Posted by Jason on: 11.03.2008 /
This week politics will dominate the minds of most Americans. As an Englishman I get to look on with a small amount of wry amusement as the candidates and their supporters vie for public attention and their votes. It’s not that I’m not interested it’s just that I’m detached from the whole thing. Despite that I know who I would vote for if I had the opportunity. Unsurprisingly for a die-hard atheist like me it is the candidate who seems to be most secular.
Why is that important? The USA is made up of diverse states with diverse people as citizens. Many are indeed Christian but some are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist. To represent all the people the President must treat all citizens as if they hold the same faith and none. He must treat them equally. Certainly he should not ignore the religious concerns of the people (or any concerns really) but his own faith should not be the deciding factor. He must weigh up the needs of the people in representing them and treat them as fairly as he is able.
A selective reading of scripture can also support just about any view and my own preference is to dispense with this sort of fallacious argument and concentrate on things that can be supported by reason. If scripture supports the reason in some way (and it probably will if you read it in the appropriately selective way) then so much the better.
Barack Obama was raised in a secular household by his own admission. From “The Audacity of Hope” he explains:
I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in Baptist and Methodist teachings as children, but religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My mother’s own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of the world’s people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal damnation—and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary. She remembered the respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun those unable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed their own dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their workers out of any nickel that they could.
For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.
This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part—no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways—and not necessarily the best way—that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well. Moreover, as a child I rarely came in contact with those who might offer a substantially different view of faith. My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was 2 years old; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition. ¹
However Obama does not make any claim to atheism. He has embraced religion to the full but in a way that I would describe as rational. He seems to view religion as a positive, building force in society and particularly black society in America. Again in his own words he explains:
For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.
And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world. Long before it became fashionable among television evangelists, the typical black sermon freely acknowledged that all Christians (including the pastors) could expect to still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced. The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a release, an acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions. In the black community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn’t, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation. You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away—because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.
It was because of these newfound understandings—that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved—that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth. ¹
It is unfortunate that my view here is so biased towards Obama and I have no explanations of faith from McCain that I can refer to directly. However he has used his faith to draw strength and cope with a terrible time in his life:
In his book Character is Destiny he says that his religious faith helped him survive his years as a POW. McCain’s church’s theology is that Jesus chose to die on the cross as a sacrifice to pay a penalty the rest of us owed God, even though Jesus himself led a sinless life. ²
There is nothing wrong with that. We draw strength from a variety of sources as human beings and if he wants to use his personal belief to cope with torture then good for him. It is how he expresses this in public life that concerns me:
A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think?
I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.
Even I know that America wasn’t founded as a Christian nation. It would be fairer to say that America was founded by Christian men who sought to protect both their faith and their diverse nation from interference by the other factor. Now either McCain wants to remove this protection to enforce religion on the citizens or he was merely pandering to the popular opinion. I suspect the latter is true and don’t really blame him for that but it is still a concern that he would not treat everyone with the same degree of respect when approving new laws or steering public policy. This is particularly true when you consider his bias towards Christianity.
Has the candidates’ personal faith become too big an issue in the presidential race?
Questions about that are very legitimate…. And it’s also appropriate for me at certain points in the conversation to say, look, that’s sort of a private matter between me and my Creator…. But I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, ‘Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?’”
It strikes me that McCain, like many people, look at the faith of a person as a mark of their character. A Christian tends towards charity and kindness, a Jew builds a strong community, a Muslim values family and their place in society and will fiercely defend both, etc. They are stereotypes of course but it is easy to put a person into a box and claim to understand them. Whatever the religion stands for is also what the person stands for…if only it were that simple. Atheists, by that definition, stand for nothing, we have no features worthy of redemption and so our voice is rejected as valueless.
Ignoring or rejecting the opinions and concerns of those without faith unfortunately means rejecting the opinions of the world’s top scientists. The world’s top scientists represent the leading experts in how we understand the world and the universe it turns in. McCain at least is willing to listen to these experts unlike some in the GOP and defers to them on the issue of evolution. Sadly not enough to reject the call of creationists to teach their view as science alongside evolution. I would hope that in issues like global warming, renewable energy, the oil industry, education, health care and many others both candidates would listen to the experts.
Perhaps I am reading too much into a few statements and a general idea of what they say and how they say it. In politics though I am sure I’ll be forgiven for making my mind up on my impression of a candidate.
