christian concern for children
I find it curious the number of ways some Christians like to show their concern for children. Children. As if ‘children’ are somehow separate from human beings, or as if the adult each child will become is of no relevance.
Three things that easily go hand in hand are: wanting to force children to be born in less than ideal circumstances; removing decent healthcare from vulnerable children and their families; feeling furious enough at ‘evil’ to want to murder criminals when it all goes wrong.
wanting to force existence on children
We have bestowed upon every woman of childbearing age an unquestionable right to end the lives of her own children in utero totally without consequence. It is a war on our children. (Madblog)
The anti-abortion movement is the apex of impassioned and hollow support for children. The movement wants to force both children and adult women to grow and give birth to babies that are unplanned and unwanted. They aim to force sentient existence on children who clearly are unlikely to get a good start in life. Why? Because they don’t agree that every woman has a right to decide when she grows and gives birth to new human beings.
Are they concerned about suffering? Not in the slightest. A developing human in the womb has no capacity for pain and suffering. A woman hosting an unwanted an unwanted pregnancy has immense capacity for suffering, and a child born to parents who didn’t plan for it, can’t provide for it, or don’t want it, is a child who may very well face a lifetime of suffering.
wanting to remove healthcare support for vulnerable children and their parents
Any person who does not purchase their own healthcare policy will be allowed to suffer the consequences of their choice! Government has no responsibility and no authority to provide for healthcare in any way. This is because it must take from one and give to another simply for the good of the receiver. This tramples the rights of the person being taken from. To do so would be another form of slavery (Theroadtoconcord)
As well as attempting to force women in difficult circumstances to give birth to unplanned and unwanted children, the typical approach to caring for people in their society is … to not care for them. We so often find that the same mindset is convinced that every person needs to look after themselves, that there is no shared responsibility or concern for fellow human beings, and no sense of compassion that healthcare needs are universally met.
Let’s pause to think about this: concern to force existence and block pregnancy terminations, but no concern about caring for the child once it’s born. Are they concerned about suffering? Not in the slightest. As long as their taxes are low and the government is small, it doesn’t matter who dies or suffers as a result of lack of access to healthcare.
wanting to murder on behalf of children
You know how I know God is merciful and full of grace? Because if it were left up to me I’d be annihilating each one of those people and holding public executions of those who abuse children and rob them of their faith. We are most fortunate I am not God because my patience is not nearly as steadfast as His, nor my mercy. I would show up as a wrathful, vengeful malevolent creator indeed, and leave a wake of destruction in my path. (Insanitybytes22)
Insanitybytes provides the crowning example of hollow Christian support for children. Conveniently ignoring that most, if not all people who commit the crime of child abuse have suffered immensely in their childhood, she is much more keen to murder them than figure out the roots of their harmful behaviour and help other people avoid the same path. Is she concerned about suffering? No, she clearly states she’s concerned abused children might not turn out to be Christians.
conclusion
If we are really concerned about children, we have to be concerned about adults. If we are really concerned about children, we have to care about how they are born, how they are treated, how much they suffer, how much support society gives them and what we can do to help them grow up to be loved, loving and responsible members of our communities.
We don’t do this by making women suffer through unwanted pregnancies, by making families suffer with unplanned children and no basic supports in society. And we most definitely don’t show our concern by then wanting to murder the children with terrible starts in life who grow up to be criminals.
“For instance, let’s look at the abortion question. I’m opposed to abortion. But I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.” (from: http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript346_full.html)
I’m reminded of this quote. It seems that said conversation never materialized.
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Thanks, that’s a great quote. I did a post a couple of months ago on a pro-life Christian worth reading who did actually cover points like that:
I think it’s fair to say that many Christians feel that way, but the loudest ones are the those who scream ‘genocide’. It’s a difficult topic that pulls at many heart strings.
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I found it hard to accept how God could fearfully and wonderfully make babies with fatal birth defects; how God could allow generations of mothers and their babies to die in the process of giving birth, and having more than once prevented Pharaoh’s entire household from having children and the image of God as being the God of the Quiverfull families, who wants every child that could possibly be born to exist, the guilt that gets dumped on women who allow their natural menstruation cycles to destroy a life that God would have wanted them to have had is consistent with his nature throughout the narrative of Scriptures and the various interpretations thereof. It seems that our technology has snatched from the jaws of death some whom God would have allowed to die, but we can’t save them all. Before Christians get upset at the world, they have to question all the genocide that God’s permitted in his own glorious name.
