Morality By the Numbers

A fellow named Phil Robertson, from the popular cable television show Duck Dynasty, made some comments about homosexuality based on his religious beliefs, and an uproar has ensued.   The television network, Arts and Entertainment, suspended him from the program.  A lot of people on opposite sides of this issue have reacted strongly.  In the midst of all this furor, it behooves the thinking Christian to know where the real problem lies.

First of all, this is not a free speech issue in any sense.  The First Amendment guarantees that congress will make no law abridging the freedom of speech.  That certainly did not occur in this case, and no law prevented Mr. Robertson from speaking his mind.  He does not face any legal repercussions from doing so.  However, assuming the contractual language is correct, the A&E network is within its rights to stop doing business with him if they so desire.  Believe it or not, your employer can fire you in most cases if you speak out in ways they do not like.  Your freedom to speak is guaranteed, but not your job security.  Your boss can fire you if you publicly endorse the KKK platform or teachings of the Nazi party.

And in this great land of ours, with its free markets, we can refuse to buy products at any time we wish, for whatever reason.  A boycott is not in any way illegal.  You could boycott A&E for allowing Mr. Robertson to make his statements or you could boycott them for suspending him. 

What we are seeing here is morality by math.  A&E knows that the Duck Dynasty program is a huge money-maker with a wide audience.  But they also know that speaking out against homosexuality is going to offend a larger number of viewers.  So they calculate which is going to do more harm, supporting or suspending, and act accordingly.  I have found the Cracker Barrel weather vane more like a windmill.  Here is a company that had employment policies in the 1990's that dismissed employees that did not display "normal heterosexual values"; they actively opposed gays and their lifestyle. In this latest brouhaha, they did the math, reversed course, and decided that they would offend paying customers by continuing to carry merchandise with Mr. Robertson's image.  So they decided to discontinue those products, hoping to keep their customers as well as burnish their image as tolerant.  They were the first corporation after A&E to take such an action.  However, when toting up the numbers they discovered that their math added up the wrong way, and after their clientele bombarded them with messages supporting Mr. Robertson they reinstated those image-bearing products.  It seems that few things are as effective at determining the correct moral stance as money.

GLAAD, which used to stand for "Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation", but now just stands for "GLAAD", decided that its Biblical expertise and interpretation of the Scriptures enabled it to make the following declaration: "Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe." And: "By taking quick action and removing Robertson from future filming, A&E has sent a strong message that discrimination is neither a Christian nor an American value."

To look at that first statement, a Christian must ask one question: "Is homosexuality a sin?"  It is a simple yes or no question.  And the Bible is not silent on that issue.  In both Old and New Testaments, God tells us generally and specifically that the answer is yes.  I could list numerous passages wherein the Bible specifically addresses homosexuality.  However, if you decided to discard those, there is the issue of sexual immorality in general.  Looking at the Westminster Catechism, we learn in questions 137-9 that the Seventh Commandment, which forbids adultery, also forbids "fornication, rape, incest, sodomy, and all unnatural lusts."  The Heidelberg Catechism similarly tells us in questions 108-9, "That all unchastity is cursed by God... he forbids all unchaste acts."  In general, if I need to know what God's opinion is on a topic, and what true Christians believe, I would look to the Scriptures before a GLAAD press release.

As far as the second statement, it is important to understand what is meant by discrimination.  In one sense of the word, it means simply to recognize and understand the difference between one thing and another.  As Christians, we are in all cases to discriminate between good and bad, between things that are sin and not sin, between the things of God and the things of this world. We cannot look to popular culture or even our laws to do this.  Although murder and theft are illegal, adultery and dishonoring our parents is not; indeed, our government, its system of transfers, and political electability is now largely based on encouraging one group of people to covet another.  The Christian uses his Bible, not popular opinion or statutes, to aid him in discriminating between right and wrong.

In the other sense of the word, discriminate means to take unfavorable action against those with whom we do not favor.  The Christian is enjoined not to do so.  James tells us in 2:1-13, "My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.  For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, 'You sit in here in a good place,' while you say to the poor man, 'You stand over there,' or, 'Sit down at my feet,' have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?"  Phil Robertson did not discriminate against anyone by treating them unfavorably; he was discriminated against.  All he did was speak the truth from the Bible as he knew it. 

As Christians, we are not to treat poorly those who hold beliefs differently than our own.  However, we are not to passively let the world and popular culture dictate what we believe, either.  That same world and culture will oppose us vigorously.  The Word of God is no longer popular currency among those whose morality is not shaped by it but who seek to shape it in a form that suits them; rather, the currency that shapes their morality is often of the green paper kind.  We are never right to deny what the Word of God instructs us, and we are never wrong to proclaim it. 

The Serpents of Today

I grew up in a medium size town in North Carolina called Wilson, with a population of around thirty thousand back in the early 1960's.  My family and I went to church there, and there were the usual church activities for children available for us, such as Cub Scouts and youth choir. Outside of church, there were the sporting leagues for football and baseball, sponsored by the city recreation center.  All-in-all, as children we were around adults much of the time from Scout leaders to choir directors to coaches to Sunday School teachers and so on. 

Looking back, we uniformly respected our elder adults, and this was certainly a part of the culture at the time.  We respected their knowledge, experience, and appreciated their concern for our well-being and development. One thing in particular is noteworthy, as I recall growing up in this environment.  We never had any reason to doubt that these grown-ups were ever less than completely honest.  As children, we experienced the fibs and falsehoods of other children, but I cannot remember an adult telling me a lie.  (The only exceptions were Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.)

As I grew older and went to college, my experience was similar, with professors and coaches being honest people.  Then came medical school and residency for my career, which was another twelve years.  Those years were spent basically living in the hospital, with not much exposure to the real world of buying houses and cars and dealing with businesses.  And in those years you pretty much believed another's word; deception was not part of the culture in those institutions, either.  In many ways we were sheltered from the harshness of everyday reality. 

It really wasn't until I got out into the real world, in my thirties, that I found out that people will lie to you.  At first, it was dealing with an unscrupulous homebuilder here or car dealer there, but it was quite surprising given my previous experience.  I later worked along side people who had little integrity, and it was always a sad thing to discover.  I have often wondered why these things seemed to appear in my later life, and I guess things like this were always going on around me as a young man, but I simply didn't see them.  Lying wasn't just invented yesterday-- the serpent started in Genesis chapter three.

As Christians, we try to be humble, and Paul advises us in Philippians 2:3, "Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself."  We try to esteem others as better, and this often leads us to be very trusting and giving others the benefit of the doubt.  In fact, I wrote earlier on this in an article, "Doubting the Benefit."  The problem arises when those others in fact are dishonest, because nowhere in the Bible are we commanded to be gullible. 

As children, we are taught to respect our government and its leaders, and that same Bible does command us to pray for them.  I Timothy 2 tells us, "Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority..."  This is easy to do when our leaders are trustworthy men of integrity.  But God, who appoints all authorities (Romans 13:1) sometimes sees fit to appoint leaders who are dishonest and lack integrity.  His sovereign will, for reasons that are not clear to us, decrees that we who are Christians will at times live in a country governed by those who would lie to us. 

Our current president is not the first in his office to be dishonest, but a precedent of dishonesty by others does not offer one an excuse for his own behavior.  The sheer magnitude of deceit we have seen in the last few years from this administration, and its supporters in congress,  far exceeds anything I have seen in my fifty-plus years.  I may not be an expert on foreign policy or national defense or agricultural affairs, but I am an expert on our health care system and I believe I have probably delivered more health care than any of the individuals who have devised the newest attempt at government run health care delivery.  And the things that were promised to the American people by this administration were false and known to be false.  I have been asked on several occasions to speak to different groups on health care economics over the last several years, and all of the problems we are now seeing with the Affordable Care Act were known and the consequences foreseen since it was enacted.  The promises that people would be able to keep their insurance, keep their doctor, and that it would all cost them less have always been untrue. The only people who are shocked by what is going on now are the people who believed the lies. 