¹ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546298,00.html
² http://atheism.about.com/od/johnmccainonreligion/tp/JohnMcCainReligionSecularism.htm
Comment by: Mike O
1Nicely done.
I know when I vote, it will have nothing to do with whether the person is a Christian or not - it will be based on their political ideology.
I’m voting for the people whose sensibilities I think will allign with my own.
Comment by: Chris C
2It’s certainly a topical subject this. Just a few points from my perspective. A Christian is a Christian, period: someone who has accepted Jesus into their life as their saviour and are seeking to be submitted to God’s will. So by his own admission, from the quote posted by Jason, Obama is a Christian and McCain, well I don’t know enough about him to say, but I think we must assume he is. So neither is secular.
I would tend to vote for the one who is best succeeding at making Jesus Lord of his life, becoming submitted to God’s will: the very opposite of being the most secular (although unless you know someone well it might be difficult to tell). As a successful research scientist of some 30 odd years, I don’t think that the secular view holds the high ground for reason or logic: you can find reasonable and unreasonable people on both sides of the divide. Personally I’ve found the Christian faith to be both reasonable and logical.
I certainly would not have voted for the secularists who led some of the notorious regimes of the 20th century. Most of them wouldn’t even have given me the opportunity to vote. But, and this is where it gets difficult in voting on this basis when you don’t really know the hearts of the candidates, there have been leaders who have claimed to be Christians whose actions have suggested that they are on a very different road from the one that follows Jesus. Ultimately this is between them and God, but it makes you wonder whether a Christian claim is always a Christian in reality.
Comment by: Mike O
3As a fellow Christian, I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure exactly what that should look like. There are a million different opinions - all of them professing to be christian, and very well may be - that I just don’t allign with. Can a Christian be either pro-choice or pro-life? Sure. Can a Christian be militaristic or pacifist? Sure. Can a Christian either support or fight against gay marraige? Sure. Can a Christian be either pro- or anti-death penalty? Absolutely. Can a Christian be either socially-minded or corporate-minded? Yes. Can a Christian be either republican or democrat? Sure.
Can a Christian “who has made Jesus Lord of his life” hold any of these convictions? I believe so.
That’s why I would vote to my convictions rather than whether or not the candidate is a Christian. I would even vote for an atheist, muslim or anything else *over* a Christian if I thought they were the right person for the job.
To me, if you prioritize a candidate’s Christian faith over their civic idealogy and track record, I don’t know what you would get. As a fellow Christian I can agree that it would generally be a good thing to have a follower of Christ elected - if they’re the right person for the job. But being a Christian doesn’t, in and of itself, make that person the right person for the job. The right person may be a muslim or an atheist.
Comment by: Jason
4Chris, there are many definitions of “secular”. One indeed is “without religion” but in this case I meant it as “of or relating to worldly or temporal concerns”. By which I meant that my impression of Obama is that he would put the worldly needs of America (and the world’s) citizens first. He may well be led by his religious beliefs to help others but his concerns strike me as practical rather than spiritual.
My vote (if I had one) would be for a person who weighed up the needs of the many rather than allowed for his religious views to take precedence. I just don’t see that in McCain and certainly not in Palin. I think that they could see scripture as “the answer” rather than “a guide” if that makes any sense.
Your points on secular regimes is well made but the governments of Stalin and Pol Pot were ideological rather than based on rejection of religion. Religion was dismissed as a waste and suppressed as a threat to the state. I’d argue that the concerns of the citizens (using my meaning in secular above) were not well represented by the government.
Your point that leaders can exploit religion to gain support is also very valid. For what it is worth I think that McCain and Obama are genuinely Christian but neither is above using their faith as a way to demonstrate good character. Both do seem to have good character independent of their faith and both come across as believing in their political ideals. Obama again seems to be willing to listen and change his view if it can be shown to be wrong and comes across as a person who considers all aspects of a decision. McCain seems confident but too set in his ways to be flexible in decision making. Again these are just impressions that I get from seeing them on the screen.
Chris and Mike
I disagree. If one had succeeded in taking the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount to heart regardless of religion then they would get my vote. Perhaps that’s what you meant Chris? I have mentioned before that a person can act in the traditions of Christ as a Christ follower would without actually believing in the divinity of Christ or the any of the supernatural stuff. I’d prefer someone without the mythology but with the good intentions and good character of a Christ follower. Again I’m not sure if that makes sense.