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Interesting point about technology ‘snatching for death’ people who in a god-created existence were meant to die, and who did die for so many thousands of years.
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Wow! How…totally self-serving (not to mention fallacious — but then, sound reason doesn’t seem to be your goal). “Force a child to be born?” “Cannot suffer in the womb?”
If you do not accept the responsibility for the result of your action, then do not do that action. if you do not want a child, DON’T HAVE SEX!
The child is not a ‘thing,’ it is a person. If YOU create it, you do NOT get to kill it. In fact, the Constitution specifically spells out the right of the unborn. But then, the law isn’t of any concern to you, either.
You attack those who seek to respect and preserve life by acting as though those who refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions, use sound reasoning or even respect the law are somehow victims?! Nay, THEY are the very people civil society was organized to protect against!
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If YOU create it, you do NOT get to kill it.
How can you “kill” something that cannot “die”?
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I agree with you Black3Actual, that creating something does not provide the license to kill it. Like for example creating humanity would not have provided any gods the license to kill humans. Any humans at all, altough the stories about gods are full of wanton murder of humans by their creators.
However, a zygote or a fetus are not children. They are development stages of the pregnancy. Yet, even if they were personas as you claim, they would not have the right to be born as the rights of one individual only extend as far as where the rights of a nother individual begin. This is why we do not force people to make organ donations, not even to their next of kin, or when the sick person dies without the donation.
The pregnant woman has not given up her rights to not have children just by having sex. People have much more sex all the time than they have children and there is nothing wrong about it, even though it sometimes leads to unwanted pregnancies. It is much the same as driving a car (even for fun) is not wrong because it sometimes leads to serious accidents.
What would be the point of forcing someone who does not want to be a parent to become one? What good would that do to their child? We have ample experience of this in our many different societies, and the results have not been good. Have they?
No doubt abortion causes trauma to the woman who has it, but the unborn is not aware of any trauma, especially since by far most abortions are done at early term when there is only a clump of cells there. The trauma of the woman could be lessened by making the society not judgemental about this difficult choise she has had to make, by making the society more equal economically, so that this would not be a reason for anyone to go through the process and by making sexual education better awailable, so that having sex would not lead to unwanted pregnancies as often as it does. Right? Demanding that people should not have sex is just naïve. Is it not?
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The thing is, in a lot of cases, the answer is not as simple as ‘don’t have sex’. Society places enormous pressure on women to be sexually appealing and available to men, who in turn are encouraged to be sexually dominant and active. Even in cases where a woman is not outright forced (such as rape) a woman might feel worn down into having sex, because it’s expected of her. Combine this with poor sex education, hard-to-access contraception (did you know some the very religions that people use to adopt anti-abortion platforms also prohibit contraception in some cases?) and you have this situation.
Pro-life isn’t really pro-life. It’s ‘pro-control-over-women-as-a-result-of-societal-pressures-and-with-concern-for-the-child-until-birth’.
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Natural law has made the mutual urge to have sex very strong, to the point where all other logical considerations can often fade into the background. But natural law has also provided herbs to stop the growth of unwanted pregnancies, and this natural solution has been used by all human societies since the beginning of time. But the biggest indication that terminating unwanted pregnancies is permissable is the fact that natural law has has decreed that most pregnancies be terminated naturally (miscarriages) – a sure indication that there is nothing ‘wrong’ with a pregnancy termination, especially when the child may suffer as a result of being born.
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Hey violet.
Maybe you can digest your own logic or lack thereof
‘Miscarriage is natural termination to pregnancy?’ Really? Let me fix it: It is an UNNATURAL termination to pregnancy. The whole idea of pregnancy is natural. Life from the womb to term. Proof?
Sure. See how long you can swim underwater holding your breath in that ‘natural ‘ environment. Nothing wrong with the water eh? Why then must you swim to the top ere you run out of breath and drown? Seems kind of natural to cease living underwater when the surface is a few feet away…….
Surely dying underwater is ‘natural…………………………’ and drowning is the natural termination to life………………’ Or is it that you have simply displayed a miscarriage of common sense?
Btw, the ‘natural’ termination to pregnancy is nine months later.
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Speaking as someone who had a miscarriage within the last few months, I can say you have no idea what you’re talking about. Did you know that somewhere around 75% of fertilized eggs never grow past that stage and are miscarried within four weeks? Even after implantation the rate of miscarriage is around 31%. This through no fault of the mother. Once the heartbeat is heard those statistics go down to around 10%. It is natural. Most pregnancies don’t make it to nine months later.
Yes, miscarriage is a very painful, natural, process.
