Breach of Trust - Part 2

Link to Part 1

Some time ago, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal regarding a Chinese businessman who had spent time working in the United States.  This man had an interesting observation about the success of American business.  He said America succeeds economically because, in general, we can trust each other in a way that was completely missing in China.  In China, he stated, you could not trust what anyone told you.  You just understood that others would take advantage of you if they got the chance.  He didn't see that in the United States.  He observed that at least in the business world, there was a general assumption of truthfulness and honesty.  He concluded that this is what makes American business work.

I find that interesting.  It wasn't our laws or our ingenuity that make our businesses work.  It wasn't our technology or our work ethic.  It wasn't our universities, our natural resources, or our intelligence.  He concluded it was our honesty in business that made our economy work.  He further concluded that it was our generally Christian worldview that provided the expectation of general honesty.  This Chinese man was so impacted by what he saw that he became a Christian himself.  He concluded that Christianity was the answer China needed for its own society, and he took his new faith with him when he repatriated.

Breach of Trust - Part 1

Do you ever think about what it takes to make a civilization function?  To prosper?  Is it possible to boil it down to a one-word concept?  It think maybe it is.  The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the necessary ingredient is trust.  Think about the implications of that notion.  What would life be like if we truly had trust in each other?  What would it be like if you knew another person always intended to do the right thing?  Forget whether or not he was capable of understanding what the right thing was.  Let's assume as a society we still have the same intelligence levels as now, the same skill levels, the same foolishness levels, the same error levels and the like.  If, in spite of all that, you could still trust that other people's intentions were to do the right thing and to be truthful with each other, how different would our society be?

Is Social Media Harming Your Happiness?

Today I ran across a Reuters article by writer Belinda Goldsmith that caught my eye.  It was titled, Is Facebook Envy Making you Miserable?  The article begins:

LONDON (Reuters) - Witnessing friends' vacations, love lives and work successes on Facebook can cause envy and trigger feelings of misery and loneliness, according to German researchers.

A study conducted jointly by two German universities found rampant envy on Facebook, the world's largest social network that now has over one billion users and has produced an unprecedented platform for social comparison.

The researchers found that one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most.

Empty Cribs - Forty Years of Abortion Complacency - Part II

In Part I of this topic, I concluded that life begins at conception.  Part II builds on that premise.  It surprises many people when I tell them that I am actually very “pro-choice".  I believe a woman has the choice of when and with whom she will have sex.  Once a child has been conceived, however, any choice regarding birth is a choice concerning the deliberate killing of a human being.  At that point, there is really no moral choice at all.  Conception, in a moral sense, automatically implies birth for cultures who believe that killing a human is wrong.  This is why teaching our children a proper sexual morality is so important.  This is why we need to teach our culture that stable, committed relationships (e.g. marriage) are needed for child rearing.  Sexual morality, marriage and child bearing are inseparably bound together in a culture that realizes life starts at conception.

Few would argue that abortion is a positive thing.  Many admit that in addition to ending a child's life, abortion harms the mother in many ways.  It harms our nation as well.  The United States might not be facing a Social Security crisis if we had another fifty-five million working citizens to support it.  More and more Americans realize that science is redefining the start of life (see January 14, 2013 edition of Time magazine), pointing to conception as the only sensible beginning.  We know that abortion is not optimal at best and may be horribly wrong at worst.

So why does anyone support abortion?  I am convinced that support for abortion betrays the desire to engage in sex without consequences.  Men and women want an escape hatch in the event of trouble.  They want the pleasure without the responsibility of sex.  At its core, privilege without responsibility is what abortion is all about.  Whether from a reluctant one-time mistake or a lifestyle of unconcerned irresponsibility, the vast majority of individuals who choose abortion are trying to wipe out the negative consequences of a conscious decision they made to have sex.

Empty Cribs - Forty Years of Abortion Complacency - Part I

I remember the first real conversation I ever had with anyone outside my family on the topic of abortion.  In a high school study-hall discussion, a teacher stated, “I know what I would do if my teenage daughter came home pregnant.  I would not let her ruin her life.”  I respected this teacher, and it really made me think about this topic on a different level.  Was abortion sometimes the best decision?  Even as an impressionable sixteen-year-old, something really nagged at me about that teacher's statement.

Fast forward nine years to 1989.  By then my views were fully formed.  As I was preparing to teach a church group of college students for a “Sanctity of Life Sunday”,  I learned a staggering fact:  twenty million babies had been aborted (at that time) since the decision in Roe V. Wade.  Since 1989, another thirty-five million babies have gone to their deaths through abortion.  Though I have always been straightforward with my views on abortion, it does not feel as if I have done very much these last twenty-four years to change this national tragedy.

It's Not About the Guns

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin

On December 14, 2012, a deranged Adam Lanza entered the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and killed twenty kindergarten children as well as six adults.  This was the second-deadliest mass shooting in United States History.  The heartfelt outcry was universal and immediate.  How could this have possibly happened again?  When were we going to do something about these mass murders?  What were we going to do to protect the innocent among us?  Shouldn’t we get rid of these powerful and high-capacity firearms that always seem to be used in these killings?  Wasn’t this the obvious answer?  Were there other solutions?  Better solutions? These are all obvious as well as very good questions.  

Can a Christian Be a Gun Nut?

I’m surprised at how infrequently I really stop to think about it, but in one way I am living a life of uneasy tension as a gun-promoting, gun-toting, card-carrying NRA member who is simultaneously a committed follower of Jesus Christ.  The Sandy Hook shooting has shown me how easily I can compartmentalize my thoughts when it comes to certain subjects.  On the one hand, I’m an ardent defender of the Second Amendment to the point of including the availability of one-hundred shot magazines and Bushmaster assault rifles.  On the other hand, I’m basically a practical personal pacifist with a strong desire to avoid physical confrontations.