derbyshire on pro-lifers

I'm still bewildered. (I seriously had never seen or heard that phrase before.)

'you can never tell how great a child from an unwanted pregnancy wouldve ended up - what if jesus had been aborted?' 'yeah, or like, imagine if he'd been executed!'

Of course Thomas is completely correct, that is precisely why he included it and why he put it at the start. I just happen to think it is intellectually lazy.

It's symptomatic of the Pro-Lifers' bad faith, innit? They use all sorts of immaterial arguments to justify their position when almost without exception what they mean is "we believe our God prohibits abortion".

I'd say it is an anti-sex stance, which is part of it, except then there's the little euthenasia kick, right. Which has nothing to do with punishing sexuality. And makes little sense, in light of the anti-abortion "Against God's will" argument: ultimately they are supporting circumventing God's will--which is to kill a person, otherwise they wouldn't need all that life support amirite--for purposes not really explained.

The purpose of this post is to say I kind of think this has very little to do with actual Christian religious beliefs at all--I believe this is why Derbyshire brings up the cult aspect but if he's not going to explore what he actually means by this, it's useless.

http://photos.friendster.com/photos/78/64/3474687/1121542227612l.jpg

xpost then why are many of these people supportive of the death penalty, the war in Iraq, occasional incredibly violent means of getting their "point" across, so on and so forth? I mean there is a whole different set of contradictions that arise if it just comes down to "Humans can't kill other humans."

fred phelps & john paul ii

xpost yeah John Paul II, that is true.

I think many of them don't see the contradiction because they are big fans of old-testament style vengeance -- it's okay to take a human life if the person being killed is a sinner, but unborn babies are innocents so then it is wrong.

The reason the death penalty is pro-life is that it puts the highest possible value on the life of the person murdered by exacting the life of the person who violated that value by murdering. It’s a strong way to say, “It is not OK for one human being to take the life of another. If you murder, you forfeit your own life because the person you killed is so valuable.”

I don't know - perhaps they're confused and not very clever!

xpost so, for a Catholic, then, it is ok to kill your baby AFTER it is born because it now has sin? The whole idea is silly--then doesn't that make the executioner guilty, so on and so forth? The excuses are kind of labrynthine after a point.

I know there's no point to really discussing this here because it's like going into a church and telling them Jesus exists, you know.

people keep posting things v quickly

Tho seriously protesting at PP is weak but as long as they were just protesting and not blocking entry I don't even see a huge problem with that. It's really nuts and completely abusive to the people going inside (it's not like abortion is the only service the place provides for crying out loud, they actually offer pre-natal services even! For women who are keeping their childrens, but might not have the $$$ to go to a private doctor!), but I mean they got the right to do so. It's the really crazy ones that start blocking entry and trying to basically tackle the women (nice one, btw, tackle a pregnant woman to save her baby. I guess accident-forced miscarriages are ok by God)...that's enough to make you wish they'd legislate a White House stand-away-from-here zone around those places.

xpost get one (1) sarcasm girl.

Hardliners! It was a sort of following-the-idea-to-its-conclusion (which I don't think is actually a reasonable thing to do, the whole this-follows-from-that therefore man-on-dog! sort of Santorum/fanatic thinking) version of straightedge that was (maybe still is, it's super-fringe) against abortion

wikipedia summary here

Nat Hentoff

i claim protestant presbyterian too & they take an identical anti-war/execution stance, unlike the nasty swarm of southern baptists i grew up around (of course some presby offshoots are more conservative like my hometowns ARP chuch)

Except that rather than using it as a dismissal of their opinions, he proceeds to engage their opinions at length. And aren't some things actually cults?

A pro-lifer is basing their views on the premise that the taking of human life by another human is prohibited by God in all circumstances. They define human life as beginning at conception and ending at death and thus both abortion and euthanasia become prohibited. The contradiction mentioned by Ally therefore doesn't exist.

That's a semantic distinction. If "euthanasia" means taking someone off life support, does that mean that a human is killing another human? The human is the one who put that person on life support in the first place.

x-x-post

1. Steve actually no as far as I'm concerned, except in the strict (pre-Xian hysteria) sense of cult i.e. "a religion whose mysteries [core doctrines] are only revealed to the initiate" - a cult with public sanction is a religion, the difference is strictly semantic imo
2. isnt the official catholic doctrine that children arent capable of sin til age 10 or something?? tell that to shorty from the omen
I taught Religious Education at St John's in Norwalk a lifetime ago - consciousness of sin is at least partly necessary for the commission of sin, this is a remnant of Judaism & a good one I think

Well I was just trying to say that calling something a cult isn't always just a rhetorical trick because cults actually exist, which you seem to agree with. As far as te definition, the wikipedia entry deals with the subject pretty extensive.

Ramesh is much more bent out of shape than I anticipated he would be. I don’t know why I misjudged this..., and I regret having done so.

Sounds like a good Iraq analogy to me: the blinkered conservative, barging blindly ahead and convinced of his own rightness (and the appropriateness of his aggressive action), startled and surprised by the real world.

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NjEzOTM1YmM4ZmYxOTExMTg1MTZmODlhZGM0N2RkY2I=

dumbest thing ive read since... yesterday

btw the link to the o.g. article still works & is still great

I wonder again: Who, actually, is the Party of Death? Here I see a woman who, having missed her period and found herself pregnant, has an abortion, comes home, downs a stiff drink, and gets on with her life. With her life. Here I meet a man whose loved wife has gone, never to return, yet her personless body still twitches and grunts randomly on its plastic sheet, defying years of care and therapy. Let her go, everyone begs him, and his own conscience cries; and at last he does, whichever way the law will permit. Here I find a couple who want a lively, healthy child, but who know their genes carry dark possibilities of a lifetime’s misery and an early death. They permit multiple embryos to be created, select the one free from the dread traits, and give over the rest to the use of science, or authorize their destruction.

The RTL-ers would tell me that these people, and the medical professionals who help them, are all moral criminals, who have destroyed human lives. They support their belief with careful definitions, precise chains of reasoning, and—I do not doubt it—sincere intentions. Yet how inhuman they seem! What a frigid and pitiless dogma they preach!