Comment by: Mike O
5I disagreed, too. my point was that I would vote according to my idealogy. And if a Christian happens to fit my idealogy and I think he’s the right person for the job, then sure, I’d like the idea of having a Christian in office.
Much the same as you, Jason, would like the idea of having an atheist in office. You wouldn’t vote for him *because* he was an atheist, but if he *happened to be* an atheist, you would be happy to have him there. Know what I mean?
Comment by: Jason
6Yes, exactly. I’d want a moral and responsible person with intelligence and the ability to think calmly and rationally. Religion is secondary to that. Although I’d prefer an atheist because my own prejudices say that they’d be more rational and more intelligent. I’m aware that they are prejudices and that Christians can be rational too…obviously.
I dare say that you consider a Christian to be more moral for the same sort of reasons.
Comment by: Chris C
7Jason, this statement was in reference to two Christians, Obama and McCain. So I think that, within this specific context, we would both agree in voting for the one who was following the heart of the teachings of Christ, possibly as reflected by the Sermon on the Mount, as you suggested. If a non-theist were more Christ like than a theist in following these teachings, like you, I would probably go for the former.
Mike, I too am ‘not sure exactly’ what someone whose making Jesus Lord of their lives should look like. But I do have a general idea what such a person would be journeying with and towards. I think Jason’s suggestion of their attitude to Matthew 5 vs 1-16 is a much more reliably assessment than their response to the three issues you suggest. If I were forced to decide on your chosen topics alone, I would certainly be uncertain of the Christian credentials of someone who was overtly militaristic, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage. Such a position is not supported by an overall view of New Testament scripture, although there will be situations where one could make a case for some leeway (serious fetal malformations, unprovoked attack on family etc).
As a non-Christian, Jason picks and choose from scripture the bits he likes (the Sermon on the Mount). Well it’s a free world, but one man’s choice is another man’s poison…. there can be no certain moral high ground in such choices, however good it may look or fit in with the values of the times. Of course if there is no God, then that’s the only way to go: Jason being true to his worldview.
However, Christians believe that in trusting Matthew 5 it’s God’s perspective we are following, not our own individual choices and, as He’s the creator and sustainer of everything and our loving Father, His ways are better than our own self-made choices. If we are wrong in our belief in God, then our choices are no better or worse than the ones Jason would make, they are simply our own. Yet there’s an even more fundamental principle here. Jason chooses some of the same ideologies for voting in a particular way that I would (at least as outlined in Matt 5), whilst rejecting almost all the authority claims of the man who suggested them and the God who he said he was ‘as one’ with. Is it reasoned or even logical to consider that someone who has got it so right in one aspect of their ministry could be so wrong in the other? The challenge of this question is particularly forceful in the Sermon on the Mount where it’s especially difficult to tease these two aspects of Jesus’ ministry apart. Here the ethical teaching of how to live that you applaud, Jason, is very closely linked to becoming part of the Kingdom of heaven, knowing God and drawing people to Him, aspects of Jesus’ teaching that you presumably don’t accept.
This objection to the arbitrary division of Jesus’ ministry into acceptable and unacceptable is more than a debating issue. It has relevance to the subject we discuss. This coming close to God, which Jesus preached about in Matthew and elsewhere, is what Christians believe provides a spiritual dynamic that helps us follow the ethical teaching. It should, in the power of the Spirit, as Jesus promised, make us more Christ like. We keep the Beatitudes, not in our own strength and understanding, but in His. Christians are called to engage with worldly and tempororal concerns, that’s why I like your use of the word secular in this context, Jason. It’s a definition that allows Christians to be just as secular as non-theists. However, in doing this we do not depart from our spirituality, our relationship with God, for this should help us rather than hinder our role. And that’s certainly been my personal experience. So my spirituality (religion, faith if you like) is certainly not secondary to my ethics, morality, rationality, responsibility or intelligence, it’s part of it. So whilst, as I said at the start of this post, I’d choose someone who followed the ethical teachings of Jesus rather than someone who didn’t, I’d certainly prefer that they also accepted what Jason calls ‘the mythology’ as well.
Comment by: Jason
8Respectfully Chris I think that it isn’t just atheists who pick and choose from scripture.
