Silly Old Bear

[PART 2 OF 5]

In my previous article, I told you that I believe in Santa Claus, and I briefly explained my reasoning. If you haven’t read that article yet, you can catch it here.

In this next series of articles, I want to dig a little deeper and explain why the Santa Claus story is important, and then provide a more substantive explanation as to why “I believe in Santa Claus”.

Are you ready?

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[PART 1 OF 5]

“Do you believe in Santa Claus?”

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I had never prayed as hard in my life as I did the morning of March 16, 1997. It was a Sunday morning, about 6:30, and I was driving from Children’s Medical Center in Dallas back to our house about 35 minutes away. Four hours earlier, Susan and I had been told by a doctor at Children’s that our 9-year-old daughter Ashley had a brain tumor.

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In “Moral Courage (Part 1)“, we looked extensively at the meaning and origins of morals. Morality, in the external sense, is the standard of right and wrong as established ultimately by God and revealed in His word. My own personal moral code is shaped as I decide whether or not, and to what extent, I will follow His standards. And that’s where courage comes into play.

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What do you think of when you hear the words “moral courage”?

Webster defines “morals” as: “moral practices or teachings; modes of conduct; ethics”. [1]

“Ethics”, then, is defined as: “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation; a set of moral principles; a theory or system of moral values; the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group; a guiding philosophy; a set of moral issues or aspects (as rightness)”. [2]

So your morals can be defined as “what you believe about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what your moral duties and obligations are, and how you should conduct yourself”.

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[PART 12 OF 12]

Let’s review what we have discovered from the book of Ecclesiastes. What have we learned by following Solomon’s quest for meaning and purpose?

The first outside piece of the Oreo cookie, the first half of Solomon’s philosophy of life, is the idea that “everything is meaningless!”

The Double Stuff filling is all the stuff he waded through in his search for meaning and purpose, and the resulting conclusions concerning each endeavor:

• Money – meaningless;
• Wisdom – meaningless;
• Hard work – meaningless;
• Achievement – meaningless;
• Life is good;
• There is a time for everything;
• Injustice is all around us.

And now, finally, we come to the conclusion, the other outside piece of the Oreo, the other half of Solomon’s philosophy of life. After all his searching, after all his attempts to find meaning and purpose, after all the frustration of coming up empty-handed again and again, here is what it all boils down to.

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One week ago, the United States of America elected its 44th President, Barack Obama. He will be the first African-American in the history of our country to serve in that capacity. Election Day 2008 was truly a historic day in many ways … some good, some bad. Here are my thoughts.

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Tolerance has become the Great Religion of America.

Webster defines tolerance as:

“sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own; the act of allowing something” [1].

In other words, if you don’t agree with me or don’t believe the same thing I believe, I will indulge or allow that difference and still accept you as being “OK”. I am not required to change my belief system in order to be tolerant. I simply allow for the fact that your belief system isn’t the same as mine.

I think that is a good definition of tolerance, and constitutes a healthy and realistic approach to life … most of the time. I also believe, however, that there is an appropriate time for intolerance. Let me give you a couple of examples in an attempt to help you understand what I mean.

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Susan and I were sitting and eating supper together tonight, and she was telling me about her day. She works at our School District’s 8th grade campus as a Paraprofessional (Teacher’s Aide) in Content Mastery. The teacher with whom she works is a young lady in her mid-20′s named Amber.

Susan and Amber were running a couple of errands together after school, which took them outside the city limits. They passed a field with cows, which naturally provoked a conversation about farm animals. Susan raised pigs when she was in high school, and both of our children raised pigs for 4H and FFA from about 4th or 5th grade on. So Susan knows a lot about pigs. You never know when that might come in handy — like today, for instance.

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[PART 6 OF 6]

What are the implications of this concept of “the sanctity of human life”?

What about abortion?

First, let’s look at some statistics (Source: abort73.com ).

In 2002:

In America, abortion kills nearly 4,000 innocent human beings every single day.

Day after day, week after week, year after year … the carnage continues. Innocent unborn children are quietly destroyed behind sterile clinic doors. Since 1973, 40 million American babies have been aborted.

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