By now, we've all heard about the murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller. Murdering and bombing in the name of God is rare in this country, but it is not unheard of. Without pausing to consider the motives of the perpetrators, some call it terrorism.
Abortion laws in this country have inflamed the religious sensibilities of the populace, and an infinitesimal percentage, egged on by Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others, just can't control themselves, so great is their outrage. We saw the end result of this on Sunday.
The only way to extirpate this violence from our land forever is to completely and unequivocally outlaw abortion in all forms. Call it the Muslim Cartoon Precedent.
Time to follow the European-UN-US Liberal line of thinking and capitulate to the anti-abortion movement. Just as Jihadi hate-preachers and their religion cannot be blamed for Islamic terror, we cannot blame Chrisitanity, nor Rush, nor O'Reilly, nor the anti-abortion Christians for this crime. We must try to understand and empathize with those who lash out in religious fervor at the abortionists who so flagrantly transgress the laws of God.
Better yet, we must refrain from offending the Christians. The only way to do that is to ban this abhorrent practice. For, if O'Reilly is to blame for putting the gun in the murderer's hand, the act of abortion itself must be logically held as the root cause. For, without it, O'Reilly would not talk about it and the violently deranged would not dance to his deadly tune.
Outlawing all abortions is the only way to end this senseless violence!
I am Silverfiddle and I approve of this message.
14 comments:
I think that's the crux of the issue, Silverfiddle. Not the capitulation, obviously. But the idea that these issues should be resolved through capitulation because we've just given up on the reasonable engagement.
I'd like to see a relatively conservative definition of birth that does not allow infanticide, but which does allow for the freedom to abort prior to the development of a baby with, say, the capacity for neo-cortical brain waves, which allow for pain or pleasure, which are precursors to conscience thought, or something that makes a good faith effort to make sure that babies who can think and feel or not killed. I think abortion should be avoided as much as possible, but short of killing a baby, I respect peoples' consciences on this matter. And, frankly, I think we underestimate peoples' capacity to sort these things out of their own consciences.
Create one simple, reasonable brightline for when a fetus becomes a baby which is conscience of its own existence, and respect peoples' consciences after that point, I think.
What I don't think we can maintain is this war between impossible and unreasonable standards that make no reasonable allowances for peoples' differences on this issue.
I have come to a very similar conclusion on this question as I have on gay marriage. I don't want people to be forced to accept something they think is wrong. But neither do I equivocate that with allowing people of conscience to sort out the moral questions that are difficult (once, in this particular matter, you have established what the brightline is for when a fetus becomes a baby with a right to life).
I don't think Dr. Tiller or really likely most, if any, abortionists are out trying to kill babies, any more than I think that gay people are really trying to wreck straight peoples' marriages. I think their making their own judgments about the use of a medical procedure for which there is a lot of disagreement and strong feelings.
I respect the fact that many people feel very strongly that gay people should not be married and that babies should be kept alive at conception.
But I do think we must find a reasonable resolution to these questions that respects that people of deep conscience have reasonable disagreements about these questions and that, as a matter of liberal democratic values and traditions, they should be able to make reasonable choices that reflect those disagreements and not have choices that are not core government responsibilities dictated by the state.
Abortion is different, I understand, because protecting the right to life is one of the more core responsibilities of the state. But I do think we have to come up with a way to define that core question as simply and as reasonably as we can and then let people exercise their consciences.
It's funny, Silverfiddle. One of my closer neo-Marxist friends is also one of my more serious and thoughtful pro-life friends. And he makes arguments for both along very similar lines, with very little concern about the propensity for state power to be abused to dictate the consciences of others. It doesn't decide the issue for me, but it does help to clarify it for me.
As a matter of political realities and, more important to me, as a matter of principle, I think respecting peoples' consciences on difficult questions is one of the most important values in a liberal democracy. It is fundamental to our liberal democratic development, I believe. And it underscores all of those values that we more honestly call liberal and democratic (when one is not confusing liberal with leftist, which are far too often antonyms more than synonyms).
What I'm tired of watching, Silverfiddle, is people killing and dying in the name of our strong feelings and opinions when reasonable discussion and debate is the more honest way to engage when we don't understand. Humility, more than righteousness, is what our deepest spiritual convictions should call from us on this question, as with so many, I believe, at least. It is a core sentiment in Jesus' teachings, I think, and the reason he did not want to see sinners stoned.
