the glory and the horror

So the Pirates signed two young men from India who have never played a game of baseball in their life. They were discovered (how else?) on a reality show designed to find people who could throw hard and accurately. These two guys were clocked in the 80s and 90s.

I think this only makes sense, as India is projected to surpass China as the most populous country on the planet. With a country with such cricket talent, it’s only a small step to train some of the bowlers to throw a little higher.

John Piper recently wrote a great article on where our true hope lies.

Please, please, explain to me how this is going to create more of a culture of life?

From the Washington Post:

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

“We have been communicating with his transition staff” almost daily, Richards said. “We expect to see a real change.”

Also, Obama has changed his transition website, but just a few days ago, it read thusly (thanks Google cache):

Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.

This is not a culture of life. It is a culture that will encourage more murder. If he chooses to remove restrictions, increasing access to abortion, he is increasing access to murder. That is NOT a culture of life.

I pray that God gives him wisdom and convicts him of his sin in this area.

Some of you know that I have struggled for quite some time now with what sort of career I envisioned myself having. There was a time when I was considering dropping out of medical school, and then there was a time when I wasn’t sure I wanted to do residency, and so on. As I’ve progressed, though, it seems that I find more and more that I enjoy and love about clinical medicine, while still keeping my deep and enduring love for the less hard-science sides of medicine, such as the theological, the philosophical, and the sociological. That said, I’m applying to a medical toxicology fellowship to start at the same time as Kathlen’s fellowship.

One thing that this has taught me over the years is that it’s ok to not have a perfect plan, as long as we are prayerfully considering our options, and living a life of faith and obedience, grounded in the grace and mercy of Christ.

So for those who haven’t heard, we’re headed to Denver for the next few years. Come on out and visit us!

Where is the hope? I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. Where is the hope? The hope that each of us has is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed, or what great things we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people, and that’s where our hope is in this country; that’s where our hope is in life.

- Chuck Colson, from the prologue to Steven Curtis Chapman’s Heaven in the Real World

The power of the Holy Spirit changes the hearts and minds of men, such that the people who were once in rebellion are now drawn to see their purpose in Christ, to be reconciled to the Father. That is our hope. When hearts and minds are radically transformed by the Holy Spirit, only then can we truly make a difference in our society. We cannot think that the efforts of a pagan governments are sufficient to address the problems of this world. They are a poor substitute, and worse, some actually actively suppress the Gospel at times.

Our hope is in Christ. It was before the election, and remains so after the election.

May the Lord use this to glorify His name and bring more people to a greater understanding of His grace and our purpose.

For those who have been following the last few posts, please consider your voting issues in terms of priorities. There will be no ideal candidate for the Christian. There will be better and worse candidates.

The question is which will implement a government most in line with basic Christian principles. In Scripture, what does God explicitly require of the government, and what does God explicitly require of His people?

Should the government make murder harder or easier to occur? Should the Church or the government have primary responsibility for taking care of the poor? Which takes higher priority - definitively protecting persons from murder, or attempting to protect them from poverty?

I am not Catholic, but this op-ed piece in Newsweek written by a Roman Catholic directed at pro-life Roman Catholics who support Obama is particularly cogent and applicable to evangelicals this election as well.

I think he makes spectacular points about the secondary nature of the purported “culture of life” that Obama will bring about, and his blatant lack of respect for unborn life.

As Cardinal George’s letter indicated, the Catholic Church’s teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion involves a first principle of justice that can be known by reason, that’s one of the building blocks of a just society, and that ought never be compromised—which is why, for example, Catholic legislators were morally obliged to oppose legal segregation (another practice once upheld by a Supreme Court decision that denied human beings the full protection of the laws). Questions of war and peace, social-welfare policy, environmental policy and economic policy, on the other hand, are matters of prudential judgment on which people who affirm the same principles of Catholic social doctrine can reasonably differ. The pro-life, pro-Obama Catholics are thus putting the full weigh of their moral argument on contingent prudential judgments that, by definition, cannot bear that weight.

While I do not appeal to the same sources of authority, I think the reasoning is still consistent and quite similar for evangelicals. While it is good to encourage good stewardship of the environment, to give generously and graciously to those in need, to show them the redemptive power of the Gospel in word and deed, all those things are done to people who are ALIVE. Abortion, and opening up wider access to abortion, immediately precludes any possibility of the above. Scripture has designated government to protect persons, and punish evildoers, not allow the murder of the most defenseless and voiceless. Life is more fundamental than quality of life.

Any person who does not govern with that understanding will never have my vote.

