Dan takes on ABORTION once and for all...
In the greatest experiment Facebook has ever attempted, all Christians using the networking system are slowly joining one group: One Body of Christ Experiment. It is a group based on several members’ mutual love of a one, Jesus Christ. Within moments of searching for something funny, I found a Forum discussion called: “Abortion is wrong…period.” By the bottom of page 1 of this Forum discussion, members of the group had already abandoned the specific subject of abortion, and moved on to general philosophy and name calling. It was up to me to set things right:
PAUL: in no particular relation to what you’ve said: Statements of absolutes are always wrong (YAY PARADOXES)
MATT: So is God ALWAYS right? well, if He is , then there are tons of absolutes, because there is One absolute Himself, who defines things exactly as they are…absolutely.
PAUL: If what I said, statements of absolutes are always wrong, was correct, then saying God is always right would not be correct. HOWEVER, what I said was a paradox… the statement itself IS a statement of an absolute stating that all such statements are wrong: it self invalidates…
ME: Listen, gentlemen, because a priest once told me this while we were reading the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas:
“Dan, things and rules are literal because they appear in literary contexts, but literal things in the world are not other things, since that would make everything everything else. And if we don’t delineate things that are things from things that are not, we are in the midst of not having absolute things that are things. And that’s absurd.”
Take that to heart when you’re thinking about babies
MATT: Not quite sure what you are getting at here, but it reminds me of something…
a friend once asked, and i am sure many Christians have gotten this question, why if God is good, did He create evil…my reply…who says evil exists? Just cuz we have a name for it doesnt mean it exists….light exists, there can be more light, less light, whatever…but dark…doesn’t exist…you cant add “dark” to a room. Evil likewise, in my opnion, doesnt exist…God, good, absolute (there’s that word again) perfection does exist…any lacking of that good is in some way distorted…and a total lack of it is evil…but God didnt create dark, cold, or evil…they are merely ways of describing the absence of something that does exist
Thoughts?
ME: This is a great argument, and I think I can respond while tying it in with the subject of abortion.
If I remember correctly (and I know it sounds a little kooky) in the film The Fifth Element pure evil is represented by the image of a large flaming meteor in space. This image has skewed America’s (nay, the entire world’s) perception of what evil is.
But, when the evil spaceball is given a voice it claims to Jean Baptiste that, “Money is of no importance, only the stones” (which mirrors an earlier line said by one of the good turtle robots: “Time is of no importance, only LIFE important), I think the film nailed it right on the head:
If money or time is more important to you than life…maybe you are the type of person who would kill a baby.
LISA: Why do you believe time and money are why women have abortions?
I work in health and out of all the reasons why women cite they have terminations, both of those are new to me. Perhaps because in Australia we give women the time and money to keep their babies, I don’t know. But nonetheless we do have a high abortion rate which we are trying to reduce, by actually addressing the reasons why at least Australian women have abortions and tackling those upstream. Prevention is better than cure….
ME: I’m not sure if anyone in The Fifth Element was Australian, but I think they were past abortion, since it was 500 years in the future. Not to say that our morals will become lax with time, but that time and money are a concern in a young woman’s life, especially when that young woman is the perfect, supreme being, recreated from the severed arm of the good turtle robot. When only your arm has over 2,000 memo groups, you can afford to shed a little DNA, and isn’t that what we’re saying here? Is it alive or just a little bit of DNA? The Supreme Being probably gets pregnant easily. Can she afford to take care of a child when the world is at stake?
Thoughts?
GLEN: The Bible says Proverbs 6:17”God Hates Hands that Shed innocent Blood”
In Isaiah 44 Verse 2 THIS IS WHAT THE LORD SAYS. HE WHO MADE YOU,who FORMED you in the womb and who will help you.
COMMANDMENT #6 YOU SHALL NOT MURDER…
READ THE BIBLE
ME: If I might quote for you from another scripture that puts abortion into a little bit of perspective. It’s from the texts of the Ancients:
“I have a different theory to offer you, Children. Imagine for a moment that this thing is not anything that can be identified because it prefers not to be [abortion], because it is the antithesis of all we are. Because it is evil. Total Evil. Evil begets evil, Children. Shooting it would only make it stronger. Time is of no importance, Children. Only life is important.”
- Vito Cornelius (50th Level Parish, from Ancient Text)
So, you see, even the Ancients knew that fighting things like abortion will only make it stronger, and throwing words at the non-believers will only make them create more words to throw back at you. I don’t see how we can fight this without some great weapon.
We are lost.
LISA: I watched Fifth Element, I enjoyed it even though it got canned by the critics. I don’t recall anything about abortion being mentioned in the film.
My own personal views about abortion aren’t really relevant. Being pro choice does not mean being pro abortion. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is pro abortion.
