Using the bible to prove the existence of god is like using the Harry Potter novels to prove the existence of Hogwarts.
If "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," (as stated in Proverbs 9:10), then what is wisdom's culmination? While the fear of the Lord is considered the starting point of wisdom, the Bible suggests that wisdom is expanded through the acquisition of knowledge, understanding and a righteous life. The pursuit of wisdom involves seeking God's guidance, living according to His principles, and growing in knowledge and understanding.
The Law Is a Teacher Romans 7:7a What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the law... Galatians 3:24a Therefore the Law has become our tutor... The Law as Teacher: Why Legalizing Euthanasia IS a Moral Endorsement Wednesday | March 6, 2024 R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR. Okay, next, I want to shift to the issue of euthanasia. But more importantly, to a pattern of thinking that Christians need to think about very, very carefully. That also has to do with the rule of law and the role of law. I want to tell you, I got onto this story in a rather backward way. I saw a letter to the editor published in a London newspaper. And it was so intriguing to me, indeed a bit infuriating, that I had to track back the issue. And I tracked it all the way back to an article that had been published in The Telegraph, again, a major London newspaper, and it was written by an American bioethicist by the name of John Keown. John Keown is a professor in the Kennedy Institute at Georgetown University. And he had written an article, again, published in the Telegraph some months ago, entitled “Assisted Suicide Must Not Be Legalized through the Back Door.” And he's making a good argument. He's on the right side here. He's against euthanasia or assisted suicide. And he points out that many governments are trying to smuggle it in through the back door. And one of the ways they're trying to do it is by not prosecuting people who are the agents of assisted suicide. He is offering a rather detailed argument and he makes clear that the British government is in danger of legalizing assisted suicide, some form of euthanasia, through the back door, when politically they can't yet do it through the front door. So, it's a very good argument. It has to do with the law. He wants the law in England to protect the sanctity of life. And remember, the Christian worldview principle is that we believe that human life is sacred and possesses dignity. Because of the Imago Dei, we're made in God's image. And that means from the moment of fertilization until the moment of natural death. So, that's why it's predictable. The Christian worldview tells us in advance. The biblical worldview warns us that if you see a subversion of human dignity in the beginning of life, you're also going to see the same at the end of life. Because those are the two great questions. When does human life begin? When does human life end? And a secular worldview is going to attack the Christian convictions on these issues at the beginning and at the end. So, that's why abortion and euthanasia are the bookends of the big crisis in bioethics and the collision between the culture of life and the culture of death in our lifetimes. But there's another issue just as fundamental that appears here. What I saw, as I said, originally was a letter to the editor in response to Professor Keown's article. And it caught my attention. I want you to hear what he said. The letter writer here identified as David Milne from London. He wrote, "Professor John Keown's expertise in ethics is unimpeachable, but he is wrong to suggest that allowing dying people to choose the manner and timing of their deaths would represent the state's endorsement of that choice. It would be just as accurate to say that the state is endorsing the unnecessary suffering of dying people who would presently want to make that choice." So, he goes on making this argument. And again, the argument he makes is that Professor Keown is just wrong to say that allowing something in the law means that it's encouraged in the law. But here's something Christians need to understand. What Professor Keown represents is an historic long standing Western, and in particular English Common Law, and even more fundamentally biblical, understanding that the law is a teacher and the law is a restraint. And so, here you have a letter writer who's identified, by the way, with an honorific title in Britain, and he makes the argument that, merely allowing something in the law is not offering moral endorsement nor encouragement. But I'm going to argue that the Christian understanding is that that's exactly what the law would be doing. Let me give you another example. Let's get away from assisted suicide and let's consider instead the question of divorce. Throughout most of Western history, divorce was very difficult to obtain. The dissolution of a marriage was almost impossible to obtain. Over a period of time, people claimed that we needed more liberal divorce laws. But even in the United States, that really didn't come until the late 1960s and the early 1970s. And then you had the development of easier access to divorce, easier legal processes for a divorce, and also the declaration and invention of what was called no-fault divorce. Because previous to that, there had to be some official court finding of a marital fault. There had to be a guilty party, generally an adultery, for a marriage to be dissolved. But divorce became routinized and available in the late '60s and in particular in the 1970s in the United States. Now, people could say that was not the moral endorsement or the opening of a government's endorsement of divorce. But that's exactly what it was. That's exactly how Americans interpreted it. It led to a predictable result, which is not only the fact that there were more divorces, but frankly a tidal wave, a tsunami of divorce. As a matter of fact, the change in the law insinuated, it implied, and this was eventually accepted more or less by the society, that marriage is now a matter of a commitment of convenience for a certain amount of time. When a couple stands and says I do, according to American law right now, it's simply I do until one of us doesn't. And so, here we as Christians looking at this letter to the editor, we need to recognize, this is a fundamental issue. And it's a wake-up call for Christians to recognize when someone tells us that if the law allows X or Y, it's not endorsing X or Y, that's a lie. That's exactly what the government is doing. It's what the government sought to do with abortion. Making abortion legal meant that, well, you had the majority of justices in the Supreme Court in the Roe decision, the majority opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun officially said, right there in black and white, that this should settle the issue of abortion and remove it as a matter of public controversy. Of course, it did no such thing. But what's important for us is to recognize, that's what the Supreme Court was seeking to do, to use the law to say, "This is now no longer a moral issue." Thanks be to God, they weren't successful. They want to do the same thing with euthanasia. They did the same thing, and we see the fruit, when it comes to the issue of divorce. Just a reminder to us that the law is not just something that has an allowance here and an allowance there. The law does teach. And in the most basic fundamental way, the law is going to teach the sanctity of human life, or it's going to teach the subversion of the sanctity of human life. The law will do so in the beginning of human life or it will do so also at the end of human life. That's a predictable pattern. And it's up to Christians to recognize the issue is, of course, the sanctity of human life. But the issue is inescapably also the function of the law. And in this case, Professor Keown is exactly right and Mr. David Milne is exactly wrong. And we need to remind ourselves our understanding of this issue really matters.
Rosalind Wright Picard is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica. She has received many recognitions for her research and inventions, and is best-known for her book, Affective Computing.