The Pursuit of Happiness

“If we pay attention to our lives and observe the lives of others, we will soon discern that a desire for happiness of one kind or another is the conscious, subconscious, or unconscious motivation for just about everything we do. Most of our daily lives and activities are aimed at the goal of experiencing and enhancing some measure of well-being and delight, even if such intentions are in the unacknowledged background of our minds.”

~ David Naugle, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Eerdmans, 2008), 4.

Eugenics by Abortion

John Piper helps us face the tragic and terrifying consequences of where technological advancement can take us when we lack a basis for recognizing the intrinsic value and dignity of a human being.

With the development of prenatal genetic diagnosis, the drive toward eugenics has returned with a vengeance. Americans may heartily cheer participants in the Special Olympics, but we abort some 90 percent of all gestating infants diagnosed with genetic disabilities such as Down Syndrome, dwarfism, and spina bifida.

Read the whole message: “Born Blind for the Glory of God“

Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

“People who grow up without a sense of how yesterday has affected today are unlikely to have a strong sense of how today affects tomorrow.”

~ Lynne Cheney, quoted by William Kilpatrick in Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1992), 196.

The Only Freedom Worth Having

“The only freedom worth having, a freedom that does not finally trivialize our choices, is a freedom that acknowledges its limits and does not seek to be godlike.”

~ Gilbert Meilander, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Eerdmans, 1996), 5.

Atheism Removes the Basis for Law

“We are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist’s words, there is no one like unto the Lord. If He does not exist, there is no metaphoric equivalent. No person, no combination of people, no document however hallowed by time, no process, no premise, nothing is equivalent to an actual God in this central function as the unexaminable examiner of good and evil. The so-called death of God turns out not to have been just His funeral; it also seems to have effected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily extrasystematic premises. . . .

Put briefly, if the law is ‘not a brooding omnipresence in the sky,’ then it can be only one place: in us. If we are trying to find a substitute final evaluator, it must be one of us, some of us, all of us — but it cannot be anything else. The result of that realization is what might be called an exhilarated vertigo, a simultaneous combination of an exultant ‘We’re free of God’ and a despairing ‘Oh God, we’re free.’”

~ Arthur Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” in Duke Law Journal (December 1979 issue), 1232-1233.

Legendary vs Everyday Heros

“The difference between the hero of legend and the hero of everyday life may be put this way: For the traditional hero such as Ulysses of Jim Hawkins the adventure takes place away from home. Home is where you go after the adventure; it is essentially the end of the adventure. For the average adult, on the other hand, home is the adventure, the place where he lays himself on the line. The adventure consists precisely in those commitments with which the classical hero or child hero rarely allows to be entangled. The temptation for the traditional hero is to avoid the adventure and settle down; the temptation for the ordinary hero is to avoid commitment and have an adventure. For the ordinary hero it is staying home that is the hard thing, the thing that requires courage and energy. He must put aside the child’s fantasy of escaping. Once having accepted the main adventure, he cannot allow himself to be distracted.”

~ William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1992), 201.

The Great Question Confronting Modern Humanity

“The great question confronting modern humanity is this: Granted that the universe contains both persons (like you and me) and impersonal structures (like matter, motion, chance, time, space, and physical laws), which is fundamental? Is the impersonal aspect of the universe grounded in the personal or is it the other way around? Secular thought generally assumes the latter — that persons are the products of matter, motion, chance, and so on. . . .

If the impersonal is primary, then there is no consciousness, no wisdom, and no will in the ultimate origin of things. What we call reason and value are the unintended, accidental consequences of chance events. (So why should we trust reason, if it is only the accidental result of irrational happenings?) Moral virtue will, in the end, be unrewarded. Friendship, love, and beauty are all of no ultimate consequence, for they are reducible to blind, uncaring process. . . .

But if the personal is primary, then the world was made according to a rational plan that can be understood by rational minds. Friendship and love are not only profound human experiences, but fundamental ingredients of the whole world order. There is someone who wants there to be friendship, who wants there to be love. Moral goodness, too, is part of the great design of the universe. If personality is absolute, there is one who cares about what we do, who approves or disapproves our conduct. . . .”

~ John Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1994), 35-36.

The Sense that Life Makes Sense

“The sense that life makes sense is really the sine qua non for ethical behavior. If the larger thing — existence itself — means nothing, then individual acts performed within that meaningless scheme are themselves meaningless.”

~ William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY; Simon & Schuster, 1992), 196.

The Stupidity of the Intelligent

Consider this testimony by J. Budziszewski in light of Romans 1:21-22 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools . . ..

“[E]verything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He’s given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that’s sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself — well, if you are like I was, maybe you can — what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structures of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that commitments are in his control?

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how much he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I though I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course I was the fool.”

~ J. Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism“

On Virtue

“Virtue may be defined as an activity of the whole person in conformity with love of God and love of neighbor.”

~ Benjamin W. Farley, In Praise of Virtue (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1995), 160.