If you don’t understand why that is wrong, why haven’t you killed every person who ever bothered you?
I mean, people will argue that fetuses are not human, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that, if they are human, it’s still okay, since killing people who inconvenience you is perfectly fine.
Laziness. Besides, I’m very easy-going by nature.
“Inconvenience”, as it is being used here, is an extraordinarily broad term. It apparently covers everything from people who cut in line ahead of you at the supermarket to people who are growing inside your body.
Which, except for the Amish (as far as I am aware), no christian religion has ever held as an absolute.
Christians have done a whole lot of killing in God’s name. Sometimes explicitly in God’s name (the Crusades or Inquisition leap to mind).
Not sure I’d rest your argument on that one.
I usually avoid discussions like this, simply because I’ve learned that they’re usually of little value. That is, the instigators are generally more interested in painting caricatures and taking potshots, and they are decidedly less interested in honestly understanding their opponents. However, I would like to make a few brief points.
First, we all know that the morality of an action is not determined by its outcome alone. Quite the contrary; when discussing morality, the intent of the action is of decidedly more importance that its consequence. For example, one can decide to give $1000 to charity, and that would normally be considered a good thing. However, if one’s intention is to be featured on the TV news rather than to help the needy, then this cannot be considered a virtuous act. Rather, it is an act of selfishness, made up to look like an act of charity.
How does this relate to abortion? Quite simply, people do not normally have abortions with the intent of sending these children to heaven. Rather, they generally have less lofty objectives. Thus, arguing that the children would enter heaven is not sufficient to transform abortion into a virtuous act – a “good thing,” in the OP’s words.
Second, the OP says,
“[T]he sort of woman that would abort her baby is a baaaaaaaaaaaad woman, so if she carried her child to term, that child wouldn’t grow up as a real, true Christian.”
This is also untrue. First of all, while abortion is considered a sin, this does not mean that a post-abortive woman is automatically considered to be “a baaaaaaaaaaaad woman.” The woman is considered to be sinful, but only in the sense that all people are sinful. In fact, Christians recognize that in times of duress or great temptation, people often do things that are sinful. This is why Christians speak about the sinful nature and the depravity of the human condition. (In fact, the Bible is quite candid about the moral failings of many of its greatest heroes, such as Solomon, David, Abraham, and even Saints Peter and Paul.)
Furthermore, even if the woman were considered to be “a baaaaaaaaaaaad woman,” it does not logically follow that the child “wouldn’t grow up as a real, true Christian.” At best, one might argue that the child is less likely to receive the religious instruction that he or she needs – and even that is not a foregone conclusion. The OP is painting post-abortive women as though they are comic book villians, which is not what Christianity teaches that they are.
Finally, when considering the consequences of an action, one must consider the entirety of these actions. People here are acting as though sending the child to heaven is the only consequence of an abortion, and are thus using it as the sole basis for evaluating its morality. Quite simply, this is foolish. Quite simply, you don’t know what the consequences of killing this child would be. This child could grow up to be a mass murderer, or he/she could become the greatest evangelist the world has ever seen. This child could become a common street thug, or he/she could wind up curing cancer and AIDS.
In other words, you don’t know what the complete consequence would be. That is why one is not justified in saying, “Ah, by killing this child, I am sending it to heaven. God would surely approve, so let’s do it!” There is a massively tangled web of consequences that are beyond one’s understanding, which is why this decision is kept out of our hands. That is, Christianity teaches that God has a purpose for each life, and it is not up to man to decide that these lives should not even be given a chance to get started.
traditional Catholic view is that little children go to Heaven if they are baptized. They even had instructions for emergency baptism by midwives, in the event of miscarriage during birth. Apparently, nobody baptizes the foetuses at Planned Parenthood clinics :eek:
How do you reconcile that with:
There are probably more things but I think that is a good start.
Is it just we have a compelling reason to see a person born and after that all bets are off?
I am not taking pot shots. I think these are relevant questions.
Or to put it another way, Fundamentalists tend not to be Utilitarians.
See post #14.
And why would they?
People can be bastards? What is their to reconcile? I’m pretty sure that Christianity tends to say war is only just if it’s in self defense or defense of another, self defense is ok because the person is defending himself from being a victim, and that causing famines is an evil act.
I didn’t claim they argued or believed this. I’m pointing out that they’re ignoring the implications of their belief system.
