Man Made God

By Jacklyn Remus

In the image of man created they him . . .

Upon being informed, as I am about to inform you, that this article is about abortion, there are probably plenty of readers whose immediate reaction would be, ‘Another article on abortion? Aren’t there enough of those already?’
My response is, as the astute reader who gives me any credit should see, No. There are not enough, and there never will be enough until abortion stops.

I think that, when we are quite honest with ourselves, we can no longer use the excuse that abortion is not taking the life of another person. Even the main proponents of it have mostly ceased trying to claim so. Science and logic point to the fact that life must start inside the mother’s womb, and at conception. Within a few days, the child inside the mother is universally regarded — by doctors and parents alike — as a child. You cannot have an inanimate child. The very designation is an acknowledgement of the life inside the womb.
Besides, if the child were not alive at this point, there would be no point in killing it, would there? Unless it is going to grow (a sign of life), mature (a sign of life), and eventually be born as a live human being in need of care (a definite sign of life), there would be very little point in removing it. We cannot compare it to a tumour, because though a tumour may grow, it will never be born as a live human. It will also never mature. It is not conceived by a mother and father, and it is never called a ‘baby.’
Therefore, if we can no longer deny that aborting a child is taking its life, we can hardly deny that abortion is murder. One definition of murder is ‘the unlawful, premeditated killing of one human being by another.’ If killing is taking the life of something, and if we must admit that a child is a human being — there are very few who claim that it is a rock or a chimpanzee — the only thing that stands in the way of calling abortion murder is the fact that it is not ‘unlawful.’ And that brings us to the issue of morality.

Murder is generally, but not universally, regarded as wrong. It is illegal in the United States of America, and generally elsewhere, to kill any person without lawful authority from the government. In recent decades there has been a decline in morality, marked most sharply by the fact that the government has made taking the life of an unborn child lawful. In 36 years, from 1973 to 2009, four times as many innocent people were killed in hospitals in the United States than were killed in Nazi camps in twelve. There is a child killed for every 24 seconds in a day. We can hardly say these children committed crimes worthy of capital punishment. Their only crime, like that of the Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany, was that of existence. Now, despite the fact that so many people are claiming abortion to be murder, modern proponents of this custom wish to make the mother judge and jury. She who was once the symbol of life, home, family and love, is now to become the deliverer of the death sentence.
There is never any excuse for abortion. Some would claim that some babies should be aborted for the health of the mother. This is not morality. Morality was never a consideration of what was best for oneself, but what was good for humanity and ultimately, what was obedience God’s commandments. It says in the gospel of Matthew, ‘Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it . . .’ It says in the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

This, then, is no longer a battle for the life of the million plus children who are destroyed every year, but a battle for morality. In the world there is no longer any real morality. It has become subjective. Men say there is no universal goodness, no absolute. Morality has become what the man in power decides to make it. If killing babies is what people want, we will make a law that says, it is all right. How can we do this? Because we no longer have any certain standard of goodness. Man decides what is good.

And that is the issue of God. Today around the world the idea of God has seemed to dwindle and dwindle until it is very small indeed. Men have not just made a god in their own image — they have decided that they do not even need a god. They have made themselves god. Morality will continue to crumble if the true goodness is not rediscovered. This is, as Vaclav Havel said, a contaminated moral environment. It is also an unsustainable one. Presently, we as a society shall return to the cannibalistic tribalism that marked the early ages of history on many continents. Civilisation survives only when it has a moral code. It flourishes only when that code is based on the goodness of God. There is no point in going green if we do not go good, there is no point in claiming a woman’s choice to commit murder if we do not claim God’s choice to punish us for it. We cannot sustain a civilisation where men are their own gods, because such a society is no longer civilised.

There is hope, because God is hope. Today, in what seems to be the opening of a new era, morality must be held to, not less strictly for the sake of those who will not conform, but more strictly for the sake of those whose lives depend upon our courage and bravery. If we are not willing to stand up against the murder and decline of morals going on around us, we are as deeply and tragically responsible as the millions of people in Russia under Stalin or in Germany under Hitler. Fifty million deaths — all of humans who hadn’t even a chance to see the world — is more than a statistic. It is a call for brave men and women, a call for those who believe in God to stand up not just for life, but for morality.