Dear Hannah,
There are only a couple of people I know who've taken a stand against the slogan all life is precious, and one of them is me. The good news for me is that the other one appears to be God.
I don't mean this in the sense that Jesus said so somewhere in the Bible. I mean it in the sense that He's obviously decided everyone has to die. If you believe the Bible is true and death isn't really the end, then you have to reconcile this with the fact that the majority are probably going to Hell, and that God is personally going to send them there. This suggests, at least to me, that all life isn't only lacking in preciousness, but that a lot of it is outright damnable. Christians are fond of asking us to do what Jesus would do. What they aren't fond of doing is thinking what Jesus would think*.
What people really mean by all life is precious and all lives matter is that everything matters except your interests, which is another way of saying that everything matters except your own happiness. For anything to be precious or to "matter" it has to first be helpful to our happiness; and the overwhelming insinuation of all life mattering is that even the most obnoxious criminals are worth it. The question, which can't be seriously asked, is to whom? The answer, which has never been proposed, is to nobody.
In fact, nobody has ever met anybody to whom everyone mattered at any moment. This isn't just because we're cold, but because caring about everyone is impossible. To live means to care, and to care about anything means you can't care about everything. To ask us to be concerned with everyone isn't to ask us to be concerned with everyone. It's to ask us to change who we're concerned with.
All lives matter is a quack moralist's way of diverting our attention from welfare of the moral majority and getting us to worry about the immoral minority. It's a way to get us to stop defending the people who make our lives better and spend our time and resources on men who make many of our lives worse -- or at best do nothing for us at all. If it says life is precious, what it really means is everyone's lives except our own. If it says all lives matter, it means the worst matter more than the best. It denies what civilization is -- a state of war against every kind of barbarian and criminal and terrorist, and cripples our defenses while emboldening our enemies.
The fact that some men matter and other men don't isn't only necessary to our happiness, but an undeniable fact of morality. The question of civilization isn't whether we'll love everyone or nobody. It's whether we'll love good men or bad, useful men or useless men, peacemakers or firestarters, trustworthy men or traitors. It isn't whether we'll riot for everyone or shrug. It's knowing when shrugging is better than rioting and when rioting is better than shrugging.
Those who believe our purpose is loving the unlovable have never done it and never will. The men who ask us to love without fear and exclusion are the most unloving people of all. For they aren't really asking whether we'll throw away our criminals. What they're asking is whether we'll throw away our families. They ask us to risk everything we hold dear and grab tight to everything we don't. They want us to terrorize our honest cops and spend our time rallying for rascals. Their slogans are testaments to either dishonesty or villainy; and if they fool themselves and other fools and pat themselves on the back and thank God they aren't like "selfish" men, there are two of us who see right through them. And one of them is me.
Your father,
-J
PS: A man went into a coma and died last week, and although I never knew him personally, he was well acquainted with a lot of my friends. He didn't matter much to me because I never knew him, but seeing the kinds of things written about him was enough to convince me that he was a man who mattered to others. He didn't matter because of a slogan or a rally or a riot. He mattered because he was a blessing to the people who knew him.
Had anyone gone on Facebook and demanded that his life matter to anyone it didn't, it would have cheapened his memory and made him a nuisance. But good men matter -- by the laws of nature known as cause and effect. Kind men matter. We know they matter because we miss them. We miss them because they make our lives better. Anyone else who says otherwise is missing the point. Anyone who didn't matter was never really willing to make himself a blessing.
*A word about the terrorist acts in France and Lebanon and Nigeria. Every act of terrorism -- every time a man with a political or religious bent blows up women and children and unarmed strangers going about daily business -- is tragic beyond dispute; and any good government is supposed to care about anyone hurt, regardless of whether anyone in government knows them personally. All of us should also believe, on some level, that no innocent should suffer an unjust deprivation of life, liberty, or property. But the ways tragedy affects us should be allowed to fall along nature's lines, and it's only fair for certain tragedies to take emotional precedence over the others.