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Sorry to hear of your personal loss ruth. And I too, have loved ones near and dear who have miscarried. The word ‘natural’ never comes up in conversation, and that’s a fact. The loss is too heavy to wash away with such aloofness.
Maybe with God in the mix……………….giving birth would be supernatural………..and miscarrying would be ‘natural,’ but I digress.
Perhaps some need to define what is ‘natural.’
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Do you not know what ‘natural’ means?
I’m using this definition straight out of Webster’s:
8a
:
occurring in conformity with the ordinary course of nature
:
not marvelous or supernatural •natural causes •died a natural death
Aloofness?!? Are you kidding me? The term ‘naturally occurring’ carries no connotation whatsoever of aloofness. A Tsunami is natural. A hurricane is natural. A tornado is natural. An earthquake is natural. A heart attack is natural. Cancer is natural. Do you think anyone who has experienced any of those things is aloof? Shm…
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I can assure you miscarriage, especially after you’ve heard the heartbeat, is no less a force than any of those.
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@ruth
Are you paying attention? I used the word ‘aloof’ in the context of people having discussions about losing a child at three months in the womb due to miscarry. I dare you to defend ‘oh, it’s ok, honey, it was natural losing your baby………..’ Yeah, words a mother wants to hear.
That’s the context ruth, and please do not ascribe to me something I never intended or said.
So let me repeat:
Btw, the ‘natural’ termination to pregnancy is nine months later.
Court is adjourned.
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I should hope that no one would be so stupid as to say such a thing to a woman who has miscarried at any point. It is probably why most women keep it to themselves.
But, I can tell you that it is reassuring to know that it is a naturally occurring event, that others have experienced it, that it isn’t some rarity, that it is, indeed, natural. I cannot tell you how comforting it is to know, medically speaking, that it’s not your fault, that you did nothing to cause this thing to happen. So on the one hand, no, there is no emotional aloofness about such a thing. It doesn’t feel natural as in, “It’s only natural to lose a baby.” But medically speaking it is quite a natural process.
Btw, the ‘natural’ desire is for pregnancy to terminate nine months later for most. But as I demonstrated earlier that isn’t the natural outcome, no matter how warm and fuzzy it makes you feel.
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Oh Ruth, CS will not tolerate the teachings of a woman. He’s too pious (that is to say, moral) to fall for your first hand experience. He knows better because his faith-based beliefs will outweigh anything you can bring from reality to the ‘discussion’ table.
No, are you paying attention, VW?
Look at how religious belief brings people together! Anti-choice versus pro choice is almost a kumbaya moment where good reason that respects women’s equality rights carries the day!
And look how little harm there is dictating to women to be second class citizens and subject to other people’s ‘moral’ claims over the medical treatment of your body because of religious belief. Yup… can’t see any perniciousness here. It’s reasonable to make equivalent the incompatibly contrary CS’ faith-based beliefs to Ruth’s actual experiences. That’s why he feels he can tell Ruth what language to use and how to view miscarriage under the control of a loving and all powerful life affirming god. Yup, black when you squint just right is another kind of white… as long as you believe the squinting is a moral expression of a divine creative intervening agency.
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Seriously tildeb?
It is ‘natural’ for a pregnancy to ‘terminate’ after 9 months gestation. Period.
This is according to the laws of science, which are observable, testable, and repeatable; then there is common sense.
Personal experience is hardly a barometer for defining what is natural. You do not get to define what is natural. And the point about a discussion of a mother losing her newborn………whether it be by miscarriage, stillbirth, (natural too eh???)
Yeah there’s a good one. Tell the mother that giving birth to her dead child after carrying for nine months is natural……….
Wake up. It hardly takes belief in God to see what is obvious. But maybe you are saying that miscarriage is supernatural…………in which case, your own logic tightens the noose around your own contradictions.
Court is adjourned for lunch. No, make that for good.
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I personally enjoy ColorStorm’s take on life. You kind of have to rewire your brain to truly appreciate it, but there’s something kind of refreshing about looking out of other windows. It’s useful to understand where the overarching viewpoint comes from. Although to be honest, I don’t quite get this one. Because obviously miscarriage is more common and therefore more natural than giving birth, but it appears that he has introduced this to the argument.
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Aah violet, it is with great risk that you find small delight in a thing or two coming from the mind of the local colorful one. (your friends may talk) lol
Seriously though, in what way is the end result different from a miscarriage to a stillbirth, since the final chapter is: no life? In what way would a still birth be natural? You have to be consistent here; you must take both.
