Perhaps when believers speak of God's "love," they use the term in a way that has nothing to do with ordinary usage. Novak maybe implies as much when he states: "What is difficult to believe is that any one of us . . . knows more than God does about His love for every individual." God's "love" is different from human love; it includes the capacity to foresee and watch the destruction of one's children and not intervene. But then why not use a different word entirely -- "callousness," say. At the very least, if we are going to continue to use ordinary words in counterintuitive ways to refer to God, we should give them some sort of diacritical marker to let listeners know that the words they are hearing don't mean what they ordinarily mean. One could speak of "G-love," for instance, to distinguish it from ordinary human love.

I am also puzzled by the attribution of justice to God, unless, of course, we are really talking about "G-justice." An elementary definition of justice is treating like cases alike and treating unlike cases differently. If a judge has two plaintiffs before him who are each suing for restitution under a contract, and each has met the conditions for restitution, we expect that he would award each plaintiff the remedy that he seeks. On the other hand, if one plaintiff has breached his contract and thus is not entitled to restitution, we would find it unacceptable if the judge nevertheless awarded both plaintiffs the sought-after remedy. In the case of God justice, however, we see like cases being treated differently and unlike cases being treated the same all the time -- or so it would seem to a human eye.

The Web site of Ms. Magazine--yes, it still exists--is calling on readers to sign a petition: "I have had an abortion. I publicly join the millions of women in the United States who have had an abortion in demanding a repeal of laws that restrict women's reproductive freedom."

Well, so much for the right to privacy. If Ms. readers hadn't had so many abortions, there might be more Ms. readers. As for the rest of us, here's a petition we could all sign: "I wasn't aborted."

Having narrowly escaped being aborted, I'd be the first in line.

In a free society, vast numbers of things are neither forbidden nor facilitated. They are considered to be none of the law's business.

Homosexuals were on their strongest ground when they said that the law had no business interfering with relations between consenting adults. Now they want the law to put a seal of approval on their behavior. But no one is entitled to anyone else's approval.

Why is marriage considered to be any of the law's business in the first place? Because the state asserts an interest in the outcomes of certain unions, separate from and independent of the interests of the parties themselves.

This seemingly abrupt shift to the ideological, to the religious, is the most noteworthy and ominous development of recent times. The fight is no longer over territory -- the West Bank, Gaza -- but over the very existence of Israel. The people who seem to hate Israel most, who will kill to kill it and die for it to die, are not reclaiming ancestral land -- no Iranian pines for his lost orange grove near Jaffa -- but instead cannot abide the very idea of Israel.

Democracies are in a fix. If your enemy will gladly die for his cause while you wouldn't think of dying for yours (not that you even know what it is: freedom? liberty?) then clearly the fight is not to the swift but to the suicidal. The obvious short-term remedy is cold, lethal technology. But the reliance on high-tech stuff has not subdued Iraq, and it utterly failed in Lebanon as well. These are the realities of the new warfare, and if they are the "birth pangs of the new Middle East," then what is being produced is not some cute, babbling democracies but a hideous monster.

Within the memory of most people over 40, the free world could distinguish between good and evil. But today, fewer make such judgments and "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter." Instead of the World War I lyric "we won't come back till it's over, over there," we - or in this case Israel - comes back before it's over. As a result, it isn't over and it won't be over until Israel and the West get over moral equivalency and political correctness and fight to win. The evil guys are fighting to win.

In the five years since President Bush authorized and at the same time restricted research on human embryonic stem cells, a marked shift has taken place in some scientists' views of how the research is likely to benefit medicine. Many no longer see cell therapy as the first goal of the research, parting company with those whose near-term expectations for cell therapy remain high.

Instead, these researchers envisage a longer-term program in which human embryonic cells would be a research tool to study the mechanisms of disease. From this, they say, many therapeutic benefits may emerge, like new drugs, which would probably be available at least as soon as any cell therapy treatment....

The approved cell lines, though regarded by many scientists as unusable for medical treatment and insufficient for many research purposes, have allowed a first round of experimentation. Work since 2001 has produced no significant advance, but has enabled a preliminary assessment of the field's possibilities. Many researchers now see human embryonic stem cells as part of a long-term research program, with any sort of cell therapy being at least 5 or 10 years off.

