Tag Archives: planned parenthood

Truth and Reality

Creation, Defending the Faith, Devils, , , , ,

The devil is a one-trick pony.  Everything he does to mankind is simply an echo of his original temptation to Eve, “you shall be like God.”  Throughout history he has dragged many souls into hell by coming up with creative ways in which he could coax men into usurping the role of God.  I say creative not in the sense that the devil can create anything.  He can only twist and distort what God creates by breathing lies into creation.  Only God truly creates while the devil fabricates, a fact that I want to spend some time focusing on.

God creates by simply speaking something into being.  He creates through His Word (c.f. Col 1:16).  Reality came into being not through some evolutionary process, but through God’s “let there be…”.  Mind you I am not saying that things don’t come into existence naturally, only that the different kinds of things (what we might call the different natures) and reality as a whole were spoken into being during the first six days of Creation.  It should not be a surprise that this foundational truth, the same truth we profess in the Creed that “through Him all things were made” is under attack.  And because it ultimately has its cause in the diabolical, it is so subtle that we might not even realize what is going on.

Lies and Reality

Human words are meant to describe reality, even if they inevitably short-change it.  The words themselves are said to be true only to the extent that the ideas they convey conform to reality.  To say “oranges are orange” conveys the truth about the color of oranges, but it does not fully describe what an orange is.  On the other hand, to say that “oranges are blue” is a falsehood because it does not describe the reality that is an orange in any intelligible way.

Now, admittedly the orange example isn’t real (as far as I know).  But it is illustrative of a larger, one might say, diabolical problem.  There are two possibilities at play here.  A person may be ignorant of the color of oranges or he may want oranges to be other than they are.  The first man is a fool and the second is a liar.  The folly of the fool can be remedied with the truth.  The liar is another story.

All lies are attempts to use words to change reality simply by declaring it so.  It is a poor man’s “let there be…”.  I say poor man, but it is really diabolical having its roots Satan who is the “Father of lies”.  He is always trying to upend Creation and make it appear to be something that it is not.  It is an attempt to “be like God” and make reality whatever you want it to be.  It is, to quote the diabolical Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1991).

The Father of Lies in Our Times

I said at the open that the devil was always seeking to institutionalize his plan and develops unique strategies for particular ages.  He has been particularly successful in our age because we have failed to recognize the mechanism by which he is shaping the spirit of the world.  For most of us, Political Correctness is a minor annoyance that we do our best to avoid.  But for the devil it is the tool by which he blinds men to reality.

Notice how the term itself, Political Correctness, creates the aura of an alternate reality.  It creates a realm where words are correct, but not true.  It does this by politicizing, that is, making public, that which is personal and private.  It is made political because it must have the “power” to make other people conform to the alternate reality. 

There are many other examples, but the renaming of “Mother” to “Birthing Person” comes to mind because it is relatively new.  We laugh at the absurdity, but we fail to see the danger because we have grown so accustomed to it.  It is simply an attempt, albeit by employing the law of gradualism, to divorce motherhood from femininity and femininity from biological sex.  It is a (not-so) subtle attempt to overthrow reality by lying.  We intuitively grasp this, but instead of fighting back we laugh at the absurdity.  It is no longer funny.

Have you ever won an argument with a liar?  Of course not.  When someone is lying you do not use arguments to refute them.  You simply insist on the truth.  Yet many of us repeatedly resort to arguments to counter Political Correctness.  They are too adept at changing meanings of words to give any room for logic.  Can you deny that a mother is a “birthing person”? Instead we must insist on the truth through precision and clarity.  Simply refuse to adopt any of the Politically Correct language.  We must have the courage not to play the game and simply tell the truth regardless of the consequences.  Words not only convey reality, but they form our ideas about it.  Only the truth can set us free to roam throughout reality.  If we do not stop the abuse of language that abuses reality, then we risk the eternal abuse of many souls.  People end up in hell for bad ideas too, especially because it changes what they become through their actions.   

A Pro-Life Video?

Abortion, ,

For obvious reasons (all of which are bad), abortion advocates tend to play their intellectual hand close to the vest.  Instead, they choose to hind behind emotivism and the smokescreen of the “right to choose.”  Every once in a while, however, their sinister logic escapes and their unvarnished train of thought escapes.  This is exactly what happened recently when a self-described “left-wing” advocacy group called the Agenda Project released a pro-abortion ad in support of Planned Parenthood.  The ad, dubbed “The Chosen” opens with video of a cooing baby shortly followed by a caption “she deserves to be loved.”  Flashing back to the baby, now smiling and laughing, a second caption follows, “she deserves to be wanted.”  Then a third time, “she deserves to be a choice.”   And there you have it, abortion logic untwisted and devoid of all verbal gymnastics.

Now, it is first worth noting that this particular video committed a capital sin when it comes to defending abortion.  Never, ever, equate the “fetus” or “embryo” or even a “clump of cells” with a child.  Usually their arguments are fatal, but not in this way.  Inadvertently or not, they made a very Pro-life argument by featuring a little baby.  That very same baby was at some point in her development an embryo or fetus just like she will be a toddler, a teenage girl and an adult.  And the video makes this very clear. Perhaps that is the point.  To drop all the ridiculous pretexts and simply finally admit what abortion really is.  Perhaps abortion advocates are “coming out” and finally admitting what they are exactly defending.  Maybe they are not actually talking about abortion but are now lobbying for infanticide.

Revealing the Logic

Maybe, but probably not.  More likely is that they tried to make a “reasonable” argument and ended up revealing just how unreasonable their position really is.  In an age where we often argue by meme, it is helpful to lay out the logic of an argument  piece by piece and see where it leads us.

The first line of the argument is that “she deserves to be loved.”  Some would say this is self-evident, but let’s state the reason why in order to connect the dots.  Borrowing from St. John Paul II we can say “She deserves to be loved” because a person “is a good toward which the only adequate response is love.”  In essence the first statement recognizes that persons have a unique value, not based upon anything they do, but solely because of what, or more to the point, who they are.  I think we can all agree that this is true.

Adding the “why” to the first statement helps to see why the second declaration, “she deserves to be wanted,” logically follows from the first.  Admittedly “want” is a rather vague word, especially when applied to a person.  We usually “want” objects but as premise 1 of their argument states, we should love subjects.  Nevertheless we can look at this as adding on to the first premise by saying that “because a person should be loved, then she should also be wanted.”  This too logically follows.

The fact that a child deserves to be wanted is not actually saying anything other than children are by nature “wantable.”  Unwanting adults are the real problem and this is because they see the subjects as objects that they can use to accessorize their life.  It is beginning to a “planned” parenthood feel to it.

Finally we get to the third premise—“she deserves to be a choice.”  This logically follows from the other two premises if all the caveats above are made.  Love requires an act of the will and a child has a right to be brought into existence through an act of love between the parents.

The Pro-Life Argument

The problem of course is that they are leaving out a hidden premise along with the conclusion.  Now if we trace out the line of argument we find a big problem

  1. A child, because she is a person, deserves to be loved.
  2. Because she is a person, they deserve to be wanted.
  3. Because she deserves to be wanted, she deserves to be conceived as an act of the will (i.e. chosen).
  4. (Hidden) But if she is not wanted, then the mother can choose to kill her.

But this is a contradiction with (1) since the right to be loved would include a right not to be deliberately torn apart in the womb and therefore by reductio ad absurdum we can conclude that the child has a right not to be killed.

And now we see why the pro-abortion people never resort to reason—it leads away from their position.  They almost distracted us with the cute baby and the lullaby music, but reason prevailed.  So perhaps rather than vilifying them, we should hire the Agenda Project.