The Good, Bad, & Ugly of Anger
Anger over an offense should be dealt with swiftly, and that anger must not be allowed to linger. Forgiveness and reconciliation is what anger’s end game should be (Ephesians 4:32).
God is slow to anger (Ps. 103:8, 145:8), but the Psalmist also asks the Lord how long “shall thy wrath burn like fire (Ps. 89:46)?” Anger is likened to a kindling of fire (Ps. 78:21). The hebrew word aph (אף) is commonly translated as anger or wrath, and it is used to describe the heat of passion when one is transgressed by another party or parties. God’s wrath in the New Testament is likened to a goblet of wine slowly filling up which will suddenly overflow in holy judgement upon evildoers. All this together should show us that anger is not a sin, but what our anger is directed at determines whether our anger is righteous or wicked.
If a genuine transgression is committed against you, anger is a proper response; but the question comes down to whether it was a real offense or only a perceived one. Furthermore, Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:26, “Be ye angry, and sin not,” followed by the famous admonition to not let the sun go down on your anger. Meaning, anger over an offense should be dealt with swiftly, and that anger must not be allowed to linger. Forgiveness and reconciliation is what anger’s end game should be (Eph. 4:32).
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Yes, Intrinsic Human Value Is a Christian Idea, but Do You Really Want to Argue Against It?
Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, August 6, 2022
This is what pro-lifers do. They usually do not make religious arguments when making their case publicly. Instead, they reason from widely-accepted moral/philosophical principles (e.g., murder should be illegal and every human being should have equal protection under the law) and scientific principles (e.g., a human being is the same kind of being from conception to death). Because both Christians and non-Christians share the ability to recognize basic moral truths (regardless of how those truths are actually grounded), and because the case against abortion can be made by arguing from these basic moral truths to pro-life conclusions, you will rarely (if ever) hear pro-life advocates appeal to their specific theological doctrines or cite the Bible to argue publicly against abortion. They have no interest in imposing their religion on others. They merely want the laws of our land to protect the lives of innocent unborn human beings just as they protect the innocent born ones.The accusation that Christians have been “imposing their religion” on everyone through the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has been widespread. Leaving aside the relevant point that the Supreme Court has not imposed a view of abortion on society but has merely returned abortion legislation to the states (since there is no actual right to abortion in the Constitution), is there any merit to the idea that the pro-life argument is religious? Well, yes and no. I do think the pro-life view is ultimately grounded in the Christian view of human beings, but not in the way most people think (and not in a way that would justify calling the argument “religious,” but we’ll get to that in a moment).
The pro-life argument, in its foundational form, is simple:It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings.
Abortion intentionally kills innocent human beings.
Therefore, abortion is wrong.The first thing to do when someone accuses you of making a religious argument against abortion is to clearly state the premises and conclusion of the argument and then ask, Which premise of this argument is religious?
I suspect most people’s answer will be #2,* but that is incorrect. The second premise depends on scientific reasons, not religious ones. It’s a biological fact that human beings are the same kind of organism from the moment they begin to exist, throughout every normal stage of development. Any embryology textbook will explain this. There’s no scientific reason to think we start out as some other kind of being and then become human at a later date.
The scientific truth is that the unborn is a living, growing, developing, very young human being. Abortion intentionally kills that human being. So no, the second premise is not where uniquely religious truth is hiding. (Incidentally, only those who argue for the mystical view that the unborn is later infused with a soul, or value, or whatever are making a “religious” claim about the unborn when it comes to this premise. Pro-lifers do not argue this way.)
Why Human Beings Have Equal Value and Equal Rights
That leaves the first premise: It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Here is where Christianity (and Judaism before it) is informing the view that human beings are intrinsically valuable (having equal rights because all equally share a valuable human nature made in the image of God), not merely instrumentally valuable (with unequal rights earned as a result of individual characteristics), and that it’s wrong to end the lives of those who are inconvenient, or damaged, or unwanted. That religious idea utterly revolutionized the world over the last 2,000 years as Christianity spread—ending slavery in the West, fighting racism, making infanticide unthinkable, and more.
At each point in history when these evils were first opposed by those who believed in the Christian idea of intrinsic, equal human value, the Christians were ridiculed, but since the Christian view of human beings is actually true and beautiful, it has, by the mercy of God, prevailed. Thankfully, today in the West, Christians are no longer ridiculed for being against infanticide. Instead, most people are horrified by the very idea of it. But please hear me when I say you should not imagine you would have been against infanticide then if you are for abortion now. The same reasoning—a lack of belief in intrinsic human value, a belief that one’s convenience, economic situation, desires, etc. justify disposing of your children—has undergirded support for both practices.
