Days Reminding Us to Value Life

Can the good people of the earth agree that life matters? Can that be a value we agree on?

If we don’t, does that mean we can identify those who are not the good people of the earth and who are? Maybe so. Then the question is, is that a permanent designation?

We had both Holocaust Remembrance Day and the annual March for Life this past week. I’m looking at both today.

 

Tyranny Devalues Human Life

image from Sen. Ted Cruz, found here

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but whenever there’s a tyrannical power setting up a “utopia,” where they rule and you of course don’t, but where you’re nevertheless supposed to be grateful, because they’re promising free stuff and no worries, that regime favors depopulation.

China is a textbook example, with its Maoist cultural revolution, murdering the educated or troublesome. Then add to that their longtime one-child policy, to keep the population down. But Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and others also seem to have had no qualms about the death of their own citizens.

They act as if it is self-evident that taking care of fewer people makes more sense.

They fail to notice that wealth is created when people are free and civilized—and that “the earth is the Lord’s and fullness thereof,”[i] so wealth is essentially unlimited. Instead, they claim, “All resources are scarce, and more won’t be found or created, so we must decide who is most deserving.” And of course, those they deem to be deserving are those who are subservient to them and support their regime.

Central planners supposedly know everything—except what is best for individuals, and how to make society better for any other than the elites. They want workers to produce what they order, but not to cost them upkeep. Too much bother.

Since we disagree with them, and since we are not among the elites, we are slated for elimination. At first it’s ideological—silencing. Then it’s preventing the dissidents (us) from basic ways of self-sustaining: earning, buying, selling. Then it’s withholding life necessities: medical care, food, shelter.

If we die, all the better for those who remain. They’ll be more compliant, and there will be fewer of them to divide those limited resources among. All the better for the tyrants.

This is the playbook of every socialist/communist regime so far: murder their own people; overtake other nations to enslave them.

Hendrik Jakobs, executed in 1945 for hiding Jews in his home,
great-grandfather of wildlife artist Carel Brest van Kempen.
Image from here.

On January 27^th, for Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Facebook friend shared a photo of his great-grandfather, Hendrik Jakobs, who was executed in 1945, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, for hiding Jews in his home. My friend reminds us of:

The most important lesson of the Holocaust: that it was not perpetrated by monsters, but by normal people who loved their country and their families and believed that they were working in their interest. Never again!

In the 20^th Century, we said, “Never again.” But the socialists of the 21^st Century step up and say, “Hold my beer.”

They aren’t different. They aren’t better informed or more qualified than the controlling elites who caused the holocaust and the other atrocities of the past century; they are identical, but have added technology to their toolkit.

I’d really like to know why less human life is their goal, and yet people buy into that. It ought to be self-evident that more human life is something the human species ought to want. It was at our nation’s founding:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men [all humans] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.—Declaration of Independence

Life is mentioned first. The others stem from life. If someone takes your liberty, that is depriving you of living your life as you choose. If they steal your property, that is depriving you of the fruits of your labors—which was how you spent your life, so it is theft of the portion of your life that it took to accrue that property.

 

Evil Devalues Unborn Life

I think it is a basic identifier between good and evil, to see whether someone values life, particularly innocent life.

If you don’t value human life, then you do not qualify as a good person.

However, among those on the wrong side are people who have been blinded and deceived, people who would choose to be on the side of good, if they knew where to find it. That’s why God is the ultimate judge, not us.

Stephanie Gray Connors, author of Love Unleashes Life
screenshot from ProlifeCon Digital Action Summit 2021

January 29^th was the annual (and this year virtual) March for Life. I was listening to the ProLifeCon Digital Action Summit 2021 online last weekend and heard a conversation with Stephanie Gray Connors, author of Love Unleashes Life. Connors says she noticed, while teaching the science behind the pro-life side, that a lot of students weren’t accepting it. She wondered why there was resistance to basic facts:

I started asking questions like, “How did you come to your viewpoint?” or “Where does your passion come from?” or “Do you know anyone who’s had an abortion?” And what I discovered is, these students started revealing to me their personal life experiences that involved profound pain, deep suffering, great woundedness. You know, living in poverty, growing up getting food on food stamps. Victims of abuse. Victims of rape and so on and so forth. And I started to see that often there was resistance to the logic of the pro-life perspective if there was an emotional wall up because of personal suffering or pain.

