Here’s another one that I’ve offered up here before, and which I think is stunningly applicable:
“The fundamental principle of all propaganda was the repetition of effective arguments; but those arguments must not be too refined – there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the man in the street. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not to the intellect. Truth was unimportant, and entirely subordinate to the tactics and psychology, but convenient lies (“poetic truth”, as he once called them) must always be made credible.”
–Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, WWII German Propaganda Minister
An attitude which, of course, encourages abortion. Because if society punishes women for having sex, then a woman who shows evidence of having had sex will be punished, and so she’ll want to remove that evidence.
And have you ever noticed that most of the people who publicly oppose contraceptives have 1-3 kids, same as everyone else? I wonder how that happens…
What you have to realize is that there are not two sides to the abortion debate, but six: Pro-life, pro-choice, anti-life, anti-choice, pro-abortion, and anti-abortion. Right now, the anti-choice faction holds most of the political power in the US. I think it was a terrible mistake on the part of many pro-lifers to think that the anti-choicers were allies. They’re not. They’d be just as happy to mandate abortion as to prohibit it, and I suspect we’ll start seeing that soon.
Also if you read the article he’s disputing the notion that his religion picks and chooses which dictates from the bible to follow based on their biases by saying “No some older guys picked and chose what we have to follow and wrote it down. So there is no bias there what so ever.”
That’s not really what he said. What he really said is "in addition to the written Torah, God also gave us a lot of information on how to interpret it, that we didn’t write down until circa 0 BCE. And that info has been studied and annotated by experts.
That being said, who gives a flying fuck what a bunch of guys thought God said to Moses thousands of years ago.
At least in Islam, the Qur’an is thought to be the actual Word of Allah, not some interpretation a guy made of the God’s words that co-incidentally match up with his personal beliefs.
Fundamentalist Christians also believe that the entire Bible (both the Old and New Testaments) is the “divinely inspired and inerrant word of God,” and that even those books and passages which don’t directly quote God or Jesus were placed in the minds of the authors by God himself.
Except the Fundamentalists I have known still interpret the Bible according to what needs to be obeyed and what can be ignored. Example: a person in my college class that insisted women toady could not be pastors as per Romans yet she did not wear a hat outdoors in violation of Corinthians because that Pauline rule only applied to women of Corinth at that time.
