“The wicked lie in wait for the righteous, intent on putting them to death.” (Psalm 37:32)
“For the life of a creature is in the blood.” (Leviticus 17:11)
Subdue and Rule is taking dominion in agreement with God and His way. Conquer and Dominate is taking dominion as opposed to God and His way. If we take dominion and exercise control godly, it’s life-giving to us and those around us because God is life’s source. But if we take dominion and exercise control counter to God, death is the inevitable result. Apart from God, everything manifests death. That’s why Conquer and Dominate always produces death.
Death, the Ultimate Conquer and Dominate
From the moment of the Fall, it didn’t take long for the perverted Subdue and Rule Mandate to erupt as Conquer and Dominate. In fact, it only takes eight verses into Genesis 4 where Cain smites Abel, Cain’s younger brother, who threatened Cain’s firstborn status by bringing a God-pleasing sacrifice, unlike Cain. But rather than changing his ways, farmer Cain changed the equation – permanently – by planting Abel in the ground. Cain’s only crop that season was punishment for Abel’s death and further separation from God.
What becomes clear from the beginning is that Conquer and Dominate ultimately leads to a form of death, either figurative or literal.
All manifestations of Conquer and Dominate are intended to eliminate anything from the equation that interferes with our drive for control and dominion. Since after the Fall, people are “fair game” within the scope of Conquer and Dominate’s control, eliminating people from the equation has become an option in our fallen world.
Under the Edenic system of working within one’s domain, the idea of exerting control over people or removing them from one’s way was unheard of. Initially, no person had the right to interfere with another’s little slice of God’s domain for which they were responsible. That is unless they were assigned or given permission to work that domain cooperatively. You know, like Adam and Eve cultivating and keeping Eden in shape and protecting it from defilement. But then… “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?” (Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Once our dominion drive was unleashed from God’s constraints, humanity turned from cooperation to crushing the competition. First, in Genesis 4, it was Cain killing Abel, followed by Cain’s fear that someone would kill him, and rightly so. Cain knew nothing of Eden’s perfect environment and eternal life. He only knew about the outside world, the effect of death, and how tenuous life was. Cain’s word show he knew what humanity was like, filled with men like himself who had no reservations about using power to enforce their domain as he had with his brother.
Not long after that, Lamech killed a man in Genesis 4:23. Then came Tubal-Cain. Some rabbis interpret Tubal-Cain’s bronze and iron tools in Genesis 4:22 as weapons of war. Their interpretation makes sense since Tubal Cain’s name means “offspring of Cain” (Key Dictionary of the Hebrew Bible), and Cain’s line seems to have quite the vein of Conquer and Dominate bloodlust coursing through it.
Death is the absolute endpoint for Conquer and Dominate. When a hunter kills a charging rhino, there’s no way the rhino will ever rise again to harm the hunter. By killing the charging beast, the hunter has gained absolute dominion over the rhino as the victor in their death match.
Sadly, so it is with human history.
Wars are a nation’s, kingdom’s, and empire’s highest-level deployment of Conquer and Dominate. It’s all about fighting until the enemy surrenders and utterly submits or is destroyed. General George Patton captured the goal of war in a speech given just before he left Africa in 1943. “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” That’s Conquer and Dominate.
War is collective Conquer and Dominate ripping across the world stage, grasping for complete control by overwhelming one’s competition, permanently, if needed.
We even make games out of Conquer and Dominate. Boxers fight until their opponent is physically subdued. One of the most extreme forms of physical combat, MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) Fights, are brutal, and Lethwei (Burmese Bareknukle Boxing) is the most vicious version because hands are only wrapped, and the rules allow for headbutting and other destructive moves. “The only way to win is by knockout or because of an injury and the inability to fight anymore” (lethweiworld.com/lethwei-rules). Sounds like fun, huh?
But Conquering and Dominating other people, especially causing their death, was never God’s plan. Our Subdue and Rule Mandate never applied to other people. But because we’re fallen, sinful, and perverted people at heart, we need God’s boundaries spelled out to prevent us from harming others out of instinctual domination.
For example, when Yehovah saved Israel from their Conquered and Dominated Egyptian enslavement, He first wrote out the boundaries for national life called the Ten Commandments. The top of the list was, “I am God, and there are no others. I’m the One who calls the shots because I’m your King.” (Okay, there’s a little elaboration here, but that really is the essence of Command #1). The rest of the Ten Commandments lay the ground rules for life with their King and one another – “Don’t make idols, don’t take God’s name vainly, keep the Sabbath, honor Dad and Mom, don’t kill…”.