So that helped me see that, as logical as I needed to be, I also needed to have a heart for the person that I was encountering, and really needed to convey that I loved them as much as I loved pre-born children. And the viewpoint I held is not just for the good of the pre-born child, but is also for their good—that they will flourish in a world where all humans are respected.

And so, the more I focused on meeting that person in their pain, hearing their story, and really listening to their needs and concerns, that, if they sensed I truly cared for them, they became more receptive to embracing the pro-life perspective.

She offers a couple of examples, one of a single mom, struggling financially. Once Connors stopped to listen, the woman opened up, and once they connected, she was more receptive. Another was a young man raised by a single mother in poverty who admitted he supported abortion to keep others from suffering what he had gone through. Their use of abortion as the answer is wrong. But understanding where they’re coming from helps when you offer an alternative.

According to Emily Berning of the nonprofit Let Them Live, 73% of women have abortions because of financial reasons; they’re pregnant and unmarried and don’t have the resources to raise a child. This nonprofit takes donations to help women through the crisis so that they feel free to choose life. They’re trying to give the message, “Yes, we care about you every bit as much as we care about the life of that unborn child.”

On the other side, what is the message? As Obama said, you shouldn’t be “punished with a baby.” There’s so much wrong with that. What did the baby do to become a punishment? Nothing. What did the young woman do to cause the pregnancy? Outside the small number related to rape, she had sex voluntarily with someone who wasn’t permanently committed to her or to any resulting children. A mistake? Yes. But it’s not a little oops, like stepping on someone’s shoe or bumping an elbow. It doesn’t happen inadvertently. Why, then, do so many make that mistake? Because of another message from the non-life side, that sex is both a right and something you can’t or shouldn’t deny yourself, and therefore it should not come with consequences attached. This message denies both human biology and psychology.

What if the message was a very clear, “Sex is for after marriage, after the permanent commitment is already made, so that you and the father of any child can work together to take care of the child, and also help take care of you during pregnancy and the raising of the child”? What if a young girl understood that she was worth respecting? That using her for sex was not an expression of love unless the commitment was already given? Without commitment, it’s only selfish lust. She deserves better.

But to receive better, she has to understand her worth and protect her value. In a healthy society, she gets that understanding from her family, her church, her friends, and societal institutions—school, entertainment, businesses. But this is not a healthy society.

The world has been failing her by lying to her, making her feel she could never be loved if she didn’t give sex to a potential partner. She shouldn’t want what is natural and right for a woman to want—permanent partnership with a caring man who will be a good husband and father.

If she’s already in the crisis, helping her get through it so she can choose life is the first concern. Then, beyond that, it is recovering her sense of worth, so she can go ahead with life, making a new path in which she chooses only what will actually bring her permanent familial love.

It takes a shift in society’s way of thinking. There is no either/or between (a) getting rid of the consequences to get rid of the crisis, or (b) saying, “You should have known better,” and failing to help. The actual alternative is to offer real loving kindness and a better path forward.

 

Are the two parts of today’s post really separate? I think this approach to understanding those on the anti-life side—learning what is causing their emotional pain that is getting in the way of reason—is worth trying related to abortion. That is, if you can get the opportunity for a rational conversation.

But can it also work to understand the anti-life side who favor tyranny? I don’t know if it can work on those who seek the power for themselves—the actual tyrants. But it might work for those who are falling for the tyrants’ lies about life getting better if you just submit to them. Again, getting the opportunity for rational conversation is another challenge altogether.

What troubles me is the responsibility this approach seems to put on those on the side of civilization to be greater than we know how to be. The only way we can do that is daily religious practice, allowing God’s spirit to guide us with the right words and actions in the moments we need them.[ii] But, then, that’s how we do any good that we do. So let’s keep praying for some miraculous help.

 

Extra Reading

·       “’Unborn Lives Matter': N.C.'s 1st Black Lt. Gov. Compares Abortion to Slavery” by Michael Foust for Christian Headlines, Jan. 26, 2021. 

