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Phil Hull
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10 months ago
in Why I am choosing to vote for Obama on PRAY|THE|REVOLUTION
As I stated on my blog, I'm trying to cut down on the political talk because I think it's doing more harm than good. But I do feel the need to respond to your issue because I think we are in agreement on things, we just prioritize them differently.
I can understand the view that we would seem hypocritical to try to solve what I see to be pro-life issues around the world when abortion is still so prevalent here at home. The flip side of that argument would be how can we spend so much time and energy on abortion when so many people are dying every day all over the world from genocide, war and disease? They are all colossal problems and all need to be addressed. What we are arguing over is the level of importance we place on each issue. My worry is that the focus is only on abortion while the others get shut out.
I can understand the view that we would seem hypocritical to try to solve what I see to be pro-life issues around the world when abortion is still so prevalent here at home. The flip side of that argument would be how can we spend so much time and energy on abortion when so many people are dying every day all over the world from genocide, war and disease? They are all colossal problems and all need to be addressed. What we are arguing over is the level of importance we place on each issue. My worry is that the focus is only on abortion while the others get shut out.
1 reply
10 months ago
in Why I am choosing to vote for Obama on PRAY|THE|REVOLUTION
Your response is a little surprising. You dismissed my arguments pretty quickly. The Iraq war has resulted in over 100,000 deaths by the most conservative of figures. This includes Iraqi and American casualties together. In Darfur, 400,000 people have died and over 2.5 million have been forced to leave their homes and the United States government has done nothing but talk tough and refuse to act. Are these lives not precious to the Father? Does God's heart not break when a poor African or Iraqi soul dies?
This is the hypocrisy of the "pro-life" position. I believe that ALL life is precious to God, including the ones that we try to ignore. ALL of us are created in the image of God and we are ALL his children. To dismiss their lives as a secondary concern is something that troubles me greatly.
Right now in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is quite literally tearing his country apart at the seams. He has destroyed what once was a prosperous economy and now the country is facing 80% unemployment and an inflation rate of 1.5 million percent. A loaf of bread in Zimbabwe now costs nearly two months salary, but no one can afford to buy bread because no one has a job to make any money. We are talking about millions of people who cannot afford a loaf of bread and thousands of whom will die very soon.
It's late and I don't really want to stay up all night looking up statistics about how many children die from starvation and disease in third world nations, but the numbers are staggering. 1 person in Africa dies every 13 seconds of AIDS. That's over 6600 every day and we are only talking about one disease in one area of the world. It breaks my heart just to think about it and I'm sure God's heart feels the pain far greater than mine does.
It rings very hollow to me to call for a return to morality and holiness while ignoring the least of these. I would hope that we can agree that protecting innocents, be they unborn children or starving children or children with AIDS, is what being pro-life should be about.
This is the hypocrisy of the "pro-life" position. I believe that ALL life is precious to God, including the ones that we try to ignore. ALL of us are created in the image of God and we are ALL his children. To dismiss their lives as a secondary concern is something that troubles me greatly.
Right now in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is quite literally tearing his country apart at the seams. He has destroyed what once was a prosperous economy and now the country is facing 80% unemployment and an inflation rate of 1.5 million percent. A loaf of bread in Zimbabwe now costs nearly two months salary, but no one can afford to buy bread because no one has a job to make any money. We are talking about millions of people who cannot afford a loaf of bread and thousands of whom will die very soon.
It's late and I don't really want to stay up all night looking up statistics about how many children die from starvation and disease in third world nations, but the numbers are staggering. 1 person in Africa dies every 13 seconds of AIDS. That's over 6600 every day and we are only talking about one disease in one area of the world. It breaks my heart just to think about it and I'm sure God's heart feels the pain far greater than mine does.
It rings very hollow to me to call for a return to morality and holiness while ignoring the least of these. I would hope that we can agree that protecting innocents, be they unborn children or starving children or children with AIDS, is what being pro-life should be about.
1 reply
John Burton
I definitely agree that there is much to be done in regard to life issues around the world. No question. However, I question our ability to have any substantial effect if we don't protect those on our home soil.
If we attempt to play peacemaker in the world (which, at certain points is a valid and important responsibility), there would be a ring of hypocrisy to it. How can a government or a people who kill their own presume they have the compassion necessary to attempt to protect others?
I know this is an ancient issue, and I know you are very much pro-life, but I can't, for the life of me, grasp how anybody could support a pro-choice candidate.
I wonder if, even those of us who are pro-life, may not fully understand the stark reality of death.
Though it provides a great opportunity for offense, the easy question to ask is this: What if a candidate clearly declared that they would attempt to pass a law making it legal to kill any child under the age of 2. Would you vote for him? Does that change the emotion of it all for you? Is there a difference between that and abortion?
