Knowing full well that the Roman Catholic Church:
- Does not condone homosexuality
- Does not condone same-sex marriage
- Does not condone sex outside of marriage
There’s your answer.
OK, great - what specific action are Christians taking that Der Trihs says is equivalent to that list?
Moderating:
I realize that it’s difficult to discuss the reasoning behind abolishing abortion without splashing some blame on certain practices of Christianity, but this thread has taken a decided turn toward Christian-bashing. Stop doing this.
Those who are participating in this thread may want to review the OP and get back on track to discuss what the OP initially contemplated.
When thinking about who opposes abortion, it can be useful to look at the people in abortion protests. They don’t strike me as women hating, religious fundamentalist, old white men. They look like regular people of all ages and genders. I wouldn’t be surprised that many of them are religious, but I don’t think they’re protesting abortion because of a blind dedication to a random religious belief. Rather, it seems to me like they are protesting because they feel that abortion is ending a life. They may incorporate religious aspects as part of their feelings on the matter, but I feel the base reason for their objection is that they see it as ending a life. I’m sure that some abortion abolishers are religious zealots who want to control women, but I think that’s just a small fraction of that group. I don’t think that kind of characterization accurately represents the typical anti-abortion person. I think the typical anti-abortion person opposes abortion because it emotionally feels to them like the life of a baby is being ended.
“Woman hating religious fundamentalists” aren’t only old, white, or male. They can be any age, and race, and, indeed, any gender.
Both of these comments deny the possibility that people who believe other than you are also complex human beings worthy of respect.
I know perfectly well why they are being demonized. I knew why when I became a Catholic forty years ago. To accuse me of ignorance of Christian teachings is kind of ironic, considering.
Bleah. This is way too ugly for me to continue with. Bye.
“Bye” is a simple answer, but know this: We choose who we respect, and the vast majority of people are blessedly ignorant of the the religion they follow.
I’m on a few conservative forums, and almost always they have a genuine conviction that abortion, at any point right from zygote, is the same as murdering a baby (or at least a person).
…it’s not a very self-consistent belief though. When I raise the issue of zygotes that perish during IVF, or a number of hypotheticals, it becomes apparent they don’t really think of it as just like a person.
But that notwithstanding, the key thing is having a strong visceral reaction that abortion equals murder, and the majority do have that, and that’s what motivates them, IME.
That’s a reason the person in my example was a man. Yes, the woman who chooses to wear an IUD is making a decision to reduce her risk of making a baby. But the guy who fucks her is more likely to make a baby than a guy who fucks me. IUDs fail way more often than women who have been menopausal for a few years conceive.
right, or it could just be that the majority of abortion opponents are NOT woman-hating religious fundamentalists. Why do you feel comfortable ascribing a blanket viewpoint to a group of people who’s actions may be motivated by, and are entirely consistent with, other beliefs besides “woman-hating”?
I think the conclusion that “abortion is murder” was reached, not through logic and emotion, but through the political process. The term “murder” is strong enough to bring the political power and emotional depth needed to get the votes they desire.
Collectively this is true, yes. The anti abortion movement in the US, was largely created out of whole cloth in the Reagan era.
At an individual level though, I don’t think so. A lot of people have genuinely been convinced that there is no distinction between fertilized egg and crawling, crying baby.
It’s why this is the dog that caught the bus. I’m sure trump and others in the GOP wished that overturning roe was sufficient to bank those voters and that would be the end of the issue.
They don’t care what happens next, but they’ve pandered to a crowd that does.
Bingo.
Because it has clearly devolved to that. Some areas are going to the extreme of investigating miscarriages on the premise that they might have occurred proactively. They get to decide the appropriate manner in which a woman is allowed to use her body. Like, um, managing livestock.
That sort of fits with my recollection, as well. From what I recall, the Catholic Church, in particular, was vocally anti-abortion at least as far back as the early 1970s (and Roe v. Wade), but conservative Protestants didn’t really get into the “pro-life” movement until the 1980s.
You’ve started a thread with “absolute” statements that are false. There are people on the left who object to abortion, And there is no demand to stop all contraception. When you understand that you can move on to the issue at hand.
It is not about controlling women’s bodies which is why Roe vs Wade was overturned. That legal precedent was based on privacy which is why it eventually fell apart.
Abortion, from a legal standpoint, is about human life. The recent laws making abortion illegal or close to it will be challenged in court and it will advance back to the SC. Ultimately it will force a court decision based on what constitutes human life. This was actually part of RvW but it wasn’t the focus of the case.
The recent laws using a heart beat as determiner of human life will likely force the court to rule directly on the concept beyond just fetal viability.
