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America's Starvation of
Morality
American Culture/Nancy Salvato |
April 5, 2005
- Those closest to me know of my eclectic religious
upbringing. As a child I sometimes attended a Protestant Church and made it
to Sunday school enough to know that it was expected I attend every week,
not twice a year. I didn't understand the importance of attending Passover
dinner at my Orthodox Jewish grandparents' house during my formative years.
In my defense, I wasn't being raised as a member of any religious community.
Like the "facts of life", you could say I learned the "facts of religion"
from my peers. Catholic friends informed me that without Baptism I would not
gain entrance to Heaven. Jewish friends told me that I wasn't really Jewish
because I never attended Temple or religious school. It was more than
obvious I wasn't being raised as a Jew. I never even heard of Rosh Hashanah
or Yom Kippur.
No wonder that maintaining faith in one particular idea of a deity has
proven difficult to sustain; always unsure if I should believe in Christ the
Savior or acknowledge Jesus as a misunderstood apostle. I have studied
religion and I took Hebrew as an adult, but never had any real epiphanies
about my allegiance.
Yet as crazy as my religious upbringing was, I find comfort in the idea that
there is a God and that there are lots of people who embrace religious
morality; valuing life and respecting humanity. With age comes wisdom and
I've come to realize that our country is filled with people of good hearts;
indicative that goodness prevails even though the preoccupation of
mainstream news with the bad in this world, would have us believe otherwise.
It was with great consternation that I read The Federalist Patriot 05-13
account of Darrell Scott's congressional testimony regarding the death of
his daughter Rachel at Columbine. His estimation is that Columbine should be
seen as a spiritual event which teaches us that when we don't acknowledge
the spirit in our lives, we create a void and allow evil to fill it. By not
allowing Judeo Christian influence in our public institutions it opens them
up to hatred and violence.
This particular edition of the Federalist Digest provides plenty of examples
of misguided public policy to underscore his point. Not only did the
Judiciary refuse to take another look at preserving Terri Schiavo's life,
they wouldn't reconsider minors having abortions without parental consent,
and they threw out, "a death sentence for a man convicted of raping and
murdering a cocktail waitress" because the jury used a Bible in their
deliberation.
As the author of the Federalist so eloquently put it, while Terri Schiavo
was allowed to die by starvation in which her mouth, nose, and skin dried
out; stomach convulsed; and organs shut down; PETA demanded jail time and
community service from a farmer whose neglect, due to alcoholism, allowed 11
of his cows to die of dehydration.
At the time of this writing, Pope John Paul II is sustained by a feeding
tube because in a speech to doctors and ethicists, he declared his "living
will" in which he concluded that a feeding tube for the comatose or
vegetative state was a moral obligation for Roman Catholics. "The intrinsic
value and the personal dignity of every human being do not change no matter
what the concrete situation of his life," the Pope said, "To deny such care
would be "euthanasia by omission."
Moral Relativism, which allows people to rationalize the morally acceptable
instead of having to strictly adhere to a moral code based on the intrinsic
value and the personal dignity of every human being explains why we can
prosecute a man for killing his cows but not take action against an
estranged husband for killing his wife. I fear that this bias against Judeo
Christian morality on which our founders created the rule of law, might be
the beginning of a Holocaust against those of faith; America's Kristalnach.
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