Marriage is About Relationship

My wife and I are married because we love each other.  Our marriage together is about our relationship together, not rules.  However, we do have rules.  We have rules about both the things that we should do to build our relationship, and rules about the things that we shouldn’t do in order to protect our marriage.

Before our son was born, and hopefully soon again, we scheduled dates alone once a week.  You might call it “organized marriage.”  Some people don’t like the idea of scheduling dates.  They believe it ruins the spontaneity.  My wife thought that when we first met, but she soon came to realize that as the week progressed she was looking forward to our time alone together.  When we didn’t get our dates for whatever reason, she often felt very jipped.  This rule of having a date night did not make our marriage dry and boring; rather it helped us to remember to continually prioritize our marriage within our schedule.  The more hectic the schedule, the more important it is to make sure that you set time aside, because as it’s said:  you make time, you don’t find it.

My wife and I also have rules that are there to protect against things that are, or lead to, what would potentially damage a marriage relationship.  For example, we have a rule that we don’t spend time alone with the opposite sex.  This simply helps reduce the chance that we will become emotionally attached to someone else during a rough time and jeopardize our marriage.  To my knowledge, most people don’t have this rule, and it may seem quite absurd to some…that’s okay.  Personally, I look at the world around me and see affairs happening left and right, and this is just one precaution that I can take to guard my heart so that my focus can stay on building my relationship with my wife.

True Religion is About Relationship

To the non-religious person, my life would appear very religious.  I go to church most Sunday mornings and to a small group on Wednesday evenings.  I also listen to approximately an hour of sermons every day.  Some might even think that sounds like a super Christian.  However, anyone who thinks that those things equate to being a good Christian has entirely missed the point.  How good of a marriage do I have if I listen to an hour of marriage seminars every day?  How good of a marriage do I have if I go on a group date on Sunday mornings and another, smaller group date, on Wednesday evenings?  These things have nothing to do with the quality of my marriage.  They may help to improve my marriage if I put the things I learn into practice, but they will not change me into a better husband.  The quality of my marriage is determined by the amount of time and energy I put into the relationship…whether or not I serve my wife and try to meet her needs to the best of my ability, the level of communication, etc. 

The same is true with God.

Religious activities are not bad.  Listening to sermons, reading the Bible, and going to church help us to keep a focus on the things that are important if we put the things that we learn into practice.  We can learn about what things might damage our relationship with God, and then we can put rules into place that help to protect us from doing that damage to our relationship with God.  Indeed, we should do these things.  Even people who don’t really believe in God see the value in doing these things.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they want to go to church so that their kids are brought up with a good moral center.  Unfortunately, with many people, Christianity ends right there…a good moral center.  It seems to me that this is like the marriage couple who says, “We’re just roommates with benefits.”  They have a family, the don’t cheat, from the outside it looks like they have a decent life.  However, without that relationship at the core, it just doesn’t add up to much.  I won’t say that rules without relationship are worthless, but they are the next closest thing.

I believe that the fact that abortion is less supported now than it has been in the past is a fairly big wake-up call. If it was found that abortion didn’t really hurt anyone, you would think over the years of it being legal, that you would start to see a broader and broader acceptance of the issue. For example, even though the use of Alcohol is behind many fatalities, etc., alcohol has become an accepted part of American society. The protests against alcohol are all but non-existent, because it is the people who abuse alcohol and not the alcohol itself that does the damage. However, that isn’t what has happened here.

Instead of seeing the slow dulling of protests against abortion like with the legalization of alcohol we, instead, see people leaving the pro-choice camp to become part of the pro-life camp. In particular the, admittedly very few, people that I’ve known that have changed camps were ones who had had abortions. If it wasn’t harmful, why did they change camps? Point in fact, at the President’s speech at Notre Dame, “Roe” (the plaintiff who got it legalized in the first place) was one of the protestors that were arrested:

Ahead of Obama’s address, at least 27 people were arrested on trespassing charges. They included Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff identified as “Roe” in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. She now opposes abortion and joined more than 300 anti-abortion demonstrators at the school’s front gate. (Yahoo)

Why would “Roe” fight so hard for a “woman’s choice” and then change her mind? Did she perhaps realize that it wasn’t just a blob of fetal tissue that she discarded, but was in fact, a little, living baby?

The Heart of the Matter

At the heart of the matter is: when does life begin and end? “A Woman’s Right to Choose,” “A Woman’s Right to a Safe Abortion,” and other such nonsense are what we call Straw Man arguments. These Straw Man arguments are created to dodge the real issue. Which means that I can only suppose that people know that life begins before the baby is born, but want to be allowed to do it anyway, so they construct these straw men and attack those…???

The only question that really matters is: Are we aborting blobs of fetal tissue, or are we killing babies? If it’s just blobs of tissue, then abort at will, who cares…it would be no more of a big deal than removing a mole from your skin. However, if there is something more there than just fetal tissue…if it is perhaps, in fact, a baby with a life of its own. In that case, we have no right to kill that child. If it is not just fetal tissue, then it is in fact murder. If it is in fact murder, then their straw man arguments become “A Woman’s Right to Murder” and “A Woman’s Right to Safely Murder”. That sounds crass, but that is exactly why those are straw man arguments, because they don’t deal with the underlying issue…it’s either a life or it’s not. Any argument that doesn’t deal with that core issue is a straw man.

Can I Get a Little Consistency Please?

