Protecting Children

I will talk about the health care bill, but at a later time. I want to have time to do my research as I write, so I'll probably do it on Thursday or Friday.

Let me start by saying that religious billboards bug me. When you can reduce your God to the same equation as Pepsi or Coke, there's a problem with your religion. But I seem to see them EVERYWHERE since I moved to the Midwest. The one that bugs me the most, probably, is the one that simply says JESUS! I'd like to buy billboard space right next to this one that says SO?!

Also, despite the fact that I am a Christian, I reject the idea of the judgment. I won't outline my arguments against it at this time. If anyone is interested, drop a comment and I'll put it in a future entry. I think that it is a pretty and logical little argument. Briefly, I think that it is incompatible with the idea of an all-knowing and all-loving God.

Having said that...

I saw a billboard (actually two billboards, one atop the other) as I was driving home from Texas the other day that really BUGGED me. It said, briefly, “When you stand in judgment before God, what will you say when he asks if you protected unborn children?”

First problem: the unborn are, by definition, not children. They are variously zygotes, fetuses, embryos, etc. So let's get our terminology right, shall we?

Also, why does God care about the unborn, and not children themselves. Does God's concern only go from conception to birth (or abortion or miscarriage, or whatever)? I mean, does God love you until you're born and then stop?

I guess that my point is this... if this billboard were put up by someone who truly understands what Christ commanded us to do, it would say “What will you say when he asks if you protected CHILDREN?” And I've gotta tell you, my conservative Christian brothers and sisters, you are doing a really SHITTY JOB of protecting children. You support George W. Bush, who put a sixteen year old CHILD to death in Texas. You oppose health coverage for poor children. You oppose school lunch programs. A “Christian” school somewhere in the Midwest or Texas recently kicked two kids out of school because their mommy and her lover are gay. HOW DOES ANY OF THAT QUALIFY AS PROTECTING CHILDREN YOU SIMPLE, IRRITATING, GREEDY, MONOMANIACAL BASTARDS?!

Er... um... sorry. Let my emotions get the best of me for a minute there. But...for GOD'S sake (literally)... please THINK about these issues. Don't walk around parroting “abortion is bad, abortion is bad” until you actually take some steps to fix the problems that we are not fixing among CHILDREN. Not fetuses, or zygotes or embryos. Living, breathing, playing, starving, suffering CHILDREN.

Any idiot stupid enough to believe that abortion is the biggest problem facing our children is an idiot who proves that abortion CAN be a good thing... after all, it should have been done to THEM. These are people who live in the over-privileged and under-thinking USA. This is a world where a child dies of hunger every five seconds. A CHILD. EVERY FIVE SECONDS. No, it doesn't happen in America. The only place in America where we have to even be confronted with another difficult concept for us (homelessness) is in the cities, and we can pretty much ignore them, right? But I think that the anti-abortion crowd might pick its fights on protecting children a little more carefully if they had to drive or walk down the street and see children starving at the streetside. One child. Every five seconds. So to whomever spent the hundreds or thousands of dollars to put those pointless billboards up, don't you think that God would be better pleased with you if you ever do have to face him in judgment if you had spent that money trying to figure out a way to reduce or eliminate the number of children dying from sheer poverty in this world?

Now. Here is where I have to take a breath when I start getting all het up about these types of things. Here is where, as a Christian, I have to put my money where my mouth is, and help me Lord, for it is difficult.

I keep a phrase forefront in my mind. It has caused many a Christian friend to stomp off in a huff when I pose this question to them. It is a question that any thinking Christian struggles with every day, every conscious moment.

Do all things NOT serve the glory of God?

The answer, to any Christian is, of course all things serve the glory of God. We may not know why or how, but they do. Abortion serves the glory of God, as do your (in my opinion) misguided attempts to stop it. The holocaust served the glory of God, although I have no idea how. Flowers and child pornography and Bart Ehrman and prison rape and joyful singing and Americans putting their money ahead of their fellow Americans... ALL of these things, good and bad, serve the glory of God.

That is why I have to take a breath, my conservative Christian brothers and sisters. Because what you do serves the glory of God just as Roe vs. Wade does.

Just be damned if I know how.

Peace.

Rev. Randal