On abortion for example the bible is clear (Leviticus 27:6) that a fetus is not a person and should not be treated in law as such (Exodus 21:22-23). Yet the prevailing Christian tradition is to take one of the Ten Commandments, Thou Shalt Not Kill, to define how we should deal with an undesired pregnancy.
On homosexuality the Old Testament in Leviticus clearly condemns the practice. I’d say this was a cultural idea but that’s obviously just my opinion. The New Testament though condemns only “vile affections” in temple orgies. Perhaps referring to drug induced orgies and the rape of temple boys. The language isn’t at all clear despite the translation to show homosexuality in a negative light.
On marriage the bible allows for bigamy (Exodus 21:10) and divorce but promotes marriage as something that people should do only if they must have sex (1 Corinthians 7). The bible is hardly promoting of family values and certainly not the nuclear family.
In Roman culture it was acceptable for a man to have a wife and male and female lovers. Early Christians sought to separate themselves from Roman culture and may well have over emphasised these aspects of Roman life to differentiate themselves.
Besides which the teachings of Jesus are packed full of stuff about loving your brother, treating others as you’d want them to treat you and generally avoiding judgements against others. Do you judge a homosexual marriage or leave them alone and allow judgment to come from on high?
I use abortion and gay marriage as examples because they were topics that you picked up on and they were frequently mentioned in the recent political campaigns. Pick a topic though and you’ll be faced with the same problem. You can find some scripture to support your view and other scripture that denies it if you look hard enough.
Sadly very little of the biblical advice is based on good evidence just on what the writers though was good at the time. Jesus promoted a culture of reciprocity and the benefits are upheld in game theory. He promoted a culture where people were not greedy and consumed only what they needed which is a common thread in several economic theories and the idea of reusable energy.
That said I’d be a fool to reject good advice just because I don’t believe in the divine nature of it. As an atheist I can take what works well from Christianity as well as from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or natural philosophy. I don’t have to accept it all as good and can openly cherry pick what I agree with.
Comment by: Chris C
9Respectfully, Jason, that still doesn’t make it a logical or reasoned thing to do: the point I was making. I think that you then imply in your post, with examples selected by Mike (not me), that I also probably pick and choose the bits that suit. If you were so implying, I assure you that I don’t pick and choose in this way, but try to assess the balance of the whole of scripture for any issue. You certainly couldn’t come to the conclusion from an overall assessment of scripture that either abortion on demand (pro-choice) or gay marriage was promoted in the Bible. Nor is marriage just for sex, as you would have (Ephesians 5 vs 22- 6 vs 4; Proverbs 18 vs 22).
You ask me if I judge people. Scripture makes clear that it’s not my place to judge, but Gods. However, I do try and travel with the teaching, the fullness of it, and seek to recommend it to others as God’s teaching, not mine. Sure, as in any worldview, there are difficult issues, often secondary to the main themes, where the answers are not black and white. But when it comes to the central issues, the New testament scriptures are clear, whether we agree with their conclusions or not. The central thrust of Jesus’ ministry is two fold, as we saw in the Sermon on the Mount. He sums it up himself (Matthew 22 vs 36-40; Mark 12 vs 29-31): the two, devotion to God and care for each other, together. You wish to divide them and I question, not your right to do so, but your logic and reasoning for accepting the ethical teaching of a man who you clearly consider was deluded in the other major aspect of His ministry.
But from this statement I have to say I’m not sure that you actually understand Jesus’ ethics, for this is a very limited view of His ministry! He didn’t promote reciprocity; He primarily called us to sacrificial giving without any expectation of any return/reciprocity (Matthew 5 vs 38-42; Luke 6 vs 27-36). It’s a philosophy He carried through practically, culminating in His death on the cross and one that the early Church also took up. There was certainly not much reciprocity from the Romans. The witness of Jesus and the early Church illustrates why the ‘how to live’ ministry of Jesus is so essentially linked with the God-relational side of His teaching. We’re not going to come close to Jesus’ ethical standards without God’s help: at least I’m not.
Comment by: Mike O
10I didn’t mean anything by the examples I gave way up there … I was just rattling issues off. These, to me, are issues that divide, yet you will find Christians on either side (right or wrong).
I have to admit I didn’t get the reciprocity bit. Why would anyone thing Jesus’ ministry was a ministry of reciprocity? “Turn the other cheak, go the extra mile, when you fast, do so in secret, when you give, do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Or maybe I just didn’t get what you meant.