If someone tells me that they think a baby is just fetal tissue until the moment it’s born, and it’s just the removal of superfluous tissue up until that point, and it definitely is NOT life. I don’t like it much, but I can’t really argue with them. They are, at least, consistent in their philosophy, and nothing that I could tell them could ever prove to them otherwise because I can’t “prove” life. However, based on the Gallup polls only 22% of Americans are possibly this consistent with their belief on allowing abortion, because only 22% of people in 2009 think that abortion should be allowed in any circumstances. On the flip side, there are 23% of Americans who believe that abortion should never be allowed. This 45% of Americans are the only ones, in my opinion, who understand the issue and are consistent in their beliefs.

However, that leaves us with the other 55% of America who I surmise don’t have a clue what they are saying. The poll shows that 37% of Americans believe that abortion should only be legal in a few circumstances, and 15% believe that it should be legal in most circumstances. That’s absurd. This means that they either believe that there are some cases where a person shouldn’t be allowed to remove superfluous tissue from their body, or they think that murder is sometimes okay. Neither of those makes sense, unless you actually believe murder is sometimes okay.

Now, I do believe that when a doctor has to make a choice to save the baby or save the mother, that it is entirely right for the doctor to save the mother. However, I do not consider this abortion, as it is choosing which life to save rather than choosing to destroy a life. If two people are drowning and you have to choose which one to save, the choice is never immoral. So, I don’t consider this to be inconsistent with believing that abortion is always wrong. However, it may be that the 37% that think abortion should be allowed in a few circumstances are thinking of cases like this and are, thus, more consistent than I’m giving them credit for, but I doubt it, as there seems to be a lot of double-speak around this issue with most people I’ve spoken to. For instance, I’ve heard many times from people that they disagree with abortion being used as birth control, but think it should be legal. It should only be legal if it’s not a life, and if it’s not a life, then there is no bad reason to have an abortion, just like there is no bad reason to have a mole removed from your face.

So, this brings me full-circle back to our president. President Obama admitted that “the two camps are irreconcilable”, but this was also written: “[Obama] supports abortion rights but says the procedure should be rare” (Yahoo). I simply don’t get this. I would be much happier with our president if he just said that he doesn’t believe it’s a living person and so he supports abortion than with the double-speak we get from so many politicians.

When President Obama was asked, “When does a baby get human rights”, he said that it’s “above [his] pay grade” (MSNBC). Seriously? He doesn’t know whether it’s removal of tissue or murder because it’s above his pay grade, but he’s going to pass laws to allow it anyway??? Please President Obama, figure out what you believe and make consistent decisions accordingly.

This has left me wondering: When will we learn that we can’t make everything a gray issue? Doing so compromises our integrity and makes all of our beliefs utterly worthless. I’ll take integrity over someone who tickles my ears with what I want to hear any day of the week. To find integrity, we have a choice to make. We must choose that it’s either a baby that has the same inalienable rights as all Americans, or it’s just a blob of fetal tissue that has no rights. Be hot or be cold, but be consistent in what you believe.

Additional Articles I’ve Written on Abortion

• Abortions: Baby or Fetus?
• Of Abortions and Straw Men

• Link to Yahoo Article on Notre Dame Speech
• Link to MSNBC’s Article on Notre Dame Speech
• Link to MSNBC’s Article on “Pay Grade” quote
• Gallup Poll Information
• Straw man definition

As to why I’m blogging…some current events have inspired me to start a blog even if I can’t update it as often as I’d like.  I will try to blog something at least once a week as time allows.  Some of the things that I write will be controversial.  So, I want to be clear that I do not write to antagonize people.  However, I do like to challenge people to think about things.  Whatever you believe, you shouldn’t just believe it because people told you that it’s true.  You shouldn’t believe something just because it’s ‘easier’ to believe it than something else.  You shouldn’t believe something just because it’s the popular belief.  Whatever you believe, it should be something where you know the full ‘why’ of your belief.

Basically, what I’m saying is: God gave us brains, so we should use them.  Growing up, I would often ask my dad what he thought about something, and he would often say something along the lines of telling me to go form my own opinion and once I have an opinion, then we’d discuss it.  Instead of telling me what to think, he taught me how to think.  Having this outlook that I do, I have had to revise my beliefs a number of times.  For instance, I changed from believing that the earth was 6000-10000 years old, which is the popularly voiced Christian perspective to, instead, believing that the earth is dated well past 4 billion years and that the ‘days’ in Genesis 1 are not literal.  I still acknowledge the fact that strictly based on Hebrew “literal days” is the best interpretation, and so if you want to go with the argument “Well God said it so that settles it”, then you’ll likely disagree with me.  My point in using your brains is not to say that if you disagree with me on ‘days’ that you’re not using your brains, but rather this is what I mean:

The world has the ‘appearance of age’ as even the most devout young earth supporters concede to.  There are stars 16 billion light years away and based on everything we know, that means that the universe is at least that old.  So, then, if God created a 40 year old man in front of 2 men, and those 2 men started arguing over whether it was a 40 year old man or a newborn baby…how stupid would that argument be?  One man argues that it’s a 40 year old man because it looks, talks, and acts like a 40 year old man…the other argues that it’s a newborn baby because it started living only moments before.  Talk about futility…  Yes, God “could” create the earth in 6 literal days, and He could create it with the ‘appearance of age’.  However, if He did create it with the appearance of age, then trying to argue that the earth is really only 6000-10000 years old becomes a pointless argument.  Beyond that, the belief in a literal 6 days is not a fundamental belief.  John 3:16 does NOT say, “For God so loves the world that he gave His only begotten son that whosoever believeth in [a literal six day creation] shall receive eternal life”.

There are additional things that I will write on creation at some other point.  However, for the time being I hope this gives you some idea as to the spirit in which my blogs will be written.  I do not necessarily seek to convert readers to thinking my way, but rather, I simply want to challenge people to think, and to understand ‘why’ they believe what they believe.