There are several lessons here for the Christian.  The first is to realize that people really will be dishonest with you in order to advance their own agenda.  God knew that just as sin entered the world through the first lie told by the serpent that lies would be a part of human existence ever since.  The second lesson is that God despises lying.  Proverbs 6:16-19 tells us that God hates a lying tongue.  Leviticus 19:11 commands us not to lie to one another.  And make no mistake about it, making false promises is lying.  Some have said, "Well, all politicians do it.  It is just a political lie."  That is absurd.  It is a lie no matter how many others may do it, and a "political" lie can be just as damaging and harmful as any other.  It teaches us that our government and leaders are not to be trusted, and damages the integrity of these institutions.

Why do people believe lies in the first place?  For one thing, it is easy to swallow a lie if it is telling you something you want to hear.  Eve thought it would be wonderful to be as knowledgeable as God.  And many people who wanted to see our health care system changed wanted to believe that this new program would do what they said it would do.  Secondly, believing a lie is often the easy thing to do, the lazy thing.  When presented with a proposition, it takes actual work to go out and research whether or not the facts are true and the arguments are supported.  It is easier to just say, "Well, that sounds good to me."  The fact of the matter is that not only are people who tell lies not supposed to do that, the people on the receiving end have a responsibility to educate themselves and study what is being proposed before deciding to accept it.  The Bereans in Acts 17 were commended because they "searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so."  Christ Himself warned his disciples to not be gullible, to be "wise as serpents" (Matthew 10:16).  So a third lesson is that we are not to take these things at face value, we are to study them, that we may not be easily deceived.

Asclepius was the Greek god associated with healing.  He had a symbol called the "Rod of Asclepius", which had a rod surrounded by a single serpent:

 

 

 



This symbol has long been associated with the healing arts and medicine.  Unfortunately, because people did not study the origins of this symbol, another symbol became accepted into medicine instead, called the "Caduceus":

 

 

 



This symbol is that of the Greek god Hermes, and it associated with "commerce, eloquence, trickery, and negotiation" (Wikipedia).  It is definitely not the symbol of medicine.  Hermes was the patron of thieves and liars. It was a lack of study and diligence that led to the mistaken use of the caduceus to represent many medical institutions. 

The final lesson is that we are to recognize the dishonest for what they are.  When one successfully lies, he is emboldened to continue in this practice.  It becomes easier each time.  Such a person will continue as long as they are able.  We can do what we can to expose their falsehoods, but it is up to God to deal with them, their sin, and lack of repentance.  Psalms 102:6 states, " He who works deceit shall not dwell within my house; he who tells lies shall not continue in my presence."  A person with a pattern of dishonesty is not to be trusted and is to be avoided.  As I was a child and young adult, these warnings would have seemed so unnecessary; as an older and wiser adult, I am saddened that they are.  Just as the serpent deceived with the first lie, the twin serpents of dishonesty and false promises are entwined today around the caduceus of government run healthcare. 



I'm Okay, I'm Not Okay

Some of you will remember a book from 1969 by Thomas Harris entitled "I'm Okay, You're Okay." In it he used a form of psychotherapy called transactional analysis to try and sort out people's problems so that ultimately they would come to the conclusion that all was well with themselves and others.  It was a phenomenally popular book, with nearly fifteen million copies sold.  However, there is a much bigger selling book that deals with our mental state and its problems, and that book was completed around two thousand years ago.

Many of us, before we become Christians, feel pretty good about ourselves because we do not see the sin in our lives.  We go forward in life with an opinion about ourselves that say's "I'm Okay."  We get our reference by comparing ourselves to others, and we usually don't rank ourselves all that badly.  I doubt anyone has said to himself, "You know, I really am as bad as Hitler."  And the unfortunate thing about this is that the majority of people also believe that because they are "Okay" they will get into heaven.  They do not see the need to be forgiven of their sin.

Then comes the day that you are moved to accept Christ as your Savior.  You begin to understand what sin truly is, your guilt before God, and the need for forgiveness.  You realize that you are not "Okay."  You read the Scriptures and learn that all have fallen short of the glory of God, especially you.  You cannot enter heaven in your sinful state, because God cannot allow sin into heaven.  You are worse than "Not Okay."  You are doomed.

Yet by accepting God's Son as your Savior, you come to know that you are forgiven of your sins.  They are imputed to Christ, and He imputes his righteousness to you.  You didn't do a thing to earn this transaction or deserve it.  It's a great deal.  All you have to do is turn your life over to Him, and in return you get all your sins washed away, and eternal life in Heaven.  There is nothing on this earth that could compare to that future eternal life.  And so now you come to know that because of Christ's work on the cross, you are Okay with God.

But you continue to sin.  Now matter how hard you try, you cannot stop it.  Even the Apostle Paul struggled with this.  In Romans Chapter 7, verse 15, he tells us about himself, "For what I am doing, I do not understand.  For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do." And verse 19: "For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil that I will not to do, that I practice."  He was pretty troubled by that feeling.  Verse 24: "O wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?"  I understand the feeling.  I can finish my morning prayer time and have three sinful thoughts before I walk out the door to work in the morning.  So once again, I'm not feeling Okay.  I'm still a sinner who can't stop sinning.

Paul provides us the answer to his question in the next sentence.  "I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  We are not only cleansed or our sins in the past by our relationship with Christ, we are forgiven of our ongoing sins, when we ask for that forgiveness.  God still forgives us, because of the work of Christ on the cross, and we are washed clean, even of that sin you committed five minutes ago.  So really you're Okay.

The problem for me as a Christian is that the more I walk with Christ, the more acutely aware I become of how short I have fallen of the glory of God.  I used to be troubled by the bigger sins in my life, but now I repent over the small ones, too, things that would not have troubled me before.  And even though I can go over and pull the Repent lever on the Sin Exchange machine and get instant Forgiveness, it does not relieve me of the awareness that I sinned or of my sin nature. Although I am constantly pointing to Christ and telling God to look at Him, because Christ has taken my sin away, I know who really committed the sin.  Even though I can lay it all on Christ, surely I'm not Okay.

Christians everywhere know of God's love and His forgiveness.  The Sin Exchange machine will never run out of tokens, and for that we can rejoice.  The answer to the dilemma that we face as sinners still rests on Christ's work.  You are Not Okay, but that's Okay.  You are a sinner, and will continue to be a sinner who sins, but God loved you enough to put His Son to death so that you will never be separated from Him.  He loves you, even though you are Not Okay.  And if you are troubled, as Paul was and I am, about continued sinning, there is a promise.  Philippians 1:6 says, "...being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ."  One day, you will sin no more, for you will be Perfect.  And that's a whole lot better than Okay.

Myocardial Protection

In modern heart surgery, we usually must stop the heart to operate upon it.  Their are chiefly two reasons for this; the first is that it is easier to perform delicate maneuvers on a still heart, and the second is that we must open the heart in cases where we work on the valves or other interior structures.  The heart, a muscular organ, receives its own blood supply from the coronary arteries which arise from the aorta just as it leaves the heart.  So what we do is to place the patient on cardiopulmonary bypass (the heart-lung machine) and drain blood from the heart down to a pump that puts oxygen into the blood.  The blood is then returned to the aorta into the patient's body.  At this point no blood is passing through the patient's own heart and lungs.  We place a clamp on the aorta above the coronary arteries and instill a medicine into the aorta that flows down the coronaries and paralyzes the heart.  Just as you have heard of the terms paraplegia and quadriplegia, this medicine is called cardioplegia, because it paralyzes the heart. 

