via Jesus Politics
Abortion issue & Schaeffer influence pushed evangelicals to engagement, Land says – (BP)
“I think that Southern Baptists are the most pro-life denomination at the rank-and-file level,†Land said.
HOGWASH. Bullshit. How do they get off limiting LIFE to this one issue. I am NOT pro-abortion, and not “Pro-Choice”. That’s because human life is sacred. It’s more than a career move, or a matter of convenience. Which is exactly why war is wrong. It is a justification based on political, economic, power-grabbing issues, and justified through a “contextual revision” of history to suit the ones making the declaration of what “history” has taught us, and WHAT that history is. When it all comes down to it, nations, and particularly OUR nation, has made this kind of a cold, calculated decision for the lives of others as if they are basically NULL in value (because in a basically self-centered, ethnocentric, economic class-centric worldview, this is what constitutes ‘morality’. And so the nation’s people succumb to the mythology of what the state shapes its institutions to advance, and respond to theat shaping of desires in severely distorted ways. And so we often hear “That’s war”. “Nothing else really works”. Use that same lens on Jesus, and guess what? Jesus’ way “didn’t work”
“Pro-life”. Not on your life, Land. The Southern Baptists actually tip the scales in the direction of Pro-death; pro-war, pro-capital punishment, pro-gun, pro-USA (the leading practicioner of “savage capitalism” (another “Bell-ism” which he drew from Franz Hinkelammert)…..the lines of “oppostion” seem drawn not on the measure of LIFE, but of what opponents are NOT (liberals supportr women’s rights, whcih gets associated with “a woman’s right to choose, and then liberals oppose war and capital punishment and criticize America at a rate far higher than do “conservatives”, so they defer to the death-dealing options on those counts. The Religious Right praised John Paul II on his Pro-life stance, but they describe ONLY his stance against abortion, and omit how his pro-life sense encompassed ALL of life. (I am interested to see the treatment of this on the second episode of the TV movie that commences tomorrow night —I’ll have to see to gettting that recorded so I can see it)
Pro-life is becoming a phrase that I am growing tired of hearing abused and distorted so blindly. NOt only is pro-life a matter of NON-death, but is also geared toward “abundant life”; of a vision for life and community as God intends for his creation, and to which the church is called to advance and BE in the eyes of the world.