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 in the eyes of the people who loved
him, because it would have made him a kind of 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.
That every act of terrorism is tragic is beyond dispute, and the just
dispensation of government requires a certain blind impartiality to those
within our borders. The cause of humanity also requires a general
admission that no innocent should suffer an unjust deprivation of life,
liberty, or property. But the ways in which tragedy affects us should be
allowed to fall along nature's lines, and it is only just for certain acts of
injustice to take emotional precedence over the others.
Great tragedies come from great beauty, and great loss from intimate
familiarity. To ask us to mourn equally (as the leftists have asked) is
never to ask us to mourn equally. It is to ask us to feel equally.
It's to ask us to neglect a proper attention to 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 themselves 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.