It’s impossible to actually pinpoint the moment that would be considered a human life. I don’t think that’s a question that the court can actually answer. Rather, I think they’ll make a decision as to what the arbitrary point in time is as to when a a human life begins for the purpose of protection under the law. It’s similar to how the ages of 18 or 21 have been arbitrarily decided as the points at which a person can be considered as an adult for certain responsibilities. There’s no magical maturation process that happens at the ages of 18 or 21, but suddenly a child can vote and drink once they age past these arbitrary boundaries. I would guess the court would make a similar decision to where they declare an arbitrary point at which life becomes legally protected, not necessarily answer the question of what constitutes human life.
And all the “good” ones have to do is stand aside (and maybe even look sad) as the bad ones do their deeds.
Maybe not but I think it’s possible to define humans from other life forms by intellect. And from what I’ve read a fetus will first exhibit brain waves and then recognizable human brain waves later on. Hard to say. But .I agree. It’s going to land back in the Supreme Court
Using a condom for purposes other than disease control doesn’t protect the man. It protects the woman.
During the time when condoms were sold “for the prevention of disease only”, it was effectively impossible for women to require fatherhood duties of any man she wasn’t married to who didn’t choose to claim them. All he had to do was to say that the child wasn’t his; she couldn’t prove otherwise, and would very likely be shamed to the point at which she might not even try it once it was clear that the father wouldn’t volunteer to acknowledge and support the child.
Yeah. I think that’s where the “inconvenience” claim comes in. As if going through pregnancy had no more effect and no more potential effect on one’s life than missing a bus and having to wait for the next one.
And I have never been pregnant (or if I have, I miscarried too early to tell.) But I know better than that.
It is, however, a logic that’s rarely applied to surgical treatment for appendicitis, or to any treatment for cancer, or to fishing drowning people out of the water and possibly applying CPR, or for any other cause of death that affects people already born. Are the occurences of such things not also God’s will, if everything is God’s will?
The problem there had nothing to do with whether Onan and/or the widow enjoyed the sex. The problem was clearly that Onan was refusing to provide his dead brother with an heir, for purposes of Onan’s own financial gain.
And lots of them have held that sex is a good thing, and have not praised celibacy.
Yup. Evangelical Christianity didn’t always oppose abortion. It’s fairly recent, and probably brought on deliberately for political reasons.
I think that for some people it’s some of both, quite possibly not fully recognized?
They’re being told over and over that a blastocyst is a baby. (Well, actually, they’ve been told over and over that a fetus or maybe an embryo is a baby; but the language clearly includes blastocysts.) Some of them have been pregnant, and it felt to them as soon as they knew they were pregnant that they were carrying a baby. Some of them have been partners of people carrying wanted children, and during the pregnancies they felt there was a baby in there, even before they could feel the fetus kicking.
None of this automatically makes someone anti-abortion, of course. But for some people, yes, that’s where it’s coming from, at least in part and sometimes probably entirely…
But also –
There’s a pretty strong sense in the culture – and not only the overtly Christian portions of it – that there’s somehow something essentially wrong about having sex. Doing the dirty. Bumping uglies. That sort of thing. It’s mixed, of course, with a much more overt sexualization of damn near everything and a near-insistence that everybody ought to be having sex of some sort and something’s wrong if you’re not getting any. Probably whatever underlies this mess is the same thing as the overall culture’s terror of total nudity mixed with its acceptance of thongs on the beach and half one’s ass hanging out even in the middle of downtown.
But I think it leaves a lot of people in an underlying state of confusion that some deal with by a surface insistence – to themselves as well as others – that there’s A Right Way to have sex and all the others are Wrong. That way you can believe simultaneously that Sex is Dirty and that People Ought To Have Sex.
But it means also believing that A Lot Of People Are Having Wrong Sex. And for many people this includes They Should Be Made To Stop; Or At Least Shamed And Punished.
Especially if one’s politicians and/or church keep saying that. Which not all religious (and/or political) teachers, Christian or otherwise, are doing; but certainly some are.
So the idea of consequence-free sex becomes anathema. And the most obvious consequence – and by far the easiest one to try to control – is pregnancy.
Which, on some level probably buried deep in the minds in some believers, would explain the odd determination of some to have the babies born but then provide no help to them afterwards. If a baby is a punishment, of course – then of course the poor (often literally poor financially) kid ought to be as much of a punishment as possible.
Kind of hard on the children, of course. ETA: As well as their parents.
And, also of course, that last portion doesn’t apply to anti abortion people who do genuinely try to, and vote to, help the children and mothers after the children are born.