“Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
There are some actions for which there is a broad moral consensus regarding their rightness or wrongness. Everyone knows these things are wrong. With but a few exceptions, they’ve always known it. The trouble is, we want what we want, and we don’t much like people getting in the way of what we want. The reason this idea is trouble (beyond all of the obvious ones) is that sometimes what we want and things everyone knows are wrong come into conflict with each other. We don’t mean for these conflicts to happen. But they do. When they happen, we have a choice to make. We can change what we want. But we want what we want, so that’s probably not the first choice we’re going to make. The other option is to redefine this thing we know is wrong in such a way that we somehow excuse our doing it in order to get what we want. This option is often preferable to us in the moment (because it lets us have what we want), but it makes a whole lot of other things a whole lot more complicated because living in a fantasy world requires constant effort to keep the walls up. Well, 49 years ago, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Roe v Wade that effectively forced our entire nation down this second path and made things a whole lot more complicated. Then, last week, with the Dobbs decision, the same institution set us back on the right path. What do we do now?
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