt, in this sense, is something that is imposed upon us by society, and that guilt that is imposed upon us by society is something that we should seek to overcome. If we have difficulty overcoming it, then we should seek therapy. The Western liberal worldview has been doing its very best to deny that there is an actual moral knowledge inherent in guilt, but, as I said, the modern Western worldview has been at odds with itself at times over this. For instance, what do we do with the Holocaust in the middle of the 20th century? The Western world had decided that guilt had no essential moral content. In other words, the Western liberal worldview has been trying to suggest that there’s no moral knowledge inherent in guilt; that guilt’s simply a matter that can be explained in terms of sociology or psychiatry. And yet the Western world has also had to face the fact that there is undeniable evil, and that evil should produce in the evildoer what can only be described as guilt.

 

On the other side, the Christian worldview sees guilt as a very important issue of moral knowledge, and that moral knowledge is a self-knowledge. The Bible makes very clear that we are made in God’s image. And to be made in God’s image is to be a moral creature and to have embedded within the very nature of who we are the knowledge that we are the doers of good and evil, and our evil condemns us. In our own hearts—and it’s not just a matter of sociology, it’s not just a matter of some kind of psychiatric projection. It’s a genuine moral knowledge. Now what should we do with it? The Christian worldview says we should come to a clear understanding of the fact that our guilt points to our need for redemption, our need for forgiveness. And as Christians well understand, we come to terms with the fact that we cannot solve this problem ourselves. It can only be solved by another; by one who is sinless. And that point us to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which alone can explain how our guilt can be forgiven; not merely overcome, but forgiven.

 

Now when you look at the clash of those worldviews just over the issue of guilt, you understand why Emily Letts is so determined, given the fact that she is such an advocate for abortion, to try to find a way to transform abortion into something that no longer brings guilt. But interestingly in these interviews, she’s saying something very, very important. She’s saying the women who come in for abortions generally, essentially feel guilty about it. Some of them even feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Again, that’s testimony to the fact that we are moral creatures made in God’s image and no video is going to overcome that. But it is interesting how this society has decided that this video is something important. It’s something important because if, indeed, you are trying your very best to deny that there is anything morally wrong with abortion and you’re trying to deny that the guilt of someone undergoing an abortion is something that should instruct us morally, then you’re trying to find some way of reframing abortion so that it looks like a happy story. The problem is no matter how good she is at making this video, no matter how happy she appears to be in undergoing this abortion, the reality is that there is guilt written all over this entire project.

 

In an interview that Emily Letts did with Philadelphia magazine, she says something very revealing. She says:

 

Yes, I don’t have any guilt. I feel like the reason people are going crazy over my story is because they want it. Women and men have been thirsting for something like this. You don’t have to feel guilty. I feel super great about having an abortion because it was the right decision for my life.

 

So here’s a woman who says abortion is no big deal morally speaking. “I feel super great about having had an abortion,” she says, and yet she recognizes that not everyone feels that way. And furthermore, she recognizes that many of the women who come in to get abortions, who she thinks should feel super great about having an abortion, don’t feel anything like super great about it. As a matter of fact, they leave the abortion clinic feeling like they had terminated an innocent human life because they have.

 

But what she has said in those interviews pales in significance to what she says in the video itself, especially in the closing seconds of that haunting video. She says:

 

It is about a month and a half after the procedure. I feel like I talk to women all the time, and, of course, everyone feels bad about this. Of course, everyone’s going to feel guilty. It’s a given how people should feel about this; that what they’re doing is wrong. I don’t feel like a bad person. I don’t feel sad. I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a baby. I can make a life. I knew that what I was going to do was right because it was right for me and no one else. I just want to share my story.

