William Saleton says abortion should be illegal because ultrasound shows the life wriggling and writhing in the mother's womb.
I’ll just point out that an ultrasound will also show your intestines writhing and wriggling in your abdomen, and that cancer is living too. So we should never remove cancerous intestines because we are destroying life when we do that, and life is sacred. The same goes with using antibiotics. You are killing innocent little baccili when you do that, and every life is sacred. (And don’t even get me started on the massacre of millions of innocent spermatozoan-Americans every day, especially in the mommy’s basements of rightwing war-bloggers nationwide!),
– Badtux the Sacred Life Penguin
Life is sacred for sure. And until humans came along and started figuring out to overrule nature and take over and over populate things where reasonably well in balance.
ReplyDeleteWhy worry about killing a fetus that isn't even born yet when there are too many here now and thirty thousand of them are dying of starvation everyday?
What a crazy planet. And you are crazy also, you just won't admit it.
As Monty Python put it:
ReplyDeleteEvery sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
You forgot about the brain cells destroyed by liquor and smoking. Smoking mothers rob their fetus' of 20% of their oxygen...so they'd better start getting their priorities straight...Mr. Badtux the well informed Penguin! I wonder if the Nutt n' Chief has figured out that bullets aren't healthy either...?
ReplyDeleteMr Deity Video
ReplyDeleteSpilling the Seed
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ReplyDelete"I’ll just point out that an ultrasound will also show your intestines writhing and wriggling in your abdomen, and that cancer is living too. So we should never remove cancerous intestines because we are destroying life when we do that, and life is sacred. The same goes with using antibiotics. You are killing innocent little baccili when you do that, and every life is sacred. (And don’t even get me started on the massacre of millions of innocent spermatozoan-Americans every day, especially in the mommy’s basements of rightwing war-bloggers nationwide!)."
ReplyDeleteYou have to be kidding. Are you honestly comparing a child in the lowest stage of development to a microscopic organism incapable of any growth related to humanity? The validty of your arguement is at the kindergarden level.
The number leading cause of preventable death that no one speaks of is abortion. Over 45 MILLION have died by an abortion. These are real people, with the potential for life...until it was taken away.
Sure, I hardly agree with you. But this post goes WAY past your norms...this is, to say the least, apprehensible.
4/5/07 4:56 PM
Jonathan, the comparison was meant to show the absurdity of saying that the fact that something was moving and obviously alive meant that it was human. Your big intestines do writhe around in your gut the same way as a fetus.
ReplyDeleteAs for the notion of a fetus being a "pre-born human being", there is no way to prove that. You accept it on faith. Other people do not. Your faith is not based on anything in the Bible, which does not mention fetuses anywhere. Your faith is based upon the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, though I doubt that you yourself are a Roman Catholic. Given that you are arguing from faith rather than based on anything that can be proven, it is rather useless for me to try to convince you of anything regarding abortion. You either believe, or you don't. You have a right to your belief, just as you have a right to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
On the other hand, faith makes a mighty poor method of government. Every theocracy on the planet eventually ends up corrupt or falling apart. Just look at Iran. The ayatollahs came in to Iran as pure as the driven snow compared to the military dictatorship that preceded them, a military dictatorship which had a habit of sending army units onto the streets with machine guns to shoot people dead in the streets just to prove they could. Now the Iranian ayatollahs are as corrupt as any government officials anywhere. Religion and government just don't mix, inevitably both religion and government end up destroyed because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In other words, you have a right to your belief. I will fight to my dying breath for your right to believe. But given that 50% of Americans when polled disagree with you, attempting to force your belief into law is misguided, undemocratic, and wrong. The fact that you are a believer does not give you a right to force other people at gunpoint to believe the same way as you. Jesus did not say "go out and kill all the motherfuckers, yo!". That was rapper Li'l Thug.
-BT
Yes, there is belief that goes into this issue, but there is assuredly science to back up my position.
ReplyDeleteHas there even been any sort of documentation that a fetus has ever become anything but a human child? On the other side, have your intestines progessed into a toddler? That would be a BIG no on both accounts.
Just because a child within the womb is defenseless, strange, and unable to speak for itself does not make it less of a human being. Yes, unborn children cannot make noise and don't breathe until out of the womb. But use that same logic in other stages of human life: babies can't walk, toddler's can't talk, 4 year olds can't accomplish cooridnated tasks, kindergartners struggle with math.