While the heart is still and not beating, it consumes very little energy and requires very little oxygen or nutrition.  And the cardioplegia is usually cold, chilling the heart and reducing its energy consumption even further.  But there is a limit to how long you can do this.  Eventually you must restore blood supply to the heart, for even the best cardioplegia cannot replace the function of blood.  This presents real challenges with difficult operations.  Thirty or forty minutes of stopping the heart is of minor concern.  Three or four hours can result in a very weakened heart.  Therefore, the cardioplegia solution often has other agents in it to give the heart muscle cells nutrition and protection during this period of semi-starvation. And the whole strategy of how we stop the heart with cardioplegia is called myocardial protection. 

We didn't always have cardioplegia.  Modern heart surgery was invented in the 1950's, and cardioplegia didn't arrive on the scene until the late 1970's.  And the first decade or so after that was spent refining and developing the chemistry of myocardial protection.  And early on, occasionally it simply didn't work.  When that happened, the heart was very, very weak at the end of the procedure.  In the worst cases, when the clamp was removed, the heart would contract once into a tight ball of muscle and then never work or beat again.  That condition was called stone heart.  I saw a case of this one time, over twenty years ago, when I was in training.  A stone heart is always fatal.

Yet all of us, in our natural state, have hearts of stone.  The most beautiful message I have read on this was from Charles Spurgeon, entitled, "The Stony Heart Removed," and delivered May 25, 1962.  He describes in great detail the natural qualities of our stony hearts, their hardness and coldness and resistance to change.  The heart of man can be warmed for a while, but then returns to its natural cold state.  As he says, "Such is the heart of man. It is warm enough towards sin; it grows hot as coals of juniper, towards its own lusts; but naturally the heart is as cold as ice towards the things of God. You may think you have heated it for a little season under a powerful exhortation, or in presence of a solemn judgment, but how soon it returns to its natural state!"

We cannot perform open heart surgery upon ourselves.  Likewise, we cannot change our hearts of stone by our human efforts.  Only God can do this by Christ's work through the Holy Spirit.  As God told Ezekiel in 36:26 (and similarly in 11:19), "I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."  To quote Spurgeon again, "But while such a thing would be impossible apart from God, it is certain that God can do it. Oh, how the Master delighteth to undertake impossibilities!"

The person who has received Christ as their Savior is assured of getting this operation.  And as I have done thousands of heart operations, I have seen hearts in all sizes and shapes, and all conditions, with some operations easy and some difficult.  While God could instantaneously soften the heart of all believers, in His sovereign will He takes longer with some than others, and the pain and recovery will be difficult in those cases.   I am one of those, and daily heart surgery is no fun. 

We must also, along with the Father, attend to our myocardial protection.  As the prophet Jeremiah tells us in 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?"  Our natural hearts tend towards sin and lusts, and we must protect our hearts from such things.  Proverbs 4:23 advises us, "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it."  These same sins and lusts that the heart desires damage it, scarring it and leaving it cold and callous.  We must pray diligently for God to work with us to guard our hearts and protect them from temptation. 

In heart surgery, a stone heart is incurable.  Not so for God and our hardened hearts. He can and will cure us.  The coronary arteries that provide blood and nourishment for our hearts encircle it like a crown, and that is where the name "coronary" comes from, from the Latin word "corona" or crown.  When we give myocardial protection into that crown of arteries, we are able to perform life-saving heart surgery, the gift of physical life.  And if we protect our hearts from sin, what happens?  James tells us in 1:12, "Blessed is the man who endures temptation,; for when he is approved, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him," the gift of spiritual life. 

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O.K. You're Human. So What?

We have spent the last several weeks looking at what it means to be human and the lethal consequences when society declares a person or group of people "not quite human".  In the case of Nazi Germany, the declaration of the Jew as "sub-human" led to the slaughter of over six million people during World War II.  Because many have declared the fetus to be not quite human, over fifty million abortions have been performed in the United States in the last forty years.  Still, the truth of humanity cannot be suppressed forever.  In horror, people look back on the Holocaust and wonder how the Jews could have been thought of in that way.  And it is getting harder and harder to look at the unborn child and say that it is not human. 

Where I think we may be headed is an even darker place than the land of untruth.  It is the land of uncaring.  It may be that modern society recognizes the unborn as a real bona fide human being, but then sees no problem with killing them.  When we last looked at late term abortions, we discussed the partial birth abortion, where an unborn child is partially extracted from the womb and then killed before fully removing it.  That practice has been illegal since the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.  But late term abortions are still performed.  The law said you could not extract a live fetus.  It didn't say anything about killing the fetus and then extracting it.  The current procedure now is to use a long needle and inject digitalis into the unborn baby's heart, killing it, and then it is dismembered, removed, and discarded.

If you remember our discussion in Part III, we talked about the Nazi euthanasia program, Aktion T4.  The Nazis decided that the "unfit" did not deserve to live and they began putting "defective" infants to death in 1939.  This was expanded to older children and then adults.  Over 70,000 German citizens were killed in this program.  When the German public at large became aware of what was going on, there was an outcry and the protests forced the Nazi leadership to officially abandon the program, although it was continued in secret for several more years.

Today, euthanasia is making a comeback in the modern world, and there is no secrecy and no protest.  To be clear in our discussions, we must make a distinction between euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.  In the latter, the physician gives to the patient the fatal medicine, and the patient takes it himself.  In euthanasia, the physician actually administers the lethal poison to the patient.  Both physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are now legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg; all three countries were defeated in World War II by the Nazis and opposed them.  They are now embracing Nazi euthanasia ideology.

On this side of the Atlantic, Quebec seems likely to be the first to blaze the euthanasia trail, as they have considered legalizing it with Bill 52.  We do not have euthanasia in the United States, but physician-assisted suicide is legal in Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and essentially in Montana.  We have not yet caught up with Europe, but there is still time.

Well, what if someone is suffering and wants to die?  Why should we care if someone submits to voluntary euthanasia?  They are only harming themselves, and they should make the decision about how and when to end their life, right? 

What if the euthanasia, like the Nazi T4 program, was involuntary?

I am sure that you think that such a thing does not exist.  I would like to refer you to the Groningen Protocol from the Netherlands.  It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and is referenced below.  It describes in great detail the selection process for putting infants to death in that country.  It requires a very smart and dedicated team of physicians and health care workers who evaluate the infant and determine that it should be euthanized.  Belgium liked the way the Dutch were doing things so much that they took the Protocol and fashioned a bill to take to their parliament last November, and it now seems close to passing.  The Belgians are likely to expand euthanasia to those with Alzheimer's disease and dementia, and a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggests that already nearly a third of euthanasia cases in that country do not involve a patient request.  According to the British Medical Journal, a fifth of cases in the Netherlands do not involve a patient request.  Although involuntary euthanasia is currently illegal in all countries (with the exception of the Groningen Protocol babies), it continues to be practiced, not prosecuted.  The right of a human to put himself to death or to request to be put to death becomes the right to put the human to death.

Personal choice, not God's sovereignty, seems paramount these days.  Someone has to choose in these matters:  the mother aborting her child, the patient requesting assisted suicide, or the doctors practicing involuntary euthanasia make a choice. The fetus whose heart is being injected with digitalis, however, does not get to choose, nor does the baby being examined by the doctors under the Groningen Protocol or the patient with Alzheimer's who is euthanized.   What happens when the state starts making the choice?  Under China's One-Child Policy, three hundred and thirty-six million abortions have been performed since 1971, many of which were forced.  And in Western Civilization, we have the National Health Service in England and its Liverpool Care Pathway.  Although it is not euthanasia, it involves withdrawing food and water from patients the NHS health care team decides are not long for this world.  It turns out that of conscious patients, half are not told this will be done to them.  If I recall correctly, the choosing of the time of one's death is to be done by God. 

