By “fishing” I meant RJUNG said what I was thinking when I posed the question.
To their view, even though it gives the fetus a “go directly to heaven” Golden Wonka Ticket, it still violates the “do not kill” commandment.
Angela Dodson: I guess God has a plan for all of us.
John Constantine: God’s a kid with an ant farm, lady. He’s not planning anything.
If your faith say that all people are ‘born in sin’ and thus have infant baptism, and they also claim that abortion is murder, then the babies either go to hell or to limbo. (YMMV)
BUT
Since many of these faiths believe that you sin in deed and in thought, and they think the fetus is (warning glurge with cheese) floating around thinking , then it is possible that they have thought about sinning and are going to hell.
At conception, you aren’t even really a life; you’re just a set of instructions. It would probably be more accurate to say that life begins at implantation, when the fertilized egg sticks to the wall of the uterus and begins nine months of parasitism. Something like thirty percent of fertilized eggs don’t even make it that far; they fail to adhere or otherwise don’t develop.
So if life really does begin at conception, then Heaven is knee-deep in the sludge of millions of ensouled zygotes.
Raise your hand if Ew.
Now I am left wondering what happens when James Brown dies.
If the soul does not exist without the body, there is no afterlife.
He IS a Soul Man, I just didn’t realize it was that kind…
I’ve often wondered this one too; it’s not unrelated to the issue of ‘age of accountability’ in some varieties of Christianity (where an infant to young to make a informed personal commitment is pardoned), but the problems with that are rather obviously:
-If God can pardon these infants, why can’t he pardon everybody (i.e. why is a personal commitment to faith the ‘only way’, when it isn’t the only way?)
-Wouldn’t it make sense to humanely end the mortal lives of all infants before they are at risk of hell? I know the ‘do not kill’ thing appears to be an argument against it, but the stakes are so incredibly high that it could be argued that there is a moral imperative to commit an individual sinful act to prevent a much greater evil.
If you think about it, if there was no life passed on through the parents and their anscestors, there would be no conception. Life began eons ago, The word soul comes from the latin animia which means life. We speak of animation meaning movement or life. A fertilized egg is not yet a chicken, an apple blossom is not yet an apple,There is human life in a zygote (from the parents) but it is not yet a person. If you look at a zygote you would not say what a cute baby, you could say it is a potential baby. A tubal pregnacy will never become a baby and will be very dangerous for the woman.
Monavis
That is not quite true, every thing changes with death to what it was before,when a cat dies its body decomposes and it’s gases atoms etc. go back into the universe. even a paper if it is burned goes back. Life is a circle,it lives on life,it need other lives to exist. If nothing died we would not be able to live.Humans live off animal and plant life etc.
Monavis
[pointless hijack]Some organisms live entirely without depending on others dying; I’m thinking about bacteria that metabolise naturally-occuring minerals, so the point is sort of moot, unless bacteria have souls.
I agree.
My response was due to a prior poster, Gigi, asserting that, to paraphrase, in Catholicism, the body and soul exist with each other and neither exists without the other.
I was pointing out that if that argument were true, then there would be no afterlife, as the soul would not exist with the body gone.
Excellent analogy.
Maybe, but you could make the same argument about the fate of the soal of week old babies, and people would have moral problems killing them anyway.
Couldn’t the same exact argument be made in the case of murdering your one-week-old infant? Surely it’s not damned to hell, right? God takes care of it, right? So killing them isn’t a problem.
That’s what I get for not refreshing the thread before posting - someone else posts a response to a day-old comment 20 minutes before mine - and it’s the same thought.
I’m confused; are you saying that no religion believes that newborn infants have souls?
No, but most of those religions which say that newborn infants have souls also say that, if they die, they’ll go to heaven/paradise/etc… just like those people who believe that fetuses have souls, but that if they die, they’ll go to heaven/paradise/etc.
Just because you don’t believe there’s horrible or undesirable fate for the soul upon death doesn’t mean that killing the person who has that soul isn’t immoral.
Well, we do have to draw a line somewhere. Life beginning at conception, I think, as should be clear from my post above, is pretty silly. Life beginning at implantation? More reasonable. But conception is a necessary prerequisite for implantation, so you could argue the life-at-conception position. Of course, the sexual act is (usually) a prerequisite for conception, so perhaps we should say that life begins at penetration. (I know it does for me, anyway.) But then, coitus cannot cause pregnancy if the female has not entered puberty and achieved fertility. Thus we move backward, to life beginning, hypothetically, at menstruation.
The only thing this line of debate proves, in my mind, is that the whole question is basically stupid.