Sometimes these are questions in which Christians try to shy
away from, since they are so definitively in the realm of science. But there does not need to be contention
between our scientific advances and our ethics if we follow a few simple
guidelines that mimic how God has revealed Himself to us. First, and most importantly, we must ALWAYS preserve the right to choose. By this I mean, we should in no way compel
another human being to conform to our own sense of right and wrong. Even when we know their conduct is against
what God would have them do, He does not force them to comply, we should not
attempt to do so either. Christians tend
to hate this idea (another oxymoron if I ever heard one). Christians now made free by accepting Christ,
turn right around and attempt to place non-believers in a subjective bondage to
their newly found sense of morality.
Instead of leading others through example, they want to compel others through
legislation. This is wrong. It is against the principles of the very God
they claim to serve. However, it is
completely in line with how Satan governs his kingdom, he is the master of
compelling the choices of others (or so he would have you believe anyway).
Bearing this in mind, we should try to limit our legislative
tendencies based strictly on our own moral interpretations and attempt to
preserve the right of the individual to determine morality when possible. The next principle to observe when
confronting bio-ethical situations is both the value of life, and the priority
of life. By this I mean, each human life
is unique and precious to the Universe (as we discussed earlier). Each one of us is created for a specific purpose;
to fulfill a unique mission that no-one else is capable of doing. This makes every life precious to God, and
ideally to each other. So sacrificing
one man to save five, is not a viable option.
You can up the odds all you like, it does
not ever negate the value of the one. If that man could be sacrificed and save
10,000 it is still not acceptable. Even
to save 10 million, a single human sacrifice is not ethically viable. Let us say for example that the single man to
be sacrificed to save 10 million others, might otherwise have gone on to have a
family. His child, a random genius
prodigy, discovers a cure for AIDS, Bird-Flu, TB, pick your earth ending
disease here. The lives saved by allowing
the man to live may well far outweigh killing him in the first place. You may have saved 10 million now, and in so
doing killed 200 million later (perhaps including your original 10). Therefore the idea of killing, in order to
save someone else is inconsistent with God’s character.
Here is another area where God takes a bad rap. Organ donors are folks who realize the value
of their bodies after their own demise; they know what it means for someone to
receive this precious gift. Yet people,
including many Christians, fear to become organ donors thinking as soon as they
do, “God” will kill them off to save someone else. This thinking is warped and completely
misrepresents the character of God. You
will not die one day sooner because you sign up to be an organ donor. Your death will occur no matter what, the
concept of when is not altered by a decision of ultimate charity. And since an organ donor is already dead,
there are no moral implications in
using their organs to save another person except ‘good’ moral
implications.
But how do you define life and death? Today we define death as the cessation of
heart beat, and brain activity. It gets
a little more gray when a machine can prolong both these activities
indefinitely. And therefore we fall back
to our earlier principle of allowing the individual to determine if this condition
is death, or artificial life, and how they would wish to handle it. Suffering
is not an excuse for suicide, however, not all suicide is
considered a ‘sin’ (check out the story of Samson in the Bible, God gave him
back his strength knowing he would commit suicide with it bringing down the Philistine
temple, and God did not intervene to save him).
Dr. Kevorkian sees his role as relieving pain and allowing terminal patients
to determine how they exit this world (in dignity). I cannot say if he is right or wrong, nor
would I ever presume to judge his patients.
How could I? I am not in their
position, neither are you. This must
default back to the rights of the individual to determine.
Defining life becomes an even more gray
area. Does life being with
the splitting of cells as they replicate?
I submit it does not. I submit
that until an organism “draws its first breath on its own” it is not yet
“alive”. My belief stems from the idea that
God breathed into man the ‘breath of life’ and man became a living soul. Now, what does that mean in terms of a fetus,
and the highly controversial practice of abortion? To me, it means that the time when ‘life’
occurs is when baby draws his first breath.
But that does not mean I would opt to terminate a pregnancy and prevent
life from occurring. But again that is
my choice. And my choice is not centered
around the idea of whether or not it is murder.
It is centered around the idea, that pregnancy in and of itself, should
be one of God’s blessings to us, and therefore something we take extra care to
preserve and protect. There is no murder
in abortion, unless your referring to the murder of an early stage organism. The idea that life begins at conception then
becomes mass murder since the woman’s body rejects massive amounts of this
‘stuff’? Would not spermicide, and even
condoms then be considered a form of pre-emptive murder? The problems become staggering. We don’t typically hold funerals for
pregnancies that end naturally in the first trimester, we call that a
miscarriage. Is the mother then a
murderer?
The biggest problem with abortion is the reason why we seek
it, not the practice itself. We use
abortion in the most self-centered way imaginable – to undo our lack of
planning, to protect our greed and style of life, and to remove the
consequences of having casual meaningless sex.
It is far less likely to be sought between a couple who have committed
themselves to each other for life. For
those folks, pregnancy is referred to as, having a family. But for single women, and single men, who did
not think enough to plan to protect themselves from natures consequences,
abortion is used as a restart button.
There are times when protecting the life of the living mother, or
removing the product of rape & incest, that our reasons for seeking an
abortion are understandable. This is not
to say, that a woman who chooses to carry the product of rape or incest is
wrong either; nor is the woman wrong who chooses to risk her own health for the
sake of trying to have a family. But these
are deeply personal choices,
and should be spared the indignity of third-party-judging. Why not allow people in these precarious
positions to seek the council of God for themselves; and simply be supportive
of whatever decisions they reach.
Life with ‘breath’ removes the morality of stem cell
research as well, in the sense that it does not kill a living thing to preserve
another. However, the practice of
starting the process of pregnancy only in order to stop it prematurely and
cash-in on a crop of potential stem cells, seems to me based in greed, and
unlikely to be the best ethical decision to be made. Utilizing all those artificially inseminated
early stage organisms, that are otherwise scheduled for termination anyway,
seems to me to be more akin to organ donation than murder. Cloning looks to me like playing God, and I
doubt we will progress enough to see it succeed, but who knows.
We have so far been discussing the ‘value’ of life, the
‘priority’ of life refers to the food-chain view of living things. We commonly eat plant life in the form of
fruits, vegetables, and nuts without a second thought. This is because since plants are devoid of
‘feelings’ and ‘thinking’ we consider these forms of life moot in the context
of our survival. Animals however begin
to present another dilemma, they are capable of ‘feeling’ things, as well as
limited ‘thoughts’. We seem content to
eat some animals, but begin to feel wrong about it when it comes to torturing
them. When scientific torture of animals
is done to research a cure for cancer, people feel bad about it, but don’t jump
up and demand a stop to it. However,
when torture of animals is done by cosmetic companies to only promote our
vanity, that seems to cross the invisible moral line and demand action. I guess it comes back to what the animal is
being sacrificed for (all too common it is to fill my stomach), we seem to
accept true medical research, but not unnecessary vain
pursuits.
In the end, I look at it this way. I have no problem swatting a mosquito, or
killing the bugs in my house. I would
work very hard to wipe out every virus or bacteria that plagues mankind with
disease. I do eat too many animals (much
to my own shame). But I think perhaps I
should be doing more to preserve animal species, and work to save them, since
they were given into our care at the origins of our earth. They may not understand everything we do, but
isn’t that how God compares against our poor limited capabilities, and He shows
us a tremendous amount of care. The
bottom line when it comes to facing bio-ethical questions comes down to how you
formulate your opinions, and how you share them with others – not really
whether you are right or wrong – only God truly knows this. Only
God should be allowed to judge …
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