All we are talking about here is the TIME element. What began as life, to life, then ending of life…………all before the delivery.
I think it’s a valid point and a fair question. And yes, while I am certainly no female, certainly my thoughts are still germane.
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A stillbirth is a natural occurrence as well, CS. I think we’re talking about two different things here. There is what we want to happen, what we feel is natural and what actually happens in reality.
Death is natural, just as is life.
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Just because something is devastating doesn’t make it unnatural. Of course, you would never say to someone, “It’s only natural you’re wife died.” But death is a natural part of existence, nonetheless. Even if we wish it were not so.
Does the fact that miscarriage and stillbirth are natural occurrences make them any less painful or traumatic? Not at all. Feelings and emotions are natural as well. But to deny the scientific evidence of the nature of life and death is idiocy.
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What happens in nature is natural, do you agree? Miscarriages are a common feature of animal, including human pregnancy, do you agree? Miscarriage could well be a way of preparing a woman’s body for stronger, healthier pregnancy, by kicking things into motion but not reaching the breeding endpoint. A practise run if you like. If that was shown to be the case would it seem natural to you? Something that makes future pregnancies more likely to go to delivery. A still birth may well be ‘natural’ in some cases, but it’s not as common, given that we know ways to intervene to save babies in many cases. We don’t know yet why the majority of fertilised eggs miscarry.
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Can’t disagree here V,
Only to say when I speak of ‘miscarry,’ I do so with the knowledge that there was something to ‘mis-carry,’ not simply the ‘potential’ of life, but ‘actual.’
The ‘stillbirth’ was actual, not just potential.
What happens in nature is natural? Of course.
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It’s a tragic fact that miscarriages and stillbirths occur in nature. That is what is meant by ‘natural’. Ruth made this point quite clearly and used examples to back this fact up.
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Giving birth after nine months is natural. Ever heard of ‘natural childbirth?’
Giving birth to a dead baby is hardly natural, unless of course you celebrate such a thing.
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It happens in nature. This is biological reality. Of course it’s not something to be celebrated but that’s a misleading strawman anyway.
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Well, VW, I suppose when one is trying to stay on the road of reason, it’s ‘interesting’ and – dare I say, even ‘natural’ – to slow down and want to look at the catastrophic and horrific effects of those who have spectacularly crashed along the way. That’s where such mangled reasoning appears by the delusional likes of a Godsmanforever or CS or SoM or IB22 or John Branyan and his daughter Amanda, or Madblog or Citizen Tom or Mel… the list never gets any shorter, does it? It’s almost like it’s the cost of reasoning to apologize for these broken thinkers and pretend that their thinking errors in no way led them into these crashes but that it must an acceptable risk if they then try their best to lead others to follow them into disaster that threatens the safety rules of the road . God forbid, I guess, if we try raise some signs warning of the danger or even try to erect guardrails with sound comments.
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That’s not really my point. Most people, believe it or not, have good intentions. It’s just that their experience of life has led them to different conclusions. Take Arb, my favourite control study. I know he has good intentions in redressing the horrific imbalance against women in society. But his experience of life and the ideology he worships, has told him that to do this he needs to attack other oppressed groups in society. He has processed the facts differently from me – both atheists using logic and evidence. If you add invisible gods into the mix, we will both be deluded about invisible gods, but most likely stick to our prior beliefs on how to treat people who identify as trans. Religion is a harmless add-on to our outlooks.
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Well, he’s already adjourned court several times. As though he were some kind of authority on the subject.
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“Insanitybytes provides the crowning example of hollow Christian support for children. Conveniently ignoring that most, if not all people who commit the crime of child abuse have suffered immensely in their childhood, she is much more keen to murder them than figure out the roots of their harmful behaviour and help other people avoid the same path.”
Oh ouch, Violet. You complain about MY allegory about the destructive nature of people and yet you have no qualms about slaying me with your words, about driving a knife in my back, about mocking my concern for children?
As if you have not already poured lemon juice on all my wounds, you now accuse me, an abuse survivor, of not having enough empathy for those who rape children?
Your thinking is defective and your belief system is incoherent, Violet. You have allowed your desire to reject God as not credible, to trump both your reason and your empathy.
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Apologies if the post offends you Insanity. I don’t think for a second that you have little concern for any people – I know you try your best and give a lot of your time to help others. My point is that it may be misdirected, or ‘hollow’ in some instances, given your sense that ‘evil monsters’ should be killed, when they in fact were the children you claim you want to protect now. Does that make sense?
