The hottest issue ever

Okay, let's be real. This post is about abortion. After arguing, studying and cringing I've drawn a number of very inconclusive conclusions. Here are the verses I used.

Exodus 21:20-21
Numbers 5:11-31

These two verses show very unequivocally the stark contrast between our understanding of Abortion and the one presented in Mosaic Law. It should be clear that "life begins at conception" is at best an extra biblical dogma and at worst a lie. You are a fee American. You are aloud to hold to this dogma and you are aloud to lie.

The act of having an abortion is at best a waste of a pregnancy and at worst a sin.
In the United States, sin is legal. Varying degrees of morality are present. Our general rule is "as long as it hurts no one else" even though plenty of perfectly legal things (like lawsuits) hurt people all the time.

If you think abortion is a sin, then don't do it. If you are a man, why the hell did you read this far? If you don't think abortion is a sin, are you sure? If your wife, sister, daughter, or friend doesn't want to carry her rape baby, don't make her, but don't abort for convenience sake.

If you must draw a hard line in the sand, I strongly recommend "implantation" which is when the medical field begins using the term "abortifacient" to describe a pregnancy terminator.

The real issue here for me is divisiveness. People choose who to vote for, who to befriend, and who to flick off based on their convictions about this issue. You will NEVER agree with any one person on everything. Why not vote on something that office can actually do? Why not love your neighbor as yourself? Why not put down your fetal poster and share the gospel for once.

Marriage, Divorce, and the Economy

The other day, NPR ran a story about marriage divorce and the economy which you can read here. The story has a couple main hitches. First is that a tough economy is tough, emotionally speaking, on marriages. Second is that divorce in and of itself is a rather expensive endeavour ("a few hundred dollars" if everything goes without a hitch). So the expected result is that more people are living in less than happy marriages with the given economic times. They even take this a step further and suggest that a net result of this is an increase in domestic violence despite admitting that said violence is "on the decline" and there is "no conclusive evidence."

A Lansing area pastor spoke a bit about marriage which can be heard here. It is here that I am going to pull most of my opinions from not because I innately agree, but because Noel is one of the wisest most trustworthy men I have ever met and his sources are carefully chosen and more trustworthy than he is.

The bottom line is this: Americans make too many decisions surrounding money. None of the subjects have taken the poor economy as a chance to rescue their marriage or even do any work at all towards making it healthier. Our divorce rate is very high not because we choose to marry the wrong person but because we expect the perfect spouse without doing the work to become the perfect spouse. I am not going to go so far as to say that people deserve what's coming to them because I know of too many scenarios where that is not true. But for 40-50% of marriages in this country (depending on the pole) the sanctity of marriage, while important enough to prohibit homosexuality, is not important enough to keep for themselves. Until infidelity and domestic violence are the only reasons for a Christian to get divorced, I don't want to hear about the "sanctity of marriage" again.

College and Pro Sports

This is a facebook status that surfaced the other day about sports. While sports deviates from my normal topics (religion and politics) I thought I'd lend my opinion since I foresee this becoming a heated discussion characterized by misinformation or odd philosophy.

My opinion about sports is squarely opposite of Ned's here (fake name). Because of this: I want to draw attention to the fact that there are more facets in which people can use college to learn besides the traditional reading and writing. There are geniuses besides those of the mind and in my experience, almost every college athlete (especially players for "money sports") are geniuses of the body. You can be bitter about their intellectual fallacies, but you must admit that they can do things that you can't.

Do we abuse our college and professional athletes? Absolutely! But who isn't abused? Who isn't whoring themselves to their profession and sucking up to their employer or their customers in order to sell their product and pad their wallets. In my experience, the principled idealists are at the economic bottom of the food chain or else they're lying (further proving my point).

Is music school an intellectual waste? What about the visual arts? Why should academic scholarships be the only and best kind? The college athletic system that we have now is extraordinary. Men and women advertise a school and bring in money which then gets turned over to other students who are equally talented in sports that have less media appeal. College sports put students in the classroom!