 

Well in those words, in the short space of about 100 spoken words, Emily Letts reveals an entire worldview. For instance, she says, “I know everyone’s feeling guilty about this. It’s a given how people should feel about this; that what they’re doing is wrong.” She says she wants to overcome that; that the sense of guilt that women feel over having an abortion is something that is simply imposed upon them by society. But she says, “I don’t feel like a bad person.” She says, “I don’t feel sad.” And then she says this. Her very next words are these: “I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a baby. I can make a life.” So she acknowledges, in just this span of the closing seconds of her video, that what was terminated, what was ended, what was murdered in that abortuary was a human life. Indeed, she each even uses the word baby. She says, in her own words, “I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a baby.” Is that what she thinks she’s done? She’s certainly right that that was a baby, but she is absolutely wrong that she made it. But there’s the worldview. She actually believes that she is not only the moral lord of her life; she believes that she is the creator of life; that she has made a baby. So maybe her worldview is explained by the fact that if she actually believes that she can make a baby, she can unmake that baby, and maybe that’s exactly the kind of protean self-expression that she is reflected here.

 

But then she goes on to say that that baby was life. “I can make a baby. I can make a life.” It’s almost as if she is saying explicitly, “I can give life and I can take life away.” But in terms of that Promethean self-expression, notice she also says, “I knew that what I was going to do was right.” How did she know that? Listen to her next words: “Because it was right for me and no one else.” A very interesting statement. In other words, her moral universe comes down to herself and herself alone. She’s the maker of life and she’s the taker of life. And she’s the determinator of what is right and wrong, and she says this was right for me and no one else because no one else matters.

 

Her worldview is also revealed in an interview she gave to Time magazine. She was asked, “Do you understand there’s a huge segment of the population that looks at you as a murderer; that you destroyed life that God created? You can’t deny this was at least potential life and that you ended it.” That’s a rather direct question; recognizing that comes from Time magazine. But Emily Letts then responds:

 

Yes. I do realize it was potential life. I have a special relationship with my ultrasound. People say it’s weird; it’s my process. I realize it was potential life and I love it in my own special way. I’m not living cavalier. I’m comfortable with my decisions.

 

So in her own words, Emily Letts says it was potential life. She otherwise says it was just life itself. And then she claims in the most bizarre way to have “a special relationship with my ultrasound,” and then she says that she loves the aborted infant “in my own special way.” In other words, she loved it by killing it. She also must surely recognize the moral insanity in what she’s saying because she also says these words: “People say it sounds weird; it’s my process.” Well what a process it is.

 

And, frankly, much as you would think that the pro-abortion movement might recoil in at least political horror from this, recognizing that it’s going to have the opposite effect of what was intended, at The Washington Post, Carter Eskew writes a very interesting affirmation, coming from the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital city. He writes this:

 

Letts, 25, decided not only to have an abortion, but also to film it and put it on YouTube. She did this, she says, to try to clear up some of the lies about the impacts on women’s health of the procedure and to lift some of the guilt that has been laid on women. For too long, those who believe in abortion rights have been playing defense, hiding behind political locutions like “safe, legal and rare.”

 

Let me point out at this point: the words are not coming from Emily Letts, but from the writer for The Washington Post, Carter Eskew. He continues:

 

The procedure itself may have come out of the back alleys, but the affirmative case for abortion, the necessary and positive impact it has had on millions of women’s lives who weren’t ready, able or desirous of having a child, has been in a shroud of shame. With her brave actions, Letts lifted it a bit.

 

Well if you think so Mr. Eskew, you better hope that Americans don’t watch this video because if they do, they’re going to get the opposite message of what was intended.

