Hello again Silat,
Forgive me if I respond to two of your posts at once.
Originally posted by Silat
Im not going to argue your religious belief about abortion. I think you are wrong and we will never agree.
I believe in a woman controlling her body period.
As horrible as the choice of abortion may be I support the womans right to decide right up until the baby is outside her body.
And I think you are evil for wanting to take her control away from her.
So Sea if you dont want an abortion then dont get one.
Come on Silat, the cliché answer, “If you don’t want an abortion then don’t get one” has never held up under any sort of philosophical scrutiny. For instance, lets apply it to other moral evils that have had legal protected status in various countries:
* “If you don’t like Slavery, don’t buy a slave”
* “If you don’t like the holocaust, don’t run a concentration camp.”
And so on…
In each of these cases the essential right to life and liberty of another person is being legally violated even though the violation is legal and a considerable number of people in the state approve of the action (sometimes even a majority). Since those whose rights are being taken away cannot defend themselves, those who can have a moral responsibility to do so. As it says in the Proverbs 31:8
“Open your mouth for the speechless, In the cause of all who are appointed to die.”In an abortion, a defenseless human life is taken without cause by another person or persons. When Scott Peterson killed his pregnant wife and her unborn child, he was rightly charged with and convicted of two murders not just one. The state acknowledged that what he did was commit a murder, but the state at the same time has created a contradiction in law – namely that when daddy kills baby, its murder, but when mommy kills baby, it’s her legally protected right. I heard from a doctor a little while ago who started out pro-abortion but eventually became pro-life. He said the catalyst to the change was that he had ended up laboring in the same hospital on the same day to save the life of a premature baby and then shortly thereafter do a late-term abortion. He said he realized that the child he had killed looked almost identical to the one he had been laboring desperately to save. The right of a mother to kill her child is a made up “right” granted by positive law, it can never, ever, supersede the inalienable right to life granted to every person by God.
Originally posted by Silat
SEA you are the greatest example in here that I can point to.
You want your religion and your religious beliefs to be the law of the land.
The American Taliban at work.
Not in my America if I have anything to say about it.
We have men and women dying right now fighting religious fanatics.
Maybe we should be fighting them here first.
Silat, I’ve answered this one so many times, I almost feel like there ought to be a sticky labeled
“What Seagoon believes about Church/State relations” – for heaven’s sake I am even doing my ThD on the subject of the Spirituality of the Church, a succinct summary of that doctrine being given by R.B. Kuiper in these words
“Just because the preaching of the Word is so great a task the church must devote itself to it alone. For the church to undertake other activities, not indissolubly bound up with this one, is a colossal blunder, because it inevitably results in neglect of its proper task. Let not the church degenerate into a social club. Let not the church go into the entertainment business. Let not the church take sides on such aspects of economics, politics, or natural science as are not dealt with in the Word of God. And let the church be content to teach special, not general revelation. Let the church be the church.” but it seems like whatever answer I give it all gets ignored by the desire to maintain the “Theocon” caricature of every evangelical Christian. Alright then, here it is again, here is the official position I have subscribed to, which I believe to be the teaching of scripture, and which I have vowed to uphold:
“It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance.”
And
“It is the duty of people to pray for magistrates, to honor their persons, to pay them tribute or other dues, to obey their lawful commands, and to be subject to their authority, for conscience' sake.Infidelity, or difference in religion, doth not make void the magistrates' just and legal authority, nor free the people from their due obedience to them : from which ecclesiastical persons are not exempted…”
Now I would invite you to show me how that is the same thing as waging Jihad in order to extirpate all other religions, ideologies, and governments and set up a world-wide caliphate governed by Sharia.
As for “maybe we should be fighting them here first” you are my dear fellow, using the judiciary and the legislature and the media and the academy. I have no doubt that if the Lord tarries and allows me to go on serving His flock, that within a few decades I will be arrested for some form of thought crime or hate speech and quite possible end up enduring a small measure of what Pastors already endure in other places where preaching the gospel is prohibited. I expect that, and hope that I will have the faith to rejoice if I am honored to be able to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:40-41)
- SEAGOON
