To the editor:

In the July 16 Lawrence Journal-World, the Rev. David Livingston cautions us against taking good ideas too far. Such ideas, he says, are morality and the sanctity of life. According to the Christianity I learned as a youth, we should be more concerned with being moral than we almost always are. (That is why we are all sinners.) Has Christianity changed? Apparently God’s truth is not immutable.

More interesting is Livingston’s assertion that “the question of whether violence against an innocent is ever justified should always carry an immediate answer: ‘No!'” Abortion is violence against an innocent. So Livingston’s assertion implies that abortion is morally wrong. But when he speaks of taking the idea of the sanctity of life too far he clearly is thinking of abortion. This is a contradiction.

On these issues it is difficult to find positions with which most people agree and also to avoid contradicting oneself. Readers of this letter might wish to contemplate how they reconcile (if they do) condemning Islamic terrorism because innocents are killed, not condemning the Allied Forces’ bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo in World War II, and favoring abortion choice.

Don Marquis,

Lawrence