So we try very hard to get these people recognized as human, and even if we succeed, it won't matter because human life is becoming devalued.  We can convince a society through evidence and reasoning that these people are human, but we cannot force a society to value human life.  We talked last week about the "collapse clause" in the Roe v. Wade decision, where it was stated that if the fetus could be shown to be a person, the argument for abortion would collapse, and the fetus would be protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.  That Amendment states that no one may be deprived of life without "due process of law".  Well, look at the Groningen Protocol and the Liverpool Care Pathway, and there is your due process.

Thinking of these things as medical "procedures" seems to make them so much more acceptable, and even dignified.  As I mentioned in an article earlier this year ("What's Your Life Worth, Anyway"), I am unable to find anywhere in the Bible a passage on death with dignity.  It is interesting that often those who are proponents of death with dignity are also supporters of abortion.  I cannot think of a less dignified way to die than to be scraped and torn apart in the womb.  The Jew facing the brutal Nazi gas chambers declares, "I am not a sub-human!"  The fetus inside its mother pleads "I am human!"  The Chinese mother facing forced abortion cries, "My baby is human!"  The elderly person with dementia implores, "I am still human!"  And before the fatal procedure is administered, the last thing they hear is "You're absolutely right.  But we don't care."

1. Verhagen, E, and Sauer, JJ. The Groningen Protocol--Euthanasia in Severely Ill Newborns.  New Eng J Med 2005;352:959-62.

2. Chambaere, K, Bilsen, J, Cohen, J, et. al. Physician Assisted Deaths Under the Euthanasia Law in Belgium: A Population-Based Survey. CMAJ 2010;1-7.

3. van der Wal, G, and Dillman, RJ. Euthanasia in the Netherlands. British Med J 1994;308:1346-9.

4.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255054/60-000-patients-death-pathway-told-minister-says-controversial-end-life-plan-fantastic.html.

Not Quite Human, Part V

We have spent the last several weeks looking at what happens when a society declares some of its members "sub-human" or "non-human", as in the case in Nazi Germany and the Jews in World War II.   A mood of anti-Semitism that had been present for many generations was transformed into a new truth over the course of only a few generations by continuous teaching and preaching-- that Jews were not human.  This led to the slaughter of over six million people that were previously acknowledged by the Germans to be human and certainly following the Holocaust are clearly known to be human today.  The horrible abuse inflicted on the Jews will never be forgotten, even by the Germans, where denying the reality of the Holocaust today is actually a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment for three months to five years.

We would think that something as simple as the definition of a human being would be straightforward and not open to change or debate.  Yet we saw an entire country change the meaning of human being for several decades and then change it back.  Something so simple as a change in definition lead to the deaths of millions.  Today, we have over a million abortions performed in the United States, in part because the fetus is not defined as a human being. 

Most people would agree with the following premise: 

                 An innocent human being must not be killed

The qualifier "innocent" is used here because the state has the authority to take the life of someone who is found guilty of a capital crime.  Furthermore, if it is established that the fetus is human, it clearly is innocent.  Therefore, for the sake of simplicity, we will leave out the term "innocent."

All arguments against abortion must destroy both halves of this premise, which can be restated as:

                   If it is a human being, it must not be killed.

Either half of this premise can be attacked.  You can argue that the fetus is not a human being. Or, you can argue that it is acceptable to kill human beings.  In fact, both sides of this premise are regularly assaulted by its pro-abortion opponents.  Today, we will look at the attacks on the fetus as a human being; next week we will study the other half of the premise.

For many decades now, it has been argued that the fetus is not a human being.  In fact, this was one of the foundational definitional issues in the Roe v. Wade decision made by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1973.  In fact, the decision has within it what is known as the "collapse clause", which states, "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course collapses, for the fetus' right to life would be guaranteed specifically by the (Fourteenth) Amendment."  It was the interpretation of those Justices that voted in favor of the decision that the fetus was not a person or human being.  In fact, they noted that "...the law has been reluctant to endorse any theory that life, as we recognize it, begins before live birth..." (emphasis mine).

If you are secure in your knowledge that a portion of a premise is false, there is no need to attack the other portion.  In fact, to do so makes it appear that you may not really be so certain about your position.  If it is absolutely true that the fetus is not a person, then there is no need to make any attacks on the portion of the premise that states that "it must not be killed."  In other words, if a fetus is truly not a person, then there should be no issue whatsoever in destroying it.  You do not need to make any arguments about women having a right to choice, women having the right to control their own bodies, or women having the right to "reproductive rights."  Likewise, if it is acceptable to kill human beings, based on women's choice, control, or reproductive rights, then there is no need to spend so much effort claiming that the fetus is not human. 

The primary problem faced by the pro-abortion crowd today is that the fetus is increasingly being recognized as a human being.  Advancing medical science has demonstrated several things in this regard.  Over and over again it is shown that the fetus has a functioning heart within six weeks of conception, brain waves can be detected at eight weeks, fetal breathing movements at ten weeks, and body movement begins at twelve weeks.  It is difficult to claim that this is not human life. 

For the vast majority of people, their death, when they cease to be a living human being, will be determined when their heart stops beating.  For a few who are kept alive by life support devices, their death will be determined by when their brain waves cease, or "brain death."  As a cardiac surgeon, I am very well acquainted with the beating and still heart and occasionally have been involved in brain death cases, usually where issues of organ donation for transplantation were involved.  If it is accepted that cardiac standstill or brain death denotes the death of a human, it would stand to reason that evidence of a heartbeat or brain waves indicates that human life is present.

The second area where advancing medical science has changed the whole notion of life has to do with the changing notion of viability.  Premature infants less than twenty-two weeks gestational age are now surviving.  The law may not recognize life until after live birth, but these small infants, that could fit into the palm of your hand, are clearly not recognizing the law. The Supreme Court, in 1973, thought viability was established at twenty-eight weeks, a difference of a month-and-a-half from current viability.  You cannot incorporate the concept of viability into the definition of a human being when you do not know when that viability occurs.

When does this human life begin?  The notion of a "trimester" is a man-made creation; we arbitrarily take the 39 weeks of gestation and divide it into 13-week thirds.  The developing fetus does not recognize this systematic nomenclature.  From the time of conception until the baby takes its first breath and cries, there is a seamless and undivided progress from embryo to fetus to child.  There is no point where you can say that this is not a human life today and then say it is a human life the next day.

We have been looking at the development of the fetus in a forwards direction; let us now do so in a reverse manner.  To do so will involve some gruesome and explicit terms, but this is what has been done and is being done in this country.  Most people would agree that to murder an infant is illegal, immoral, and unacceptable.  However, the United States had to actually pass a law, in 2002, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, to give legal protection to live babies that had survived abortions. 

Yet up until 2003, it was legal to perform partial birth abortions, medically known as "intact dilation and extraction."  In that procedure, an infant yet to be born was turned around in its mother's womb until the feet were grasped and the infant is pulled part of the way out of the vaginal canal.  The infant is extracted until only the head remains inside.  At that point the base of the skull is punctured and the brains are suctioned out, killing the infant and allowing the skull to collapse.  The dead child is now delivered.  The key component here was the abortion doctor's thumb, which held the skull inside the vaginal canal while it was punctured and suctioned.  If his thumb slipped, the head would be delivered and he would now have a live baby in his hands.  The six inches of the vaginal canal, the distance the head would travel, changed the definition of the child from unborn fetus, which seemingly was not yet human and had no rights, to that of live infant, with all the rights of any human.  Today, although partial birth abortions are illegal, late term abortions are performed up until 35 weeks of gestation.

What the fetus doesn't know can kill it.  The twenty one week old fetus doesn't know that if he can hang in there just one more week he might be viable and therefore human in the eyes of some.  The late term fetus undergoing a partial birth abortion, feeling the cool air on his body, arms and legs, didn't know that while his head was warm and still inside his mother that his skull was about to be punctured because he wasn't quite human yet. 

