Do infants who die before they’ve had a chance to accept Jesus as their savior spend an eternity in Hell?
If not, then doesn’t it make more sense to kill babies before they have a chance to blow their shot at Heaven? After all, the longer they’re alive, the greater the risk that they might become atheists, and therefore suffer eternal torment in Hell.
Sure, murder is bad- there’s even some sort of ruling against it, as near as I can remember- but if you do it with the kid’s best interests at heart, shouldn’t you be forgiven? Heck, you could always ask for forgiveness afterwards- that always works, right?
And even if it doesn’t, wouldn’t that make you the ultimate martyr? It seems like risking an eternity in Hell to save a child’s soul would be the ultimate sacrifice.
Of course, if you don’t want to be proactive, you could always just refuse medical treatment for your child- then you wouldn’t be killing the kid, you’d be leaving it in God’s hands, right?
I mean, if atheists are expected to pillage, why shouldn’t Christians be expected to kill babies?
Makin’ babies skydive sounds like the right course. If’n they die then, as you say, a ready stamped ticket to heaven is in order. If by some bizarre means they should live, like if they landed on a circus tent or came through the skylight of a mattress factory then hey, it’s divine intervention.
The funny thing is, there’s actually an ANSWER for this one. A doctrinal answer.
Shockingly enough, just because a person belongs to a religion – or does not belong to a religion – doesn’t mean they are or are not decent people. I think it’s a reasonable question both ways, though: it’s a question that can be reasonable if it’s a question asked seriously, just as it’s possible to ask seriously about where atheists get their religion without being offensive.
Well the easiest part is the forgiveness issue. To get Forgiveness, you have to repent (be sorry for what you did), promise God not to do it again, in some flavors of Christianity, Confess, and then not do it again. So a plan of murdering a baby each morning before Confession falls down on the repentance and not doing it again criteria.
Killing a baby to save its soul doesn’t make you a martyr in Catholicism (nor, I think but am not certain, in other Christian faiths.) Only being killed specifically for being a Christian or doing Christian things makes you a martyr and on the VIP list to enter Heaven without spending time in Purgatory first:
Anyone else who dies - even being a hero - with the weight of sin on his soul goes to Purgatory, if not Hell.
The Catholic Church officially has no opinion on what happens to unbaptized babies when they die. Limbo used to be the idea, a neutral place which wasn’t as good as Heaven but not as bad as Hell, but it went out of fashion a while ago:
The Catholic Church, and most Christian churches, feel that human ingenuity and medical knowledge are gifts from God, and that they should be used as long as they don’t violate one of the Commandments (like taking or preventing life). Some, of course, do believe exactly as you posit, that medicine is Sin and illness should be addressed with nothing but prayer and attempts to keep the patient comfortable. The vast majority of Christians call those people “whackjobs”.
Since God was rather specific about that not murdering thing, and since most Christian churches do believe that life is precious, not to be wasted and better than death (even if you do get to sit at the big table when you die), killing babies, preventing their conception or not healing their illnesses doesn’t jibe well with their theology, really it doesn’t.
The short answer is that God isn’t stupid and does not play the loophole game.
The long answer: Partly, it falls under the same umbrella as St. Augustine’s prohibition of suicide: it’s murder, even if it is with “good” intentions. Even very early Christians, not known for being family-oriented or all that incredibly stable, were strongly against infanticide in a time and place where it was very commonplace.
Life is supposed to be sacred. So why did/do Christians kill? Because they thought it was worth breaking God’s law for earthly reasons. Were they right? Guess they’ll find out, one way or the other.
Uh hello, purgatory? If anything, you’ve got to save the baby at all costs – even if it means sacrificing the mother’s life, even if the newborn will only live for a few minutes – so you can baptize them. Duh.