My thought is that we need to repent and wash the blood off of our hands here at home and then we will have much to offer the world.
If we attempt to play peacemaker in the world (which, at certain points is a valid and important responsibility), there would be a ring of hypocrisy to it. How can a government or a people who kill their own presume they have the compassion necessary to attempt to protect others?
I know this is an ancient issue, and I know you are very much pro-life, but I can't, for the life of me, grasp how anybody could support a pro-choice candidate.
I wonder if, even those of us who are pro-life, may not fully understand the stark reality of death.
Though it provides a great opportunity for offense, the easy question to ask is this: What if a candidate clearly declared that they would attempt to pass a law making it legal to kill any child under the age of 2. Would you vote for him? Does that change the emotion of it all for you? Is there a difference between that and abortion?
My thought is that we need to repent and wash the blood off of our hands here at home and then we will have much to offer the world.
10 months ago
in Why I am choosing to vote for Obama on PRAY|THE|REVOLUTION
John,
First of all, I must say that I would rather you would have discussed this with me privately first before posting this on your blog. My blog is only read by my close friends and family which is why I chose to write about it there, I didn't want to become a lightning rod for conservatives all over the country who have no idea who I am.
I am pro-life. I would love to support a candidate who was pro-life, and I mean really pro-life. I would love to support someone who doesn't stop at abortion and says that all life is precious including the lives of poor Iraquis that have died in an unjust war. I would love to support someone who sees hundreds of thousands of innocent Africans dying in Darfur and has the guts to call it genocide and act on our moral obligations to protect those people. I would love to support a candidate who not only deals with the lives of the unborn children but with the tens of millions of children living in abject poverty without health insurance. Life does not stop with those that have not been born yet.
I knew that I would take criticism from people over making this decision public. I could have kept things to myself and just walked into a voting booth like any other anonymous citizen. The reason I chose to make my decision known is that I am fed up with Christians who see only one or two issues as "moral issues" and vote based on abortion and gay marriage. My heart is broken by the very concept of abortion, and I truly wish it was not a reality in our world, but I am also pragmatic enough to know that it will always be the law in our country. No matter who takes the White House and no matter how conservatives pack the Supreme Court. I do not support gay marriage and I believe that homosexuality is wrong and is forbidden by the Bible. I also realize that homosexuality is a sin that will exist until Christ returns and no amount of laws preventing marriage or sharing of benefits will change it.
I am not only voting for Obama because I hope that he presents a brighter economic future for our country, create more jobs and end a war that we should have never waged. I hope that he has a broader view of what protecting life means and actually has the guts to do something about it instead of posturing.
I don't believe I am "coming into intentional agreement with death… with a strategy to methodically kill" by voting for Obama, but I'm not surprised that you would believe it. You have always been an absolutist as long as I've known you and I'm sure you were long before we met. Things are not always as clear as you may like them to be and decisions like this should not be made based on such a narrow set of criteria.
Next time, lets have this discussion over email or the phone instead of on the internet for all to see. You know where to reach me.
First of all, I must say that I would rather you would have discussed this with me privately first before posting this on your blog. My blog is only read by my close friends and family which is why I chose to write about it there, I didn't want to become a lightning rod for conservatives all over the country who have no idea who I am.
I am pro-life. I would love to support a candidate who was pro-life, and I mean really pro-life. I would love to support someone who doesn't stop at abortion and says that all life is precious including the lives of poor Iraquis that have died in an unjust war. I would love to support someone who sees hundreds of thousands of innocent Africans dying in Darfur and has the guts to call it genocide and act on our moral obligations to protect those people. I would love to support a candidate who not only deals with the lives of the unborn children but with the tens of millions of children living in abject poverty without health insurance. Life does not stop with those that have not been born yet.
I knew that I would take criticism from people over making this decision public. I could have kept things to myself and just walked into a voting booth like any other anonymous citizen. The reason I chose to make my decision known is that I am fed up with Christians who see only one or two issues as "moral issues" and vote based on abortion and gay marriage. My heart is broken by the very concept of abortion, and I truly wish it was not a reality in our world, but I am also pragmatic enough to know that it will always be the law in our country. No matter who takes the White House and no matter how conservatives pack the Supreme Court. I do not support gay marriage and I believe that homosexuality is wrong and is forbidden by the Bible. I also realize that homosexuality is a sin that will exist until Christ returns and no amount of laws preventing marriage or sharing of benefits will change it.
I am not only voting for Obama because I hope that he presents a brighter economic future for our country, create more jobs and end a war that we should have never waged. I hope that he has a broader view of what protecting life means and actually has the guts to do something about it instead of posturing.
