I confess to being half-crazy or weird and tell Christians that non-religious folk and even they, as Christians. need not take the Bible as a reliable guide for their beliefs and behaviour in our modern world but be prepared to live with the consequences of rejecting the light offered by the Bible.
How many College-level Biology students/lecturers even know the full title or more so the implications and consequences of Darwin’s landmark book on Evolution?
Here is the full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. I have underlined the last part of the title to make it easier to connect the dots with that work and some current consequences of Darwinian ideas.
It is difficult to gainsay the probable. even likely influence of social Darwinism on the racist enterprise of colonialism and the horrible slave trade including the indictable complicity of Church leaders who had to have dissed the book of Genesis and its unique emphasis on the fact that God created humans in the image and likeness of God thereby endowing all humanity with inestimable worth and inalienable dignity.
If humans, a la evolution, are simply the sum of primeval slime plus time plus chance along with cumulative beneficial mutations all within an undirected biological process without an end in view, whence then comes human dignity and worth? Cruel consequence, humans are basically not worth the pride of place they hold in modern societies,
The disregard for the sanctity of human life is quite understandable though despicable given the prevalence of social Darwinism and the inevitable devaluing of human life. The mega-abortion industry (albeit in the sheep’s clothing of female reproductive rights) is likewise despicable though understandable. A global abortion count should shock our sensibilities if we still have these.
The site worldometers.info/abortions says: “The data on abortions displayed on the Worldometer’s counter is based on the latest statistics on worldwide abortions published by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.” (accessed July 24, 2020, my emphasis)
How much of the Caribbean population would be left in any year if they killed us off at that rate? Okay swallow your heart and breathe, however uneasily. Ideas have consequences.
One more values issue in this year of elections in Jamaica and the USA. The issue of integrity amidst scandals shallow promises and barefaced lies plus. I just learned from a lawyer friend that there is no definition of integrity in the expected Jamaican statutes (Integrity commission, etc.) so the definition is what you would find in dictionaries! In disappointment concerning this reality I checked Oxford and Merriam-Webster and had my disappointment increased. One of them used the word while defining the word!
I offer my own definition, coined and shared since the late 1990s “integrity is wholehearted abiding fidelity to wholesome abiding principles.”
Values that are not conducive to wholesome individual lives and ennobling societal mores are not worth our time though we are free to reject these and encourage and practice whatever we please regardless of consequences.
Such are the cruel options we all must face re values sooner than later!
I rework the late Billy Graham’s sage words about the USA “Jamaica is not now at a crossroad [re values] she is a long way down the wrong road and must come back to the crossroad and resolutely take the right road.”