Bury My Heart at Joe Byrd Cemetery...Oh, and Bury the Rest of Me There Too

Last year, I found myself with no choice but to adopt an opposition to the death penalty. My newfound position stemmed from my vehemently pro-life/anti-abortion views. One of the standard arguments for the pro-choice side of the abortion debate would be the perceived hypocrisy of so many who are "pro-life," but support the death penalty and oppose food stamp programs. And while I've never opposed food stamps, I was often on the fence about capital punishment. The Law of Moses gave clear instructions for the death penalty, but the New Testament's position on the subject has been a source of debate, even among we who believe (though the apostle Paul writes, "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death." -Romans 8:2, emphasis added; and, if we're going to base a support of capital punishment on the Old Covenant in the Bible, we'd also have to execute those who commit adultery).

But I soon realized I had no choice. Being pro-life must not end at the womb or at birth. It must carry into the child's well-being, education, and even into old age. Therefore, I decided I wouldn't give the other side of the abortion debate the ammunition - no longer could they pin me down in some generic mold of hypocrisy that they've concocted.

I oppose the death penalty.

I'm not sure how the two thoughts became connected - the thought of where I'd like to be buried when I die, and my opposition to capital punishment - but they did connect somehow, and left me with the wish to be buried in a prison cemetery, any one that will have me.
In January, I made a call to the Texas Prison Museum, to gather information on the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas, a cemetery for prisoners in my state who die with no one to claim their remains. When I asked the admittedly odd question about a non-inmate being buried there, the answer was that, if for no other reason, I might be prohibited only because they're quickly running out of room.
Many prison inmates, whether sentenced to life or not, die while incarcerated each day, and many have no relatives to claim their bodies (and many have relatives who simply refuse to claim their bodies based on the deeds they've done). I'd assume that Texas would have to open a new state prison cemetery at some point. But when I pass away, I hope that any prison cemetery that will have me will allow my remains to be buried there.

My reasons are simple. When the Lord Jesus returns to gather all who are saved, both dead and alive, He will no doubt gather even those who died on the gallows, in the electric chair, the gas chamber, or the lethal injection stretcher, who confessed their sins and repented before their executions. And if I'm so pro-life, so opposed to the killing of a human being in the womb or outside of it, I can only empathize with those who were executed for their crimes by the state, though they were cleansed of them by a much Higher Authority. I've never done anything deserving of death according to the state, but had I lived during the time of the Old Testament, I could have been stoned to death for taking the Lord's name in vain, for adultery, or any number of sins for which I've been forgiven, under the New Covenant of the blood of Jesus Christ.
Therefore, it would be an honor to be raised at Jesus' Second Coming with men who, like me, are forgiven scoundrels, criminals purged with hyssop. It's my desire to meet the Lord in the air, but it's my dream to meet Him with men who had no one in their lifetime to claim their mortal bodies. In death, they were in the company of only strangers, guards and shackles. In life, they'll be in the company of their fellow saints.    

I suppose I could find just as many forgiven wretches and deviants in any cemetery, and many graves with the careless word "Unknown" etched where a name should be. But most of those people weren't killed by their state, their deaths condoned by many governors and politicians who rally against death by lethal injection in the womb, but support death by lethal injection outside it.

I don't want a special tombstone to designate that I wasn't a prisoner. I'd just need a simple marker with a number for the sake of records, the same as those who died as inmates. Jesus Christ will know where to find me when He returns.
I suppose there was no way to write this blog without looking both morbid and fanatical. I can admit to the fanatical part - I know that if I'm a fanatical supporter of life, I won't kill anyone to make my point. But I don't find eternal life and the promise of God to be morbid. He is a God of life, not of death. My job in this world is to proclaim the good news of eternal life offered to us by the Lord Jesus, paid for by His own blood; and I hope to someday be risen next to men who died alone and forsaken, but forgiven and blessed with eternal life by Him whose authority exceeds any court or lynch mob.

