MIKE
STECKER.com

Beggars

All you great men of power,
you who boast of your feats,
politicians and entrepreneurs:
Can you safeguard your breath in the night while you sleep,
keep your heart beating steady and sure?
As you lie in your bed,
does the thought haunt your head,
that your really rather small?
If there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

All you champions of science,
And rulers of men:
Can you summon the sun from its sleep?
And does the earth seek your council on how fast to spin?
Can you shut up the gates of the deep?
And don’t you know that all things,
hang as if by string o’er the darkness,
poised to fall?
If there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

All you big-shots do swagger,
and strive with conceit.
Did you devise that your fray would be fought?
If you’ve been raised in a palace,
or live about on the streets,
(did you) choose the place or the hour you’d be born?
Tell me what can you claim?
Not a thing!
Not your name!
Tell me if you can recall,
just one thing, not a gift, in this life?
Can you hear what’s been said?
Can you see now that everything’s graced?
After all,
if there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

No, Mr. President

John Piper provides a thoughtful and firm response to the cloudy, contradictory, and killing view that most of our culture, including our President, holds . . . for now that is.

Lincoln’s Logic On Slavery Applied To Abortion

On January 12, 2009 Samantha Heiges, age 23, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for drowning her newborn in Burnsville, Minnesota. If she had arranged for a doctor to kill the child a few weeks earlier she would be a free woman.

What are the differences between this child before and after birth that would justify its protection just after birth but not just before? There are none. This is why Abraham Lincoln's reasoning about slavery is relevant in ways he could not foresee. He wrote:

You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.

You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. ("Fragments: On Slavery")

There are no morally relevant differences between white and black or between child-in-the-womb and child-outside-the-womb that would give a right to either to enslave or kill the other.