Grace

Camille Paglia on abortion:

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

My wife has been asking me recently how it is that people can think like this. She is especially baffled at nurses and doctors who routinely end the lives of babies. The only answer we have is grace. Unless God extends to us his unmerited grace, we will act in accordance with our sinful nature. So the issue is not how good we are but how bad we are. If we were left to ourselves, we would all become Mengelas, Stalins, Dahmers and the like. But because we are covered by the common grace of God (to varying degrees), we are prone to love and justice. And when we are covered by the grace of Christ, we are saved. 1 Corinthians 2:7-10:

But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him"--these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

HT: The Corner