So I've now seen Babies Are Murdered Here in its entirety. My last article was purely to respond to the claims made in Jon Speed's article about 40 Days for Life, but it seems there are those who believed I was responding to the video, itself, without having watched it. Obviously, I was not doing that, though I was perfectly honest about my not having seen the video.
Having seen it, there's a lot to like about the documentary, and I agree with a good number of the points that are raised. I confess I allowed my view of AHA to color my perception of the film, and for that I was most definitely in error.
I did take issue with a few things in the documentary, however. So I'll give my thoughts on a few things that happened in the film.
At the beginning, the gentleman speaking (I think it's RC Sproul, Jr.), asks: "have 3,000 ever come to faith by [your method of evangelism]?" Now this is clearly a wrongly-worded question. If the Holy Spirit ever comes down in a tongue for fire and gets me preaching, then I would expect a multitude to get saved. I don't expect this to be a regular occurrence. And this gentlemen seems to be forgetting that there were many places in the Bible where only a few came to faith. He seems to be taking one example, Pentecost at Acts 2, and extrapolating from that that all of our encounters should be like this. Jesus spoke kindly to the woman at the well. He didn't call her a sinner, despite what Marcus alleges. He confronted her with her sin, but not in a way that was obnoxious. He helped her understand what she had done rather than throwing it in her face. This is what organizations like Justice for All help to do, to get people to realize for themselves these things are wrong, which is much more effective than just telling someone why they are wrong.
I still firmly believe that Jon Speed had no right to say that 40 Days for Life is not a Christian event, and now I am more firmly convicted that the reason he thinks so is because they don't want to use his methods at the abortion clinics. Jon Speed can wait until 40 Days for Life is over, then go to the clinics and do things his own way. He even concedes that 40 Days for Life has saved over 8,000 babies. So obviously their method works.
Around the 26:00 mark, R.C. Sproul, Jr. asserts that, "this misguided, poor, innocent, pregnant girl is a myth. This is a heartless woman." Now I don't know who gave him the ability to see into someone's heart, but this pregnant girl who is not culpable for the crime is not a myth. Many women are coerced into having abortions, and often abortion practitioners will use evasive language to downplay what the unborn child actually is. At any rate, calling abortion-minded women cold-hearted by the very fact alone that they are going in to have an abortion is just rhetoric. Women deserve better than abortion, and women deserve to be treated like people. We need them to know that we care about them as people, and we need to get to the heart of why these women feel they need to go in for an abortion.
There's more that I could say about this video, but I've said enough. It's not my intention to be divisive, and I only wrote this article to clear up some of the confusion surrounding my last article. So anyway, now I have seen the video, and I don't feel my original article was off-based at all. If anything, my comparing them to AHA may not have been the best thing, but the rest of my article stands without those comparisons.
That's R.C. Sproul, Jr. making that comment. Not Marcus.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the correction.
Delete"Around the 26:00 mark, R.C. Sproul, Jr. asserts that, "this misguided, poor, innocent, pregnant girl is a myth. This is a heartless woman." Now I don't know who gave him the ability to see into someone's heart, but this pregnant girl who is not culpable for the crime is not a myth"
ReplyDeleteSorry, but ask anyone who has done any work for the pro-life movement on the front-lines if R.C. Sproul's comments aren't true. (meaning people who actually talk to women getting abortions.) There was a time in history where perhaps you could argue (although poorly) that maybe mothers didn't know what their unborn child was. Now, with ultrasounds and vivid pictures, we have a window in into the womb. These women know exactly what they're doing, and we need to start calling them on it. You'll notice animal-rights don't ask for sympathy toward animal-cruelty perpetrators. Or feminists against rapists. Or liberals against though who they perceive as anti-gay. Or basically any group that has been successful. When people hear us being sympathetic toward abortive women, what they hear is, "abortion just isn't that big of a deal".