Uh, wait a minute. That’s not right. It’s “Don’t murder,” not “Don’t kill.” The Hebrew word is ratzach (to murder), not harag (to kill). Under certain clear conditions, people are allowed to take human life. That’s called justified killing. But without those clear conditions, the taking of human life is unauthorized by God and is murder. Period. No excuses.
God-authorized, justified killing via our dominion drive is Subdue and Rule. Take self-defense, for example. Suppose you’re being attacked by someone intent on harming or killing you. Protecting your domain (your body and life) demands you neutralize the threat, which sometimes requires subduing and ruling with extreme prejudice, that is, killing them.
But outside of God’s will, the unauthorized killing of a person is murder, the ultimate form of Conquer and Dominate. Sadly, Conquer and Dominate’s unauthorized-by-God murder has a horrible grasp on the United States and has created a culture of death.
Abortion.
Most abortions fall under the Conquer and Dominate rubric. Generally speaking, nearly every abortion is fallen humanity’s attempt to control God’s domain and His design for humanity.
Before I go on, please, let me be clear. Aborting a preborn child is sometimes medically necessary to save the mother’s life. That said, when I talk about abortion from now on, I’m referring to elective abortions that fall outside the “saving a life” principle. Furthermore, I believe all abortions are tragic, especially to God, who intends to bring forth the person whose soul He created and imparted into the developing child’s body.
God’s command to humanity to produce offspring (Genesis 1:28) was second only to “Do it My way only” (Genesis 2:17). Humans having a part in bringing forth more humans reflects God’s creative nature, which we all share, and producing children is foundational to the Lord’s plans to populate His world. Making children is the most profoundly intimate expression of God’s oneness within His design for humanity.
In this present darkness, God’s way is not to abort preborn children unless absolutely necessary and to be performed only within His parameters. Again, abortion falls under Subdue and Rule only when it’s medically necessary to save a life. But when abortion is used for reasons other than saving a life, the procedure crosses the line into Conquer and Dominate as unjustified killing.
Abortion is Conquer and Dominate against God and His domain by destroying His image, both in substance (since we mirror Him) and function (as His representatives on earth). Abortion is Conquer and Dominate against human beings because it’s someone taking absolute dominion over another person’s life by ending it. What makes abortion especially egregious is that the mother who should be nurturing and protecting the preborn child is abdicating her role as caregiver and allowing, even facilitating her child’s death. Every person who assists in the abortion procedure or facilitates it in any way is complicit in murder.
Please don’t get mad at me. That’s how our justice system would address a murderer and any accomplice.
The entire abortion industry is Conquer and Dominate on steroids. No matter how the abortion apologists try to sugar-coat their arguments, the sole purpose of the abortion industry is to cause a human being’s death and profit from it.
What caused the Conquer and Dominate abortion industry to overwhelm our nation to 66 million+ abortions based on the National Right To Life and Guttmacher Institute’s statistics (nrlc.org/uploads/factsheets/FS01AbortionintheUS.pdf)?
The baseline reason is spiritual. When life is rejected, death results. When people reject God, He gives them over to their sin and its consequences, death (Romans 6:23). In the previous part, I showed how the United States began turning its back on God during the 1960s. The Sexual Revolution swept the nation almost immediately in the late 60s (Conquering and Dominating the sex drive). Shortly after that came the Stonewall Riot (1969), leading to the rise of the Homosexual Rights movement (Conquering and Dominating the sex drive and perverting it), and in 1973 the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which opened the door to legalized abortion (Conquering and Dominating God’s domain as the sole authority over life). When our nation abandoned God, perversion moved in, followed by death.
The leading merchant of death via abortion today is Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Planned Parenthood began in 1942 as “an advocate for education and personal liberties in the areas of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health care.” To understand Planned Parenthood’s nature and mission, we must look to Planned Parenthood’s roots in the birth control movement led by Margaret Sanger.
Margaret Sanger (1879 –1966) was the “founder of the birth control movement in the United States and an international leader in the field. She is credited with originating the term birth control” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Sanger was “a feminist who believed in every woman’s right to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and she devoted herself to removing the legal barriers to publicizing the facts about contraception” (Ibid.). Her motivation came from what she observed as an “obstetrical nursing on the Lower East Side of New York City, where she witnessed the relationships between poverty, uncontrolled fertility, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and deaths from botched illegal abortions” (Ibid.).
While we can appreciate her motive to help people, a lot of ungodly baggage accompanied Sanger’s ideas and efforts, most notably her position on eugenics.