Great tragedies come from great beauty, and great loss from great familiarity. To ask us to mourn equally (as the leftists have asked about France and Lebanon and Nigeria) is never to ask us to mourn equally. It's to ask us to feel equally. It's to ask us to neglect a nation which is not only responsible for a long and prosperous and amicable history with our own, but responsible for our very independence, and give equal attention to a nation which has not only given us nothing, but sometimes given us trouble. What nobody has been willing to say is that the leftists are picketing the funerals of our wives because we didn't mourn the deaths of our acquaintances. They think they're being saintly by picketing. But then again so do the Westboro Baptists.
There are only a couple of people I know who've taken a stand against the slogan all life is precious, and one of them is me. The good news for me is that the other one appears to be God.
I don't mean this in the sense that Jesus said so somewhere in the Bible. I mean it in the sense that He's obviously decided everyone has to die. If you believe the Bible is true and death isn't really the end, then you have to reconcile this with the fact that the majority are probably going to Hell, and that God is personally going to send them there. This suggests, at least to me, that all life isn't only lacking in preciousness, but that a lot of it is outright damnable. Christians are fond of asking us to do what Jesus would do. What they aren't fond of doing is thinking what Jesus would think*.
What people really mean by all life is precious and all lives matter is that everything matters except your interests, which is another way of saying that everything matters except your own happiness. For anything to be precious or to "matter" it has to first be helpful to our happiness; and the overwhelming insinuation of all life mattering is that even the most obnoxious criminals are worth it. The question, which can't be seriously asked, is to whom? The answer, which has never been proposed, is to nobody.
In fact, nobody has ever met anybody to whom everyone mattered at any moment. This isn't just because we're cold, but because caring about everyone is impossible. To live means to care, and to care about anything means you can't care about everything. To ask us to be concerned with everyone isn't to ask us to be concerned with everyone. It's to ask us to change who we're concerned with.
All lives matter is a quack moralist's way of diverting our attention from welfare of the moral majority and getting us to worry about the immoral minority. It's a way to get us to stop defending the people who make our lives better and spend our time and resources on men who make many of our lives worse -- or at best do nothing for us at all. If it says life is precious, what it really means is everyone's lives except our own. If it says all lives matter, it means the worst matter more than the best. It denies what civilization is -- a state of war against every kind of barbarian and criminal and terrorist, and cripples our defenses while emboldening our enemies.
The fact that some men matter and other men don't isn't only necessary to our happiness, but an undeniable fact of morality. The question of civilization isn't whether we'll love everyone or nobody. It's whether we'll love good men or bad, useful men or useless men, peacemakers or firestarters, trustworthy men or traitors. It isn't whether we'll riot for everyone or shrug. It's knowing when shrugging is better than rioting and when rioting is better than shrugging.
Those who believe our purpose is loving the unlovable have never done it and never will. The men who ask us to love without fear and exclusion are the most unloving people of all. For they aren't really asking whether we'll throw away our criminals. What they're asking is whether we'll throw away our families. They ask us to risk everything we hold dear and grab tight to everything we don't. They want us to terrorize our honest cops and spend our time rallying for rascals. Their slogans are testaments to either dishonesty or villainy; and if they fool themselves and other fools and pat themselves on the back and thank God they aren't like "selfish" men, there are two of us who see right through them. And one of them is me.
Your father,
-J
PS: A man went into a coma and died last week, and although I never knew him personally, he was well acquainted with a lot of my friends. He didn't matter much to me because I never knew him, but seeing the kinds of things written about him was enough to convince me that he was a man who mattered to others. He didn't matter because of a slogan or a rally or a riot. He mattered because he was a blessing to the people who knew him.
Had anyone gone on Facebook and demanded that his life matter to anyone it didn't, it would have cheapened his memory and made him a nuisance. But good men matter -- by the laws of nature known as cause and effect. Kind men matter. We know they matter because we miss them. We miss them because they make our lives better. Anyone else who says otherwise is missing the point. Anyone who didn't matter was never really willing to make himself a blessing.
