You do realize that there are some pro-choice Christians, correct? — Arkady

And may I ask how they circumvent the murder accusation.

You do realize that there are some pro-choice Christians, correct? — Arkady

And may I ask how they circumvent the murder accusation.

You could ask them. You said:

Atheists don't think abortion amounts to murder. — TheMadFool

The point is that presumably everyone (or nearly so) who is pro-choice doesn't believe that abortion constitutes murder, whether they're Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or whatever. You were drawing a dichotomy between the supposed proscription of abortion in Christianity and the supposedly atheistic belief that abortion isn't murder, while seemingly ignoring the fact that some Christians are pro-choice.

As to how they reconcile these beliefs (even assuming that Christian theology, doctrine, dogma, or creeds uniformly oppose abortion), I don't know; that presumably varies on a person-by-person basis. How does one deal with cognitive dissonance in general? Usually by compartmentalizing one's beliefs.

How does one deal with cognitive dissonance in general? Usually by compartmentalizing one's beliefs. — Arkady

If there's enough wiggle room in christianity to allow pro-choice then I guess the debate is internal (within Christianity). Atheists should simply recline in their seats and watch the show unfold - perhaps stepping up to deliver the coup de grace that ends the debate in favor of pro-choicers.

I had sex in gay bath houses where the Holy — Bitter Crank

Does anyone actually bathe in a bath house? It would seem there would be few bath houses because most people have running water in their homes and can just bathe there. It would be like going to a dressing house to get dressed. I mean, just get dressed at home.

Does anyone actually bathe in a bath house? — Hanover

Indeed, they bathe in bath houses because cleanliness is next to godliness, and if you should find yourself in close proximity to a sex god, you would want to look and smell your best.

The People here may not know that bath houses used to be a common facility in the urban United States, prior to the epidemic of indoor plumbing, private showers, and water heaters which made them unnecessary. People would go to the local bath house (probably once a week) for the purpose of a thorough scrubbing, soak, and rinse. These were not 'turkish baths' which featured pools with different temperatures, heated marble massage tables, food service, steam rooms, etc. Turkish baths were upscale. Ordinary folk went to down market municipal bath houses which offered tubs and showers.

Many turkish baths became gay baths in the 1950s and 60s.

Once upon a time in America, country people took their once a week bath on Saturday night, quite often in the kitchen in a laundry tub.

Most interesting shit. Thank you. I bathe daily in the Nile, defacating, scrubbing, washing my clothes and dishes, all in one sitting. Cleanses my mind, body, and spirit.

I believe it was one of your early ancestors that got his big start in the Nile.

Yeah, right. Instead of "had their mother been celibate", why go even further and use the substitution, "had their mother never existed"? Obviously, the argument needs to begin with a pregnant woman, otherwise it will quickly degenerate into witless absurdity.

Yeah, right. Instead of "had their mother been celibate", why go even further and use the substitution, "had their mother never existed"? Obviously, the argument needs to begin with a pregnant woman, otherwise it will quickly degenerate into witless absurdity. — Dredge

Because no person can be held culpable for their not existing. You seek to accuse women of "snuffing out a life" by means of a certain action. As I demonstrated, the same result follows by means of a certain inaction (i.e. celibacy, in this case). Ergo, celibate women are equally culpable for "snuffing out a human life" as women who obtain abortions. Non-existent people cannot "snuff out" anything (one must exist in order to do the snuffing).

I understand that that is not a conclusion you intended, but you need to add more to your argument for it to go through.

That the issue is framed as a pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy is already a sneaky move. The default position is of course to defer to the actual people involved and let them make this very personal decision. And the alternative is coercion, not life. Ironically, "pro-life" is the more deliberately chosen position - it's just a choice of meddlers .

I agree, I don't entirely understand it as well...

Thanks for the information.

