[1]NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)—American society has devolved from a “culture of death” to “death cults,” Richard Land told the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee Sept. 18.
The president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission cited a Sept. 12 New Jersey Supreme Court decision which held that a physician has “no legal duty” to inform a pregnant woman considering an abortion that a “complete, separate, unique human being” is in her womb.
This was a case in which a woman who asked her physician, “Is there a baby in there?” was told, “Don’t be stupid. It’s only blood,” Land recounted.
Based upon the doctor’s statement, the woman had an abortion but developed complications several weeks later, Land continued. Upon admittance to a hospital for treatment, she was told: “The doctor had left parts of the baby inside.”
The woman then realized that she had aborted her baby, Land said, explaining that the baby’s life was taken at six to eight weeks’ gestation, “which means that a baby has a beating heart at 24 days after conception and has measurable brain waves at 42 days gestation — the legal definition of life in most states.”
“We are and have been aborting about 1.4 million babies a year, on average,” Land said. “That’s nearly 50 million babies since 1973 — one out of every three babies conceived.”
[2]This “death cult,” as Land termed it, has brutalized and desensitized society, having led to outrageous behavior and statements such as one made last year by Eric Pianka, an “evolutionary ecologist” at the University of Texas, who said “human beings are the enemy of the planet.”
The solution to the earth’s environmental woes would be for 90 percent of the globe’s population to be killed by airborne Ebola, Pianka reportedly said.
“That’s an extraordinary enough statement,” Land said, “but it was met by a standing ovation.” The people in the crowd, Land said, may have thought they were going to be part of the 10 percent who survive such a worldwide calamity.
Incredibly enough, Land said, Pianka was honored on the day he made those remarks by his hosts, the Texas Academy of Science, as the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.
The death cults “have devalued life, and their handiwork is memorialized in the ignominious Roe v. Wade decision, as well as in those state statutes that allow for voluntary euthanasia, ‘mercy killing’ and lethal experimentation on embryonic stem cells and those who would seek to commodify human flesh by a market in the harvested stem cells of destroyed embryos,” Land said.
As believers in Christ, however, “[W]e follow a Gospel that says every human being is of esteemable value to God,” Land noted.
“We must stand up and face the reality that we face a deadly threat beyond our borders from a death cult called radical Islamic jihadism and we face a similarly deadly threat [at home] to our future, to our children’s future and our nation,” he said.
“Our nation’s future hangs in the balance and depends on how we respond as believers to these death cults,” Land concluded.
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Dwayne Hastings is a vice president with the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.