Hi Tao — not imputing anything to you, by the way.
One of the tragic miscomprehensions of Christianity, it sometimes seems to me, is that it is a religion that adheres to the Letter of the Law, and the Spirit of the Law, without compromise to either.
Forgiveness is absolutely fundamental to its doctrine, and yet this is largely ignored ... where those (and this an objective view not coloured by our discussions) who criticise Christianity accuse it of a dogmatism in a shallow and perjorative sense (the real meaning of the word is all but lost today) are equally if not more dogmatic in their reasoning with regard to the object of their criticism. You end up with extremism on both sides.
From a Christian perspective, man is the victim of his own sin, he suffers a nature corrupted by contingent circumstance ... and yet he is forgiven. No man, in the Christian book, is beyond salvation, and the requirement of that salvation is not beyond the possibility of a fallen nature.
If Christianity adhered to a morality of the absolute, that is a morality that will allow no fault or failure, then it would be a callous and brutal regime. And yet that is patently not the case. The Doctrine of Love mediates and ameliorates the absolute. It is fundamental to it — "God is Love".
Without love, Christianity is an empty shell.
The metaphysical dimension of love, of caritas, is the allowing of another to be, to delight in that existence, without trying to possess it in any sense.
Its activity is twofold:
1 — It demands the best (of self and other) — absolutely.
2 — It demands the forgiveness (of self and other) — absolutely.
As someone said, the most fundamental religion today is secularism — a secularism which refuses to accept, allow, or even recognise the freedom of the individual to pursue their own beliefs if that belief is seen as having any taint of religious sensibility. In so doing it demeans both self and other whilst claiming to uphold the right of both.
You are absolutely free and your freedom is a fundamental right, as long as you exercise that freedom according to what I deem acceptable behaviour.
You talk about a child not a partially developed foetus.
Because we hold to the absolute position. The foetus is a life. It might only be a foetus, but its potential is that of the person. For this reason the destruction of a foetus is no different, in principle, than the destruction of a person. How much less of a person is a foetus, a day short of delivery, than a baby, one day old.
Does a matter of minutes change everything so absolutely?
Only if life, human life, occurs only at the moment of delivery ... that something essentially not human becomes something essentially human by the passage through the uterus.
Is an autistic child not fully human? Is a Down Syndrome child, an impaired physicality and mentality (we cannot comment on a mode of spirituality), not worthy of the basic human right to life?
I fully agree that the person has certain rights with regard to their own existence, but those rights do not extend to extinguishing the rights of another that present no threat to their own existence, beyond an inconvenience.
Christianity observes the principle of the right of life to have a life — and so for us the foetus is as much a person as you or I.
A person in a persistent vegetative state is still a person, accorded the rights of a person, according to its nature, not according to its mode of activity, even if it does not conform to the classical philosophical definition of a person — 'an individual presence of a rational nature' (Boethius).
In the same way, a person is held to account by law (that is, by his or her fellows) according to this definition, even if he or she demonstrates a total lack of rational thought.
And the 'final solutions' of history are demonstrations of the horror that occurs when man determines the personhood of another according to what boils down to the relative and the contingent. The horror of Auschwitz is twofold: we are aghast at the suffering inflicted on another, and we are aghast at the actions of those who inflict the suffering, apparently without conscience, when he conforms himself to a contingent 'necessity'.
In the case of National Socialism, this is the 'rights of the individual' on a collective scale. The right to commit genocide in the name of
lebensraum — freedom.
A foetus is in many senses a parasite feeding from within a host body.
I just don't accept that argument. At what point does a parasite become a person? Was not that personhood intrinsic to the nature of the parasite?
At what point do the old and inform, the sick and the damaged, the different, become a parasite feeding from within a host body?
The case is different, but the principle is exactly the same.
In our book, the foetus is a person in essence, a person by nature ... even if unrecognisable in its formative stage.
In the same way that a person who suffers a physical or mental impairment is, nevertheless, a person.
I am of course fully aware ... (of) ... your ingrained and prejudiced patriarchal mindset will have a tough time seeing that an individual woman owns her own body.
I will disagree with you here. We receive life, we are not self-causative, so we have a responsibility of care, but not ownership, not possession, that applies both to self and other, whether that self or other is inside or outside.
No man owns another, and by extension, no woman owns the life she carries within her ... it is a life, an-other life, not her life.
Eugenics and euthenasia is the expression of the ownership of the body on a sociological scale. The same rule applied collectively, rather than individually, as does the insistence on 'breeding programmes' in weaker countries in exchange for aid. It's still eugenics.
By extension of your argument, into the collective domain, one could say a given collective (any sociological unit you choose — friend, family, country, culture) has the right to deny life those outside the unit.
This is what we do in Africa and elsewhere ... aid is tied into the requirement of population control.
We have explored at some length on other threads exactly why it suits the Catholic Church that its flock breeds a lot, (something along the lines of the more indoctrinated slaves the merrier, or richer).
Oh, please be careful, my friend. It seems to me, on such terms, that in light of recent historical events to which I have alluded above, that if such a statement became the rhetoric of politicians, I as a Catholic I would think of emigrating, or the prospect of another holocaust.
This is nothing to do with the rights of the unborn. It stems without doubt from male ego and the animal urge to breed.
That's a purely political perspective. It would be the case if there was no sound philosophical or moral argument underpinnning the doctrine.
Marie Stopes, the hero of the English movement for birth control, was a monster. Her whole position on birth control was to limit the expansion of the lower classes, and to weed out the weak and impaired from the species. It was polite and discreet eugenics. She dispossessed and disowned her own son for falling in love with a girl who was ... short sighted. By so doing, she saw him as betraying everything she believed in.
This is what the argument boils down to: We stand by the right to life. The counter argument is the right to destroy life. The abortion debate is a symptom of those two views ... everything else is subsequent and politics.
As I said, a woman owns her own body and the choice is hers, not yours, mine or the unborns. This is fundamental human rights.
I don't think so, as you state it. And not solely for the sake of the unborn.
If life is a gift, then the carriage of life is a greater gift, and with it greater responsibility.
I agree the world is full of hypocrisy, but that in itself is a failure, and should not impair our critical thinking.
I don't think any woman, at any time, in any culture, has aborted a child in clear conscience. I think there is a traumatic cost, and this I suggest puts the question above sociopolitical debate re patriarchies.
And in my religion, abortion is a profound and serious matter, but not beyond forgiveness.
Personally, I rather that than a culture in which someone else's right to life doesn't count.
Thomas
