The thread where we make enemies out of friends, aka the abortion debate thread — Page 17

walkingdork said:

Warbler said:

walkingdork said:

Warbler said:

walkingdork said:

darth_ender said:

Well, much as I enjoy this debate, I don't think I'm going to argue with you if you think that a perfectly fair analogy is crazy without providing any rational reason.  You don't have to like it, but both were/are legal, and yet some people saw/see such as acceptable while others saw/see such as unacceptable.  Nothing crazy about that.  But I think I'm done defending definitions since I feel like I am continually taken out of context (not just by you, mind you).

Comparing the legality of abortion to the legality of genocide during Nazi Germany is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard of. So no, I will not be offering much "rational reason" for saying an analogy is crazy.

why was it crazy?  C3PS argued that since abortion is legal and socially acceptable,  I was silly for "getting my panties tangled up" over it.   In Germany, at the time, the Holocaust was also deemed legal and socially acceptable(at least for some Germans, I realize some Germans opposed all the stuff Hitler was doing).    The comparison seems very logical to me.  

America is nothing like Nazi Germany. Abortion is nothing like genocide.

I know that, but that is irrelevant to the comparison I was making.  I think you need to go back and read the conversation between me and C3PS.  Maybe then it will make more sense to you what I brought up the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was not made legal, they just did it.

Not so sure of that.   At the time, Hitler was the law, and Hitler approved of and authorized what happened to the Jews. 

darth_ender said:

I know C3PS doesn't want to talk about the definition anymore, but clearly Warbler's intention is that just because killing someone is legal doesn't make it right.

And also to be clear, regardless of any improper word choices, the intent of his argument is not invalidated just because his interpretation of the word 'murder' is not necessarily the legal definition.  We use many words improperly.  Warbler's argument is not deflated simply because his usage involves what he and I believe is the violation of a higher law than that here on earth.

I don't have a problem with talking about the definition of murder, I just wasn't interested in getting too hung up on semantics when I clearly understand what Warbler means when he says murder. In other words, it isn't important and it isn't garbling communication at all. Also let it be clear I was never trying to claim his argument invalid in anyway based on his interpretation of the word murder.

walkingdork said:

some dude in the bible shot one off (ejaculated) into the ground and was immediately put to death by God for wasting his seed.

Not exactly. You're thinking of the story of Onan and Tamar. So, Judah (one of the brothers of Joseph, the kid with the colorful coat) had a few sons, the oldest two were Er and Onan. Er married a woman named Tamar, God decided Er was kind of an asshole, so he stuck him down. Unfortunately, Er hadn't sired any offspring to carry on his lineage. So, as was the custom it was now his younger brother Onan's duty to have sex with Er's widow and impregnate her for his brother. The resulting child would be considered Er's offspring and would inherit his stuff. So, Onan does his duty and sleeps with his sister-in-law, but he doesn't like the idea that the resulting kid isn't going to be his, so he pulls out before coming and ejaculates on the ground. God get's mad that he refused to carry out his duty, and strikes him dead. 

So many people misuse this story to make it about masturbation or birth control. It had nothing to do with him "wasting his seed", it had to do with his attitude and his refusal to fulfill his duties and do what Judah told him to do.

Story get's even more crazy when Judah gets drunk, sleep with his daughter-in-law, forgets about it, get's outraged when he discovers she is pregnant (obviously through promiscuity as she is not remarried), and then ends up feeling all sheepish when she pulls out a few items her lover left behind which he identifies as his own belongings. Even the best and most smuttiest of soap operas can't roll with this stuff.

Prior to discovering he was the one who screwed and impregnated his own daughter-in-law, Judah ordered Tamar to be burned to death, indwelling future human inside her and all.

A far more interesting bit pertaining to abortion is found in Exodus:

Exodus 21:22-25

When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that she has a miscarriage but no other injury occurs, then the guilty party will be fined what the woman's husband demands, as negotiated with the judges. If there is further injury, then you will give a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a bruise for a bruise, a wound for a wound.

Apparently God doesn't (or at least didn't under the Old Covenant) equate the death of a fetus with that of a human either. The death of the unborn baby is treated here like a civil dispute, the same sort of charge that would be made for the loss of property or livestock, not the loss of a human life.

^Nice to see you knowledge of the Bible coming out :)  Reading your old posts prior to your "conversion," it's fascinating to see how knowledgeable you are about biblical topics.

I do wish to address the Exodus 21 bit, which I'd considered yesterday as well, but again, time is short.  I actually found a site with a number of supposed arguments for abortion in the Bible...most of which are weak, but there are some worth discussion, including the verses you mentioned.  Again, too busy to go into any depth right now.

I feel the Exodus 21 bit is the only one that give any kind of indication at all.

The fact that children of less than a months age weren't counted for tax purposes or for population censuses is very likely to do with the infant mortality rate. In that time it wouldn't have been uncommon to lose an infant in the early months, or especially the early days, of its life. Making someone pay taxes on them or including them in the census may have been considered premature given the possibility they might not survive.