Dear Omg a Black Conservative, feel free to call me ‘Omg a born-again Christian who forgot to turn his brain off.’
Forty years of hanging around Christians of various stripes, including plenty of fundies (hell, I even taught at an evangelical Christian college for five years) has provided me plenty of substantiation that the cosmology of the Left Behind series, or at least the two pieces of it I rely on here, is widely held among conservative Christians. They largely believe that most people won’t be saved (in fact, right now, fundies are up in arms about Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” which hypothesizes near-universal salvation: fundies by and large hate that idea), and they also largely believe that kids who die before reaching the age of accountability will be saved as well. (You’ll get a range of views as to what the age of accountability is.) But if you believe that persons must make a commitment to Christ in this life to be saved for eternity, assuming they’re old enough to comprehend what they’re doing by making that commitment, then they’re left with two options when a 3 year old gets killed in a traffic accident: they can believe the 3 year old is automatically going to heaven, or they can believe the 3 year old is automatically going to hell. Even most fundies aren’t hardhearted enough to believe the latter - now claiming that would be a strawman, because while there are some fundies who believe that, IME they’re definitely the exception.
Now, what was that about a strawman?
That’s a whole debate of its own. Though I agree with you on this point, I think it’s an uphill argument. To put it in the language of statistics, God’s foreknowledge constituting predestination must be granted the status of being the null hypothesis, that is assumed true until disproven.
I’d point out that even with respect to more prosaic moral issues, outcomes matter. And here, the difference in outcomes is so great that it’s hard to imagine how intent could counterbalance that difference. If someone’s in hell for eternity (assuming you believe in that sort of thing), then they’re in hell for eternity. How can it matter that they went there for someone else’s right reasons? It’s like trying to balance an integer against the cardinality of the continuum.
Yes, RTFirefly, outcome does matter. As I said though, one must consider the totality of the outcome, not just taking one aspect in isolation. Frankly, you may decide that it’s best to snuff out a particular life before it’s even been given a chance, but as I emphasized, that’s an action that’s borne out of ignorance. You don’t know what the consequences of this person’s life will be one year from now, twenty years from now, or a hundred years from now.
Do you remember the Ray Bradbury story, A Sound of Thunder? Or the movie Back to the Future? Or perhaps It’s A Wonderful Life? Or even the Star Trek episodes, Tomorrow is Yesterday and The City on the Edge of Forever? While fictional, each one of those stories emphasizes that little actions can have consequences beyond what we can possibly imagine.
That’s why it’s fallacious to decide that it’s best to send some little child off to heaven before he or she can experience anything of life. That’s simply not a decision that you or I are adequately prepared to make – not with our severely limited perspectives of the world and its future. As I said, what if it turns out that this person would become a great soul-winning evangelist? Or perhaps this person’s son, or grandson, or distance ancestor? Or perhaps this child would influence history in other, more subtle and unpredictable ways. Is it not conceivable that God – someone who sees more of time and space that you can possible imagine – would consider it unwise to end the life of this child before it is given a chance?
And so Christianity teaches that this decision lies in the hands of a sovereign God, and not in the hands of some mortal with a microscopic view of the world. Some of us like to pride ourselves on our intellectual prowess, failing to realize just how little we can see and how little we know.
As for intentionality, my point is simple. When an action is committed using wrongful methods, then it is wrong regardless of the outcome, no matter how wonderful those results may be. So you sent a child to heaven? The final outcome may be beneficial – perhaps even wonderfully so – but no sane person would go around pinning a medal on you. That’s why one cannot pretend that the sending of children to heaven would suddenly make abortion a laudable act – not when the growth of heaven is far from their intentions.
Why can’t Christianity just say “live your life according to such-and-such guidelines and you can have contentment and inner peace despite the natural and random pain existence inflicts” ? Why bother investing all this additional mysticism with heaven and angels and junk?
That’s an interesting question, Bryan Ekers, but as I think you realize, it strays rather far from the OP’s question. The OP asked whether abortion should be considered a laudable act, based on the teachings of fundamentalist Christianity.
Now, if you want to ask, “Why do Christians need to believe in heaven, and angels, and all that stuff?” – well, you’re in abundant company. I think that it’s clearly far beyond the scope of the OP’s question though, which uses Christian teachings as its premises. So really, I think that it’s a rather poor response to the discussion on hand.