 

It doesn’t take much moral insight to recognize that we’re living in a time of widespread grotesque moral confusion. If you need more evidence of that, just consider something that appeared in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. There’s a new column in The Times. It’s in the Style Section every Sunday. It’s in the Vows Section, but it isn’t about getting married. It’s about getting unmarried. The new column is entitled “Unhitched.” Written by Louise Rafkin, she explains, “In Unhitched, longtime couples tell the story of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward.” In other words, American culture is becoming so habituated to the issue of divorce, it’s becoming so much the normal and normative experience for many people, especially, I guess, the people who are expected to read The New York Times, that The Times has decided that in its Sunday Styles Section, which has been for well over 100 years an indicator of the social elite and its directions and tastes in New York City and beyond, they’ve decided they need a column on being unhitched. And, as you might expect, it’s quite a story. The couple who appears in this week’s edition of Unhitched is Hope Adair and Joe Weeks, identified as both 30. They became involved after graduating from high school. As Rafkin writes:

 

After college together, they married but divorced less than two years later after realizing they were headed in different directions. In separate phone interviews, Ms. Adair and Mr. Weeks discussed their lives.

 

So you heard this right. The New York Times is actually calling divorced persons to ask them how they fell in love, how they became married, how they got divorced, and how they’re doing now. They got married and both said the first year was kind of fun, but she said she couldn’t imagine life without him and had pushed for marriage, but he had already made the commitment. The first year was fun, but “though by the time the first year was ending, she wanted to move onto the next phase and focus on career more than community. She really wanted the two of them to live alone.” So in other words, she wanted be married, but she wanted for them to live alone. That became very clear when her next proposal was that they live in the same house, but in different rooms. He didn’t want to do it so, in the words of Louise Rafkin, “She called it.” What did she call? She called divorce. It’s clear that she wanted the divorce and the separation far more than he. That’s honestly displayed in this article. Rafkin asked, “Did you have second thoughts?” “Both thought they might reconcile,” she writes, “but she began to feel angry, making it easier for her to move on, while he wore his wedding ring for almost a year.” “I didn’t know what to do without her.”

 

Oh and they’re still close; at least to some degree. They talk about once a month, according to the article. They don’t look back in anger. Instead, they both made the point that a lasting marriage should not be the only criteria for success. But that was the point that was made particularly by Hope Adair, the woman in this former marriage. She went on to say, “You wouldn’t say a person is successful at their job if they hated it for 50 years, but stuck with it anyway.” No, Ms. Adair, I don’t guess the word ‘successful’ would fit there, but ‘faithful’ might or honesty in making a vow; something less than frivolous about leaving a marriage after two years because you decided that you were more interested in career that in community and you were just ready to move on.

 

What we have here is the perfect Exhibit A of what goes on in  society that decides it wants to overcome guilt not only in the issue of the sanctity of life, but on the issue of the sanctity of marriage. And when you think about all the confusions in our culture right now about marriage, many of them, perhaps even most of them, come back to this. When we decided that marriage could be temporary, that the marriage vow could be something that would be made and unmade at convenience, we pretty much decided to redefine marriage entirely, and all these court decisions on the issue of same-sex marriage are just coming back to say, “If you’re going to redefine marriage, we’re going to redefine it.”

 

Finally, yesterday, most of the major newspapers had headlines about a climate change report that was presented to the White House, and the White House is now presenting to the nation as a cause for major legislative and executive action. The headlines are including those such as found in The Financial Times: “US Warned on Extreme Weather.” As Barney Jopson reports:

 

The US is not doing enough to adapt to climate change, which is already affecting every corner of America and threatening its supplies of water, food and electricity, according to a report for the White House.

As President Barack Obama seeks to build more support for action on climate change, which he wants to be part of his legacy, a comprehensive assessment blamed it for more extreme heat, wildfires, torrential rains and seasonal allergies.

 

 

The report known as the National Climate Assessment included these words:

 

Despite emerging effects, the pace and extent of adaptation activities are not proportional to the risks to people, property, infrastructure and ecosystems from climate.

 

Now from a Christian worldview perspective we need to recognize that there could well be something very important to this climate change issue. There could be something here of vital importance to us when we consider our role as stewards of all that God has made, when we understand that the Genesis account gives us not only the responsibility of dominion, but that dominion comes with the responsibility of stewardship. We come to understand that we can’t reject a report like this simply because it tells us something we don’t want to accept.