The Bible does not talk about "viability" and "trimesters." Psalm 139:13 says, "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.  I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."  Even further, in Jeremiah 1:5, we are told that God said, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you."  God knew us as people, as humans, from the very moment we were conceived.  He doesn't say that He only knew us after we became viable or exited the birth canal.  Everything that makes us human, every gene and chromosome, is present from the moment of conception. 

However, being a human may not be enough.  There are many who do not believe human life is sacred.  As we began this series, we looked at Genesis 9:5-6, "Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning, from the hand of every beast I will require it and from the hand of man.  From the hand of every man's brother I will require the life of man.  Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man."  Man's life is special and belongs to God alone.  Man plays God when he decides who gets to be human and when, and he plays God when he decides which life should be ended and when.  The latter we will look at next week.

By defining Jews as not quite human, Germany was able to justify killing six million of them.  By defining the fetus as not quite human, America has been able to justify killing over fifty million babies since 1973.   Just as the Jews reclaimed their humanity from their horrible suffering, our unborn children may yet one day reclaim their humanity after losing millions of their unborn brothers and sisters.

Not Quite Human, Part IV

We return now after a few weeks to look at what happens when a society declares a group of people to be "sub-human" as well as the source of problems in that society.  We have seen how the Jewish people came to be despised in Germany, with full-blown anti-Semitism developing by the early twentieth century.  We followed this as it developed into all forms of persecution, closing Jewish businesses and resulting in beatings and other abuse.  Kristallnacht in 1938 was one of the culminations of generations of Germans who had been taught of the evil and sub-human Jew. 

Most Jews who could leave Germany did so, and less than half a million remained by the beginning of the second World War in 1939. By that time, Hitler and his physicians had already begun the process of mass extermination of infants and small children that they had deemed "unfit".  First with chemicals, those selected to die were involuntarily euthanized, and when chemicals proved to be too expensive and inefficient, carbon monoxide gas was used.  Having begun solving one "problem", that of the "undesirable" children (and later adults), the Nazi leadership began to work on the much larger "Jewish problem".  It was after the onset of World War II, with the invasion of Poland and Eastern Europe, that there were large numbers of Jews that came under Nazi control.

During that first year of the war, Jewish people were required to be identified and wear a yellow star.  many Jews were sent to concentration camps.  Initially, these camps were simply holding places, although forced labor was required.  A portion of Warsaw was walled off, the "Ghetto", where living conditions with starvation and disease all but precluded survival.  The real effort at exterminating the Jews, however, began not in these camps and ghettos, but in the villages and towns throughout Poland.  The Nazis organized Einsatzgruppen from the Schutzstaffel, (or "SS"  as it is commonly known) for the purpose of disposing of Jews in the newly conquered territories.  I must warn you that the following material is quite graphic.

These Einsatzgruppen roamed the Polish countryside, raiding homes and farms and businesses.  The men and women, boys and girls, young and old were usually rounded up to some central location and then shot.  The mass killings were usually performed by having the victims lie prone and then receive a bullet to the back of the head.  Hundreds and then thousands of these executions were performed.  The killings were not restricted to Einsatzgruppen, however.  Even ordinary German citizens who were too old or unfit to serve as soldiers worked in police squads that were employed for the work of eliminating Jews.  If a Jew was found in a home or hospital and was too weak or ill to make it to the killing site, they were simply shot in bed.  If they escaped to the surrounding countryside or forest, they were hunted down.   As opposed to firing at enemy soldiers across a battlefield, innocent people had the backs of their heads blown off at close range.  The killers were frequently covered with blood, brains, and skull fragments.  All in a day's work, I suppose.  Get cleaned up and go out the next day to start another job.

 

Woman and Child

(yadvashem.org)

 

The killings soon expanded into Russia in 1941, and the picture above of the woman holding her daughter is presumed to be from Ivangorod.  In Babi Yar, near Kiev, 35,000 Jews were shot and killed over two days.  But this was not efficient enough.  The lessons learned from the Nazi euthanasia program would soon be put into use.  That same year, the first executions using carbon monoxide gas were carried out in Chelmno, Poland, using mobile vans.

 

 

(inconvenienthistory.com)

 

 

The "Jewish problem" was considered big enough by the Germans to convene a large meeting known as the Wansee Conference in 1942.  Wansee was a small town outside of Berlin, and there the Nazi leaders gathered together under the leadership of Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich to come up with the "final solution", once and for all with how to eliminate the Jews.  Two new camp systems were developed from the concentration camp model: the extermination camps and the work camps.  The purpose of both was to kill the Jew; the work camps simply extracted labor from the Jew until they died of starvation and exhaustion.  The names of the extermination camps, all in Poland, will be forever remembered:   Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Majdanek.  Of note is that Auschwitz was a combined extermination and work camp.  Upon entry into the camp, those thought fit enough to work were spared immediate execution.  Numbers were tattooed on the forearms of those kept alive, and Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz with those tattoos can still be seen alive today.  And Auschwitz was where Zyklon B, a form of cyanide gas, was introduced to the killing system.

 

Eight to twelve hundred Jews could be gassed in these chambers.  Their teeth with gold fillings were extracted, and their bodies were burned in the crematoria ovens:

 

 

(israelarbeitergallery.org)

 

There are many, many more horrific pictures and stories available to the interested reader on multiple websites.  Before it was all over, it is estimated that over six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazi regime.  Yet it must be remembered that "Nazi" was a political party, just as we have political parties in this country.  Not all Germans, or even German military members, were Nazis.  In his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen shows how Germans from all walks of life were complicit or involved in the process.  Generations of anti-Semitism had led the Germans to see the Jews as "sub-human" and the source of almost all of Germany's problems.  Even if the average German did not actually break a storefront or shoot a Jewish child, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  Looking back today, we cannot comprehend how the unthinkable was thinkable. 

 

Several things came together to make all of this a reality.  It wasn't so much that human life was devalued, it was that the Jew was not really human.  Many are familiar with the word Ubermensch which was created by Freidrich Neitzsche, meaning "superman".  But there was another word in German, Untermensch, which came into use in the 1920's before Hitler and his Nazis were in power.  It means "underman", or "sub-human."  Later, in his book, Der Untermensch, Heinrich Himmler described the Jewish Untermensch: "The sub-human-- that biologically same shaped creation with hands, feet and a kind of a brain, with eyes and mouth, is nonetheless a totally different, terrible creature, is only an approximation of man, with human-like facial features--spiritually, psychologically, however standing lower than any animal."  It only took a few generations of teaching and preaching this point of view for it to be widely accepted. 

 

The Jews were a problem to be eliminated, and why not use murder to extinguish something that was not human?   There was no need to keep this secret from the German people, as had been the case with the Nazi euthanasia program.  And medical science had provided some of the breakthroughs in the mass execution process, for it was easier to exterminate people from behind a cement wall with gas than it was to actually put a bullet in the back of someone's head.  The execution process had now become a "procedure". 

 

We are fortunate now to live in a world where nothing like that could ever happen again.  Basic truths about life and what it means to be a human will not change because of a few generations of teaching and educating.  Our modern society values human life far too much to take lives to serve its own purposes.  We would never look at the human condition and its difficulties as a simple "problem" needing a simple "solution."  We would never allow medicine, with its wondrous ability to preserve life, to be used to perform "procedures" to eliminate human beings.  We would never, in this world today, put to death people without their knowledge or consent, as the Nazi euthanasia doctors did, simply because someone decided someone else was "unfit."  Something like this, suffering on an unimaginable scale, could never happen again. 

 

Right?

 

 

(doctortipster.com)

 

"...that biologically same shaped creation with hands, feet and a kind of a brain, with eyes and mouth...is only an approximation of man, with human-like facial features."

 

Part V to follow...

