There is more than one dimension to the meaning of “life” and “death”. We think of life in terms of our mortal lives – that is we are the centre of the very existence of life, and we have a finite beginning and end. Yet, our worldly life and death is only one dimension for the meaning of what is life and death.
I have repeatedly asked Fundamentalists to explain what is meant by these terms. I never seem to get a response from them relating to the state of the soul. Yet this is how we are viewed by God. Each time we sin, we begin to slowly die inside of ourselves. Another dimension of Life is that it is the grace or the very breath of God, existing within us, so that we, in turn exist in the world. The flip side of the spiritual life is spiritual death. It is the withdrawal of grace – a free gift from God that feeds and nourishes us on a daily basis – that causes the death of the soul because of sin.
I had my own brush with what it means to come face to face with my own mortality last year when my next oldest sister was suddenly diagnosed with bone cancer and died. She did not make it to her 53rd birthday. It is a shock when someone so close in age suddenly dies like that and it causes one to recognize the reality that we are only here for a short time. Yet, her spiritual existence continues even though her flesh has been consumed in the fire from a cremation.
Christians sometimes tend to negate that the animals, birds, and even the flora are the creation of God, and that it is God that gives life to these things. We have the superior intellect and the superior soul, but these other creations of the Creator also have their own form of soul. How Christians view the souls of animals is a juxtaposition of the way in which an atheist sees the life of an animal.
As I digress for a moment, I want to briefly consider the views of the Greens and their counterparts who seem to think that animals have feelings on the same level as humans. For this reason, they demonstrate against cooking live lobster because of the sounds that come from a cooking pot. They are blissfully unaware of the fact that God created these creatures so that we would have food. They also get uptight about cutting down a tree, sometimes behaving in a way that suggests that they worship trees as though the trees are gods. Their sense of proportion with regard to human life and the lives of these other creatures is truly distorted. To highlight their inconsistency, I point to the fact that this same group are the ones who promote the murder of the unborn on the grounds that a foetus is not legally recognized as having a life.
The abortion debate centres upon when life begins, but this debate has implications that is infringing upon giving justice to the unborn and to the parents of the unborn when a child has been killed as a result of a car accident. A recent decision in Hawaii has led to a further denial of the rights of the unborn and a man has been allowed to get away with the manslaughter of an unborn child because of the lack of a legal definition of when life begins. It would seem that the activist judges have outsmarted themselves because now it is possible for irresponsible drivers to escape prosecution when the victim is an unborn infant. Once again we see an overwhelming sense of a lack of justice that has been allowed to permeate the world, in the name of feminism, modernism and political correctness.
Another debate that rages in this modern world of ours is that of the concept of the Immaculate Conception. The reforming fathers such as Martin Luther believed that Mary was in fact conceived without the stain of original sin. The problem centres upon the philosophy that has stemmed from the age of the “Enlightenment”, as well as anti-Catholic rhetoric and bigotry. The Fundamentalists and Evangelicals who are so keen to deny the Immaculate Conception fail to see that they are in fact denying that Jesus is the Christ through their very failure to accept the Immaculate Conception. This dogma, which centres not upon Mary, but upon the origins of Jesus Christ, states that Mary is the woman with whom Satan has enmity. If she had sinned, then she would be a friend of Satan, and she would not have grace within, yet the angel gave the greeting: “Hail, Full of Grace”, (which also bestows upon Mary, the TITLE – “Full of Grace” – according to the Will of God.)
The denial of the life of an unborn infant has now spread to the point that people are willing to deny the life of those who are incapacitated. The danger to the incapacitated is that there are family members and unscrupulous lawyers who act as public guardians who want the people dead. The Terri Schindler-Schiavo story is in fact the tip of the iceberg. This was a case where hard evidence was not provided and the outcome has the potential of affecting millions of the incapacitated every day of every year. The life safeguards were further eroded by the refusal to properly evaluate the case and Greer’s decision making.
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