I just don't understand why some folks don't believe that the soul of the fetus/baby goes to heaven or reincarnate if it dies before birth. God certainly isn't unfair, so why do we have this expectation that God can't handle abortion issues on his own? Do most religious people think God needs their help to handle abortion issues? Must be a weak God if true... It's not like God is giving us a clear sign that abortion is wrong or anything. What gives us the right and power to think we understand the afterlife and to interfere in other people's personal lives, anyways?

And the alternative is coercion, not life. Ironically, "pro-life" is the more deliberately chosen position - it's just a choice of meddlers — Roke

Nice try. Ironically, your wording here is itself rather "sneaky." People who call themselves pro-life are not trying to meddle with a woman's body. They care about the human life in her womb. You don't get to kill it, just as you don't get to kill any other human being, simply because you feel like it.

If the Holy Spirit is present during intercourse, does that mean all acts of sex are threesomes?

Anyway, I've only glanced at the comments in this thread...is anyone participating actually pro-life here? What's interesting to me is that despite accusations that abortion is murder, why isn't childbirth by extension torture? Why would God make it painful? Why does stillbirth occur in 1 out of 160 pregnancies?

is anyone participating actually pro-life here? — Maw

I am.

why isn't childbirth by extension torture? Why would God make it painful? Why does stillbirth occur in 1 out of 160 pregnancies? — Maw

This is just one doorway into the larger problem of evil, which would take us far away from the thread topic and down a pretty deep rabbit hole. I'm not a Christian either (at the moment anyway).

why isn't childbirth by extension torture? Why would God make it painful? Why does stillbirth occur in 1 out of 160 pregnancies? — Maw

If you want God to be responsible for the details of life and the pain of childbirth, It's mostly about bad design. Big head, narrow pelvis: pain. Short of slicing the womb open through the abdomen (a la caesar) there is only one doorway out of the womb. God should have taken a design course. Or better, majored in design.

There are examples of bad design all over. Why don't we regrow teeth throughout our lives? Some species do? Why was the urinary line routed through the prostate which swells up with age, choking off the outlet from the bladder? Why doesn't every man have abundant, great looking hair all the way to the grave in old age? One damned bad design after another!

If you want Nature to be responsible, well... nature just stumbles into solutions and reproduction works well enough. Nature says, you are here; it worked well enough in your case, so stop complaining.

Don't forget the doctrine of the fall....

Are you talking to me?

Harris is talking about embryonic stem-cell research, but the points are salient to the discussion here.

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. Your beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings. — Sam Harris

Pretty well makes a mash out of this whole thread, methinks.

Common Christians that believe that the soul is born before the fetus is developed don't give a shit about this explanation. Have you actually explained this to an audience of common everyday Christians in public? I'm not criticizing your intelligence or logic, but Christians that argue for pro-life almost don't even care about what's rational anymore.

You could argue that the soul is a group of zygotes or embryos and when they split up they are still one soul because they belong to each other or have the same DNA. However, I don't give a damn about outsmarting Sam Harris and the major point of my post isn't to prove him wrong, anyways.

Christians that believe in pro-life will never listen to reason such as the above example from Sam Harris because they will just not take it seriously for some reason (probably because of cognitive dissonance). Great ignorance can cause people to not listen to what's rational and only care about what agrees with their ignorance.

If you explained this to people in public man, I don't know how they will respond, but they aren't just going to immediately become enlightened and agree with you. The whole pro-life versus pro-choice is more of a cultural problem than a logical problem, in my opinion because most of these extreme pro-life folks don't listen to reason opposing their hard-coded beliefs and religions have affected our cultures in both negative and positive ways. This is just one of those negative ways.



The only cure is for the new generations to replace the old generations, in my opinion. Adults are way more stubborn than children.

Yeah, in part.

I don't like the common interpretation of The Fall (I understand why the church interpreted the Eden story that way, but Jews, for instance, didn't interpret it that way, apparently). However, there are few Christian doctrines that are as validated with as much historical, statistical, and anecdotal evidence for the human condition as Our Fall from Grace.