As people have probably figured out if you read my blog or know me at all, I tend to be a fairly classic conservative in terms of not liking tons of federal government involvement in things, not being a huge fan of large entitlement programs, pro-life, pro-capital punishment (justly administered), and so on.

So Senator Obama is not exactly my cup of tea. That’s pretty easy for me.

However, there has been a clear shift among certain segments of Christendom that claim to be evangelical and pro-life, yet have swung pretty far into Obama-fandom, something which I don’t really understand.

Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton and a member of the President’s Council for Bioethics, recently wrote a very well-written, insightful and indicting article on Senator Obama’s positions and actions, in the form of sponsored legislation, as they relate to the sanctity of life, especially the unborn.

I strongly urge you to read it, but here are a few quotes for those who don’t want to read it all:

In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

[Obama] has promised that ”the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (known as FOCA)… In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would ‘’sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.”

Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism, how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral principle, not just prudence. These questions reveal the character and judgment of each man. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect. Across the spectrum of pro-life concerns for the unborn, he would deny these small and vulnerable members of the human family the basic protection of the laws.

I don’t know how anyone who is pro-life could ever claim that Obama is in line with that position. I’m not saying that pro-life Christians must be single-issue voters, but I think John Piper said it well in this article:

No endorsement of any single issue qualifies a person to hold public office. Being pro-life does not make a person a good governor, mayor, or president. But there are numerous single issues that disqualify a person from public office.

If you’re a Christian and are considering voting for Obama, please prayerfully consider what that means for the millions of unborn children who have been murdered in the US, and the many more who will be murdered around the world should he become president. Our responsibility is to protect and care for those who cannot do so for themselves, and that includes interventions like adoption and crisis preganancy counseling, as well as preventing the government from making it easier to kill them.

Children of the black dust is an article from CNN.com highlighting the problem of exploitative child labor in developing countries, particularly Bangladesh in this case.

I wanted to highlight a certain section of the article that is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences.

But all of [the child employment in the garment industry] came to an abrupt halt in 1992 when Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa introduced the well-meaning Child Labor Deterrence Act. Also known as the Harkin Bill, it threatened to ban importation of garments from developing countries that employ child labor. Fearing loss of substantial business from U.S. buyers, frightened garment companies in Bangladesh quickly fired more than 50,000 child workers.

A UNICEF study later concluded that these unemployed children were, for the most part, forced into other work that was often far more dangerous and less lucrative — breaking rocks, rolling cigarettes,working construction and engaging in prostitution.

This is not to say that I support child exploitation in the garment industry over other less visible types of child exploitation, but I think it illustrates an important point.

Government corruption and the resultant cycle of poverty have a direct and calamitous impact on the welfare of Bangladeshi children. More than seven million children work in Bangladesh — many from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m. — scavenging heaps of garbage, hammering and breaking bricks under the burning heat, melting and molding metal in workshops.

What is the answer to this sort of problem? Is it simply more laws to make more things illegal?

Even the author of the article goes on to say:

As horrible as all this may sound, it is important to understand that, for many children, earning a living or supplementing their family’s income is a matter of survival. Slogans like “Stop Child Labor” embody romantic and ultimately impractical notions when it comes to places like Bangladesh. Instead of trying to abolish child labor by boycotting goods made by children, governments and civil societies should help create safer working environments for children, ensure that systems are in place to monitor abuse, and provide education and a living wage.

However, I would argue that a more fundamental change must occur, because as the author himself highlights, Bangladesh and other countries where this problem is endemic, find ways to get around pesky rules and regulations, because they’re horrendously corrupt. Rules don’t matter if they’re not enforced, or easily avoided.

So if your government and police are corrupt, what good are rules? People may do lip service to them, and have them ostensibly written up as law, but so long as they don’t follow them and no one enforces them, it really doesn’t matter.

So where does that leave us? I argue that it brings us back to people and their own hearts and consciences. Until hearts and minds are changed such that they actually care about following the law and doing what is right, we won’t really make progress. In this case, until people actually see the children as valuable and worth protecting in some fashion, and not merely as means to the end of economic productivity.

That sort of change, however, does not occur because a government mandates it or because of pressure from the international community. It occurs because the very heart of man is changed from utter rebellion against God to seeing the world as God sees it, and seeing those people as God sees them. And that only happens through the redemptive work of Christ.

So I think I may have found my favorite drink.

I had my first taste of a port today at the Dry Comal Creek Vineyard, their 1096, which spends 3 years and a day (hence the name 1096) in oak casks at the winery, and then at dinner, I had a glass of Taylor Fladgate 20 year tawny.

All I can say is that the aroma and flavor of both were amazing. There is a richness, a fullness to port that rolls over the tongue.

I look forward to trying more. Too bad port is so expensive.