As to abortion, my son has been challenging me with questions on whether or not abortion is actually killing. He’s a Christian. But I keep coming back to scriptures where, when God blesses someone with offspring, he tells them *before* the pregnancy. God has plans for that child before it’s born. John the Baptist was destined to be the forerunner of Christ before he was born. God told Abraham that his descendants would be vast before Isaac was born. David says in psalms that God knew me while I was in my mother’s womb.
Plus, I don’t understand how the verses you gave, Jason, imply that abortion is allowed. One doesn’t speak about it (placing a value on children as young as a month old. It doesn’t say anything at all about the fetus, so how could it support abortion? In fact, using your logic, it would support killing any born baby under 1 month old.
And the other one does place a value on the miscarried life. If it were nothing, the father would not be repaid at all, let alone “whatever the court allows.”
Comment by: Jason
11Chris, I don’t know you so I can’t say if you follow the bible literally and completely. I would be very surprised if you do. I don’t say this to point to Christians and label you hypocrites but because many of the rules are social and we simply do not live in the same society as in biblical times. Bill wrote in his introduction about A.J. Jacob’s book.
Moving on. You said:
I’m not sure I’ve ever called Jesus deluded but are you not able to believe in a leader’s positive message but not every single policy? If Jesus tells me that kindness and compassion are good should I ignore that because he also says that we should fear hell? Perhaps I agree that compassion is good independently on his ministry and his words only reinforce by own ideas.
As for reciprocity I’m sure you’ve heard of Matthew 7:12 “Do to others what you would have them do to you”. Game theory goes a little further to explain this. Someone has to make the first move after all, you do something good not for an instant and like reward but in the spirit that similar behaviour will be forthcoming. Sometimes it fails to elicit a reciprocal response but most often being trustworthy and generous pays off. It benefits individual members of a group to act honestly and fairly and with compassion and it benefits the group. My reference to game theory merely points out that Jesus “good idea” in Matthew 7:12 is supported with good evidence in modern life.
Perhaps I should write something on game theory. I may have assumed that everyone had a passing knowledge of it. If so it is my mistake.
Mike said
Indeed it would and perhaps it was sensible in a society with a very high infant mortality to not regard a fetus or very young child as a member of the tribe until they had survived for a week. I’m suggesting that abortion wasn’t a concern 2000 years ago and so no mandate was made for it in biblical law. Perhaps the emphasis on abortion is really a modern idea totally unrelated to the cultural issues of the bible.
Honestly though I think it is simply an emotive issue that certain political groups have latched onto and claimed to be faith based. One interpretation which I have used and exaggerated says that it is OK while another says it is horrible. I’m sure there is scripture for that view too.
Comment by: Mike O
12That’s a good point.
I can’t speak to political groups motives for or against abortion. But for religious people, it *is* faith-based, whichever side you happen to fall on.
To me, though, it’s a common sense thing. You have a *thing* with arms, legs, organs, a heartbeat and brainwaves. How can you fault people for considering abortion murder - even if it were purely emotional.
Combine that with the idea that if the mother and/or father doesn’t *want* the baby, it’s just an abortion. But if the same woman wanted the baby and she is killed, it is considered a double-murder in many places. The value of that fetus is 100% dependant upon whether or not the mother *wanted* it - whether it served her purposes or not. That is completely narcissistic in my book.
Surely, you can see their point even if you don’t agree with it?
Comment by: Jason
13Mike said
I don’t think it is though. There is a distinction between a fetus and an person in scripture and no mention at all of abortion or miscarriage. At least I’m not aware of any. Instead some religious groups have claimed that Thou Shalt Not Kill applies to abortions and claim that life begins at conception. I don’t see how this is supported in science or scripture.
Now, of course, a person is entitled to believe that a person is alive from the moment an egg is fertilized. I simply believe that they do not have the right to enforce it on anyone else. The thing works in the other direction as well.
That’s just it though, you don’t. Not till later in the development of the fetus anyway. Actually it isn’t even a fetus for much of it’s development. If you want to argue that it is alive once it has organs like lungs then I might concede but some people take an absolute approach and call a handful of cells a life. Again, I’ve no problem people believing that but I don’t have to accept it.
