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To: SaveTheChief; Restorer
The Old Testament says that if you cause a miscarriage by accident you have to pay a fine. That is as specific as the OT gets on the subject. Children and women were considered property and not full human beings in the ancient Hebrew system where only adult males were full human beings before the law.

It was the pagan Greeks (and who we should thank) that considered abortion immoral and their doctors had to swear (oaths are a Greek pagan religious invention - the Jews did not swear oaths) to the Hippocratic Oath vowing not to euthanize or carry out an abortion.

Nor did the Bible ban slavery. The pagan Greeks were the first to consider slavery wrong and ban it - but only for fellow Greeks.

82 posted on 08/17/2004 10:22:01 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting www.johnathangaltfilms.com)
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To: Destro

Actually, the OT also says that capital punishment should be inflicted for intentional murder of a fetus, although the exact meaning of the passage is rather vague as it is difficult to translate.

It is also only fair to point out that the ancient Greeks may have been opposed to abortion, but they had no trouble at all with infanticide. Letters have been found written by Greeks from around the time of Christ instructing the wife to "expose" the child if female, but keep it if male. Greek (and Roman) writers of the day were astounded that Jews raised all the children they gave birth to, as infanticide was extremely common in their societies.

You might call it post-partum abortion.

It is likely that the reason (some) Greeks objected to abortion was that it interfered with the right of the man to decide whether to keep his child or not. Women in Greek (and again, Roman) society were, if anything, less recognized as fully human than among the Jews. As a remarkably egregious example, Roman women weren't even given names! Roman daughters were numbered: first, second, third and so forth.

The Greeks had nothing at all against slavery, only against Greeks being enslaved, which didn't stop them from doing a great deal of it. The surviving Athenian soldiers from the invasion of Sicily were sold into slavery, for instance.

The Athenians (those wonderful democrats) killed all the men and sold all the women and children from at least one of the island states that had the temerity to rebel against their oppression.

The Jews allowed slavery for Jews, but only for a limited term, a maximum of 7 years. This made it more a type of indentured servitude than true slavery. And it was a capital crime to sell a Jewish slave to foreigners.

The balance between the morality of Jewish and Greek institutions is not nearly as one-sided as you portray.


91 posted on 08/18/2004 8:50:29 AM PDT by Restorer
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