Recently the attention of the country was riveted to the story of two young college sweethearts who conceived a baby and then upon the birth of this baby they allegedly murdered the newborn. Although our ability to feel any sense of shock has been diminished by ever more frequent revelations of abnormal and deviant behavior, to our credit we still managed to register a certain shock at these turn of events. We openly wondered how two "nice" college kids could stoop to murdering their own baby. We shouldn't have been surprised!

In our society life has in recent years progressively become more and more cheap. The tragedy of two college lovers murdering their own baby is only one example of a general cheapening of life that has occurred within the last generation.

For example, over the last 20 years we have aborted some 30 million babies from their mother's womb. Our laws reveal a blatant moral schizophrenia when our president rules that it is quite legal and OK to kill a baby as it is on its way out of the birth canal but he doesn't care to explain why it is all of a sudden murder if two teens do the same thing to the baby three minutes later.

Then I could mention Dr. Death, Jack Kevorkian who now champions the cause not only of suicide but especially of physician assisted suicide.

Or we could bring up some of the recent court cases where murder clearly occurred and yet by all accounts the jury has apparently let the defendant literally get away with murder.

Life is being treated more cheaply every day. Why? I will tell you why.

What is a human being? There are two very different answers that you might hear to this question. The Bible says we are creatures that God made especially in his image. Jesus says that we are of much more value than the birds of the air. That is one answer. There is a second answer to this question. This answer says that a human being is a rather complex animal who descended from the monkeys, that we are a chance mixture of the right molecules and chemicals that ages ago emerged from the primordial slime and climbed into the trees and viola! - here we are!

Now the answer we give to this question ... will determine precisely what we are willing to do to one. What do we do with guinea pigs and mice in this country? Should we begin to think of humans as intrinsically no different than pigs or mice, we will do to one another what we do to pigs and mice, the same things that Hitler and Stalin, neither of whom believed in God, did to the people of their day. Is this too far back for us to remember? "As a man thinks in..."

How could Hitler exterminate millions of Christians and Jews? How could the communists kill and torture over a hundred million of their own people? Would you have difficulty killing a rat? Would it be a problem for you to step on a roach? Think of humans as no more than a glorified roach or rat and it is no problem to treat them as you would a roach or a rat.

It is no coincidence that our attitude toward life has cheapened to the extent that we have rejected or ignored the fact of God. As we in the post-Christian west abandon our Judeo-Christian heritage, life is becoming cheap once again. In the last few decades the secular humanists have done everything possible to remove any thought or consideration of God from the public sphere. Schools are pressured to not even mention the subject of God or to even sing religious songs anymore. Children are systematically taught from k-12 that a human being is really nothing more than a glorified monkey. As we are taught and as we believe that we are nothing more than an animal, it should be no surprise to anyone that we will treat each other more and more like animals, and get away with it. There will be more cases like the college couple, and more gruesome.

This is one reason it is for our good to believe in and to honor God. It is just as the Bible teaches. "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" When we devalue God we devalue human life. When we honor God, we give value to human life.