Yes, i totally can and I’d hope for “them” to see the other view. Largely though that isn’t allowed because they believe that abortion equates to murder and the issue is absolutely right or wrong. There is also an inconsistency in the idea. Many Christians who view abortion in black and white terms allow for them in the case of rape or incest. Surely any fetus is innocent of these crimes and should be allowed to live if the view is consistent. Yet it isn’t. If these two reasons are enough then why not more?
Curiously the same group of people have no issue with criminal executions. An issue to which I am opposed to.
Oh, I just realised that I’ve not stated by own view on abortion. You might be curious to know that I could not countenance an abortion within my own family. I believe that a couple should be responsible for the consequences of their coupling and welcome any life that forms. I wouldn’t want to force that view on anyone else though and fully support the right for women to choose for themselves.
Comment by: Mike O
14I agree that this doesn’t make any sense. I’m of the position that it’s abortion at any point in the process after fertilization. But that’s just me. I see it as alive.
Change the scenario just a bit, and instead of a baby, let’s say it’s the fetus of an endangered species. Would you protect it? If someone were to “kill” that fetus, is that more reprehensible than a human abortion? Somehow, I think it would be, and if I’m right, that’s inconsistent. Let’s say a zoo is successfully incubating a dodo bird egg. If I smashed that egg, would I have killed something? I think so - I would have destroyed potential life, which would have *been* life. The fact that someone else wanted (or didn’t want) it is irrelevant.
Well, the criminal supposedly *deserves* it, though. So that part is quite different.
Comment by: Jason
15Mike, the analogy is flawed because you are talking about something that is done to an animal and not something that it chooses to do itself. Obviously I wouldn’t want anyone to force an abortion on any other living thing, not unless the lives of mother and forming child were both in danger and terminating the pregnancy would save the mother.
By way of another explanation I refer you to the “famous violinist” thought experiment.
There are some arguments against this idea and I’m sure you can think of them but I still see the idea as compelling.
Comment by: Mike O
16It’s an interesting analogy, but not quite equivalent.
However, if you had caused the violinist to fall into a coma, and volunteered to be hooked up to save him, that would correlate better. The pregnant girl most ofted doesn’t just “wake up pregnant.” She (and he) caused it. Of course, I’m not including rape, etc. here.
Or let’s say it’s your lifesaving equipment hooked up to the violinist. And you decide to unhook it simply because you didn’t want to any more. Should people be allowed to just “pull the plug” like that?
Comment by: Chris C
17I didn’t say that I did Jason (some of it’s poetry, some is instruction for Israelite nomads and settlers under a different covenant with God). But I do try and balance all the relevant scriptures on a particular subject in the light of the new covenant, even if, on some peripheral issues, balance isn’t easy to find.
Off course, but in the case of Jesus it’s not a single policy you reject Jason, but most of the heart of the message. You even seem to select within the bits you find positive. Yes, Jesus’ teaching includes Matthew 7:12, He starts, as He says in this reference, with the Law and the Prophets. But He then goes further in both His teaching and example, so that the balance of all the relevant New Testament scriptures on this go far beyond reciprocity, it’s sacrificial unto death, as both Mike and I have pointed out. You’re free to take this selective approach, but I question it’s reasoning and logic, especially as I think you’re also imply you choose because “his words only reinforce my own ideas”!
I find Jesus challenges me far beyond my own ideas. I suppose He wouldn’t be bringing God to me if He didn’t. And although it’s that part of the message you reject, its only God’s strength that allows me to go beyond reciprocity. Reciprocity is a relatively easy call, following Jesus isn’t.
Comment by: Politics and religion | All Reason
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Comment by: Jason
19Mike, I understand your point but not all pregnancies are planned and no precautions are 100% effective. Well, except abstinence but that’s just not practical. Sometimes women get pregnant because they don’t take precautions (or rather precautions weren’t used) and this could be for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they had not received an education that covered contraceptive advice or lack the maturity to implement it.
Now I think that this is besides the point. What is important is who is the procedure being performed on and what does it do. Is the undeveloped embryo being terminated or is the pregnancy being terminated? Is the procedure on the mother or the fetus?
There is also the question about who is most important in a triage. For me it is clearly the woman who is pregnant because without her life to sustain and develop the embryo that life has no chance to develop.
What I think we can all agree on is that we want to see the rates of abortion drop. Abortion is traumatic for the woman and can lead to feelings of guilt and remorse in later life. She may also be put under pressure to make a decision one way or another.
For me this is a matter of education is preventing pregnancy so that conception occurs when planned and not at other times.