Posted on 03/20/2006 2:23:32 PM PST by madprof98
Those who seek to outlaw abortion often use the rhetoric of "protecting the most vulnerable and helpless" in our communities. Many of them are Christians who see their opposition to abortion rights as inextricably linked with their faith and their understanding of Christian ethics. After all, wouldn't a God of love and life want us to protect life wherever we found it?
If only it were that simple.
In practice, there are other questions we must ask. Does a God of love and life ever support war? Does such a God understand that some innocent civilians will die when we fight to protect our freedoms? In other words, does God approve when we make the decision to kill other people to protect our quality of life? What about when we kill to prevent genocide? Does God have a holy balancing scale that weighs intangibles like "intent" and "the greater good" or one that compares the number of innocent lives lost against the number of innocent lives saved?
We do not know. For every Christian with a "God Bless Our Troops" sticker on their bumper there is another with "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" on their rear windshield.
If my experience as a pastor is any indication, it is unlikely that the driver of either car would be making their point from the kind of complex theological arguments I learned in seminary. In practice, our upbringings, our biases and our circumstances have much more to do with what we believe God thinks; and we are often inconsistent.
How else could we spend millions of dollars to oppose abortion --- despite no clear biblical argument for or against it --- and ignore the overwhelming number of biblical texts that explicitly command us to care for the poor?
For the vast majority of Christians, it is not about consistency --- it is about convenience. Even those of us who speak passionately about protecting the weak often forget that our willingness to purchase cheap goods produced by exploited workers sentences children to poverty, disease, violence and death. The cars that we drive, the food that we allow to be marketed to children, the tax breaks we support or oppose, they all have a life-or-death impact on the most vulnerable among us. It is not only in war that we make decisions to value one life over another. Consciously or not, we do it every time we go to the supermarket.
The issue of abortion is not about whether life starts at conception. There are convincing arguments either way. The issue is which carries more weight: the life that may be in the embryo, or the life and needs of the woman in whose body that embryo was conceived?
After spending time in women's health clinics, I have come to realize that the "most vulnerable and helpless" who need our active protection are the women and couples who are faced with the agonizingly difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy. As a Christian pastor, I strongly support protecting the right of women to make this decision. Other Christian pastors have chosen otherwise, and our division on this issue is proof that there is no Christian consensus here.
The far right, however, has been able to set the issue of abortion apart from all of the other controversial, life-or-death decisions we make every day. Abortion is not a special case; and I pray that the guardians of our Constitution will continue to protect our freedom to choose our own priorities in all of these weighty matters.
The beliefs or prejudices of some, regardless of who has a majority, should not be used to take the choice out of the hands of the woman who will be the main bearer, perhaps the only bearer, of the consequences of her decision.
The Rev. C. Joshua Villines of Decatur is a regional spokesman for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. An ordained United Church of Christ pastor, he is completing a doctorate degree at Vanderbilt University.
Since, Jesus is to come back as the Lion...I'd say, he'd bomb the same people.
You don't really think this guy is the least bit interested in what the Bible says do you?
Somone needs to read some Thomas Aquinas writings...
"No, there's not."
I saw that too. He bases his argument in fantasy. Civil discourse is not possible with people who have no basis in reality.
As an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, I certainly wouldn't label Vilines a Christian. He's more of an adherent to the old Flip Wilson's "The Church of What's Happenin' Now". But not to worry...God knows exactly who is in favor of murdering His little ones and those people will have a special punishment.
He is a prime example of why people are leaving the UCC in droves.
I vote for the life that didn't have the choice to screw around and get knocked up as having more weight.
He's a phony and should be ignored.
Please "BARF ALERT" these articles!!
Oh, yes there is, "pastor" Villines!
This guy tries his best to build straw-man arguments by attributing moral equivalences to unrelated issues.
He should spend more time studying his Bible instead of indulging in those superfluous "theological" arguments stuffed in his head from his seminary.
This man seems to be lost- intellectually and spiritually.
C. Joshua Villines = nickname for 1940s Harley Big Twin
Moral relativism, the kind we see when comparing the execution of murderers with abortion.
Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment--even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I have always thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting 'Thou shalt not kill.' There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes the commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distintion in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercource is adultery.
--C.S. Lewis, 'Mere Christianity'
Part of the indifference to the abortion issue stems from our disregard of human life before birth in general.
It's true miscarriage is heartbreaking, and many people are callous about it.
There are treatments for many causes of miscarriage. Some problems are fairly simple to treat, others very difficult.
About half of miscarriages are caused by a genetic defect in the unborn child - most of them miscarried before you could test, damage done before you could test, tests invasive and carrying risk.
How would you correct a trisomy in every cell, for instance? If you could do that kind of genetic manipulation what re-design of human beings would the brave new world contemplate?
Should everyone be conceived in vitro, controlled? There are worse evils than miscarriage.
Mrs VS
---"An ordained United Church of Christ pastor"---
I think you could have just printed this part and everyone would have already known his politics and real motivation.
Maybe it should be:
C. Joshua Villain
I was trolling DU to see their reaction to Bush's speech. Yeah typical vile as you might imagine. However I noticed a thread on DU entirely dedicated to your comment on this thread. Congrats your famous lol
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=709083&mesg_id=709083
That explains volumes. If this guy is a Christian, then I'm a Chinese astronaut!
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