Month: October 2006

What If God’s Plan Involves Choices?

Now, ignoring for the moment that I am fanatically agnostic, I started to contemplate today the pro-life argument against abortion. The argument I most commonly hear is that a fetus is a living person with a right to life, even if that life is a miserable one. Sometimes, in the case of the pro-lifer being a Christian, this is backed up my a statement that life is a precious gift from God, and that it is a sin to cast it away, no matter what the circumstances.

What I wonder is this: If God is omniscient and omnipotent, but permissive in the sense that He wishes humans to have free will, then can we be so sure that the life of a fetus has independent value in His eyes? Before you dismiss this possibility without further thought, please allow me to expound. Continue reading

Who’s Breaking The Will Of The American People?

Just two weeks to go until the mid-term elections, and the political climate is (as we Americans have come to expect) rapidly degenerating into a quagmire of finger pointing and name calling, as each “side” tries to blame the other for all the turmoil the average citizen hears in the evening news. Recently, the conservative trend has been to try to blame the liberals for the upsurge in violence in Iraq. In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking from his White House office was quoted as saying:

I think they’re very much aware of our political calendar here, I really do. And when you see the kinds of things that happened this year, for example, when the Democratic Party in Connecticut purged Joe Lieberman, in effect, drummed him out of the party on the grounds that he had supported the President in the global war on terror, that sends a message to the terrorists overseas that their basic strategy of trying to break the will of the American people may, in fact, work.

Now, ignoring for the moment the blatant lapse in logic of this sentiment, let’s consider the will of the American people, and what might be happening to break it.

Continue reading