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Violet, you pen this post with three prime examples of how harmful religious thought is, yet on the last post you’re trying to argue it’s not harmful.
Signed, Confused in Brasil.
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Yes, isn’t it an interesting experiment? No-one has pointed out that these three views could equally be held by any right-wing misogynistic atheist (of which there many). Women should take responsibility for allowing life to be created within them, no-one should get co-operative healthcare, and all criminals should be punished or killed. Some forms of Christianity provide a uniting dogma, but if these people weren’t religious they’d unite around another ideology.
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So you’re saying someone like Theroadtoconcord is just a horrible, hate-filled person through and through?
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Not at all. Theroadtoconcord simply processes facts in a different manner to us. They see the counterproductive aspects of most large governments – wastage, corruption etc – instead of seeing it as a necessary fact of a co-operative society that can be improved over time. They also fall for the ‘generations on welfare’ story, which they choose to view as more harmful than ‘generations in dire poverty making their living from rubbish tips or worse’. We still don’t know how to solve the grotesque inequalities in our societies but providing for those in need seems like a basic consideration for wealthy nations. Unless you’ve been brought up in a country that brainwashes you to be paranoid about the people you elect to govern you.
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What is it with the US Americans and war? They are always declaring war on crime, terrorism, fat, or referring to it as if there was one on christmass and now on children. “It is a war on our children.” (Madblog) Should not Madblog have argued something more like: it is a “war” on their fetuses? Her children are not attacked on any level so it is not certainly a war on “our children”. Especially not, since a child is something that has born out of a human, not something that has not been born. We do have other words for the different development stages of a pregnancy, so why would anyone claim the unborn to be children? To more or less dishonestly appeal to emotions in order to settle the argument?
Is paying taxes to have a proper infrastructure just a nother form of slavery? “To do so would be another form of slavery” (Theroadtoconcord) Why is it, that taking care of other people with commonly collected taxes can be referred to as a nother form of “slavery”, but taking care of that the most expensive military on the planet runs smoothly while corporate capitalists make buck on the taxmoney is somehow not “slavery”? The hypocricy is tantamount and the idiocy credulity is just sad. Maybe Americans hate the taxes so much, because they do not feel they are getting their money’s worth, as obviously they do not trust their police to be able to protect them from violent crime, but every individual wants to carry a gun, wether they have any idea how to really use it or not.
In reference to your previous post, it is important to notice, that we can not really say, Christians are actually deriving these values they stand for from the tenets of their religion. “I would show up as a wrathful, vengeful malevolent creator indeed, and leave a wake of destruction in my path.” (Insanitybytes22) To be fair, saying this she is describing her own emotions, not what she thinks is the nature of her god. Infact Insanitybytes claims her god is the opposite of this sort of vengefullness. However, one could draw this kind of god from the Old Testament and be sincere about it. There is no question about wether or not our beliefs affect our actions. So, her admission is, that regardless of her god being mercifull she herself is not. How does she justify this disparity between what her god is and possibly expects of humans and her seeing herself not being able to be as mercifull as expected of her? Perhaps, after all the underlying culture of revenge serving as justice from the Old Testament has influenced the way she sees justice? Perhaps her surrounding culture of US American culture of violence and revenge mistaken for justice has influenced her, or perhaps, the culture has been greatly affected by the Biblical description of the vengefull god and she in turn by both of them.
Most Christians I know here in Finland have nothing at all against proper sex education, abortion, paying taxes to support a wellfare system, nor do they support the death penalty. Infact, some of them are even proud to declare, that their values are the true Christian ones and that the reason why in our country we have the legal liberty to have abortions, tax based wellfare system and no death penalty are the results of Christian values and the teachings of Jesus that have affected our society in this manner. So, wich way is it? I do not expect the Christians to get their act together. They all seem to be sure on what their god wants, even in the most contradicting issues, and they all base their beliefs on the same book and direct councell it gives, and it seems to give reason enough for them to belive completely opposite moral views, so I do not see it as a moral book, rather just a story about primitive humans trying to cope in the nature and with each others.
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They should call it a ‘war on unwanted pregnancies’ and campaign for better sex education and free birth control. But instead they want to shut down access to abortion and force women to give birth to children in insecure circumstances.
Thanks for the reference to Christians in Finland. John Zande and Tildeb both liked your comment but still insist that only harm can come from Christianity.
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Hmmm… I think that the four of us, you, I Tildeb and John Zande can agree, that the question is not wether anything good can come out of Christianity, or religion in general, but rather that the problem is, that the harm by far outweights the benefits.