(BTW, do you remember what I said earlier – about how I tend to avoid discusssions like these? I said that they tend to be unfocused, and that the participants tend to be more interested in taking potshots than in generally seeking answers or understanding their opponents’ viewpoints. With all due respect, this here is a prime example of what I was talking about.)
Yeah, well, there are several religion threads going, I just randomly picked this one. It’s not like angels-dancing-on-pins discussions hinge on what kind of pin it is.
As an incidental note, somewhere in this or the other threads I saw a link to an earlier discussion in which OMG used the “Fatima miracle” as evidence, but was completely unresponsive to any follow-up questions about how 100,000 Portuguese could see the sun dancing around the sky but 20 million people in the rest of Europe did not.
It might be, given the fundie premises.
Something like 55 million fetuses have been aborted in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade. Given the fundie assumptions, all 55 million went to heaven. If they’d lived, given those same assumptions, let’s say 20 million get saved, and 35 million don’t. (In 40+ years as a Christian, I have rarely seen guesstimates that more than 1/3 of us get saved, from those who look at the world this way.) Among the saved children, that’s going to have to be one hell of an evangelist that we missed out on, to even up the balance!
But even if it does, the logic is horrific: tens of millions would have had to spend eternity in hell who would otherwise be in heaven, so that others somewhere down the road could be saved and spend eternity in heaven, who would otherwise have spent eternity in hell.
I guess you have to be a fundie to be comfortable with this sort of divine bargain. Yeah, sure, the bargain may work out, from a net-souls-saved accounting, but that’s one cold, callous, ruthless accounting nonetheless. Sure, God can see more of time and space than I can, by a factor of whatever you care to name. But I can’t see love in this equation, even though I am capable of seeing that.
Sorry, but given the fundie assumptions, it’s still the right thing to do. Send a kid to heaven, and let the future take care of itself. If these are the rules God made, and we can divine them, then God must want us to heed their logic, and in any event, he’s supposedly capable of redeeming our bad choices. If he wants a great evangelist, he’ll raise one up, no matter what we do, right?
Yes, it sounds ruthless - of course it does. But the problem doesn’t lie wth my proposed course of action; it lies in the ruthlessness and heartlessness of the fundie God that allegedly made these cosmic rules.
Of course, I don’t believe in the fundie God. That God would be evil, if he existed - which I believe he doesn’t. As I’ve said, the very possibility of such a moral calculus is a wrongness; I don’t believe it exists in the universe of God-that-is, as opposed to God-as-the-fundies-invented-him. One can fix the moral calculus that justifies killing babies by making God more ruthless, by eliminating the age of accountability so that the infant who dies goes to hell, but that’s still not a very loving God, is it? The fundies say the Bible is inerrant, so when the Bible says God is love, that must mean something, and one would hope it means something better than sending dying infants to eternal damnation.
Maybe the problem’s with the other one. Maybe a God who allegedly created us because he loves us, isn’t going to damn most of us to hell by some arbitrary set of rules. Maybe, as C.S. Lewis suggested in The Great Divorce, God ultimately saves all who would be saved, and only damns those who see him face to face and refuse his love nonetheless. Maybe the eternal fate of others doesn’t rest on us; maybe the whole fundie “suppose you don’t witness to that person, and they get killed in a car wreck tomorrow” logic (and if anyone dares to say this is a strawman, then I can only say they’ve spent no time around fundies and have no idea wtf they’re talking about) that lays an unreasonable, life-distorting load of guilt on anyone who buys into it, has no actual validity in the universe of the God-that-is.
But a God who damns tens of millions of persons so that some other group of persons (even if it’s a larger group) can be saved? If that’s the best God the fundie axioms can produce, then the problem’s in the axioms.
But it ain’t just a religious dilemma. For example, the best way to eliminate human suffering, forever, would be if a giant rock hit the Earth and we all died.
See also ethical antinatalism.
“Ethical antinatalism” isn’t something to be “seen” so much as “carefully monitored”.
Unlike nonbelievers, we religious types can escape the dilemma of earthly human suffering by postulating the existence of an afterlife whose rewards (and punishments) make the sufferings of this life look trivial by comparison.
And that really does away with the dilemma altogether (and not just for this life), if one is so inclined: there’s no reason one can’t postulate an afterlife where the only people who spend eternity in hell are those who continuously refuse God’s love and forgiveness throughout eternity.
The dilemma reasserts itself for fundies because they are not so inclined. It’s their different assumptions concerning the afterlife that put them back in the dilemma.