by Fr. Ben Johnson –
Why would the radical Left increasingly use such religious language to defend the indefensible, the gruesome murder of the unborn?
Because abortion is their religion.
Its promoters cling to it more closely than any other political principle. They consecrate it as “sacred” and brand any attempt to constrain it as “an abomination,” a blasphemy against their idolatrous creed. Any attempt to reason about it is met with emotion-laden non-sequiturs and fulminating excommunications. How else can one even conceive of a book like The Sacrament of Abortion?
The rhetoric is getting weird out there.
As the House of Representatives considered passing a ban on abortions beyond the 20th week of pregnancy, Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin filled the chamber with the rhetoric of a fundamentalist preacher. Reacting with righteous fury, the representative from the Milwaukee shouted, “This bill is an abomination!”
The Biblical language to defend late-term abortion – as much an affront against science as against Scripture – calls to mind the true definition of abomination:
- “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire” – that is, that sacrifices his children to a false God – “For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee” (Deuteronomy 18:10, 12);
- “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood…A false witness that speaketh lies.” (Proverbs 6:16-17, 19); and
- “Nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into [the New Jerusalem], but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:27, NASB).
Moore’s moronic mutterings would be little more than unfortunate political rhetoric, except for the fact that of late a little schola of “progressives” has begun chanting about their religion of abortion-on-demand.
At about the same time, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi invoked her Catholic faith to say abortion is “sacred ground” to her.
Pelosi held herself out as a patristics scholar on the issue of when life begins in 2008, telling Meet the Press:
I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose…[O]ver the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy.
She went on to say Christianity has believed life begins at conception for “like maybe 50 years or something like that.”
If she had really studied the teachings of her flaunted and flouted faith for virtually any time, she would known that abortion has been condemned as a cardinal sin from the earliest moments in Church history.
The Didache (sometimes called The Teaching of the 12 Apostles), which may have been written at about the same time as the Book of Revelation, says, “You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child.”
Abortion is condemned by The Letter of Barnabas, written perhaps as early as 74 A.D.; by early Church writers like Athenagoras in 177 A.D., Tertullian in 197 A.D., Hippolytus in 228 A.D., and many others.
Perhaps the definitive word came from Archbishop Basil of Caesarea – a writer so powerful he was called St. Basil the Great. He wrote in 375 A.D. that anyone “who deliberately destroys a fetus is answerable for murder. And any fine distinction as to its being completely formed or unformed is not admissible among us.”
Of course, 375 A.D. was 32 times 50-years-ago. Maybe Pelosi was speaking figuratively, like Jesus saying we must forgive 70 times 7, or the like.
The sudden retreat behind the language of heretical faith exposes the Democrats’ ruse that they are serially incapable of determining the moment that life begins – as modern science, biology, and embryology textbooks have.
When confronted with the unanimous testimony of science, they retreat to a confused haze, muddying the debate by falling back on pre-scientific phrases uttered by St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 A.D.) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Each, with the science of his day, guessed that perhaps, life begins at the moment of “quickening.”
Like St. Basil, neither taught that abortion was a blameless act.
Why would the radical Left increasingly use such religious language to defend the indefensible, the gruesome murder of the unborn?
Because abortion is their religion.
Its promoters cling to it more closely than any other political principle. They consecrate it as “sacred” and brand any attempt to constrain it as “an abomination,” a blasphemy against their idolatrous creed. Any attempt to reason about it is met with emotion-laden non-sequiturs and fulminating excommunications. How else can one even conceive of a book like The Sacrament of Abortion?
Jesus Christ – Who had seen some religious frauds in His day – said in the Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruits, ye shall know them” (St. Matthew 7:20). Moore, Pelosi, et. al., stand on a faith that has resulted in the bloodshed of more than 50 million dead children – red and yellow, black and white, they were all deprived of life.
That is strange fruit, indeed.
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HT LifeSiteNews.