And the world would be a lot better if people could learn to reasonably engage and resolve these questions rather than rationalizing all of the worst uses, abuses, and manipulations of power and aggression to achieve their ends rather than discussing them sincerely and decently as matters of conscience between lots of all too fallible human beings who have never been and never will be gods or an Almighty God to finally know without uncertainty how all such questions should be resolved.
That's my opinion, at least. At this point. Love to hear your thoughts.
This was a sad moment for country to full of its own self-righteous grandstanding and conflict to fully appreciate how arrogant and ugly it makes us to behave this way, IMHO.
For the record, I in no way think violence solves the abortion issue. The person who murdered that doctor is a murderer. I can't see how any Christian thinks he is doing God's work by blowing things up and killing people.
As Christians in a free society, we must accept that some things will offend us. That's just the way it is. Abortion is legal in this country, murdering someone in cold blood is not. It's that simple. We have a legal and political system to try to change things and that's the way we should work it. Not through violence.
I'm not making light of the situation, but I did want to use it to make the obvious comparison between Islamic terrorists and Christian ones. And not just make the comparison, but draw it out to a logical conclusion since I know the libs will be making hay over this for a long time.
I like you're logic. why stop there? haha wow, just think of it.... Stopping american imperialism might just stop terrorisim too.
Are you genuine? or only a dissembler? A representative? or the represented itself?
you are merely an imitation of a dissembler.
... every now and then an incoherent inmate escapes the liberal insane asylum and doesn't know what to do with the freedom...
You know what I think bothers me about this issue that I was sharing with this girl I'm dating, the other day.
I find it hard to believe that people actually believe that George Tiller woke up every day and thought, "I'm gonna go kill some babies today."
I just don't think that's the case. Even though I would likely not feel comfortable with some of the abortions he performed (I wouldn't know, frankly, unless I knew more about the abortions he performed; but I would imagine that he and I would have some likely, and perhaps serious, disagreements).
What bothers me is the notion that because people disagree on this question that therefore the other side are villains. People may have disagreed with George Tillers abortion practice. But he wasn't a murderer. Not in any reasonable sense of people with an clear criminal intent to kill another person. That was not his intent. We just all get so full of the rhetoric, on this issue, I think, Silverfiddle, that we can't just allow for people to disagree with one another.
If there is a more fundamental problem in America and liberal democracies, right now, that is the one. We are so scared of just letting people act out of their consciences that we will rationalize almost any intrusion into their choices and judgments in the name of forcing them to act consistent with our own beliefs.
It's crazy is what it is. And it's the same problem we've had for as long as we have been governed and governing.
I've never been a John Brown fan, Silverfiddle. And all of the anti-abortion rhetoric comparing this issue to slavery is exactly why that has always been true for me. The idea that people cannot imagine that people might have reasonable disagreements about how to resolve the most serious issues of conscience is exactly the most dangerous threat to liberal values, I think. That somehow conscience only matters if you agree with me just seems like such a cowardly position. And yet everyone is rationalizing it, these days, Silverfiddle. Makes my heart ache.
Why we are all such arrogant, manipulative, and violent fools, I will never know.
I think abortions should be avoided, as much as possible. But I've never thought that women who sought them or doctors who performed them were murderers. I just don't think that's the way it works, all rhetoric aside.
And that murder, Sunday, reflects everything that's wrong in our politics, I think. And it has not a lick to do with anything that is unique to the pro-life or pro-choice movements, or to conservatives or liberals, or Republicans or Democrats.
It's this self-righteous notion that I'm right and that those who disagree with me are villains because I say they are. All of which rationalizes whatever means necessary to round them up. And if isn't the most extreme thing I can think of, then it will be a lesser extreme, so that I can rationalize anything that stops short of the most destructive thing I can think of.
It's this ugly impulse to treat everyone else's conscience as an afterthought that really bugs me about politics, today. And that is the stuff that needs to end, I think, Silverfiddle.
Politics is all about manipulating people to gain power. That's why I consider the whole enterprise a disgusting necessity.
Some people cannot separate religious belief from law. I don't like abortion, and I will vote against it every chance I get because I think it is the taking of an innocent human life, but I've also got to accept the reality that it is legal. Some just cannot abide such affronts to their beliefs so they go off the deep end.
This is not a theocracy. As Jesus once said: Render unto Caesar...
You're wrong about Limbaugh egging on anti-abortion extremists. Please provide proof that this is true.
Anon: It's Satire!!!I am lampooning the left by applying their terrorism philosophy to the current situation.
I am a conservative. Rush good, abortion bad.