·       “Honduras Makes Its Abortion Ban Permanent: ‘All Human Beings Have a Right to Life’” by Micaiah Bilger for Life News, Feb. 1, 2021. 

 

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[i] Psalm 24:1 

[ii] Matthew 10:19-20. See also Luke 11:12, Doctrine & Covenants 84:85 and 100:6.   

Israel, Part IV: Holocaust and Statehood

This if Part IV of a series on Israel, to cover some basic history and how we got where we are. For Part I covered ancient history; Part II covered Zionism; and Part III covered conflict and violence. Today we cover the Holocaust and statehood. This will take us up to 1948. It will take at least a couple more parts to get us up to the present.

It is impossible to overstate the effect of the Holocaust on Jews as well as on civilized people worldwide. As of 1933 there were about nine million Jews living in the 21 European countries. By the end of WWII in 1945 six million of them had been murdered—that’s two out of every three. The number included 1.5 million children.
 

To give you perspective, worldwide there are about 14 million Jews today. Six million of that number would be a known loss to every civilized person in the world—people they actually knew or loved ones of people they know. Compare to 9/11. That day we lost about three thousand; all of us know someone who was lost or who knew someone lost that day. We are a country of over 300 million. Twenty times that actual number of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, from a population much much smaller. If two thirds of the total US population were annihilated, that would be a loss of 200 million people. That’s how it felt to Jews in Europe.
 

But they were not allowed to immigrate to their homeland as promised, even to escape certain death from savage tyrants—because civilized people failed to keep their promises to them.
 

Despite betrayals against the Jews, among the British were 26,000 Jewish volunteers fighting against the Axis powers. In 1944 the Jewish Brigade became an independent military unit of the British army, seeing action in Egypt, Italy and northwest Europe. Following victory, these same soldiers joined the “illegal immigration” efforts to carry Holocaust survivors to Eretz Israel.
 

Victory against Hitler didn’t mean victory for the Jews. The White Papers had essentially nullified the Balfour Declaration, and they used diplomatic means worldwide to let their complaints be known. Diplomacy was not enough. People networked to smuggle in thousands of refugees past the British blockade. And simultaneously underground groups worked to defend Jewish neighborhoods, as well as supplies and infrastructure, from Arab attack. Some also worked to subvert British command. A handful were executed for their underground activities.
 

Working and fighting for their own survival, while simultaneously rallying support worldwide eventually resulted in delegations to the United Nations to explore the possibility of independent statehood. President Harry Truman took an interest almost as soon as he took office, and on Yom Kippur 1946 Truman declared his support for the Jewish Agency’s plan to partition the Palestine area into separate Jewish and Arab states.
 

Britain withdrew its paternal role, having failed to keep basic order, and referred the problem to the United Nations. After a UN study, a commission recommended that the Jews become sovereign over the area that included their main holdings (Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel-Aviv), and leave the rest to become an independent Arab state.

At the time, Arabs in the Jewish areas outnumbered Jews, and the partition severely restricted new settlement areas for the influx of European refugees. Nevertheless, the Jews agreed to the partition, and they continued diplomatic efforts, particularly to gain US support. Up until just days before the vote, the solution seemed impossible, but worldwide efforts finally came to fruition. On November 29, 1947, Resolution 181 was approved by the UN General Assembly—to much Jewish fanfare around the globe.
 

The Arabs outright rejected the partition. They responded by blowing up buses, attacking people in their neighborhoods and businesses, and destroying the main roads between Jewish cities. Jews were attacked throughout the Middle East.

With British protection withdrawing, Jews and Arabs struggled for control of strategic positions. Yet amid the conflict, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the formation of the State of Israel. Within hours the Arab response was to bring in the armies of surrounding Arab countries, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and contributing forces from other countries as well, to “drive the Jews into the Mediterranean.”
 

Beleaguered new Israelis used light artillery and not much more than handguns and rifles to hold off the onslaught of the surrounding Arab world—and prevailed, slightly increasing their territory during the dispute
.

One of the byproducts of this battle to defend their right to exist was the refugee problem. That will be Part V.