<\/p>\n

While Virginia Ironside ostensibly wants to relieve the suffering of a child by killing it, what she really wants is to relieve her own anguish caused by the suffering child. Watch the reactions of the guests, especially the female minister with the clerical collar (an incongruous image, but her reactions are authentic and appropriate). <\/p>\n

(While I am at it, beware too of the financial pragmatism of the right spilling over into the utilitarian ethic [see: Not Dead Yet Mike Huckabee Says Folks with Pre-Existing Conditions are Uninsurable, Just Like a Burnt-Out House<\/a>]. Mike Huckabee is no moral relativist and values human life, but good motives don’t justify sloppy thinking.)<\/p>\n

Back to the point: Smith’s argument that some people want to eliminate suffering by killing those that suffer has tremendous moral power and strikes the conscience as true. It’s one of those statements that pulls back the curtain on the wizard pulling the levers. <\/p>\n

4. Learn, learn, learn. Read Smith’s books, and anything else that reveals the cultural juggernaut around us. Don’t be asleep at the switch. (You can order his books here<\/a>, scroll to bottom.) If you want to learn more, I just posted an article on Orthodoxy Today that offers a superb analysis of culture (Living Within the Truth: Religious Liberty and Catholic Mission in the New Order of the World<\/a>). It is written for Catholics, but the analysis applies to the Orthodox as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I listened to Wesley J. Smith’s lecture a few days ago and have been thinking about it ever since (listen to it here). Some thoughts in no particular order: 1. It is very good that St. Tikhon’s invited Smith to speak for several reasons. First it introduces the seminarians to the concrete questions debated in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[11,296,8,1269,607],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7919"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7943,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919\/revisions\/7943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}