Too often politics becomes about manipulating people, sadly. If you read Mein Kampf and early Hitler thought, Silverfiddle, you'll find that this is exactly why he did what he did. He took that cynical reality to its most ugly, destructive, and logical consequence.
This is why politics, and religion, need be grounded in some sense of how the world should be and not just a rationalization of how it is, I think, Silverfiddle. I just think they both need to accept, better, too, how the world is and offer us a way out.
Curiously enough, some unknown, decent-hearted Jewish carpenter tried to do exactly that about 2000years ago. Most people just find his message about love and compassion and understanding just too difficult and rationalizing all of it into some warped and perverted support for their hatefulness, meanspiritedness, and self-righteousness. Most of his comtemporary followers, right and left, have distorted that much more fundamental message that Jesus had, I think, Silverfiddle, for their own small-minded, small-hearted, far too self-centered agendas, I think, Silverfiddle.
It's a tragedy, is what it is. That man died in great part as a consequence of the considerable ugliness of the people of his own time only to have people 2000 years later to use his name to rationalize all sorts of ugliness of their own making. It's right and left, and it hardly occurs in Jesus' name alone. It's just ugly that such a beautiful message gets distorted because most people just can't find it in their hearts to live with that kind of decency and compassion, not because they can't, but because they don't want to and they find it inconvenient.
Kind of similar to why too many people get abortions, don't you think?
Sad that we all live this way.
And a fact of life that I have come to accept, even as I think we need to do better.
And that's exactly how I think we should approach this issue, generally. Accept that people are sad, pitiful, self-centered creatures often. And be more focussed on encouraging them to be better than on trying to twist their arms to do our bidding, in the moment (which is always and only in the moment and forgoes that more fundamental change of heart, no matter how much we pretend otherwise).
Perhaps people are too irredeemably pathetic and self-centered to be trusted with making their own decisions, in the world. In which case, we are horribly and perhaps similarly irredeemably naive to think that a law will change that, unless they will it to be so.
Don't you find it amazing that 2000years later we are all so obsessed with what this great man would want, almost exclusively based on what a great man he was and the message he had to offer, but he himself never once passed any law nor advocated for any similar passage in his lifetime?
Terribly ironic, isn't it? Terribly tragic in its irony on Sunday, I think. Many things I can think of that Jesus would do. I'm pretty sure that was not one of them.
I can't tell, anymore, Silverfiddle, if Jesus' legacy meant anything, so rarely and honestly do most of even his most ardent followers take his clearest legacy of compassion and love seriously. I hope most people do, independent of their religious persuasion. But I am very sad, often, that we so often fight about these larger questions of what it means to be and do good without even the smallest inkling that Jesus' clear intent was not that people fought incessantly about such matters, but that they learned to love one another and do better when they screwed up, without stoning one another in the process.
For some reason, 2000 years later, we still prefer the stoning to the love. As someone who took and takes Christ's example seriously, I've never quite understood it.
Talk soon, bud.
We are screwed up, and that is why we need Jesus. That was his message. If we did not need him he would not have come down from heaven.
God creates, Satan destroys. Some are hell-bent on doing evil. Unfortunately, we all unwittingly stumble into Satan's employ from time to time. It's so much easier to destroy than to create.
"Unfortunately, we all unwittingly stumble into Satan's employ from time to time. It's so much easier to destroy than to create."
Amen to that, brother. That was the whole point, when folks take a moment to listen to that guy, I think.
Anything Jesus can do, I can do better. We need him? He sounds like a systemiser to me. What an asshole.
Jesus, God, what ever phycologicly-cutural factors indused your idea of divintiy... Your god sounds like Stalin..
Jewist direvitive religions are always open to human interpretation and curruption -Unless you're neanderthal who thinks God and Satan represents over simplifyed perspectives of good and evil (by judging from your blog... might just be the case)
Freedom to kill and destroy is my right. My freedom not Satans. Many people kill animals and eat them. Animals..cooked up corpses, gross. And then you say you're "pro-life" and the systemisers again work on that loop hole?
"God creates, Satan destroys." At least there is some truth in your simplicity... your god is the personification of 'suvival of the fittest'.
Why don't you become a true conservative and love god and burn the church?
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing...
Not only are Jewish derivative religions open to human interpretation; everything is open to human interpretation! We have the light of reason.
Freedom to kill and destroy is your right? OK. That morality system conflicts with our system of western jurisprudence (the closest thing we have to a universally accepted morality).
If you decide to exercise your self-given "rights" be sure to do it in Texas or some other southern state where they have the death penalty. Then you will learn what the whole "My God's bigger than your god" thing is really all about.
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