Where does the line start and end? Why must the earliest form of life be penalized in an inconsistent manner that no other human form has ever dealt with?
*And just for the record, the Bible does speak on life before birth:
"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." Psalm 139:13
Along with that verse there is:
-Num. 12:2
-Job 1:21, 31:15
-Psm. 22:9-10, 71:6, 139:13
-Ecc. 5:15, 11:5
Well, Jonathan, what is "human"? When does human life begin or end? There is no argument amongst most people that a baby in the process of being delivered or post-delivery is a human being, capable of interacting with the world and learning and growing. Before that... there is argument.
ReplyDeleteI think part of the problem is that we are coming at this notion of the proper role of governance in regard to the issue of abortion from different viewpoints. You come to this conversation with the notion that all humans are inherently evil, that God needs Man to speak for Him on this planet, and thus it is proper for believers to impose their belief at gunpoint via the power of government upon other people. Because you believe that humans are inherently evil, you believe that most humans must be prevented from doing evil by using force i.e. the power of government.
I come to this conversation with years of experience interacting with people even in the worst of ghettos, even with people who sell drugs on street corners, and finding that most of them simply are not evil. They do not go out and deliberately try to harm people, which is the definition of evil. They're just people, trying to make their way through life as best they can. When they do wrong it is out of ignorance or desperation, not out of desire to harm others. You, on the other hand, have likely never interacted with anybody other than your fellow home-schooled children, and thus all you know about the majority of people is what you're told, which is that they're evil and your role in life must be to convert them to not being evil, at gunpoint if necessary to prevent them from doing evil. I disagree. The proper role of a religious person is to educate, not legislate and force a particular morality upon people at gunpoint. Most people, I find, do not need laws to force them to do the right thing. They naturally want to do the right thing. They just need to know what the right thing is, which isn't easy to tell far too often.
Which brings up another point. You act as if God is dead and incapable of uttering His will directly. But if my finding that most people are not inherently evil is true, then most people are not deliberately trying to go against God. What that means is that if half the people disagree that abortion is the taking of a human life, that doesn't mean that half the population is evil. It means that for some reason God has not made it clear that abortion is the taking of a human life. After all, if you ask most people whether it's okay to kill a 1 week old baby, 99.9% of people would say "No, that's wrong." You might say that God has spoken and the people have heard.
My point: unless half of Americans are evil, which simply is not true (otherwise half of Americans would say it's okay to kill a 1 week old baby), there's a good argument to make against the notion that abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, then half of Americans are evil -- but that contradicts every single thing that every other statistic says about Americans, and contradicts my own personal experience dealing with Americans of all shape size color and faith, which is that Americans are, in general, a people who are a good people who want to do the right thing. I might suggest that the proper course of action here is prayer, not legislation, not the forcing of people at gunpoint to follow your faith.
- BT
A dead faith that "relies on God" to impose his will on what's going on is useless. As Christians, we are called to actually get off our buts and do something about what we believe.
ReplyDeleteSaying to ourselves, "Well OK, God will just let them know sometime..." and then sitting down with a bag of Doritos to watch the Red Sox tromp the Yankees is irresponsible in every way. God has his desires, yes, but he also commands those that listen to him to carry out those desires. We can't just give the hard topics to God, and hope someone else will carry the baton.
If, for the sake of arguement, 45 million deaths could have been easily stopped by the government (in any other form except for abortion...which seems to be taboo), wouldn't you also be up in arms to stop that form of death? Despite the fact that on average over 10 million people die a year for no good reason, we decied only to view the rights of the mother and never view the rights of the dead child?
So this is only consistent with how I would view the government to act in a way to save lives from improper decisions. It isn't about what I think the government should do according to my belief; its about the government stepping in and saving human beings from politically correct garbage and a facade of human rights. We could save millions of lives in a moment, but we haven't. That is why I push the pro-life stance.
I would probably agree with you that the majority of American citizens are attempting to do the right thing.
But would you agree with me in saying that ALL Americans, at some point or another, have done something in someway that was sinful? If that is the case, then BAMMO they are no longer "good people." Sin is sin, we have to accept the consequences of it (Rom. 6:23). What are the consequences? Death. Because God can't be with Sin.
