A question.

I had occasion to revisit the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac the other day, and I didn't mind because the story is so haunting and so provocative.

Why did Abraham agree to this act?

Why was he so uncommunicative about it to his son and servant?

Did Isaac resist the final binding on the place of sacrifice?

Did Abraham ever have a doubt?

Why does God stay his hand only at the last second?

Did God have a doubt?

What is the lesson?  Does the lesson belong to the realm of faith as the absoluteness of abandonment to the will of the Other?  Or does the lesson belong to the realm of morals and the awakening of conscience to the true voice of God, who ultimately forbids barbarism and demands a prudent, orderly, civil and humane faith?

A Fragment on Michael Jackson

In spite of millions of words, one small thought I haven't seen yet: How unhappy must a person be, who spent his last hours, days, months, and perhaps even years, begging for more pain-killers.

It's obvious that it wasn't for the thrills....

On the government health care debate--

I have not heard good answers to two issues:

[1] No one has given a definitive answer to the question of what would happen to a patient like one of my family members. He's 85 and in otherwise very robust health, but some weeks ago was diagnosed with an early stage lymphoma in the neighborhood of his sciatic nerve. Now his physician and the cancer specialist both agree and insist that, treated assertively, this is a very remediable condition, and he should have a normal quality of life once the tumor is reduced and eliminated. They've started some chemo treatments, and he has already responded very well. The question is whether, under the government plan, elderly persons like this will receive treatment at all. I have heard this asked a couple of times in interviews of administration officials and their fellow-travelers, and the answers are either to the effect that the respondent does not know this provision of the plan or that they can't talk about specific cases. That bothers me. What if I'm in that position one day?

[2] There is also a lot of temporizing and avoidance of the pro-life question. I don't want my tax money used to extinguish the very human lives of the unborn.

Until I have satisfactory answers to the above, I'm against that legislation from beginning to end. We can't put these issues in the hands of the eugenicists.

Janus? Is that you?

President Barack Obama signed a law that explicitly bans federal funding of any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death” only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the killing of new human embryos.

Goodness--words mean nothing with him. To adapt an O'Reilly-ism: is he the bloviator-in-chief?

The proportionality argument

In an e-mail conversation the other day, I allowed that I thought the U.S. Church was correct in its teaching that the life issues were to be taken as primary among the public considerations used by one's informed conscience as one votes. My friend and correspondent wrote something like this: "Well, you know that this terrible war in the Middle East is cutting short some lives and futures, too."

He has a certain point--a war may be a bad thing. I was tempted to buy into this informal equivalence argument. Fortunately, I gave it a moment's thought. There is a significant difference between the personal action of abortion and the decision of a government and its responsible parties to order hostile actions to be conducted in the name of their people.

Further, unless one is using nuclear weapons, the loss of life is grossly disproportionate, and that disproportion falls incriminatingly against abortion. The commonly accepted statistic for 2005 (slightly outdated, but one I recall clearly) is that 1.2 million elective abortions were performed in the U.S. By contrast, 4,191 American soldiers have lost their lives in the Iraq conflict--none last month, by the way. Using a ratio of abortions per day in 2005, that number of 4,191 abortions was performed in about 32 hours, 1 1/3 days, in that year. Granted that there would certainly be other arguments about war and about abortion, the sense that "they both take life" doesn't seem anything but a dodge to me.

Choosing boys over girls

Jeff Jacoby's analysis in today's Boston Globe is right on the mark, and has (as Secretary of State Kissinger once said) the added benefit of being true--based on some factual study. It is now a given that women around the world are using abortion--sometimes in response to government mandates to limit family size--to gender-select their children. However, they choose boys instead of girls with statistically significant regularity. I don't know the demographic mechanics of this, but it sounds like a disaster in the making. Jacoby worries that American women may be doing the same. I'm sure it proves nothing one way or the other, but I have known more than one family over the years whose sole reason for having that second, third or later child was that the earlier children were all girls.

I'll simply say that humankind's deeper moral intuitions, around which later codes of law are constructed, may embody serious truths. And truths will defeat ideology every time, in the long run. Facts are what remain, no matter how inconvenient they may seem to one's own prejudices or to the prevailing winds of opinion.

Another perhaps random thought: when I was young, the older ladies would say, upon hearing that so-and-so had had a male child, that it seemed there had been a lot of boys born lately. At that point, someone would take the cue and chime in: "Well, it looks like there's going to be a war." Is a tale told by old wives necessarily an old wives' tale?