*A word about the terrorist acts in France and Lebanon and Nigeria. Every act of terrorism -- every time a man with a political or religious bent blows up women and children and unarmed strangers going about daily business -- is tragic beyond dispute; and any good government is supposed to care about anyone hurt, regardless of whether anyone in government knows them personally. All of us should also believe, on some level, that no innocent should suffer an unjust deprivation of life, liberty, or property. But the ways tragedy affects us should be allowed to fall along nature's lines, and it's only fair for certain tragedies to take emotional precedence over the others.
Great tragedies come from great beauty, and great loss from great familiarity. To ask us to mourn equally (as the leftists have asked about France and Lebanon and Nigeria) is never to ask us to mourn equally. It's to ask us to feel equally. It's to ask us to neglect a nation which is not only responsible for a long and prosperous and amicable history with our own, but responsible for our very independence, and give equal attention to a nation which has not only given us nothing, but sometimes given us trouble. What nobody has been willing to say is that the leftists are picketing the funerals of our wives because we didn't mourn the deaths of our acquaintances. They think they're being saintly by picketing. But then again so do the Westboro Baptists.
Wrong on all levels. All human life is of value because man was made in the image of God, and because he demonstrated our value to Him by taking on the form of a man and being the sacrifice for our sin. There are people who have "loved the unlovable"! Have you ever read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom? Ever heard of Elisabeth Eliot who took her toddler daughter and went to live with the savage tribe who murdered her husband?
ReplyDeleteHannah,
ReplyDeleteGod bless your daddy, but he is mistaken. Nobody is perfect and sometimes we get things wrong.
Was it the statement "..good men matter" that made your head explode?
DeleteHannah, your father loves you, as evidenced by his grasp that if all are special, none are special.
ReplyDeleteIf, Hannah, your father instead valued others as much as he values you, you'd be nothing but one more drone in the hive. This is the Utopia Leftists promise, where family ties are to be broken in favor of vague, platitudinous Virtue-signalling. Those of the Left want no covalent bonds of blood, shared culture or identity, they desire a muddy suspension that mixes ugly with pretty, stupid with intelligent and safe with pathogenic. We live in a world governed by Satan via his proxies in political systems, the very same systems Leftists employ in their zeal to Make Mankind Better. Ask your father in whose eyes their Utopia will be better, Jesus or Lucifer.
God says He values "whosever will ...", not whosever won't. It's your choice and a choice must be made if you want to be valued by Him. He shows His love for all of us by the offer of His Son's sacrifice. But we distinguish for Him who is valued by our reponse. And, by the way, Corrie ten Boom saved Jews who were wholly innocent and wholly lovable.
ReplyDeleteOr...in a world where everybody is special, no one is.
ReplyDeleteI have been teaching my doughters to be able to say "I don't care", when they need not care. It is surprisingly difficult to even say. We have to care about all minorities, about all victims, from here to the farthest reaches of Africa. It is, as you say,to disconnect you fom holding anyone more special than others.
Hannah's Father: Your conclusions are the result of someone who has given Christianity only a cursory look.
ReplyDeleteThe truths of God are said (in the Bible) to be as treasure. The Bible tells us to seek these truths with all our might. Jesus tells a parable where a man found "great treasure" in a field, so he went and sold all that he had to get the money needed to buy that field.
You expect to understand God and spiritual truth, but you have obviously not sought these things very seriously because you make a great many assumptions that are wrong. Please, for your sake and the sake of your child, you should put at least as much effort into knowing God as you put into your other pursuits, seeing as how knowing God or not knowing God will effect your eternity and should therefore be worth more effort than you give the things with only temporal value.
Jeremy,
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely right. Your article was so well written. And the truth of the matter (as you explained so well) is that if you love everything equally, then you love nothing.
What the left wants is to destroy personal priorities; and to replace them with the primary communist priority: the abolition of private property. But to do that, they need to get rid of trustworthy, useful, men; and replace them with apparatchiks.
That is exactly what Hillary Clinton would do.