So yes, it is very Christian to think human beings are valuable and should not be disposed of—no matter their characteristics, no matter the care they require from others, no matter whether or not they’re wanted by the world—and it is indeed lurking behind the first premise of the pro-life argument. After all, even our own founding documents here in America recognize the fact that our unalienable natural rights come from our Creator, who endowed them.
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Lessons from “One Life”
As I say, believers can sometimes wonder what sort of life they are living. The truth is, for most of us, the full and final revelation of what good we may have done and what lives we may have impacted or even helped save (spiritually speaking) will have to wait for the next world. Who knows, there might even be in one sense “Muehlenberg’s Children” – at least in the next life. Yes, we may from time to time be told by someone in this life what an impact we had on them. Perhaps we inspired or encouraged them during a really dark period. Perhaps they sensed our prayers during a needy period. You may even have helped prevent a few folks from committing suicide. We just do not know all that we may have achieved.
I just did something I very seldom do of late: I saw a film. It was about rescuing children. Perhaps the only other movie I went to see during the past four years was also about rescuing children, from sexual traffickers: The Sound of Freedom.
This one was about saving young children in Prague – most of them Jewish – from the Nazis in 1938-1939. It is called One Life and it stars Anthony Hopkins who plays a true character: the British stockbroker and humanitarian Nicholas Winton. He had become deeply concerned about these poor children, many orphaned, all in precarious positions, given the Nazi threat they were facing. It was just a matter of time before Hitler took all of the nation.
All up Winton and a dedicated team managed to save 669 children and bring them to England, just before WWII broke out. The film looks at his life both during the late 1930s, and in the 1980s. It is a powerful and moving story, and tissues will be needed to help you make it through.
Ordinary People
Several lessons emerged from the film – at least for me. One is the fact that much of what happens in life is achieved by ordinary people – both for good and ill. One important book that looks at the great evil ordinary people can do – in this case, during the Nazi era – is entitled Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. One write-up says this about the volume:
‘Ordinary Men’ is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.
But this film of course features a far different sort of ordinary man – one who spent his life working for good, and not for evil. It is an inspiring and moving story of how so much can be achieved by a few committed individuals. Indeed, in the film Nicky refers to his helpers as an ‘army of ordinary men’.
The Power of One – and a Small Group
This film certainly shows just what one person can do to make a difference. Winton kept insisting that he was no hero and that others were heavily involved in this work.
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Civilizational Suicide
Written by Christopher F. Rufo |
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
The outcome of “decolonization” is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people on the street, and mutilating infants in their homes. For the radical academics, the process is less brutal but barbaric all the same: it means destroying our best institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige. The philosopher Leo Strauss once defined nihilism as opposition to civilization as such—and this is precisely what the decolonizing academics have done, acting out their vengeful fantasies to “abolish” Harvard, once a crowning symbol of Western civilization.Harvard finds itself in an ideological bind. Following Hamas’s horrific terror attack against Israel, the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement, co-signed by 33 other student groups, blaming the Jewish state for the murder, rape, and mutilation of its own citizens by Hamas. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement read. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
The reaction was swift. The media, the public, and prominent political figures condemned the students for rationalizing atrocities against innocent people, including women, children, and the elderly. Harvard’s administration, long accustomed to toeing the radical line, hesitated for days before releasing a generic statement of condemnation and writing that “no student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
Meantime, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers expressed surprise, wondering on social media why the university could not “find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard statements after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
It is hard to believe that Summers is being sincere. As anyone in Harvard’s orbit would know—especially a long-time professor and former university president—the politics of decolonization, critical race theory, and anti-Israel agitation has been a staple of public life on that campus for decades. And it is not a cause driven solely by misguided students: administrators, department leaders, and prominent faculty have all developed it, institutionalized it, or at least publicly deferred to the radicals who did.
One needs only to browse the current Harvard course catalog to see how deeply the rhetoric of “decolonization” has been embedded. One course, “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization,” draws on critical ethnic studies, a subfield of critical race theory, and promises to promote “Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous radicalism”—that is, left-wing ethnopolitics for everyone except whites and Jews. The goal, according to the course description, is to “discuss how BIPOC communities forged cross-racial, internationalist solidarities to rebel against global white supremacy.”
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