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And along that line of reasoning is this:
“This is not a hopeless situation, though: hardly any of these problems are insoluble. But there’s a catch: we simply can’t expect to overcome such formidable dangers to civilization without taking seriously the good epistemology that underlies the new atheist movement, even if this movement sometimes falls short of its own high standards. More than ever before, we need people who value evidence, science, reason, observation, experimentation, logic, and expertise — all of which are antithetical to the feeble foundation of faith and revelation that supports religious systems. If we want to navigate the vast wilderness before us without tripping into the grave of extinction, we need to embrace a “robust sense of reality,” and this means discarding the ancient myths and eschatological fairy-tales that guide a growing proportion of humanity into ignorance.
Harris once said that, “No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs.” One could flip this statement around, as follows: Many cultures in human history have suffered and even collapsed because their people became too unreasonable and deluded by superstitious nonsense. With the stakes higher today than at any point in the past and lower than in the foreseeable future, a failure to become sufficiently reasonable could result in societal catastrophes unlike anything our species has previously experienced. This makes the new atheist movement and its emphasis on thoughtful rationality perhaps the most important movement of the present century.” (a href=”http://quillette.com/2016/09/23/is-the-new-atheism-movement-irrelevant/”>Source)
This is key: understanding and appreciating what a good epistemology means and why it’s so incredibly important. And the foundation for what constitutes that epistemology to be preferable when addressing concerns about real people in real life has to be directly connected with that real world! An epistemology that does not respect reality’s role to arbitrate claims made about it is not one worthy of respect. What DOES need more respect and promoting is respect for reality.
Religious belief is the opposite to what constitutes a good epistemology about reality and anything that supports trying to make this incompatible epistemology of substituting faith-based belief in place of respecting reality, one that does not place a higher value on evidence, science, reason, observation, experimentation, logic, and expertise because it conflicts with some faith-based belief is not going to help ANY real world problem. It is going to HINDER our common ability as a species to favourably address real species-wide extinction problems in real life.
This not some difference of opinion but a real and present and growing danger. To ALL of us.
This urge to accommodate two incompatible thinking methods that regularly and reliably divides people into opposing camps under the heading of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’ for real people is a guaranteed way to fail the species as a whole.
We all have a choice.
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Tildeb, you sound like you’re building a new religion where there is an obvious Right and Wrong to everything. Humans will never know everything, as I keep saying, and we can never evaluate all the outcomes of our actions. So while evidence, knowledge and logic are all invaluable, with our limited resources they don’t hold all the answers (like some invisible god). Furthermore, I’m convinced that given the breadth of interpretation under the umbrellas of all religions that people make up their own minds anyway. I really don’t think religion has the huge impact you think it does. It provides a framework/an ideology that can be harmful, much like any other secular framework can be once implemented. Communism is amazing in principle – we all work together and share the benefits, but probably impossible to implement on a large scale. The differences we all have, the variety of viewpoints we all have, provide checks and balances for each other. Seeking to wipe out an established and natural human expression that comes in so many different forms, because you’ve decided it’s Wrong is dodgy to say the least.
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You are incorrect to assign to me this notion that religion as a set of fundamental beliefs about reality is toxic to human understanding. Just look to religion! It has never, ever, produced one jot or tittle of knowledge. Not once. Ever. At all. It is safe (and demonstrable) to say at this time that it is a reasonable conclusion to say that religious belief contains no knowledge that it claims to have, no special insight, no means to show why it is a different kind of knowledge or another way of knowing. It is a set of fundamental beliefs divorced from the very reality it purports to accurately describe. I’m simply pointing this fact out and am not importing this conclusion as if it were simply a personal assumption. Reality is responsible for painting religion to be fully equivalent to delusional thinking. I’m not introducing this idea: religious belief has done this work already.
Now, you seem to think that because human populations have created religion as a means to account for some phenomena, it’s somehow okay… because it’s ‘natural’ for humans to make shit up and pretend to know stuff they don’t know anything about (because perhaps some people sleep better for it… actually, there’s a very good evolutionary explanation for this tendency). The fact of the matter is that from all these religious explanations, it’s still made-up shit. And we know it’s shit because it has not, does not, and probably never shall produce knowledge about reality because reality is not linked to it.
