Counterpoint

I recently read a manifesto/pledge published by a very prominent lefty a few weeks ago. The manifesto was written as a direct reaction to the Republican loss of the House and Senate in the recently concluded mid-term elections and is, frighteningly enough, addressed to "disheartened conservatives". On the surface the article reads like an olive branch and doctrine on tolerance, world conservation and love all around. That is until I realized that the article was devoid of all obedience to God's word. Upon close inspection and comparison to the Bible, I found the article to be blatantly lacking in Godly principles and brimming with defiance to God's commands.

And so, in keeping with our rights to free expression, which is God-given, by the way, and not granted or bestowed by any man, I'd like to put forth my counterpoints to several, if not all, of the items in that manifesto.

First off, I am not a disheartened conservative. As I already posted, I am unhappy and disappointed with the results of the elections but I did not stay indoors in my jammies for 3 days to mope. As a matter of fact, I am looking forward to these 4 days off to take a break and get a chance to stay indoors in my jammies and get caught up with the important things like post-election analyses and predictions of where our country is headed but I digress.

God's Law:
Christ says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself." (Luke 10:27, NASB)

Love and respect are the two predominant themes underlying God's command. Therefore, we should love and respect God, our parents, our wives, our husbands, our children, our fellow man and even our enemies. However, it doesn't say that we should let them get away with doing wrong or with perpetrating evil. Which is why:

(1) I am an advocate of the Death Penalty. Saddam needs to hang! After all the evil this man has wreaked on his countrymen and the world, the world needs an accounting for all the atrocities he has committed. Even if, like the thief on the cross, he accepts Christ as His savior, between now and his final hour, it still doesn't acquit him of his sins. Accepting Christ guarantees his passage to heaven. God can take care of his soul afterward. Do note that as much as I call for his death, I DO NOT rejoice in it. No one alive should have had the kind of hate this man wielded and no man alive should dwell on the same hate after his death.

(2) I am also an advocate of pro-life. Abortion is murder. It's the snuffing out of a life. Go back to Science 101. Matter can be classified into two things. Organic and Non-organic. Inorganic matter, such as a rock, astro turf or that pink-flamingo on the front lawn is either man-made or does not support life. Believe it or not, the air we breathe is considered inorganic, for although it sustains life as we know it, air itself is not a building block of life.

Organic matter, like bacteria, algae, a female egg, and a male sperm, supports and are building blocks of life. Let me write that again, anything organic, supports and builds life. To say that a zygote or an embryo or a fetus is not life is making a mockery out of science. To say that conception does not create life is saying that there are bits and pieces of our human body that are non-living and suddenly come to life after an incubation period. Why then do we have still births? How can we call it a "death" if there was no life to begin with.

(3) It is also the same reason I am vehemently against embryonic stem cell research. It's killing a life in the name of science. Stem cell research is a great field in discovering new cures, that's why adult stem cells are being harvested and used all the time. I find it ironic that we have an advocacy group to save wetlands, seals, whales, emus, dodo birds, oceans, and the like, and yet, when it comes to our unborn children, we can't wait to serve them up on a silver platter in the name of science.

(4) I love the Lord and my neighbor, and even though it's a pain, I try to love my enemies too.
But I'm not commanded to marry every Tom, Dick or Harry or even Debbie that I've determined I love. All this outcry about marrying the same sex is nothing more than man's disobedience and defiance of God's word. It's not about benefits and entitlement between partners. There are already laws in place addressing those issues - it's called domestic partnership regardless of the partner's gender.

Let's take God's word out of this equation, and take this concept to its natural conclusion, if marrying within the same sex is okay, then how about marrying one from each sex? How about 2? How about marrying outside our species? If I decided that my pet goat is the best spouse I can come up with, what's going to stop me? The point is where do you draw the line? And for the record, it is immoral! For references, see 1 Cor 6:9; 1 Tim 1:8-10 and Rom. 1:26. Bottom line, if God says it's wrong, who am I to argue.

I love my homosexual brother and sister but I do not condone their lifestyle. I can plant seeds of what God wants them to be, but it is ultimately up to God to water them and make them grow. I grieve when they contract HIV and die of AIDS, I get angry when they are discriminated upon and called unkind names. I praise and worship the Lord when they too find the path to the kingdom and I am at their side and support them when they need a shoulder to cry on or when they need a kind word. We agree or disagree on politics, religion and life in genereal but they are still my brother and sister made in the image of God.

(5) Also love for one's neighbor doesn't necessarily translate to a perennial handout. I'll give to anyone who is truly in need of a boost but I am not a bottomless pit of generosity. I would rather give and support a person who is determined to make a better life for himself than to give and give and give to support a nasty habit.

I am a compassionate, consenting adult. My compassion is long-term and I do not dole out money I don't own or have the right to give. I consent to all that is good and moral and right and just and pure. Anything beyond these parameters I have a problem with.

The Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness:

(1) I believe that my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are God-given. It is not granted by a Monarch, a Ruler, A Dictator, A President or even a political party. In this great country I have a right to vote and a right to free speech, not because it was incorporated in some document in the National Archives two hundred plus years ago, but because God gave me that right when I was created. It's the consequence of exercising those rights that can (a) get me into trouble or (b) allow me to carry out God's will in this fallen world.

