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"If you were walking by a burning house and you saw a scared child on the second floor what would you do?" There are a great many ways to answer that question, but they all come down to the same basic answer. You would act. You might call the police, or you might rush inside and pull the child out yourself, but the one thing that you wouldn't do is ignore it. Why is that? Because you believe in the truth of the fire. You know that the fire will hurt that child and even though you don't know them, don't know anything about them you know you would help them.

So then the question comes why do we not act on other ideas? As a Christan the generally held belief is that anyone who doesn't accept Christ is going to go to hell and this leads back to the first question. If you saw a child who was going to be burn in a fire would you do something? Then why isn't there the same urgency when you see someone who your beliefs say will be in a fire for all eternity. The only answers that make any sense assuming that you are a moral person is that you don't believe in hell as much as you believe in the fire.The idea of hell isn't true to you in the same way that the idea of the fire is.

This same principle can be applied to almost any truth of importance. There are 5000 children a day dying of diarrhea because they don't have clean groundwater. The solution is far simpler and less dangerous than rushing into a burning building. The people in this country could eliminate most of those deaths within months and all of them within years. And to say that we don't care about the idea of children dying is to say that we are an immoral people. The truth is that, just like the child in the fire, if we saw those kids here drinking dirty water and dying we would act, but it isn't real to us when it is happening to someone in Africa.

Ideas require application. If you believe something it will change you. If you believe that abortion is killing a child then you will apply that idea to everything that you believe about abortion. If you believe instead that it is not a child when the abortion is done then that idea must be applied to your opinion of abortion. As contradictory ideas one of those must be faulty but a more faulty and immoral choice than acting on assumption that proved to be wrong would be to not apply any action. The same could said of war and peace, love and hate, racism and almost any other truly important idea. An idea that doesn't apply itself to you either isn't important, you don't believe it, or you are making a choice to act in a way you know is wrong.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
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