  

 

 

 



 

 

 





Not Quite Human, Part III

Medicine has never been completely and totally science.  Those of us who practice this profession know it as "the art and science of medicine." Although there is a scientific foundation to medicine, the art comes from applying science to human beings.  Pure science has no inherent ethics or morals.  It is the application of testing to theories to confirm hypotheses, and in doing so provides explanation for how things work. The proven hypothesis becomes a scientific fact and may then be used to direct further efforts at shaping ourselves and our world.  In medicine, it is the application of those facts to living, breathing people that is the art, and the art requires moral judgment.

When people do not have a system of moral judgment other than the one they construct for themselves, moral relativism results.  What I consider moral may not be the same as what you consider to be moral.  And what is tragic is when moral relativism infuses the art of medicine.  Throughout history, people in all societies have held a special regard for their healers.  Few things are more terrifying than to have a broken body, and the people with the knowledge to heal are elevated in the minds of the public.  Although it is human nature to be suspicious of those things that we do not understand, when we find that a science that is incomprehensible to many can cure illness and disease, that suspicion is often replaced with awe and respect.  This leads many to accept and obey the pronouncements of scientists and doctors as dispensers not only of healing but truth itself.  (Of course, as a doctor, I kind of like it that way myself.)

We have been looking at Germany in the first half of the twentieth century and developments in that society as the Jews were defined as "sub-human", capable of great evil and seen as the greatest threat to that nation.  Decades of teaching and reinforcing this notion led to it being widespread in German thought.  Even before Hitler rose to power, there was the "Jewish problem," and much debate was carried forth on how to address it.  Hitler and his Nazis brought this to the forefront of national consciousness, with much resulting abuse of the Jews. We left off our discussion in 1938, following the terrible Kristallnacht, but for today we will turn our attention to another Nazi program, Aktion T4.  To do that, we will need to follow scientific thought from the turn of the century.

Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859, and in it he described how species developed over time with continual improvement due to the natural selection of superior species.  A good deal of his thought had derived from his study of the breeding of animals.  It was actually his cousin, Francis Galton, who developed the notion that societies could actually improve its members by artificial selection, choosing those with the best genes.  This led to Galton coining the term eugenics (from the Greek, "eu-", meaning "good" and "genos", meaning birth).  Over the next many decades, eugenics looked not only at choosing the best members of society breeding with each other but eliminating the most undesirable elements from breeding.  In the United States, many states in the early 1900's had forcible sterilization laws for the mentally disabled or epileptic.  For over fifty years in this country, more than 60,000 people were sterilized because someone had deemed them "unfit."  You must remember, for states to carry out these laws, someone had to be invested with the power to decide who was "fit" and who was "unfit."

The notions of eugenics were a large part of Nazi ideology and the idea of racial superiority.  But simply preventing the less desirables from breeding was not enough.  Hitler was very much interested in eliminating those undesirables directly.  The Nazi party promoted the idea of euthanasia throughout the 1930's.  Requests for mercy killing from parents with deformed children were funneled directly to Hitler's office.  And in 1939, a child that was born with congenital defects was chosen to be the first to be eliminated.  Eugenics, "good birth," had now become Euthanasia, "good death" (eu = good, thanatos = death). 

Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt, was put in charge of developing the program of euthanizing infants.  A large medical bureaucracy was created, with a system put in place to process these killings.  The program was later known as Aktion T4, with the "T4" being an abbreviation for Tiergartenstraβe 4, the address of the "Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care."  Initially parental consent was needed for these killings, but that was eventually dropped.  Doctors and midwives were ordered to report any defective babies at birth, and although originally decisions were made after examining the infant, simply filling out a questionnaire was sufficient to make the decision to euthanize.  Six centers were set up around Germany to handle these children, first infants and then the older ones.  Parents were told that their child was going to a special center, and then after the child was euthanized, they would receive a phony death certificate and cause of death.  The parents were often suspicious of these reports, especially if their child who had no appendix supposedly died of appendicitis.

It didn't take long for the Nazis and their physicians to realize that they could eliminate disabled adults as well.  The "mercy killings" soon became a way to exterminate all undesirables from the German gene pool. The mentally ill and retarded, the epileptic and schizophrenic, those with dementia or any illness that required prolonged institutional care were deemed candidates for euthanasia. 

Initially, people were put to death with injection, but this was slow and costly.  It was much more efficient to use carbon monoxide gas, and gas chambers were set up at the killing centers.  The bodies were cremated.  This process of gas execution and cremation would later be utilized on an industrial scale during the Holocaust.  There was one huge difference between the Nazi euthanasia program and the slaughter of the Jews, however.  The euthanasia program was kept secret.

This was necessary because Hitler knew that the German people would be outraged at the state-sanctioned killing of German citizens.  In fact, when word finally got out, the German people protested to the point where the program was officially ended only two years later in 1941.  However, it continued unofficially until the end of the war.  Over 70,000 Germans were euthanized.

Several points need to be taken in here.  The "science" of eugenics and its cold calculations of genetic inferiority and racial superiority were translated into the "art" of killing, a machine for assassination carried out by the German medical profession.  Someone somewhere had to make a decision that you were "fit" to live or were "unfit"; you did not make that decision yourself.  The science was divorced from an objective God-given morality and coupled with a man-made morality, where it was seen as morally desirable to execute the undesirable.  Finally, it was a "medical procedure" that made it all possible, first injection and then the more efficient gassing. 

All of these lessons learned by the Nazis from the murder of children would enable them to exterminate millions of Jews.  The striking difference was that the German public objected to the forced deaths of other German "humans."  There would not be the same outrage at the elimination of Jewish "non-humans", nor any need to keep those programs secret.  After only a few generations of being taught that the Jew was not a human were necessary to remove them from the conscience of the German country.  Next week we will look at the Holocaust itself, and how Germany developed the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem".

Not Quite Human, Part II

Many people today, if they are aware of the Holocaust at all, believe that it was purely a program initiated by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi leadership.  Last week, however, we saw that anti-Semitism had a history going back centuries, and although Jews in Germany had been granted equality and citizenship in the late 1800's, the late nineteenth century saw a change in attitudes towards them.  Only a few generations of teaching and preaching hatred against them was enough to turn the public opinion of nearly the entire country from one of acceptance to one of antipathy.

Jew were seen to be "sub-human," and although this would imply inferiority, they were seen as capable of great cunning and wickedness.  Newspapers and magazines began discussing how to solve the "Jewish problem", or "Judenfrage."  There was a widespread notion that the Jews needed to be eliminated from Germany.

By the early twentieth century, many felt they were the biggest threat to Germany.  They were felt to be responsible for the economic suffering of the German people due to financial manipulation.  Germany was in terrible condition following World War I, and it was easy to point to the Jews as the root source of all of the woes the country faced.  The schools and universities were full of anti-Semitism.

The Nazi Party became fully functional in 1920.  It was a nationalist organization, with elements of socialism.  In fact, its name was the "National Socialist German Workers Party" and that is where the name "Nazi" was derived.  They were opposed to capitalism, and felt that the Jews had manipulated the capitalist system to their benefit and the ruin of the country.  Adolph Hitler joined the party shortly after it was formed, and became a powerful public speaker. Both he and the party claimed the superiority of the Aryan blue-eyed, blond race, and emphasized the danger of the Jews to Germany.  Although Hitler was imprisoned for a short time in 1924 following a failed  government takeover, he and the party rose to power during the Great Depression of the 1930's, when economic conditions reached their nadir.  Hitler finally assumed the role of Chancellor in 1933.

The underlying anti-Semitism in Germany was now whipped into a roaring flame during the Nazi regime. The Jew was seen to be a force of evil, and children were taught that Jews were the source of all of the misfortunes in Germany and other countries.  In his landmark book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen describes the stages Jewish persecution would take, including severe legal restrictions, physical and verbal attacks, the transformation of Jews into "socially dead" beings, and obtaining a country-wide consensus on the need to eliminate the Jew from Germany.