Eugenics is “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition” (Merriam-Webster). From the Subdue and Rule Mandate perspective, Conquer and Dominate is writ large on eugenics. Notice that eugenics’ definition refers to “controlled selective breeding.” All justifications aside, eugenics aims to control reproduction among humanity to “improve” desirable characteristics. Conversely, this also implies weeding out undesirable characteristics.
In 1920 “Margaret Sanger publicly states that ‘birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.’ Despite disagreeing with some of the ideas of the eugenicists, who were part of the mainstream scientific establishment of the day, Sanger sought legitimacy for her controversial demand for birth control by aligning with them.” (ourbodiesourselves.org/subject-area/contraception-and-abortion)
What determines desirable and undesirable characteristics? Are those characteristics physical like birth defects, acquired disabilities, ethnicity, or “race” (as if racial traits can be clearly defined)? Are they based on mental capacity or fitness? Or are those characteristics immaterial, like values, economic status, spiritual beliefs, or any other subjective metric? If left up to people, such determinations are never objective.
Even worse, who gets to determine another human being’s grounds for termination?
To be blunt, it’s a short, perverted slippery slope between “selective breeding” to “selective termination.”
The Conquer and Dominate eugenics movement of the early 1900s led to Hitler’s Holocaust, where the Nazis justified terminating vast numbers of people, primarily Jews, based on the Nazis’ assessment of undesirability or defectiveness. Dehumanizing became the necessary step to move from identification to termination. Once the undesirable qualities or nature had been identified based on mental or physical capacity, race or ethnicity, or sexual preferences, the Nazis dehumanized their targets. Once that was accomplished, it became easy to murder them.
Eugenics was the justification, dehumanizing was the process, and the Holocaust was the means to Hitler’s Conquer and Dominate goal – death.
The same holds today with Planned Parenthood. Only its targets aren’t limited to defects and undesirable traits. Simply being unwanted qualifies a preborn child for death. Dehumanizing is still a crucial part of the process. Planned Parenthood argues that the preborn child is just a “ball of tissue” or referred to as an embryo or fetus, or a “potential” person, never a baby, child, or anything other truth that makes the preborn child sound alive. After all, how can you be accused of murder if no “life” is present?
That’s their deceptive tactic and the delusion Planned Parenthood foists on the public.
Planned Parenthood is the natural extension of the Sexual Revolution. As a whore riding a beast, Planned Parenthood rides the back of the Sexual Revolution. Planned Parenthood’s Sex Education efforts are intended to push its agenda and increase sexual activity, which statistically increases pregnancies which ultimately increases their bottom line from abortions.
Despite their claims to care for women and families, Planned Parenthood’s focus and income stream should cause them to be renamed Planned People-cide. (For recent information on Planned Parenthood’s statistics and financials, see heritage.org/life/commentary/planned-parenthoods-overdue-annual-report-finally-out-heres-what-you-should-know.)
“But what about cases of rape or incest? Doesn’t that justify the need for abortion?” I researched the reasons women generally give for pursuing abortion to see what percentage of those reasons reflected Conquering and Dominating a preborn child or a case of Subdue and Rule needed by a woman in danger of losing her life.
After reading the reasons given in two pro-abortion articles, I noted the respondents’ overwhelming concerns had more to do with personal motivations than health issues. The women polled were concerned about finances, timing, partner issues, other responsibilities, mental or emotional health, inability to provide, immaturity, influences by family and friends, and health issues. Both articles noted health issues in 12% of the respondents, but that also included mental health. Here’s the kicker. The premier argument for abortion, cases of rape and incest, came in extremely low – rape, less than 1%, and incest, less than .5%.
The fact that the overwhelming percentages were leaning toward any reason other than the mother’s life demonstrates how people can justify their way to Conquer and Dominate another’s life to benefit their own. How far the human race has fallen from Eden!
In response to the last two cases, I know those are terrible situations. But to those caught in those situations, I plead, “Why punish the child for the sin of the father?” And in all cases, I maintain that there is a multitude of qualified, loving families who would gladly accept any child to adopt and raise as their own.
Therefore, there is absolutely no need for the murderous abortion industry. But Planned Parenthood continues with the help of their Conquer and Dominate political partners.
Infanticide
The abortion battle has extended beyond the womb with “after-birth” abortion, allowing a newborn child to die without needed care. Let’s not mince words or play dumb. After-birth abortion is infanticide.
In justifying infanticide, I recently read a disturbing paper from the Journal of Medical Ethics (Melbourne, Australia, 2011) arguing for permission to kill newborn babies. Seriously. The authors’ abstract is as follows:
“Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled” (jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261, italics author).