"There ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear the trumpet sound
I'm gonna get up outta the ground
There ain't no grave gonna hold my body down."
-traditional American folk song

That's Not Science - And That's Not Jesus

A few months ago, a friend asked me about my widely criticized, Biblically-influenced, belief that our planet is only several thousand years old, rather than the hundreds of millions of years believed by most scientists (though to be honest, even if one goes by the Bible, he still has no positive idea how old this world is). I didn't want to debate my beliefs, and basically stated that I trust God more than I trust man, and that I believe in the divinity of His word, this Book we came to call the Bible. I don't dispute that my spiritual beliefs are dogmatic - if I believe something to be an absolute truth, such as "2 plus 3 makes 5," I also can't help but be "dogmatic" if I refuse to believe the possible answer could be pi. When pressed further about my beliefs, I pointed out how many times scientists have been wrong over the centuries; for example, many of Aristotle's theories are now known to be butt-over-tea-kettle wrong, and yet he's still lauded as one of the grandfathers of science.

My friend's response was simply, "That wasn't science."

For a while, I thought that to be a silly and dodgy answer. But the more I thought about it, I realized my friend was right. No, Aristotle's misses weren't science. I believe God gave us science to study and better care for our environment, our bodies, and so forth - and being so, I believe true science, much like true religion, holds one true answer to our questions, even if man provides a myriad of blunders to try and explain them.
Man's wrongs don't render science null and void. Even now-defunct scientific theories that were widely held until just the 19th century - the Miasmatic theory of disease, Luminiferous aether, the immovability of Earth's continents, the "static universe" (if I've misspelled Miasmatic or Luminiferous, I apologize) - have been debunked and abandoned in droves, yet that doesn't make science a waste of time. And it didn't negate the many times scientists have been right to be somehow wrong.

Likewise, man's wrongs don't render my God or my faith in Jesus as the Messiah to be useless. The Westboro Baptist Churches, the false doctrines of Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and etc., are all against God's words, twisted doctrines that claim Him but are in direct opposition to His truth. Man's lies and evil actions don't render God's truth ineffective. Fred Phelps was to Christianity what Immanuel Velikovsky was to independent theory. The abominable "Phinehas Priesthood" is to Christianity what Cyrus Teed was to...to um, not-getting-electrocuted-and-developing-wildly-inaccurate-theories-about-the-planet.

If a person does something in the name of Christ that is actually against Christ - picketing funerals, condemning someone to hell while frothing at the mouth, banishing someone from attending their church because they've been divorced, etc. - this is not the command or love of Christ. Much like my friend's assertion that it was not "science" to believe the universe to be spherical and finite. Just because I misidentified that obsolete belief with science doesn't make it science.

A disproven theory is not science, much like hypocrisy is not Jesus.

I've always found the Bible to be in harmony with nature and science. Certainly the Bible acknowledges God's creation and sovereignty over these things (Psalm 147:8, Isaiah 5:6, Job chapters 38 and 39), which many dispute. I understand that. But, the Bible doesn't claim that angels dump buckets of water from the sky to make rain - it acknowledges rain as moisture and precipitation descending from clouds (Psalm 147:8, Proverbs 25:14, Ecclesiastes 11:3, etc.). The Bible doesn't claim mischievous sprites make flowers and grass in underground factories - it acknowledges that plants need seeds, rain, soil, and such to grow (Deuteronomy 32:2, Leviticus 26:4, Jesus' parable of the sower in Matthew chapter 13, etc.).
The Bible never described Earth as a flat center of the universe, but a planet suspended in space, when as yet no images from satellites and space stations existed (Job 26:7 - Job is, by the way, widely accepted, even among non-believing scholars, to be among, if not the, oldest recorded book of the Bible).
The Bible never claimed a fixed amount of stars or celestial bodies, as other early astronomers did - God alluded to an uncountable amount of stars when He told Abraham in Genesis 15:5, "'Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.' And He said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.'"

Likewise, when contrasted with myths, the Bible always makes a distinction between the natural and the Supernatural. Unlike in the myth of Icarus, where it was supposed that men are just somehow able to fly when they strap wax wings to themselves. I once read a Native American legend during which a warrior went to sleep and told his thigh (or in other versions, his excrement) to keep watch and speak to warn him if enemies approached - because apparently that's just how it works.
Not in the Bible. When miraculous and awesome events are described, they're always separated from natural occurrence and attributed to the supernatural work of an omnipotent and all-powerful God. This ranges from Creation to the plagues of Egypt to Jonah surviving in the belly of a large fish, and most importantly, to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. It's a Pasteur-like dismissal of spontaneous generation - the Bible teaches that the awesome doesn't "just happen."

Scientists and science may not always, nor have they always been, in harmony. And, those who claim the name of Christ are not in harmony with the truth of the Lord when they blaspheme His name with evil ideas and doctrines.
But truth can never be separated from itself.