The former, naturally. Kind of hard to cite a negative.
As far as I know the history of government and religion is so entertwined that at the beginnings of history they were essentially merged.
Today we seek to seperate the two, and part of the problem is that even though the power behind ancient government was “god” still many of the problem areas ancient criminal law sought to correct have a secular as well as a religious basis even though they were religious governments.
Just because the ancients said “god said so” doesn’t mean that the same things shouldn’t, to a large extent, be outlawed in secular society.
The ten commandments, even the first four largely also have secular reasons behind them.
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Thou shall have no gods before Me. *To remain culturally relevant, we first must acknowledge that since God was the government to the people who wrote this, this is the equivalent to modern treason. I beleive treason to have a sufficient secular basis to be enforcable upon others to protect the rights of the people of a nation. Of course to likewise be culturally relevant we have to see the modern equivalent as “Thou shall have no nation before ______” *
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Thou shall have no graven images. This one largely has no secular equivalent. Remember the Hebrews had no visual art due to this prohibition
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Thou shall not take My name in Vain. Secular equivalents have arisen many times in repressive countries–“thou shalt not speak against the state.” Americans have rejected this in favor of free speech, but an appeal to religion isn’t necessary for it to make sense; as in, we will maintain control by not allowing seditious speech, and America has even embraced this from time to time
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Remember the Sabbath. The details of this command are rooted in resting. Today we have legislated rest in a number of ways without appeal to religion, such as 40 hour work weeks. Blue laws have also passed constitutional muster due to the fact that humans perform better if we’re not slave-driven 18/7.
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Honor your father and mother. I cannot think of a modern equivalent in our modern law, to most of us it’s just plain decent behavior to respect your parents; of course some aren’t too worthy of respect. Still we need no religious appeal for this to make sense
6, 7, 8, 9) thoushalt not murder, commit adultery, steal or bear false witness. We have criminalized all of these things and have secular reasons for so doing; Our theory of human rights forbids these things (although in about half the states adultery has been repealed)
- Thou shalt not covet. Well we do not criminalize desire, and I can’t think of a secular reason to do so.
8 of the 10 have a secular reason for existing as well.
I think it is perfectly idotic that just because these (mostly good) ideas once appeared in a religious text that they should not be implemented “because it’s religious.”
There is a great deal of overlap between secular and religious good.
The clearest is Leviticus 18:22, which is grouped with all of the sexual purity laws against incest and bestiality. “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.” Admittedly that seems to leave lesbians in the clear; I don’t know if female homosexuality is specifically addressed in ancient Judaism or not.
I meant abortion, not homosexuality.
Oops, sorry, somehow I substituted homosexuality for abortion. My bad.
Here’s one cite: Josephus wrote (Against Apion, 2.202) "“The [Jewish] Law orders all the offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the foetus; a woman convicted of this is regarded as an infanticide, because she destroys a soul and diminishes the race.”
Other information I’ve read indicates that abortion was permitted in certain situations when necessary for medical reasons such as protecting the life of the mother. The Wikipedia article on “Judaism and Abortion” makes this point, although it doesn’t seem to be well cited. The article does assert that abortion was not seen as equal to murder, however.
If the parents or all ancestors didn’t exist first there could be no conception, so life was passed on to the ova makeing it possible for it to become a person. LIfe began eons ago. with out plant life or other animal life there would be no human life, for there would be nothing to sustain it. Humans depend on tother life to keep existing.The sperm and ova contain life,but it takes tome for the egg and sperm to get to the place of personhood.
An embryo can be frozen for an indefinit time, so that would mean the soul freezes too. and either it does, or it jumps in at another time,and there is no proof of a soul, just belief and belief is not fact!
IF the embryo has a soul, why would it have to be frozen or “jump to another time?” What would it even mean for a soul to be frozen?
And of course it is a belief. I don’t think anyone (here at least) claims to have proof.
Also, I am not taking a position on whether an embryo has a soul or not.
If it wasn’t frozen that would mean iether the soul wasn’t there or it came in later. Many embryos are frozen for several years. And if the soul wasn’t there it would have a whole different way of looking at soul. Of course if the soul is spirit then it would mean the soul was lingering around a frozen embryo. It does raise a lot of questions about weither it is a person or not. We do know a person cannot be frozen for years and then thaw out. A very small person can go into a state of hibernation for a short time(and that has happened) and they were revived, but they couldn’t be frozen for years and then survive.
Since we don’t know what the properties of a soul are, you have know way of knowing whether they can continue to exist in a frozen embryo for years or not. Why couldn’t one?
It doesn’t really matter anyway - the body/soul duality is a corruption of orthodox Christian theology anyway, which makes no distinction. The body is not a vessel for the soul; the body and the soul are both essential parts of the person and do not exist apart from each other. In the resurrection, people are given new bodies; they do not exist as incorporeal spirits.
That kind of reinforces the idea that abortion is okay, IMHO. Would you agree?
Uh… no? Josephus says that women who aborted were accused of infanticide, and other sources indicate that abortion was only acceptable to save the mother’s life. Wikipedia claims that abortion wasn’t considered equivalent to murder, but that hardly makes it okay; infact it implies that it was considered a crime, just less less grave than killing another person.
That’s just it: that implies that a foetus isn’t a person.
Are you suggesting that infants weren’t considered persons? Josephus did report that abortion was regarded as a form of infanticide, after all.
That is belief …not fact. One cannot freeze a baby for years, but one can freeze an embryo, nd many are frozen for several years, I don’t recall the year limit, but there is a limit. An embryo doesn’t yet have a body,but if it has soul and is never thawed out or implanted in a womb it seems to me there would be no body to unite with or if it can be ressurected then the embryo should be thankful that they never aquired a body because now they could live in eternal bliss with out the problems of a fully developed person!
Josephus was just another person with his own ideas. medicine at that time was far from want it is today. They thought that a person with seizers were possessed by a devil!
I’m not claiming any facts here. But everything you’ve asserted about the ability (or inability) of souls to inhabit embryos is your own personal speculation. Even among people who believe souls exist, there is wide differences of belief as to when ensoulments happens. If it happens at conception (which is a common view), then a frozen ebryo would have one.
Don’t come back at me and say “that’s just a belief.” I know that’s just a belief, that’s the point! You can’t logically determine what souls can or cannot do. Saying they can’t inhabit a frozen embryo is like saying.. I don’t know, identical twins each contain a half-soul because the zygote split after conception. It’s just making up rules.
How is that relevant? I was asked for a cite that abortion violated Jewish law in Jesus’ time. I provided a quote from Josephus that says “Abortion is considered infanticide and is treated as a crime.” Those aren’t his ideas, that’s historical evidence that such a law existed. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the medical knowledge of the time was. Again you’re refuting some kind of argument that no one is making.
Clearly they weren’t, because the penalty for abortion was not the same as the penalty for murder.
If abortion wasn’t considered equal to murder (and Josephus doesn’t say that; Wikipedia does without a source) – Josephus indicates it was equal to infanticide. I suppose that leads us to conclude that infanticide was a lesser crime than murder, and maybe it was.
The general point was (to get back to the point of this semi-hijack) that around Jesus’ time, abortion was considered a form of infanticide (if not murder) and we have no recod of Jesus addressing it. We might assume that Jesus agreed with the law since he did not contradict it, but we don’t really have any way to be sure.
The fact that the only penalty for causing a woman to miscarry was a fine seems to suggest that it was a far lesser crime.
The larger point is that the basis of pro-life arguments - that the Bible forbids abortion - are nonsense.