I don't believe I am "coming into intentional agreement with death… with a strategy to methodically kill" by voting for Obama, but I'm not surprised that you would believe it. You have always been an absolutist as long as I've known you and I'm sure you were long before we met. Things are not always as clear as you may like them to be and decisions like this should not be made based on such a narrow set of criteria.
Next time, lets have this discussion over email or the phone instead of on the internet for all to see. You know where to reach me.
1 reply
John Burton
Hey Bro! Very sorry I didn't contact you first... I thought it would be engaging to discuss this important issue. You always appear to me as someone who's on the forefront of thought provoking discussion and I thought this would be a healthy dialogue that you would appreciate.
That being said, an alarm simply has to be sounded regarding the issue of morality in this nation. Abortion could very possibly be the most serious sin that we must deal with as Americans. If we don't respond, the judgment of God will really strike our nation with a terrible vengeance. God loves us too much to let us destroy ourselves this way.
The church has become so passive and desensitized that we're actually embracing the same entertainment and ideals and patterns of living as the world. On the contrary, our call as a national church is to see this American culture radically shocked as the fire and passion of Jesus comes in power. This shocking will come as we pray and fast and repent night and day. Revival must come!
It's so critical in these end-times that we as the church rally together with people like Lou Engle and stand strong from a position of radical prayer and fasting in agreement.
To equate a war that has resulted in a slim fraction of lost lives to the torture and termination of the lives of babies in America just can't make sense. Do you realize that the number of people killed on American soil at the hands of doctors every day nearly equals the total number of Americans who died in the Iraq war since it began? The war has the intent of advancing the cause of life while abortion has no other purpose except death.
It's the exact same thing if we were to line up 3000 middle aged men and women every day on some public street in our city and gun them down. I've heard that 7 out of 10 pregnancies in New York are terminated!
Every day over 3000 humans die, and for any man, much less one who desires to lead our country, to not only approve of the killing but to fight for the right to kill is beyond my comprehension. How can this be?
Will there be a time when we as believers won't be able to vote due to a lack of appropriate candidates? Possibly. I wondered if I would be able to vote in this election... but, as it stands, with the addition of a strong Christian as VP, I'm feeling better this time around.
We'll see as the election draws near.
We could talk about so many things that are defiling the church, but this one issue has to be at the top of the list. We must have unapologetic, zealous, Holy Spirit driven sermons on holiness return to our pulpits again. We must all humbly repent and sound a piercing alarm to our homeland- we are at great and fearful risk.
That being said, an alarm simply has to be sounded regarding the issue of morality in this nation. Abortion could very possibly be the most serious sin that we must deal with as Americans. If we don't respond, the judgment of God will really strike our nation with a terrible vengeance. God loves us too much to let us destroy ourselves this way.
The church has become so passive and desensitized that we're actually embracing the same entertainment and ideals and patterns of living as the world. On the contrary, our call as a national church is to see this American culture radically shocked as the fire and passion of Jesus comes in power. This shocking will come as we pray and fast and repent night and day. Revival must come!
It's so critical in these end-times that we as the church rally together with people like Lou Engle and stand strong from a position of radical prayer and fasting in agreement.
To equate a war that has resulted in a slim fraction of lost lives to the torture and termination of the lives of babies in America just can't make sense. Do you realize that the number of people killed on American soil at the hands of doctors every day nearly equals the total number of Americans who died in the Iraq war since it began? The war has the intent of advancing the cause of life while abortion has no other purpose except death.
It's the exact same thing if we were to line up 3000 middle aged men and women every day on some public street in our city and gun them down. I've heard that 7 out of 10 pregnancies in New York are terminated!
Every day over 3000 humans die, and for any man, much less one who desires to lead our country, to not only approve of the killing but to fight for the right to kill is beyond my comprehension. How can this be?
Will there be a time when we as believers won't be able to vote due to a lack of appropriate candidates? Possibly. I wondered if I would be able to vote in this election... but, as it stands, with the addition of a strong Christian as VP, I'm feeling better this time around.
We'll see as the election draws near.
We could talk about so many things that are defiling the church, but this one issue has to be at the top of the list. We must have unapologetic, zealous, Holy Spirit driven sermons on holiness return to our pulpits again. We must all humbly repent and sound a piercing alarm to our homeland- we are at great and fearful risk.
1. The numbers don't compare- the number of people killed by abortion far out numbers those killed in war, by disease, etc.
2. There is a coming judgment on America due to the bloodshed on our home soil.
3. There's a serious difference between refusing to help and defend people in other nations (or even in our own) and the intentional killing of our own citizens. We kill American citizens as a favor to people.
If the Holocaust were still going on, what would be the more important issue- ending the Holocaust or helping those sick with disease? What if it were going on in our nation and we were approaching an election that included a pro-Holocaust candidate?