Pro sports offer a unique form of entertainment that unites all kinds of people: poor and rich, smart and dumb. All of this around their local athletic franchise. Why would you want to give that up. What is unethical about something bigger?  Do sports detract from Jesus? No way, but they put the followers of Jesus and the unbelievers on bench seats next to each other and nothing is more powerful than that.

Politics in general

When I first heard John Piper's thoughts on Politics I was astounded. How on earth could politics not be important. Why should we diminish the importance the people who decide the financial fates of our country and the destination of our troops? What could be more important?

Later in life I learned that there is something way more important. When you think about the implications of heaven and hell and God and Jesus, you are thinking about something bigger than life and death. (Think about it, you could die and still be alive in heaven or you could live but find yourself dead in hell). In Matthew 10:28, Jesus shows that he agrees with me. 

While politics is important, the issues of Jesus and the Gospel really need to take precedence if you are a Christian because God puts souls before lives. Who would have thought that in the end money and financial success would prove secondary to something personal? 

Thoughts on the 9-9-9 plan

There's been a lot of talk about Herman Cain lately, mostly because of his famous (or infamous) 9-9-9 tax plan. Today I will say this about Herman Cain but rest assured I will blog more generally about politics in the near future.

A friend of mine the other day mentioned that Herman Cain was his favorite candidate for president because of the flat tax plan which would simplify the tax code as well as encourage "equality." I have lots of compassion for this friend because he is a friend of mine and I intend to keep it that way. Nothing political is big enough to ruin a relationship unless you want it to. 

For those of you who don't know, Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan removes the current federal tax code altogether and installs a 9% tax each for business, sales, and income. The exceptions for this include deductions for charitable giving and a 0% income tax for those below the poverty level. 

It should be noted right away that this is far simpler than the tax plan we have today. Currently the corporate tax is 35% with several hundred possibilities for deductions or exemptions. This problem exists to a lesser degree with our federal income tax system. I think it is also important to recognize that even if Herman Cain was elected president, it is remarkably unlikely that this plan would ever surface in the form of a law. American's have this interesting habit of talking about presidential candidates like they are voting for king. 

My own opinion on the matter is based on the following facts. Middle classed and under classed American's would be paying more than they are now. Nobody is sure just how much, but any way you spin it, it is more. Conversely, and in the same way, the wealthiest Americans will be paying less. I will back this up momentarily. 

I will begin however by addressing the concept of equality. On the surface, asking those who pay nothing to pay their fare share and asking those who pay most to pay less seems like a step towards equality. I want to evaluate this through a quote that I took from a very wise man named Richard Stearns in his book entitled The Hole in our Gospel, "it is not that the poor are lazier, less intelligent, or unwilling to make efforts to change their condition. Rather, it is that they are trapped by circumstances beyond their power to change" Stearns (118). Consider the notion for a second that those who aren't paying taxes (nearly 40% of American households) aren't being asked because it is somewhat rightly assumed that they can't. 

I myself am a college student in Michigan. I work fifteen hours a week and have about 4.7% withheld from my paycheck. I pay most of my tuition by selling stock that my parents invested when I was between the ages of birth and sixteen. I also pay a capital gains tax on these. At the end of the year I file a federal and state return. My state tax is a couple hundred dollars and my federal tax is about a thousand dollar refund (yes, I gain a thousand dollars, roughly equal to what was withheld). In essence, I am a household that does not pay taxes and I am above the poverty line. But I will say that if I was filing taxes under the 9-9-9 plan, it might bleed me dry. I legitimately believe I would not be able to go to college. My opinion on this plan is simple: it is not a good plan. 

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Welcome to my blog. I hope you found it okay. Today, all I am going to do is share my goals. I aim to write controversially about those things which matter most. Being a Christ-follower, I am going to share my opinions from that perspective. I will be honest and say that lots of people will not agree with me including and in some cases especially my closest friends but I am writing things because I think they're important. In some cases, I think they're the most important. Feel free to have some fun with this. In fact, I hope you do.