Thinkaloud | the worth of a life

It’s as if human life has no value

I

t is terrible beyond description to see the outworking of evil in human life, to see the dehumanizing influence of destructive ideas which appear to be innocent and of benefit to the race yet which mask gaping horrors. Such insidious evil underlies the modern and pervasive belief that there is really no difference between humans and animals. People are, as a once popular book said, merely “naked apes.” We see the tragic results of such thinking all around us today.

It is cleverly disguised in writings such as Farley Mowat’s book Sea of Slaughter, in many popular TV shows. They draw their assumptions from the evolutionary theories put forth by Charles Darwin and his disciples. These assumptions are widely believed to be true.

The Bible stands in opposition to this deadly notion by stating quite clearly that the human race has been created separate from the animal kingdom. People are made in the image of God. This does not mean that every person is good. What it does mean, however, is that each person who has ever lived, or is living, or will ever live can make moral choices.

Animals cannot make moral choices. They cannot choose. Instinct is not decision-making. Patterned behavior, reward and punishment response are not decision-making. God has given this to the human race only.

Because they choose God’s way and respond to His invitation to be fully human, people are kind to the animal and plant world. Such changed people — whom the Bible calls representatives of the new humanity — show compassion and care, and work in harmony with the world God has created, rather than exploit it for their selfish advantage.

But when people choose to ignore God’s way and consider themselves to be members of the animal kingdom only, then all manner of evil is unleashed on the world.
The following things can and do happen:

• A woman spends 12 years in a psychiatric hospital in a totalitarian country because she openly confesses her belief in God. She has been subjected to mind-altering torture “solely for her non-violent expression of her religious beliefs.”
• Each week a child growing up in the west can watch on TV more than 100 realistically portrayed murders, where killers are the heroes. The same child can see deceit, trickery, marital infidelity, and can hear violent, crude and blasphemous language.
• Prostitutes are murdered by people who show no remorse. Children are brutalized, sexually molested, burnt with cigarettes, forced to watch orgies. It is almost as if human life has no special value; that people can be disposed of without further thought; that there is no hereafter.

God’s ideas are different. A human life is so valuable that God gave His Son to redeem it from slavery and to make it free. When such redeemed lives are increasingly obedient to Christ the quality of life grows – for everyone.

Writer: Lieut.-Colonel Maxwell Ryan is a former Editor in Chief in Canada and the UK. In retirement he is a part-time chaplain in a Salvation Army hospital in Winnipeg, Canada, a copy editor of theRubicon and the author of theRubicon series called Resurrected Writers.

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