I also believe in tolerance - true tolerance not this one-way variety that's been going around lately. Tolerance, the way I define it is this: We talk, we disagree, I'll defend by beliefs, you defend yours and if we still don't see eye to eye, we agree to disagree, part ways, move on with our daily lives but still remain friends.

We don't hold a grudge against each other, we don't call each other names, we certainly do not suppress each other's belief or start a jihad and call for each other's head in a bag over our disagreement.

Tolerance - as it exist today, is thus: We talk, we disagree, you judge me as an ignoramus, i judge you as an infidel and we're off to the races. Let's see who can smear the other with mud first. How about Jihad? I want your head, you want my complete surrender. What's next Armageddon, nuclear fallout, the assimmilation of an entire civilization? So much for that idea.

(2) I also have the right to bear arms to defend my pursuit of happiness. I don't need to hunt for Bambi, Bugs, Daffy or Moose. We have groceries for a reason. I am not a proponent of hunting for game or sport, but I understand that elk tastes good. More power to those who prefer otherwise, but I don't look forward to coming face to face with a 200 pound animal with horns and hooves, even if they're 50 yards away. Bottom line is it's not the gun, it's the gun in the wrong hands, that makes it dangerous. And as long as we're all educated and respectful of such raw power we should all be just fine. So please don't legislate the when and wherefore of my owning a .45. Let's all do something productive, like sending the U.N. back to Geneva or something.

(3) This country has a right to create its own militia (aka Armed Forces) primarily to defend the land within our borders and occasionally to fight on foreign soil. For the record, I hate war. In a perfect, ideal world, there is no war. But this is not a perfect, ideal world. War along with natural and man-made disasters are a result of our falleness. God grieves when His people are at war with each other, but we are also commanded to go to war. How many times in the days of old did God command the likes of Samson, Joshua, David, and Solomon to go against or wipe out this people or that tribe or that nation from this earth because of their evil ways. And the Lord was with them too as they went into battle. Had we not declared war on Germany, Japan, and Italy how could we account for God's more than six million people who suffered and died under Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolinni's tyranny?

We have this war going on in Iraq and I hate having to hear about our fellow Americans dying fighting the good fight. But I also hate how we've demonized those who've sent our troops to fight and how we're glorifying the real pertpetrators of evil. There's a reason we can't find WMD's in Iraq. It's because we've all but announced to the whole world that we are going to go look for them in Iraq. How about we go in, unannounced, say to Iran or Syria on some peace-keeping mission and start poking around there.

I hate war, but, I hate evil more. And if declaring war is the only way left to stamp out evil, then with God by my side, to battle I go.

(4) I also believe in fiscal responsibility and accountability. Economics 101: Don't spend what you don't have and always save for a rainy day. Living beyond our means is a fast track to all kinds of trouble. We have personal debts and debts as a nation that will take beyond the grave to pay back. Believe it or not, we've already indebted our grandchildren's grandchildren. As long as we keep passing Bond Measure after Bond Measure, we are borrowing money from our future heirs all in the hopes that they will do better than we did.

Newsflash: It's not going to get better. It's called inflation for a reason. And as long as we keep raising the minimum wage, dolling out welfare and borrow against some future hope that we can't even foresee, then we're only digging ourselves into a deeper mess.

Schemes like universal health coverage aren't going to cut it. First rule of holes. Stop digging! Second, throw away the shovel, just in case you get the urge to pick it back up and dig again. This country has always thrived on free market economics. Healthy competition, not monopoly and Democracy not Socialism is what allowed us to prosper and be a leader and world power, in a just a few short years.

(5) There's a passage in Genesis about the "Dominion Mandate". In Genesis 1:28 God tells us to "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish and the sea and over the birds or the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." And as we read on there are other things that we are commanded to do with all of the life here on earth. God, in these passages, is giving us stewardship of this planet and so far we have done so in admirable fashion.

To those who claim that we've polluted the air and the water, let me say that that is a myth. Our waters and air have never been cleaner compared to the first thousand years or to a third world country. When was the last time an American contracted diptheria by drinking tap water. Let's be realistic about this, okay? If God wanted to pollute the waters, He'd turn them into blood. If He wanted the air to be unbreatheable He'd rain sulfur on our land. There is no global warming unless you consider a less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit rise every hundred years or so in the temperature. And for a planet that's approximately 6,000 years old, that's fairly negligible. Certainly not to the alarming degree that they pretend it to be.

Besides if I'm so concerned about pollution, I may just reconsider tooling around all over the world in my private jet that exudes more hydrocarbons per square inch per flight than my Ford does per year.

(6) Let's not forget, our form of government is "of the people, by the people and for the people". Elected officials are not supposed to serve a lifetime position. Power corrupts, there is no doubt about that. And power goes both ways. There is power in the form of the elected official because that person becomes the voice of their constituents, and there is power in the constituents as well for it is them who chooses the official. If either (or both) sides are corrupted then what you have is an elected goverment "of special interest groups, by lobbyist and for certain, entitled individuals." A far cry from what our forefathers had in mind.

Here's a quotation to ponder: "The totality of the Lordship of Christ in the life of man". Implicit in that quotation is the TOTAL surrender to the Lordship of Christ. TOTAL! Christ's Lordship is manifested in ALL aspects of our lives whether it's how we manage our finances or how we conduct ourselves in public and most especially, how we manifest our beliefs in our society. Society is changed by man, not the other way around and it is in our best interest to always keep that in mind.