 

Jewish students being humiliated in class.  The writing says, "The Jew is our greatest enemy.  Beware the Jew!" (from Isurvived.org.)

 

Those very things then began to unfold.  Jews were beaten and businesses vandalized.  There was a nationwide boycott of these Jewish businesses in 1933.  The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, banning all Jews from holding civil service jobs.  Signs all over Germany were seen at villages, hotels, and restaurants, saying "Jews Not Wanted Here," and the like.  The physical attacks increased, and Jews were publicly mocked.  Men had their beards forcibly cut off.  These were not always the actions of German soldiers or Nazi government officials or Hitler's SS, but the acts of ordinary Germans who were taking their cue from the vitriol expressed by the government and media.  Over and over people were taught of the evil wickedness of the Jew and that their race was not human.  The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped the Jews of their citizenship that had come with Jewish emancipation, and Jews were forbidden to marry Germans.  Finally, in 1938, the horrific Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) took place, and throughout Germany Jews were killed or beaten, their synagogues burnt, and the glass fronts of thousands of Jewish businesses were shattered.  Although organized largely by the army, many German citizens participated and most were accepting of this destruction.

 

"Jews are not wanted here" (from U.S. Holocaust museum)

 

 

Kristallnacht (from the Telegraph.co.uk)

 

All Jews that could manage to leave the country did so.  Their German neighbors treated them as outcasts or "lepers."  Yet, the leadership in Germany continued to preach about the "Jewish problem," and the need to eliminate Jews from the country.  Just how to do so was not readily apparent, although extermination was beginning to be discussed at the highest levels of government. By the beginning of World War II, in 1939, however, the children of German citizens themselves would point to how Germany could rid themselves of the Jewish plague.  These little ones, though "human", would guide the Germans in their elimination of the Jewish "sub-humans", all with the aid of modern medical science. We will look at this program next week, known by a simple letter and a number--"T4."

Not Quite Human

I would like to talk to you for the next several weeks about what it means to be a human.  Certainly humans and lesser beings are both capable of suffering.  God has given man dominion over the creatures that are not human (Genesis 9).  As stewards of all that God has given us, we are to treat those things entrusted to us with respect.  Humans, however, are due the highest regard.  God gives life to man, and in that same chapter he states, "And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man.  From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.  Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image" (vv. 4-6).  This comes far before the law seen in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.  The concept here is that man and man's life is special to God, and we are accountable to God for the preservation of man's life.

There are few alive today that can recall the Holocaust.  I would imagine that if you stopped a young person on the street they would not recognize that time in the world's history.  I have been blessed to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. as well as the one in Israel, and to have met and heard a Holocaust survivor speak while in Israel.  I have just finished reading many writings on the Holocaust, and foremost among these is a book called Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.  The more you study it and delve into it, the more horrific it becomes.  There is no point in the study of the Holocaust where you think to yourself, "Well, it wasn't as bad as I thought."  Whatever you think you know about the Holocaust, the realities were much, much worse.  Many of the things I wish to discuss with you about suffering on such a scale will be very unpleasant to read.  As you read these things and feel uncomfortable, you must imagine them being done to you or your loved ones.  They really happened.  They are not fiction.

The development of a system to slaughter six to eight million human beings does not occur in short order.  This week, I would like to show you how Germany got to the point where as a country these things could be carried out.  And yes, I said "Germany", not "Hitler" or "the SS" or "the Nazis".  In some way or another, nearly the entire population of a country condoned or participated in the extermination of millions of Jews.

After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A. D. by the Romans under the emperor Titus, Jews fled the Holy Land and dispersed throughout the world.  Jews fled to other countries in the Middle East, to North Africa and Spain, and to Eastern Europe. This dispersion, or "diaspora", resulted in a large population of Jews in Poland, Russia, and other Eastern European countries, although many settled in Western Europe as well.  Because of their unique religious beliefs, often living in Christian lands, they were never really fully assimilated into these countries and cultures, and in many lands they were not considered citizens.  After the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215, the Catholic Church
required Jews to wear special clothing, or often yellow badges, to identify themselves as Jews.  There were many restrictions placed on them.  Many in the Church held the Jews responsible for the death of Christ, and anti-Semitism was widespread.  For centuries, then, the Jews were identified, ostracized, and kept from fully realizing their identity as citizens of the countries wherein they lived. 

In the late 1700's and up until the 1900's there were many movements to grant equality to the Jews.  This was known as "Jewish Emancipation," and it occurred unevenly across Europe, one country or province at a time.  The United States was actually the first country to give Jews equal rights, in 1789; the first country to do so in Europe was France in 1791.  Individual German states gave Jews equal rights in the decades to follow, but the country as a whole did not do so until around 1870.

In the early 20th century, the tide turned against the Jews in Germany. Public opinion and the news media began to cast suspicion upon them.  Much of this originated with the notions of race, genetics, and had its origins in Darwinian theory and eugenics.  The Jews were felt to be a separate race, and an inferior one at that.  After the disastrous defeat of Germany in World War I, the economy collapsed.  Germany was in horrendous debt as the Treaty of Versailles called for enormous reparations.  Unemployment and inflation were rampant.  Somebody had to be responsible for all of this misery, and the Jews were identified as being the most responsible.  There came to be a feeling that Jews were malicious, wicked, and full of evil impulses to control the economy.  It was an unusual combination of sentiments; the Jews in Germany were felt to be a "subhuman" race, an "inferior" race compared to the German  blue-eyed and blond-haired Aryan ideal, yet capable of extreme intelligence and cunning.  So an inferior Jew could be quite intellectually capable.

Jews proved to be extremely adaptable to harsh conditions.  Hardworking and intelligent, bound by religious codes of conduct, they became successful in many foreign lands.  They did not typically invest in capital, land, and buildings that could be taken from them.  Jews usually did not own factories and large farms.  They learned skills that could be taken with them, such as medicine and law, so that when persecution came they could relocate more easily.  They became experts at managing money and finance, and many became jewelers and diamond merchants, because you could pick up your precious stones and move quickly if need be.

That the Jews could do well in times of economic distress led many in Germany to despise them and hold them responsible for the poor conditions.  The nature of fallen man is often to hate another's success, and to feel that the success of one somehow must mean that he has robbed the less fortunate.  There is a linkage in the minds of many that simply cannot be broken, not that one fails and one succeeds, but that the failure of one is due to the success of another.  The finger of one that fails is rarely pointed at himself. 

These, then, are the roots of anti-Semitism.  The notion of Jews as a despicable people, not fully human but "sub-human", capable of great evil and cunning, and responsible for the misery of the German people, was taught and preached and printed and broadcast at every opportunity.  Words were not always necessary.  The cartoons, drawings, and caricatures spoke volumes.  Lies repeated endlessly become the truth.  It takes only a generation for a new truth to be accepted. Only one generation of schoolchildren must be raised with a false teaching for that to become the new dogma.

Next week we will look at how a decades of characterizing the Jew led to demonizing the Jew, and how people began to treat the Jews.  How we treat others is determined by how we think we should treat others.  We treat humans differently than we do other creatures.  When the Jew was determined to be something other than human, they were treated differently.  As described in Goldhagen's book, a murderer of many Jews explained, "The Jew was not acknowledged by us to be a human being."

I Don't Deserve This

Oftentimes those who suffer become angry.  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross worked out what she thought were the five stages of response to grief and loss, and the second of these, after denial, was anger; it seems that there can sometimes be a sense of anger that is just generalized and not necessarily directed at anyone.  Many who are suffering can become angry at themselves.  Sometimes Christians become angry at God.  In fact, I devote an entire chapter of my book, Surviving the Suffering, to the problem of becoming angry with God.

One of the underlying problems with suffering is the sense of injustice some feel at being afflicted.  There may be the case where someone truly is the victim of injustice, as when someone wrongly causes us to suffer.  Much of the time, however, our sense of injustice is inflamed because we have a complete misunderstanding of God's sovereignty.  When we suffer, we can feel that God has incorrectly allowed this to happen, and we become angry with Him for acting unjustly.