I'll save you the Romans road, as I am sure you have heard it many times before. But your definition basically states that if people are good more times than they are bad, then they are good.
2good + 1bad = 100% good
The Bible's definition is quite different:
Xgood + 1bad = 100% unable to reach heaven
That is why our views on people are radically different.
In the end, I would like to refer to the comment of a religious professor from Duke University.
ReplyDeleteHe is against stem cell research, and abortion, because he views the objects used as human beings. He asks (I'm paraphrasing), "If it was found that the fetus were actually a tasty delicacy, would you eat it?" The obvious answer is NO!
Sure, some people have eaten wierd bugs in disgust, but the revolting idea of consuming a fetus is beyond any such bug entree.
Where does that disgust originate from? It comes from our deep down understanding that the "lump of flesh" (as you've titled it) is really a human being.
Jonathan, I would not eat a snail either. This is despite the fact that I *KNOW* it is a tasty delicacy. Does this mean that a snail is human?
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest of your screed:
1. There is no genetic difference between a cancer and a fetus. Both have human genes.
2. I feel sorry for you. Jesus Christ came to Earth with a message of salvation, not a message of damnation. Jesus came to Earth with a message of joy, not a message of hellfire and brimstone. The notion of going to Hell if you do the least thing wrong is nowhere in the Gospels of our Lord Jesus Christ, which about salvation, not damnation. Carrying the burden of hellfire around was not the message that Jesus brought to Earth, though I suppose you can take a few verses out of context and misread them. I will pray for you tonight that you may find the joy of Christ.
3. The power of government is the power of the gun. If you use government to do something, you are forcing people to do something at gunpoint. This only works if a majority of the people already want to do that something. You believe (not based on science, but on faith passed down to you by your elders) that a fetus is a human being and thus abortion is murder. Majestik (a feminist blogger) believes that the fetus is a cancer, a tumor in her uterus, and that if she catches this cancer she is well within her rights to get rid of it because she has absolutely no desire to be a mother. Who is right? That, in my opinion, is a matter of conscience. I have no personal opinion on the matter, other than that this is not a matter for the State, because the State is about things that we all pretty much agree are wrong, like dropping six-month-old babies into vats of boiling water and eating them (Jonathan Swift's answer to the problem of Irish overpopulation and famine). If there is no consensus amongst the people that it is wrong, then the State should keep out of it.
4. Note that I in no way state that you should not attempt to teach others in order to build such a consensus. I'm just stating that the consensus isn't there yet. Furthermore, I'll just give you a little tidbit -- threatening people *never* is a way to build consensus. If you threaten people with the power of the Gun (i.e. the power of the State), people will look at you as being undemocratic and evil, as well as un-Christian. Jesus did not come to Earth and threaten people with guns. The closest he got to violence was overturning some tables at the Temple, never any violence against people. When you threaten people with guns (which is what attempts to use the power of the State to enforce your morality upon people is), you are not behaving in a Christ-like manner and should spend some time in prayer and communion with Christ before you continue further.
And finally, please look up the difference between a "shallow" read of a text and a "deep" read of the text. For example, a "shallow" read of Mark Twain's novel "Huckleberry Finn" specifically the character of the slave Jim would be that this is a very racist novel. A deep read, looking at the entire context of the novel, brings you to the realization that it is both an anti-slavery novel and an anti-racism novel. The slave Jim is a better person, a more caring and trustworthy and helping person, with more insight into the people that they encounter along their journey, than every white person in the novel.
It is easy to take a few sentences (or verses) out of context and create a misleading shallow read of the meaning of the work. The same applies to the Gospels as applies to Huckleberry Finn. We are, in the end, only human, and thus fallable by definition. There was only one infallable human being that ever walked this Earth, and they crucified him.
-BT
BT,
ReplyDeleteI have a question. Do you believe in sin? You mention in your blogs that people do wrong and by definition are fallabble. That sounds like sin. So my bigger question is this: do you believe that there are consequences to doing wrong, being fallable, or sin?
You said Jesus came with a message of salvation, and I agree, but what, if there is no consequence for wrong, is he saving us from? (And I'm not trying to be smart, I really want to know where your coming from on this whole issue.)
John 1:29
"The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said 'Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.'"