Pro-Life Activist Gunned Down in Michigan

[Felch]

Wezil, here's what I think Ben is trying to say.

The Supreme Court is not a moral authority. It is not a scientific authority. It is a Constitutional authority. When the Supreme Court makes a decision it is supposed to be based on the law. If the law supports slavery, then you wind up with a decision like Dred Scott. If it makes a decision about abortion, it is a legal decision, not a moral one. It is up to the people to be better than their laws, and to improve the laws of the past so that they mesh with a moral decision, like we did with slavery.

Now he got kind of side tracked there, and started talking about Nazis, but that's what I make of what he was saying.

Personally I see no point in criminalizing abortions. People have hard hearts, and they will go on trying to kill fetuses outside of regulated conditions. Considering an abortionist is a doctor who specializes doing harm, it makes sense to force them into legitimacy, kept under careful scrutiny. Otherwise you'll have women dying of fistulas and all kinds of horrible ****.

The task for the pro-life movement is therefore to soften people's hearts, so that they start to see something more in a fetus than some liability or inconvenience. I think the way that some people go about this is wrong. When you're trying to persuade someone about something like this, you need to use a light touch.

[Nikolai]

Except for e.g. not suffering a witch to live and so forth.

That's where Jesus and the new pact came in.

[Nikolai]

That is your interpretation. For those people it was the true belief and they would consider themself quite enlightened. To be honest, I don't think that they saw themself as persecuting other people - they simply did was what god demanded - converting people or let them out of their misery.

Again, if they'd read Jesus' teachings and understood the NT's words about conversion...

[David Floyd]

That's where Jesus and the new pact came in.

People were burning witches in the name of Jesus, too, up til a couple hundred years ago, ie, like 1700 years after the birth of Jesus.

Also, there's the little problem with Jesus saying that he didn't come to overturn the Law (the Law being the Old Testament). If you want to argue that burning witches in Jesus' name is not what Christ wanted, then why didn't he say so, or at least say something less ambiguous?

[BlackCat]

That's where Jesus and the new pact came in.

Uhmn, I think that he forgot to tell that to his belivers - they did such and they also had a merry time when they denied help to people that wouldn't convert in that floding incidents a few years back.

[Wezil]

Wezil, here's what I think Ben is trying to say.

The Supreme Court is not a moral authority. It is not a scientific authority. It is a Constitutional authority. When the Supreme Court makes a decision it is supposed to be based on the law. If the law supports slavery, then you wind up with a decision like Dred Scott. If it makes a decision about abortion, it is a legal decision, not a moral one. It is up to the people to be better than their laws, and to improve the laws of the past so that they mesh with a moral decision, like we did with slavery.

It goes further than that. First we have to get Ben to understand what the law actually is. We never got past that point.

Now he got kind of side tracked there, and started talking about Nazis, but that's what I make of what he was saying.

Yes, his argument that if the fetus isn't legally a person then anyone/everyone alive and breathing may be fair game.

[Felch]

I agree he sort of ran with it. He's excitable though, we all know this.

[loinburger]

Yes, his argument that if the fetus isn't legally a person then anyone/everyone alive and breathing may be fair game.

I believe PETA uses a similar argument - if you eat a cow then you might as well be mass-murdering the Jews. I would no more waste my time arguing the point with a die-hard PETA member than I would with Ben, hence my request that if he's not going to argue about personhood in good faith then he shouldn't even bring up the point (not that I expected him to abide by my request, as doing so wouldn't be the trollish thing to do).

[Nikolai]

People were burning witches in the name of Jesus, too, up til a couple hundred years ago, ie, like 1700 years after the birth of Jesus.

Also, there's the little problem with Jesus saying that he didn't come to overturn the Law (the Law being the Old Testament). If you want to argue that burning witches in Jesus' name is not what Christ wanted, then why didn't he say so, or at least say something less ambiguous?

You do know that the Law, apart from not only being laws, can be divided into different parts, right? Some are universal, some are given to Israel alone, most is given to Israel in a specific time and situation.

And people claiming to do something in God's Jesus' or someone else's name, does not automagically do so. Like BC's example. That is not a thing one should expect from Christians. It's definitely not with basis in Jesus' teachings.

[loinburger]

You do know that the Law, apart from not only being laws, can be divided into different parts, right? Some are universal, some are given to Israel alone, most is given to Israel in a specific time and situation.

I've never seen somebody give a consistent and thorough formula for determining which laws still apply and which don't. Usually it's just something like "I like eating ham and I like hating fags, so the ham laws go while the gay laws stay."

[chequita guevara]

Some fringe people like Che will say that humanity depends on social, not purely material, existence.

That's hardly a fringe argument. Anyone who studies humanity rationally, has to understand that human beings don't exist outside a social context. Removed from contact with other humans, people lose the ability to communicate over time and actually suffer brain damage. So called "wolf" children actually suffer permanent brain damage. If you were to take an infant and deny it human society, simply giving it care through machines, and what not, it would never be anything more than a wild animal. It would lack all of the special characteristics that make us human: most importantly, sentience.

And sentience is where I draw the line, both for humans and non-human animals (i.e., we should not kill great apes, dolphins, etc). Brain wave activity is not a valid measure of humanity because different parts of the brain "come on line" at different points in development. The part of the brain that makes us human, the cerebral cortex, doesn't begin working until late in pregnancy, and even then, the "thoughts" if they can be called such, are chaotic, random, not even indicative of remedial awareness.

[David Floyd]

You do know that the Law, apart from not only being laws, can be divided into different parts, right? Some are universal, some are given to Israel alone, most is given to Israel in a specific time and situation.

So, only Jews were commanded to not suffer a witch to live? That makes it OK? Similarly, God's commands to wipe out entire populations were only given to the Chosen People.

But that doesn't make it OK.

And people claiming to do something in God's Jesus' or someone else's name, does not automagically do so. Like BC's example. That is not a thing one should expect from Christians. It's definitely not with basis in Jesus' teachings.

As che has pointed out, if you can pick and choose what you want out of what people do in God's name, then he can say Stalin wasn't a communist. What you are doing is arguing a logical fallacy.

When the Church, which is the recognized authority on Christianity, says it's OK to do something, then that means Christianity condones x activity. If Jesus didn't intend for that to be the case, he could easily have said so.

Additionally, if you agree that Christianity is anti-abortion (which you seem to), because many-most theologians in many-most Christian sects agree the Bible says so, then how is it a stretch for you to agree that throughout history, Christianity was pro-witch burning?

[Felch]

I've never seen somebody give a consistent and thorough formula for determining which laws still apply and which don't. Usually it's just something like "I like eating ham and I like hating fags, so the ham laws go while the gay laws stay."

[BlackCat]

Like BC's example. That is not a thing one should expect from Christians. It's definitely not with basis in Jesus' teachings.

But it was true cristians who did it. They were more true belivers than todays christians.

[Felch]

As che has pointed out, if you can pick and choose what you want out of what people do in God's name, then he can say Stalin wasn't a communist. What you are doing is arguing a logical fallacy.

I would argue, and I think che would agree, that the problem is not with the ideology, but with the people who put it into practice. Christ killed no one, nor did Marx. But the Crusaders murdered many, as did the NKVD. The lesson I take from this is that the ideology should be kept alive, and freely advanced, but it should not be forced on anyone. Compulsion is the common error.