There only two views, pro choice or anti choice.
ME: I think it is VERY CLEAR when The Fifth Element addresses abortion specifically. It’s subtle, but at the end of the opera, the blue alien lady with the techno horns inside her throat tells Bruce Willis very pointedly before she dies:
“The stones are in me.”
Leading Bruce to understand that she wants (effectively) an abortion right then and there of the four stones that will save earth from destruction. She DID have money and time from touring the galaxy (and especially from her Floston Paradise gig), yet she still asks for Bruce’s beautiful man hands to rip the stones from her body. Abortion must be right according to this image, and so there are people that are, in fact, pro-abortion, not just anti-choice, because sometimes it is not only necessary to abort, it is also exciting and fun. QED.
Dan
P.S. Roger Ebert liked and disliked the movie but thought it was good. Here is a part of his review:
“The Fifth Element,” which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is one of the great goofy movies—a film so preposterous I wasn’t surprised to discover it was written by a teenage boy. That boy grew up to become Luc Besson, director of good smaller movies and bizarre big ones, and here he’s spent $90 million to create sights so remarkable they really ought to be seen.”
ME: On a scale of 1 to baby, how much of the embryo is humanoid at 6 months? Because I heard (actually I read about it in an article about science) that babies have more in common with a whale calf than their parents’ DNA. So can we really call that baby a human baby yet?
Also, my gay friend has been open to having a child his entire life though modern biological “evidence” suggests that his having a child is “impossible,” is it OK for him to have sex still since he, like a pregnant women will never conceive?
And if my gay friend does have a child, would it be like that the kid in The Omen? All antichrist-like and stuff? I heard that everything in The Omen actually happened once. Could it happen again?
MATT: No, he is not being open to life. No homosexual act could possibly be open to life. I will consider you joking here, the alternative would lead me to question your intellegence and honesty, and I will refrain from doing so.
As for the Omen stuff, I got no idea
ME: I am 100% serious.
MATT: By your standards, people could have “relations” with animals, fish, maybe with inanimate objects, as long as they don’t contracept, they are “remaining open to life.” Can we yet see the absurdity of your argument?
ME: According to your argument that having sex with a woman when she can’t possibly have a child is “remaining open to life,” then yes, you could also argue that having sex with a fish is being “open to life” even though it’s impossible to seed a fish.
But having sex with an animal sounds gross to me, so my argument would be, “yeah, you’re being open to life, but dude…a fish? Kind of gross.” I think that’s what we’re really saying here, right? Being open to life is cool when it doesn’t get all freaky with a fish or a bicycle or a man.
MATT: Well, if i had to choose, I would probably have sex with a fish before I would have it with another man… So if ‘gross’ is the standard here…
If and when we see two male dogs “go at it” we get a sense that it is unnatural (not natures intention). What excuse do we humans, supposedely more intellegent, etc, than these animals, have for justifying acts we clearly recognize as unnatural?
ME: Whenever I watch two dogs go at it, I always think: This is why God wants all dogs to go to heaven. They are performing God’s will since they are in nature, acting natural without any inhibitions. When I watched my pug hump a couch pillow for an hour one day (this was before we did the humane thing, and got him neutered) I thought “Man, it would appear as though God gave animals a little extra freedom when it comes to what they should have sex with.”
I guess it’s just the human condition to want more freedom. And if you want to have sex with a fish instead of experiencing physical contact with a sentient being, I will allow it as long as the fish remains unharmed and open to life. Godspeed.
PAUL: this is a stupid point.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1651259.stm
obviously, that screws the pooch on pregnant women NEVER being able to get pregnant again.
ME: What is it with all the pooch screwing? I think everyone should take the day off and think about which animal should be cataloged as better to have sex with than a gay man.
PAUL: Screw the pooch is a navy term for a ramp strike you uneducated sod. Although it IS based off a vulgar term, it really has nothing to do with dogs even in its original context.
(PAUL sent me a private message making it clear that the term “screw the pooch” had nothing to do with gay dogs, er whatever: “screwing the pooch refers to when a pilot ramp strike on an aircraft carrier… landings were often refered to as “coming in doggy style” because of the way a plane came in on final approach from behind.” Thanks for clearing that up, Paul. I was worried it had something to do with dogfucking, but now I see it has nothing to do with that at all. Thank you. Thank YOU.)
And finally:
LISA: I think it’s very clear you saw what you wanted to see in that movie. I thought Gary Oldman played a good bad guy and the special effects were neat. Pure entertainment on an old theme of earth, water, fire, air and the Fifth, love. Good vs evil, aliens built the pyramids and created humans.
Nothing deep, just pure fantasy. Anyway, I reject your original premise that women have abortions because of time and money.