 

But even as this report is shrouded in politics, it’s also very short on prescriptions for what exactly might solve the problem and that’s the real problem. When human beings look at a problem of this scale, assuming that the problem is exactly as they define it just for terms of this conversation, the response to it is not at all clear. The report itself says that our response isn’t proportional. Well what could be proportional? We’re not going to turn out the lights and give up heat during the winter. We’re not going to give up CAT scans and hospitals and mass transit. We’re not going to give up those things because they are vital to human health, human happiness, and human flourishing. And furthermore, we need to recognize that around the world the people who do not have those things want them. They want heat for their homes. They want food for their children and they want the kind of things that can only be brought about, at least at this point in technology, by means of that energy that comes by burning fossil fuels. In other words, this kind of report points to the fact that even the United States doesn’t know what to do. And even as the world comes up with continual platforms about what exactly must be done and done now, no nation has lived up to the commitments that they have assigned to themselves, much less to each other. The Kyoto protocols and others continually are moving ground because the politicians claim to achieve some major victory, only to leave the meeting and do virtually nothing of what they have claimed to do.

 

And if that’s not enough, yesterday’s edition of The New York Times in the business section has an article by Eduardo Porter. It’s the Economics Scene column. The headline is “At the U.N., a Free-for-All on Setting Global Goals.” The United Nations is trying once again to establish sustainable development goals known as SDGs. “The SDGs will provide the overarching narrative for how to make the world function adequately for its inhabitants,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a noted development economist at Columbia University. He’s heading the panel of experts advising the United Nations on this issue. But if you didn’t think the United Nations was already claiming too much authority and overreaching in terms of its mission, consider this as reported by Eduardo Porter:

 

Goals include mitigating climate change, guaranteeing industrialization and good jobs for all, and promoting peaceful societies and the rule of law. Meeting them might seem like a stretch, considering that so many poor countries failed to reach the last ones, which aimed at straightforward targets like alleviating poverty and reducing infant and maternal mortality.

 

But then Porter writes:

 

But the new batch faces extra hurdles. It is much more ambitious. The list so far includes 16 goals, with some 140 specific targets, aimed not merely at helping the poor but at saving the entire world.

 

I didn’t make that up. Those are his words. Eduardo Porter says the United Nations is trying to come up with a set of goals that will not only help the poor, but save the entire world. And this comes right after he acknowledges that the United Nations failed to meet the last set of goals, which were far more specific, definite, and less ambitious. So after the United Nations declared that it didn’t meet its last set of the goals, it’s coming up with new ones, far more expansive than the old ones. And the new ones aren’t intended just to solve economic, political, and health problems, but to save the world.

 

Now before we dismiss these goals completely out of hand, Christians need to recognize that many things on this list are not only right, but righteous. It would be a wonderful and good thing if they were accomplished and, furthermore, we should do anything within our power to see them accomplished. But that’s the problem. Some of these things are simply beyond any reach of human activity; certainly even of the United Nations. Certainly when the United Nations says that its goal is not only to solve some definite, limited problems that might be within our reach, but to save the world. That, dear friends at the United Nations, is above your pay grade.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the release on Saturday of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. To call with your question in your voice, just call 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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-08-14

1)Emily Letts attempts to undermine moral sense of guilt by filming own abortion

Why I Filmed My Abortion, Cosmopolitan (Emily Letts)

Philly Actress Emily Letts Films Her Abortion for YouTube, Philadelphia Magazine (Victor Fiorillo)

Here’s Why This Woman Filmed Her Own Abortion, TIME (Charlotte Alter)

A brave voice among choice supporters, Washington Post (Carter Eskew)

2) Divorce column furthers cultural redefinition of marriage

With Hindsight in the Rearview Mirror, New York Times (Louise Rafkin)

3) After climate change report, UN takes on goal of saving world

US failing to adapt to climate change threats, says report, Financial Times (Barney Jopson)

At the U.N., a Free-for-All on Setting Global Goals, New York Times (Eduardo Porter)