Beware of these chips

My D.F. told me about Pringles Select Szechuan Barbecue rice crisps, and then actually bought some for me. Now I'm hooked on the stupid things.

It's a scene played out in darkened sonogram rooms all over the country every day:

Greenbaum turned the screen toward the patient. "That’s the little heartbeat," she said, pointing to the area where a tiny organ was clearly pulsing. "And there are the little hands. There's the head. The body."

"Oh, my God, I can really see it!" the patient cried. "Oh, my God! I can see the fingers!"

But, instead of a glow of happiness, this reaction from the mother:

"Okay!" she said, abruptly, gesturing for the screen to be turned away. She began sobbing. There were no tissues in the room, so her husband gave her a paper towel, which she crumpled to her face. The patient spent the rest of the procedure with her hospital gown over her face, so she would not see any more of what was happening.

What happened was something like this:

Then he pinned [the third one] with the needle, and pushed the plunger to release the chemical. The fetus, which had been undulating and waving, went still. It would remain in the womb, while the other fetuses grew and developed.

"Let's check the other two," Evans said, and they moved the transducer to see the other two fetuses, still there, still waving, two hearts beating, unaware of what had just happened to the sibling they would never have.

Source

I truly believe that the women facing this agonizing choice are victims. They are caught up in a web of lies fed them by thoughtless or uninformed media people, well-meaning doctors, and putative ethicists who persuade them of a series of incorrect conclusions. Where you start in your thinking determines the road you will take... up to and including taking actions which cause the very dilemma in the first place, of having more children than the doctors feel is wise to try to carry to anything like "term."

We are slaughtering untold numbers of presidents, theoreticians, waste management specialists, teachers, mothers, fathers, warriors, peacemakers, mathematicians, linguists, cookie-bakers and lawyers every single day. Of course, we are also self-selecting against chromosomally-deficient persons every day, too - including those whose male or female genes render them inappropriate for life, according to their parents. Those ill and damaged people would be a drain on society, no doubt; they would also allow us to have the opportunity to cherish and care for them. And - I realize for some this will be heresy - sometimes, the doctors are wrong. They predict all kinds of miserable outcomes, but their dire predictions come to naught.

Maybe what's needed is a dose of reality. Maybe, instead of sentimentality, we need to look at the real reason for wanting population to decline:

...the farmers of Bobai and nearby towns have been known since the Qing Dynasty for resistance to highhanded rulers. True to their legacy, they rose up against the collection teams, whom they decried as bandits. Backed by their sons, thousands of peasants and townspeople encircled government and birth control centers across surrounding Bobai County, residents here said, stoning riot police brought in to quell the unrest and, in some places, trashing local offices.

"There was trouble in all the villages around here," said a truck driver who, like most of those interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution by local officials.

Even near the main county office building, a witness said, a white banner was unfurled calling for revenge against Su Jianzhong, the Bobai County Communist Party secretary. "Crack down on the head of the bandits, Su Jianzhong," it advertised for all to see, until authorities pulled it down.

The townspeople were all the more unwilling to accept authorities' demands for payment because, as frequently is the case in China, they expressed belief that local officials were generally corrupt and that the money for fines would go to line their pockets rather than into government coffers.

Are we being persuaded to cull ourselves into small, manageable groups so we cannot fight back against people who would control us for their own ends?

As for the mothers who are persuaded to do the heinous act of allowing a perfectly healthy child to be killed, I would not trade with them for a moment. If ever their ability to remain in denial about what they have done breaks down, they will know what they have done, and they will suffer terribly. God is merciful, and loving, and knows to what extent their "choice" was theirs, and how much was in response to cruelly relentless deception and lies. If they ever feel in need of peace about what they did, I pray they will find it in His love. But, unless they are able to prevent the truth from breaking through into their consciousness, they will forever think of that little one, alive and waving.

Friends first, friends forever

from Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, via the Anchoress:

Physical intimacy cannot ’speed up’ the friendship part of a relationship, much less the emotional part of that relationship. Physical intimacy will either enhance a solid platonic relationship that already exists or it will destroy a relationship that might have worked, had the physical intimacy been delayed.

I know this is true, and I know it from sad, sad experience. Fortunately, deep, real friendships never end, and God is good.

Tony Snow's address to the Catholic University of America graduates

... Commit. This is a way of talking about faith. American culture likes to celebrate the petulant outcast, the smart-aleck with the contempt for everything and faith in nothing. Snarky mavericks. The problem is these guys are losers. They have signed up for an impossible mission. Because they’ve decided they’re going to create all the meaning in their lives. They’ve either decided that no moral law exists or they will be the creator, the author of those laws. Now one road leads to complete and total anarchy. Life is solitary, nasty, brutish and short. The other is to insanity, since it requires playing God. We know in our hearts, intuitively, from our first years as children, that the universe unfolds with a discernable order and that moral laws, far from being convenient social conventions, are firm and unalterable. They predate us, they will survive us. Rather than admitting our weakness a lot of times, we just decide we’ll try to get by. And maybe rather than giving God credit, we’ll try to look for a cheap substitute.

Walk into a bookstore, you’ll know what I mean. The shelves are groaning underneath the trendy tomes promising salvation — medicine balls, herbs, purges, all sorts of weird stuff. In politics, there’s a variant that elevates government to the status of God. It says that it is the source of love. It ought to be the recipient of your tithes, but government, while it does pursue compassionate ends, cannot be loving and personal. It treats all of us as completely equal rather than uniquely divine. The point is you can’t escape the question of God and you can’t escape the question of commitments.

When it comes to faith, I’ve taken my own journey. You will have to take your own. But here’s what I know. Faith is as natural as the air we breathe. Religion is not an opiate, just the opposite. It is the introduction to the ultimate extreme sport. There is nothing that you can imagine that God cannot trump. As Paul said “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And once you realize that there is something greater than you out there, then you have to decide, “Do I acknowledge it and do I act upon it?” You have to at some point surrender yourself. And there is nothing worthwhile in your life that will not at some point require an act of submission. It’s true of faith and friendship. It is a practical passage [of the Bible], especially to marriage.

Tolstoy once said all happy marriages are happy in the same way and here’s what he meant. When both people commit, when they say, “You and I are bound together, forever, period, no questions, no codicils, no pre-nups, no escape clauses,” then all of a sudden, the temptations become irrelevant, and the glories become possible.

There is nothing like the pleasure of being a parent. Waking up the next morning to somebody whose breath has become the echo of your heartbeat. Trust me on this, it does not get any better. Commit.

Just checking in

A lot can happen in a month. Children are born. Untying of ties goes on. On the other hand, some things never change, even though some things might.

My spiritual journey continues, and this quiz correctly reflects where I've found myself of late:

You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavily by John Wesley and the Methodists.

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan		89%
Roman Catholic		75%
Neo orthodox		68%
Charismatic/Pentecostal		64%
Emergent/Postmodern		57%
Reformed Evangelical		50%
Classical Liberal		36%
Fundamentalist		25%
Modern Liberal		18%

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

Peace and blessings to you.