Right, so now go back and take a look at your attributing all those horrible things you mentioned to God.

I will comply,, but your instructions are unclear. Do you want me to go back and mention to God all those horrible things, or do you want me to attribute to God all those horrible things? And which horrible things are you referencing?

I think it's fair to blame the volcano for the lava it makes which then destroys a town, just as one might blame God for having made fallible creatures that then destroy the world.

Edit: I'm reminded of the recent reporting on Remington having to recall and replace millions of rifles because of a defect in the safety system, which when flipping it on or off, actually fired the gun, resulting in a lot of false murder charges. So, is it the defective gun's fault for killing people, or is it the creator(s) fault for having made defective guns? At least in reality, Remington, as much as they tried to deflect blame, ended up being forced to take blame, quite rightly, in my opinion.

I can't tell if you're being coy with me or not. Heister clearly picked up on my meaning, as his criticism depends on understanding it.

do you want me to attribute to God all those horrible things? — Bitter Crank

You did this. My comment was meant to imply that the Christian would disagree with you: God did not design the things you listed; they are instead a result of the fall.

I think it's fair to blame the volcano for the lava it makes which then destroys a town, just as one might blame God for having made fallible creatures that then destroy the world. — Heister Eggcart

Well, to play the devil's advocate once again (an ironic phrase in this instance), the Christian might respond to this as follows. God is indeed ultimately responsible for everything, including the fall, but this is precisely why he sent his son, Jesus, to redeem his creation. If he did not do this, then we would, as you imply, be obliged to think of him as wicked. All the same, in a proximate sense, humans are still responsible for the fall.

However, it remains true that because there is none greater than God, everything he creates is by definition imperfect and fallible in some way. The question then becomes: why did God choose to create anything at all, given that he would presumably know that what he created would be deficient in certain respects? One answer would be that we don't know and can't know. Much also depends on what is meant by "freedom." To say that God is free to act must in one sense mean that he was not compelled to act by anything outside of himself. If there were some external factor that caused him to create, then he did not create freely. Thus, God can only act according to his nature. If his nature is love, then God created out of love. In a sense, he was "compelled" by his own nature to create. In other words, a being whose nature is love couldn't not create, but not because he was forced to, just as a functioning human being cannot not create, say, red blood cells, even though no one is forcing him to create them.

Well, to play the devil's advocate once again (an ironic phrase in this instance), the Christian might respond to as follows. God is indeed ultimately responsible for everything, including the fall, but this is precisely why he sent his son, Jesus, to redeem his creation. If he did not do this, then we would, as you imply, be obliged to think of him as wicked. All the same, in a proximate sense, humans are still responsible for the fall. — Thorongil

Does this mean that God was wicked before he sent himself in Christ to redeem the world?

~

If it is in God's very nature to create, then he cannot thus abort the world once it falls to sin, as such would be against his nature. Although, wouldn't "aborting" the world actually be an act of God's will to create, that in destroying the world he thus creates nothing in its place? Perhaps in this way, creation ends up just being a not-so-merry-go-round.

Does this mean that God was wicked before he sent himself in Christ to redeem the world? — Heister Eggcart

No, because there never was such a time. "In the beginning was the Word..."

If it is in God's very nature to create, then he cannot thus abort the world once it falls to sin, as such would be against his nature. — Heister Eggcart

Correct.

Although, wouldn't "aborting" the world actually be an act of God's will to create, that in destroying the world he thus creates nothing in its place? Perhaps in this way, creation ends up just being a not-so-merry-go-round. — Heister Eggcart

I'm not following this.

No, because there never was such a time. "In the beginning was the Word..." — Thorongil

Surely Christ in the flesh was a unique emanation, and wasn't always there, right? What did Mary birth then if that's not the case?

I'm not following this. — Thorongil

Wouldn't it be possible to create nothing?