Christ's Last Word

The Last Word of Christ

By Roy D. Follendore III

June 27, 2002

I find it particularly peculiar that the very people who most often fight against the idea of birth control and a woman's right of choice for an abortion, are also the same people who most support the death penalty. Religion is no excuse for irrational or immoral thinking. They are saying that children should be born simply because a male has ejaculated into a female. And by that, what these people are then saying is that the environment in which that child may be brought up is not the responsibility of society. Their ultimate conclusion is that society has no blame for the actions of the individual. But as a society we may accept the rewards of the good people but we do not have to accept the burdens of the bad.

To me, the people who think like this are the worst of hypocrites; for if as individuals we force people to have unwanted children we individually become responsible for them. Consensus always arises from individuals and so we become responsible for that child's good deeds and their bad. If we wish to accept the smaller aspects of life then we also must accept the larger burden of our philosophy. If life is so precious that we can not deny the opportunity of life to an egg and sperm that has just united, then it is impossible for any rational human being to accept the fact that an adult is also not worth the same consideration. Stop and think about this. Human beings have the ability to change and to repair ourselves. Every few years our cells replace themselves as we grow older. Stem cells that make the child, exist within the adult. We therefore always contain the child that we were within us. In this same way we must not forget that society itself represents a prison because society includes prisons within itself. We may not want to accept the fact that prisoners are a part of human society but we are wrong if we do not. Prisoners are also the children of society.

Perhaps there well may be cases where death is more appropriate than life. I have seen that many times. An increasing number of prisoners with our society certainly choose their death over their abandonment of prison. In the end all, of us face our death as a consequence of living. Life, not death is always the immediate issue of living beings probably because death is the absence of life. It can not be the other way around. Life is the the willingness to exist and existence is by it's most essential definition, the change of who and what we are. If the death of a fertilized egg is more precious than the death of a criminal then there is something wrong with our way of thinking. If so, then we are ignoring all of the events that took place between fertilization and death, and we are ignoring the random facets that makeup our existence. We are also ignoring the fact that if everything has to have to have a purpose, man would not have free will. We would like to abandon the notion of hope in favor of logic but that is not really possible.

Mankind does not have absolute control over this Universe in which we exist and we do not possess the knowledge of how best to manage that level of control if we did. The more knowledge that we have, the more we are aware that we are ignorant. All of mankind simply learn from mistakes. Therefore what we might choose to do in the name of good can be far more evil than anything we might conceive of in the name of evil. If as intelligent and knowledgeable beings we continue to choose to ignore our ignorance, and our failings through ignorance, then we are inherently evil regardless of our good beliefs. If so then the notion of God as we know God can not exist.

If as a Christian you are upset by these words I have written then fast forward through the life of the one in which you say you expect to have faith.

The last words of Christ was to ask God for forgiveness of mankind's ignorance and our use of capital punishment.

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