All the ‘nice’ words we use to describe religion’s contributions to human society rely on hazy and/or muddied metaphysical terms. Well, it has to, doesn’t it? Religious belief with all its explanations – often contrary and incompatible with other religious beliefs, let us never forget – has yet to actually produce any knowledge to demonstrate its unique contribution, to show its merit, to indicate why it is revelatory about reality. Nada. That is a remarkable feat… considering even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day. Religion doesn’t even have that much going for it. That’s why religion has to steal anything and everything of truth value from somewhere else… and then claim itself to be its source! That’s why we have discussions about morality and ethics constantly attributed to some religious influence but that has no truth value when examined. JZ likes to ask what unique insight Jesus brought to the world and has yet to receive an answer worth knowing.
Because religion has shown, does show, and probably shall continue to show no explanatory insight into how reality operates and what it contains, it contains no truth value to its explanations that anyone anywhere at any time has been able to show… independent of some belief that it does… apparently because it must! And what is that belief based on? Not evidence from reality. It’s based on – come on, three guesses and the first two don’t count… faith. That’s why it’s not knowledge!
This is where religious apologists excuse the absence of any knowledge from religious belief with the accusation that no set of beliefs contains total knowledge… and so holding one set of beliefs that has none is somehow equivalent to those that have some. This is what you continue to do. It’s silly. The point raised is that acting on a total absence of knowledge really is equivalent to acting on privileged ignorance… an ignorance that really does cause a huge amount of harm AND one protected from evaluation because it’s from ‘another way of knowing’ and a ‘different kind of knowledge’. Well, the made-up shit has now morphed into bullshit that drives a lot of public policy that harms real people in real life… from education to law, from medicine to foreign aid. This is what you are excusing while claiming it doesn’t really harm anyone.
Guess what? You’re wrong.
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Religions were formed in times of relative ignorance by people who were relatively intelligent. They told interesting stories and made up some useful rules for societies in those times, and some of those rules have lasting interest for us. Could we ‘discover’ these rules, conclusions about life, independent of religions? Of course. But the religions provided the means to spread the structure. And as time has marched on, the rules, the understandings have been modified, as would have been done without religion. Jesus didn’t need to saying anything unique, but the stories do leave us with useful philosophical and moral ponders.
Please read what I write – I haven’t claimed religion is harmless, it is relatively harmless. The same amount of harm is done by similar people without religion. It is a relatively harmless framework that people use to pursue policies we may personally evaluate to be harmful. Ignorance comes in many forms, and we’re not even in position to judge with total clarity where we fall within this.
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Quoting you, VW:
“But the religions provided the means to spread the structure.”
Compared to what? Democracy? Reason? Philosophy? What? Your assertion is baseless without an honest comparison! You fill in the missing bit with an assumption that religion has offered something beneficial.
“…the stories do leave us with useful philosophical and moral ponders.”
Compared to what? Myths? Fables? Oral traditions? What? Your assertion is baseless without an honest comparison! You fill in the missing bit with an assumption that religion has offered something beneficial.
“It (religion) is a relatively harmless framework that people use…”
Compared to what? The scientific method? The Enlightenment? The Age of Reason? What? Your assertion is baseless without an honest comparison! You fill in the missing bit with an assumption that religion has offered something beneficial.
“Ignorance comes in many forms, and we’re not even in position to judge with total clarity where we fall within this.”
Compared to total clarity? Who said anything about total clarity? And how might we know we are ever in possession of total clarity. (Your cell phone works not because anyone has total clarity over the physical and chemical and electronic mechanisms in operation, but you would have us believe that it works because we import some kind of ideology similar to demon possession and that’s why our claims to know stuff about reality – and demonstrate the explanatory value of this understanding – is apparently equivalently hazy as some superstitious faith-based belief. I mean, come on.)
Once again, VW, you use this form of argument that this complete absence of knowledge (religious belief) is at least equivalent to an incomplete body of knowledge we apply that works for everyone everywhere all the time reliably and consistently well. This is terribly flawed reasoning and yet you use it time after time to excuse privileging religious ignorance to have some measure of benefit (that you import to your claims and not deduce from reality) and then equate the harm done (mostly innocuous as you seem to imply from time to time) to be about the same. It’s not. Cell phones that explode are pulled from the market. Religious belief never is; it’s switched from a literal reading to some metaphorical ‘insight’ and then eventually sidelined to be relative to the time of the writing when confronted and overpowered by advances from gaining real world knowledge. One way, VW: the movement is ALWAYS in only one direction… away from religious ignorance towards knowledge). This is a thinking mistake you rely on to excuse the broken methodology upon which all superstitious nonsense arises, based as I’ve pointed out several times now as a false equivalency. And the false equivalency is based on your assumption that religion imports benefit!
Bunk.
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I’m wondering if that’s the case Raut. I’ve just done a new post on the subject.