We see examples of people responding that way in Scripture.  Job stated in the midst of his sufferings that "...He crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause" (9:17).  Job felt that he did not deserve his sufferings.  We tend to think of some suffering as deserved (much more likely when we observe the suffering of another), and some as undeserved (more likely when it is we that suffer).  All of this comes from what we think of when we think, "I deserve."  The word deserve comes from the Latin "de-" meaning "completely and "servire", meaning "service".  The notion is that we are entitled to good things because of our service. 

In dealing with this problem that we do not deserve our suffering there are several things to consider.  The first should be an immediate assessment of our sense of pride.  Much of the time that we are angry at our sufferings it is because we do not feel that we deserve to suffer because of our inflated sense of self-worth.  "I didn't do anything to deserve this" may be what we are saying, but what we are thinking is "I am too good to deserve this".  In some cases, God may be chastening us for our pride, and the suffering that we are undergoing is to correct that very thought.  Your pride that leads you to think that you are too good to suffer leads God to correctively apply suffering to make you realize that you are not too good to suffer.  Ouch.

A second thing to deal with is that God is allowing suffering to occur in our lives for a purpose and that we are never to think that God does not know what He is doing or that He is capable of doing wrong.  We cannot under any circumstances hold God to our sense of justice.  Good people will suffer along with the bad, for as Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:45, "He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust."  In fact, sometimes while the good are suffering, the wicked prosper (Jeremiah 12:1).  When we become angry with God because we do not feel we deserve suffering, we are passing judgment on Him.

You may not feel that you deserve your suffering, but you must understand that God is not wrong in allowing it to occur.  This is what faith and trust in Him is all about.  If you can allow yourself to believe that God is wrong about your suffering, what else is He wrong about?  God is not bound to give you what you think you deserve.  He is bound to do what will bring Him glory.  It may be that you are suffering to do just that.  We learn about that in the story of the blind man healed by Jesus in the gospel of John, chapter nine: "And His disciples asked Him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.'"

So far, many of the people we have been discussing have an inflated sense of self-worth.  But there is another group of people who suffer because of the opposite problem.  Many individuals inflict misery upon themselves because they have a sense of unworthiness.  They look at the mercy and grace given to them by God and feel unworthy, and say to themselves, "I don't deserve this."  They are aware of and grateful for their salvation, but look at the sin in their lives and feel that they do not measure up to God's standards.  Here again, we are basically accusing God of being wrong.  You are not worthy of your salvation and eternal life because of what you do or what you have done.  You are worthy because you have received justification by receiving Christ as your Savior. 

It is best to put thoughts of what we deserve far from our minds. Unfortunately, because of the sin of Adam, fallen man has inherited that sin.  When sin entered the world, so did suffering.  What God's justice requires to pay for this is death.  Christ, who did not deserve to be crucified, endured that death for us, and He did not accuse God of not knowing what He was doing.  No suffering here on earth, that we may feel we do not deserve, can possibly match the suffering of eternal death that we would deserve.  We, who do not deserve eternal life, will freely receive it, because of Christ's work, if we receive Him.  If you accuse God of not knowing what He is doing, giving you suffering that you do not deserve or grace and mercy that you do not deserve, then you will just end up increasing your misery.  And that you probably deserve.   

A Mouth Full of Thanksgiving

 A children's story I read long ago  by Charles Verral had an episode within where several youngsters were involved in a spat and were forced to sit together and eat ice cream by an adult.  As tempers settled, it was remarked about one of the characters, "She didn't want to agree, but she was finding it hard to stay mad with a mouth full of ice cream."  It seems there is something pacifying about the creamy smoothness of ice cream that blunts the sharpness of our agitation.  As we focus on the good, we lose our preoccupation with the bad.

One of the most difficult things to deal with when faced with real or possible sufferings is the anxiety and worry they induce.  All of us have had to deal with worrying at some point, and while people gifted with eternally sunny dispositions may be able to conceal their anxieties, it is a struggle for many of us to keep them from taking over.  In fact, the worrying may cause more distress than the actual suffering or consequences which we anticipate.  I have seen many people crippled by worrying.  I myself am prone to it.  Our lesson in church this morning from Philippians suggested a further study of Paul's instructions for dealing with this.   

Many in the Christian community would suggest that worrying is a sin in and of itself.  It represents a lack of faith in God and His providence.  In his second letter to Timothy, Paul stated, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" (II Tim 1:7).  Since God does not give us a spirit of fear, to be fearful means to disbelieve Him.  Or conversely we do not have a sound mind.  Clearly then, the worrier has a defective faith or defective mind.

Sometimes we are simply told to stop worrying or stop being afraid.  It is indeed true that we can exercise control over what we think about and how we feel about things.  The Christian should not be a slave to his thoughts or feelings.  But to suggest that we should all have immediate and total control over these things may be unrealistic.  For some, it takes a lifetime to master the firing of nervous impulses throughout the neurons of our brains.  It is somewhat like trying to lasso electricity itself. 

Probably the best author I have ever read on dealing with such problems was D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and he deals with worry and anxiety in his book, "Spiritual Depression."  Before telling you his advice, let us look at Philippians 4:6-7, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

Yes, there is a command there, "Be anxious for nothing."  And as we discussed before, if we are disobedient to God we are sinning, so if we are anxious for anything we have not followed God's instructions. How many of us are never anxious about anything?  God would not give us a requirement without a way to carry it out.  He does not give commands which cannot be followed.  He would not tell us to float four feet off of the ground by sheer willpower. 

I believe Lloyd-Jones gives us the secret.  He says you cannot just, "stop worrying."  You cannot just slap yourself in the face and say, "Get over it!  Pull yourself together!"  We are to approach God in worship.  We are not to rush into prayer with our requests for this awful thing we are facing to be taken away, or for God to immediately stop our anxiety.  We should enter into His presence humbly, even forgetting our problems for the moment.  We should worship Him.  And then we should give thanks. 

As Paul says above, "with thanksgiving."  As Lloyd-Jones says, "If we go on our knees feeling that God is against us, we may as well get up and go out."  We must ask, "What can I thank God for?"  To quote further:

I may be in trouble at the moment, but I can thank God for my salvation and that  He has sent His Son to die on the cross for me and for my sins.  There is a terrible problem facing me, I know, but He has done that for me.  I thank God that He sent His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, into the world.  I will thank Him for rising again for my justification.  I will pour out my heart in thanksgiving for that.  I will thank Him for the many blessings I have received in the past.

What God promises us if we do that is His peace.  Lloyd-Jones is careful to say that we do not give ourselves that peace but that it is a gift from God in return for our taking our worries to Him in this fashion.  The real key here is thanksgiving.  Just as our little girl in the story above found it hard to stay mad with ice cream in her mouth, it is hard for us to stay worried and anxious when there is thanksgiving in our hearts.  I can attest to times of great turbulence and difficulty in my life, when all seemed beyond hope, when it would have been easy to succumb to worry and anxiety and fear.  In days gone by, I would have appealed to God to remedy my situation immediately.  Now I first go to Him and give thanks, and in return He gives me peace.  It is easy to come up with an endless list of things for which to be thankful.

So why not try what God says for a change?  Worries and anxieties are a daily event for many.  It shouldn't take long for the next opportunity to put this into play.  The next time you feel overwhelmed by worry, simply stop what you are doing, prayerfully enter into the Lord's presence, and give thanks.  Thank Him for your salvation, for the gift of His Son, and all of His other blessings.  You can even thank Him in the midst of your trial for the opportunity to strengthen your faith.  I think that you will find that as you stop and give thanks, the anxiety will be replaced by peace.  How can God work such a magnificent change?  Well don't ask me.  He said it "surpasses all understanding."