Again, who gets to set the standard for the moral status of a fetus or newborn as actual persons – infallible, perfect God, or fallible, imperfect humans? God’s morality is absolutely just, and human morality is situationally fluid. Sadly, history proves we’re more than willing to shift our moral stance depending (usually) on how that shift would benefit us personally.
The entire paper is the authors’ attempt to justify infanticide by dehumanizing the infant. The human embryo or fetus is not a person at all, and it is, at best, a “potential person,” as the argument goes. The paper’s authors extend dehumanization past birth to wipe out any objection based on personhood, from infant to potential human, thus justifying not calling the procedure infanticide but after-birth abortion. Read it yourself:
“If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all.” According to the authors, what determines when a person is a person is “the point at which they will be able to make aims and appreciate their own life.”
Well, there’s a solid moral baseline! Their argument isn’t based on God’s omniscience but on their intellectual reasoning, which is obviously far above God’s intellect. (“You shall be as God,” anyone?)
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22).
Going on, “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.” This statement is stunning. Although an infant is alive by any reasonable objective scientific measure, the authors declare it may “lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
Therefore, the moral status of an infant is the same as that of a fetus, a non-person with only the “potential” of becoming a person. Their conclusion is jaw-dropping because the authors relegate the justification for murdering an infant to the moral determination of another human being – and we all know how that turned out during the Holocaust.
The authors’ position is nuclearized Conquer and Dominate; according to God’s standard of morality, this is pure evil.
Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
Sadly, Conquering and Dominating another person’s life (which remains their absolute domain) is not limited to ending a preborn or after-birth child’s life. The culture of death unleashed since the Roe v. Wade decision has also promoted and produced other attacks on human life on a societal and cultural level – Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.
Euthanasia is “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy,” and Assisted Suicide is “suicide committed by someone with assistance from another person” (Merriam Webster).
Whether by one’s own hand or with the help of another person, ending a human life is an act of Conquer and Dominate unless it falls within God’s moral parameters, and like abortion, there are times when “pulling the plug” is an act of mercy.
Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide are complicated and sensitive topics to address. While I’ve observed that most reasons for abortion are less than justifiable, the aspect of human suffering as it directly relates to ending a life is crucial to take into prayerful consideration. I want to point you to gotquestions.org/euthanasia.html as a fundamental, foundational presentation about the subjects. The gotquestions.org article’s point is this:
“God has the final say over death (see 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54–56; Hebrews 2:9, 14–15; Revelation 21:4). Euthanasia and assisted suicide are man’s attempts to usurp that authority from God…” and “We should never seek to prematurely end a life, but neither must we go to extraordinary means to preserve a life. To actively hasten death is wrong; to passively withhold treatment can also be wrong; but to allow death to occur naturally in a terminally ill person is not necessarily wrong.”
What makes the difference between Subdue and Rule and Conquer and Dominate regarding these two end-of-life challenges? Simple. As with any other aspect regarding a human being’s domain and their autonomy before God – “Does my decision or action infringe or encroach upon, or usurp God’s authority and moral guidelines over that person’s domain or my interaction with them?”
That’s the critical question that arcs across all domains whether Culture and Society, Government and Politics, Environment and Education, Technology, Business, Sports and Arts and Entertainment, and Religion that determines whether I’m Subduing and Ruling God’s way or Conquering and Dominating my way.
What we’ve seen so far is how humanity’s Conquer and Dominate drive for dominion in Society and Culture has challenged God’s domain regarding Sex (one man/one woman marriage v. all other expressions), Design (male-female differences vs. the transgender movement), and Life (promoting life/justifiable killing v. murder). In the next part, we’ll examine how the two approaches have affected our Government and Politics.
Yes, we’re going to talk politics.
Sources:
Patton, George, quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/24/war/
Prager, Dennis, Do Not Murder, youtube.com/watch?v=0RENPaY043o
Lethwei Rules, lethweiworld.com/lethwei-rules
Number of abortions in the United States, 1973-2019, nrlc.org/uploads/factsheets/FS01AbortionintheUS.pdf, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/11/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-u-s-2/
Planned Parenthood, britannica.com/topic/Planned-Parenthood-organization
Margaret Sanger, britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Sanger
Eugenics, Merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics
History of contraception and abortion, ourbodiesourselves.org/subject-area/contraception-and-abortion
What are the different reasons to have an abortion? medicalnewstoday.com/articles/reasons-for-abortions#reasons-for-abortion
Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives, 2005, guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-women-have-abortions-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives
Assisted Suicide, Merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assisted%20suicide
Euthanasia, Merriam-webster.com/dictionary/euthanasia
Pastor Jay Christianson
The Truth Barista, Frothy Thoughts