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I have been and will continue to be torn about the issue of abortion. I do not feel I have the right to tell another what she must do with her body, yet I find the notion of abortion as a form of birth control unconscionable. I could not choose it for myself, but I hold no judgment on anyone who has been in the position to choose it for themselves. Access to safe and legal abortion clinics is preferable to not having it, IMHO, because I do not believe that banning it reduces it. I believe it simply raises the risks to a woman who chooses an unsafe back alley clinic or a do-it-yourself job which won’t end well. No, I do not under any circumstances believe that abortion is deserving of the death sentence. We can see that when even the most ardent pro-lifer says with conviction that abortion should be allowed if the woman’s life is in jeopardy. If pro-birth were all there were to it then the life of the mother would be of no consequence and we’d be saving the fetus at the expense of life of the woman.
It is noteworthy that the abortion rate is going down. In fact 2016 showed the abortion rate at the lowest since it was legalized in America. There are many more effective ways of lowering the abortion rate than banning it. Proper sex education is invaluable. Birth control can be obtained for the very poor at no cost to them by going to their local health department. Many do not know this because it isn’t advertised and it isn’t taught in school. Even when birth control isn’t free, it can be obtained at a relatively low cost in comparison with raising a child. That doesn’t mean it’s always cheap, though. It is also less risky than abortion. Even as safe as abortion has become no medical procedure is without risk.
The abortion issue is most assuredly not so black and white as its opponents and proponents would like to make it.
But I don’t think the point of your post is the rightness or wrongness of abortion. That debate will rage on. What I see at the heart of your post is that all some people seem to care about is pregnant women giving birth. Who cares if she has the means to obtain proper prenatal care ensuring a healthy child? That’s her problem! Who cares if she has the money to feed that child once they have been born? *Shrug* Not my problem! But she damned well better have it!
Did not Christ supposedly say, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
As you rightly note, it is the height of hypocrisy to treat abortion as if it were some kind of horrific evil and forget that being callous to the plight of the poor, the sick, the hungry, the prisoner, the weak is and evil just as great. I don’t think we need any god to separate the sheep from the goats. The goats show themselves as what they are just fine on their own.
While I don’t believe in an afterlife or this reckoning one would think that those who do would shudder at the thought of how materialistic and capitalist they are.
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Hi Ruth, so sorry to read about your recent miscarriage, hope you’re okay. The physical and emotional toll is enormous. I had a couple, one before each live birth, and it frustrated me how much it’s swept under the carpet – obviously because of the pain it causes and also because it’s such a private, individual experience. But then perhaps this societal silence makes it more painful, I’m not sure.
Anyway, obviously being keen to have children makes it difficult to deal with the thought of terminating what, for us, are such precious growths. But I think it’s safe to say that people who seek abortion aren’t generally in a secure relationship, or secure situation, where they feel they can give a child the best start in life. I don’t think it’s ever our place to judge how someone else feels about their own pregnancy or condone a society that would expose desperate people to the risk of illegal abortions. Like you say, the only logical course, from every point of view, is to cut the numbers of unwanted pregnancy, which has only been shown to be successful through education and access to birth control.
And then there’s the point about caring for other human beings in the world. Why is that so lost on this brand of Christianity? Caring= leaving to rot. Because otherwise we’re slaves to the state? Something like that. Or a naive idea that individual charitable acts can have an impact. It’s simply not realistic.
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Or a naive idea that individual charitable acts can have an impact.
There is a faction who believes that charity should be left to the church because they can do it best. Were that so we wouldn’t be having this discussion, would we?
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If you want Christians to be concerned about the health and welfare of children, you have to stick ’em back in the womb.
I’m also pretty sure that children – unlike fertilized eggs – die when frozen. But hey, we could always do this under the religious assumption that a zygote is a synonymous condition to that of a child… that they are the same and should be treated by law as such. And if the child turns out to have died once we thaw the corpse, why, then we could have a steady source of tender baby meat for us atheists to throw on the barbi. Win win… and just so darned pro-life!
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“If you want Christians to be concerned about the health and welfare of children, you have to stick ’em back in the womb.”
Some Christians. 😉
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The un-aborted have no right to speak for the pre-aborted.
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A developing creature within a sentient creature’s body, dependent on that body in a parasitic manner, has no ‘right’ over the host body, and even if they did, they have no way to express thoughts or opinions they can’t yet form. If you think that makes them equal in terms of rights, you can spend your days growing and giving birth to children you don’t want. But don’t attempt inflict your misplaced concern for children on the rest of humanity.
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