It is funny that site uses the conquest of Midian under what the Bible says about abortion. The Israelites were taking the city of Midian and were commanded by God to kill every Midianite male, including any woman who could potentially be pregnant with a male baby, which included all non-virgins (virgins, however, were valuable for integration). It is really stretching to try to see this section as having anything to do with abortion, since it is about all out war and wiping out an entire civilization of people. Same thing goes for the Hosea passages, which are Hosea's pleas to God to destroy their enemies.

The only time out of all of those that it is talking about unborn Isrealite babies is in Exodus 21, that is the only verse in the Bible that talks about unnatural occurring miscarriage from a legal standpoint. I don't think the taxing and the census stuff says much about the value of an unborn child, other than to say they were not yet considered in the tax you owed or that they weren't yet tallied as part of the population. I can't imagine any culture, modern or ancient that would count unborn children as a number of their population, or charge them taxes.

Is it not murder if God commands it, surely it's legal?

True that! It was only genocide, not murder.

*sigh*

You have a point about Hitler being an evil despot, and it might be a bit silly for the UK to have a constitutional monarch and I can see how you might find my position on mice difficult to follow but are you sure about worshipping this chap?

Commanding people to kill pregnant women seems a bit on the extreme side.

Just sayin'

CP3S said:

I can't imagine any culture, modern or ancient that would count unborn children as a number of their population, or charge them taxes.

I believe some states allow people who have a stillborn baby to take a child credit deduction on their taxes that year.

That is reasonable, because a stillborn is a hardship and has monetary and time loss associated with it. The thing I couldn't imagine would be akin to charging someone property tax on a fetus. 

The Leviticus passage was regarding charging a household taxes based on the number in their household, you pay more tax the bigger your family is (which means the more assets and workers you have). If they were under one month of age, they didn't get counted. 

Bingowings said:

You have a point about Hitler being an evil despot, and it might be a bit silly for the UK to have a constitutional monarch and I can see how you might find my position on mice difficult to follow but are you sure about worshipping this chap?

Commanding people to kill pregnant women seems a bit on the extreme side.

Just sayin'

yeah, I've never been too comfortable with some of the Old Testament stuff.   I've often wondered if those kinds of things were truly ordered by God,  or did the people back then just think it was, or did they make it up to use an excuse to justify the slaughter they wanted to do?  The slaughter in the Old Testament always seemed inconsistent with the message of love and peace preached by Jesus.     

not sure what is real or made up.   I what do believe for certain is that there was a Christ,  he is the son of God,  He died for our sins and three days later he rose from the dead.   I have faith that part of the Bible is true.  The rest, I do not know about. 

walkingdork said:

Genesis 38:9-10

King James Version (KJV)

⁹ And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.

¹⁰ And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also.

Either way you read it, the Lord is kind of a dick. So Onan was supposed to knock up his brother's wife and when he decided he was killed. That is weird cult kind of shit.

according to the story, I don't think he was killed for knocking up his brother's wife,  I think was killed because he was supposed to try to get his brother's wife pregnant and he instead "pulled out". 

Yeah he was clearly killed for ¡BANG!-¡KNOCK!.

Warbler said:

yeah, I've never been too comfortable with some of the Old Testament stuff.   I've often wondered if those kinds of things were truly ordered by God,  or did the people back then just think it was, or did they make it up to use an excuse to justify the slaughter they wanted to do?

Adi Shankara used to tell this story about two birds living in a tree.

One lived on the highest branches and didn't seem to do much but look serene and content, the other one lived on the lower branches pecking around, sometimes getting a sweet berry sometimes a vile sour berry which would make him sick.

Everytime he got sick he hopped up a branch to get a better view of the happy bird to see what his secret was.

Eventually he got to the top and realised he was the only bird in the tree.

He had been seeing his future.

God's a bit like that.

Our ideas about God evolve over time until such a thing is achievable and at the end of time there you are, able to warp time and space to bring the universe that made you possible into being.

Always complete but still in a state of becoming.

Which means we get the God we deserve.

Or it could all be the Great Green Arkleseizure.

Not to be a poop, but this would actually be a really good conversation for my Religion thread.  Now where did I put that...?

darth_ender said:

By the unanimous vote of all twister111s here, I am starting a thread devoted to the debate of abortion.

Those who know my style know I'm generally fairly middle ground and am good at seeing others' perspectives and trying to be accommodating.  You will find no such middle ground here.  I feel abortion should only be permitted when the mother's health is severely at risk, be it physical or mental, meaning following rape/incest.  Even then, I feel it should not be a default decision, but rather a well-thought one.  I will never understanding how someone can feel so passionately about women's rights that they feel justified in removing the right to life of another human.  Even if I did not believe in God, I could never support this practice.  How can we protect the lives of endangered animals and plants, yet treat unborn human life as trivial because we are not endangered?  I'll never understand it.  But you're welcome to try to make me.  I'm ready to be outnumbered, but I assure you I am will not cop out on this topic.

Because unborn embryo's have no feelings or sensations. That's is why I am very strongly pro choice, at the very least in that area of subject/topic..!!!!

George Carlin would explain himself perfectly if he were still alive.

Urge to vote Republican rising...

Keep posting here, YubNub! You're winning me converts!!!!!!