That projection shows a gap between scientists' views and those of the public and of people for whom the overriding purpose of research with human embryonic stem cells is to generate cells that can restore damaged tissues.

1. Mr. President, you are telling colleagues in Iran that you believe the end of the world is rapidly approaching. Why do you believe this? How are these views shaping your foreign policy?

2. Could you tell us more in the West about your belief that the "Twelfth Imam" (or "Hidden Imam") will soon reappear and why you believe that the way to hasten the coming of this Islamic messiah is to launch a global jihad against Israel and the U.S.?...

Iran is the new Germany. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Adolf Hitler. Radical Shiite Islamic jihadists are the new Nazi storm troopers. The pursuit of the Twelfth Imam is the pursuit of the new Third Reich. CBS News had both the opportunity and responsibility to help the world truly understand this regime and the danger it poses. It failed miserably, and we are all poorer for it.

"'Jesus never mentioned abortion,' notes Paul Simmons, a Baptist minister..." Hmmm. Jesus never mentioned a lot of things, but that doesn't make any of them "right" simply on the grounds of express verbal omission. Weak exegesis = weak conviction, every time.

I would wager that the overwhelming majority of folk like Mr. Simmons simply support "the right for people to have control over their own bodies" or "the freedom to choose... whatever I want." That is to say - in my estimation - they are not defending abortion so much as they are defending an abstract ideology of personal autonomy. Abortion is easy to support when it has has no real meaning or context outside of its association with "personal rights," "freedom of choice," and other ambiguous terminolgy. My guess is that Mr. Simmons has never seen an abortion and is sadly ignorant of what he is actually promoting. For a man of pastoral persuasion, that is uninformed ideology at best, blatant heresy at worst.

A good site to get some firsthand truth regarding the issue: http://www.abort73.com/ (As a warning, some of the videos and the 'photographic evidence' sections are very graphic... but I don't think it's sensationalized - it's just the way it is.)

The religious abortion-rights movement, like the antiabortion movement, grounds its understanding of abortion in the Bible. Abortion-rights religious groups point to what they see as a telling silence in Scripture. "Jesus never mentioned abortion," notes Paul Simmons, a Baptist minister and author of the forthcoming "Faith and Health: Religion, Science and Public Policy." "The apostle Paul wrote all these lengthy letters to the Greco-Roman world, where abortion was widely practiced, with lists of virtues and vices. If anyone was a common-sense moralist, Paul was." But the subject doesn't come up in his counsel, or anywhere else in the Old or New Testament....

The religious abortion-rights movement stresses that it presents these biblical readings not to promote abortion, but to endorse it as an option. The movement works toward what it calls true "reproductive choice," envisioning a society in which education and contraception prevent unintended pregnancies, and widely available healthcare and child care foster conditions supportive of childbearing. The religious right, they charge, has largely neglected these goals in favor of pressing the fight against abortion. "If you say you don't want to see abortions, let's try to prevent them," says Veazey.

Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing -- and the church's -- to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute "voters' guides" that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn't the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called "The Cross and the Sword" in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a "Christian nation" and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

The article paints him in heroic terms, willing to stand against the tide. It quotes other Christian leaders who support him, but none of those who might give the other point of view. It seems if you want to get into the New York Times these days, all you've got to do is bash conservative evangelicals.

It is inarguable that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks on its citizens, but it is inhumane and counterproductive to punish civilian populations in the illogical hope that somehow they will blame Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking the devastating response. The result instead has been that broad Arab and worldwide support has been rallied for these groups, while condemnation of both Israel and the United States has intensified.

Israel belatedly announced, but did not carry out, a two-day cessation in bombing Lebanon, responding to the global condemnation of an air attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, where 57 civilians were killed this past weekend and where 106 died from the same cause 10 years ago. As before there were expressions of "deep regret," a promise of "immediate investigation" and the explanation that dropped leaflets had warned families in the region to leave their homes. The urgent need in Lebanon is that Israeli attacks stop, the nation's regular military forces control the southern region, Hezbollah cease as a separate fighting force, and future attacks against Israel be prevented. Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms, and release the Lebanese prisoners. Yet yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire.