> > Except for all the holy stuff (no disrespect) I agree too.
> >
> > If killing is wrong, then it is wrong. Period.
> >
> > Zarn"either it's good or it's not. Otherwise it's a hypocritical double standard"iwoop
> >
> > PS: You know, the last person to be hanged over here was pardoned. Fat lot of good it did his corpse.
>
> Let's open another can of worms, then. What's your view on abortion?
> I find it interesting that most people who oppose the death penalty are all for abortion. And yet those who support the death penalty are opposed to abortion.
>
> Ti'no, you don't have to answer, really. It's an inflamatory question and I don't expect anyone to reply. Just thought I'd throw it out there.'cia

Hmmm... I'm afraid if I say why I think pro-life and pro-DP go together I'll righteously offend a lot of people, so let me first say that this doesn't apply to any individuals here, this is just an observation of a large-scale phenomenon. But I think, especially in the U.S., the conservative Christian movement is fueled by a healthy dose of fundamentalism, which I define as "taking literally parts of the Bible many people don't". Note that I didn't say that was a bad thing. I consider myself a fundamentalist, though not the same *kind* of fundamentalist I often run into.

What such people take literally are usually Old Testament injunctions, particularly the Ten Commandments, which they then apply to all areas of life, including and especially the political sphere. (We can get into separation of church and state another time, if absolutely necessary :), but these people generally aren't fans of it.)

That means, basically, "Candy for the good guys and smack the bad guys, and here's a few simple rules for picking who's who". People who haven't broken any rules (most notably fetuses) are good guys. People who *have* broken rules (most notably murderers) are bad guys. Good guys' lives must be protected at all costs. Bad guys' lives are immediately and completely forfeit (though to varying degrees; few these days would advocate DP for, say, homosexuals or adulterers; the consensus seems to be that only taking another life is enough to forfeit one's life, a nice-sounding principle that is however *not* authentic OT, where you can be killed for anything from sassing your parents to worshiping Baal).

I have mixed feelings about this phenomenon. While they and I, I believe, are servants of the same God, and I agree with most of their principles, and I applaud the fact that they stand for something in a world that all too often stands for nothing, I confess my approach is different. Mine runs more like, "We're all good guys or we're all bad guys, depending how you look at it; either way we're all in this together."

So I'm vehemently anti-DP, because (not all, but many) DP advocates base their whole philosophy on good guys vs. bad guys, on the idea that a person is capable of voluntarily forfeiting their humanity and right to life (which I strongly believe they *are* *not*; hence why I'm also anti-assisted suicide and anti-euthanasia, but only in cases of true euthanasia, not pulling the plug on the brain-dead).

I am wishy-washy pro-choice; I use that term because pro-lifers tend to be more strict about the definition of the sides and hence calling myself pro-life would mislead a lot of people (the consensus now seems to be that even advocating taking morning-after pills makes one pro-choice, though all the latest and most reliable studies show there's no evidence the morning-after pill (not to be confused with RU-486) even affects fertilized embryos). I don't like pro-choice, though, because what that really means is that there should always be freedom of choice even when it comes to human beings, that a woman has the right to kill a human being in her body because it's her body, which I totally disagree with. I've heard the "forced organ donor" analogy, and I always respond that, yes, I *would* consider it murder not to donate an organ if someone desperately needed it and I knew there was no chance they could get it from another source. The "eviction" definition of abortion is preposterous; if you evict someone from your property they have a good chance of surviving on their own; if you evict a fetus from your body it will certainly die.

But...

The question about abortion, for me, is not whether life is important (it is more important than choice, to me) but how life is defined anyway. Most pro-lifers base the definition of life beginning at conception not on religion itself but on quasi-religious extrapolations from scientific pricnciples. The Bible itself does *not* give any clear statement on when life begins; lines like "you knit me together in my mother's womb" prove that, yes, God is involved in every step of life's development, but really don't say anything about whether or not David was a *person* when God was knitting him together, if you think about it; after all, didn't God "know" David *before* his conception, even? Meaning that God's knowing you (presumably because of his ability to see the future, by being outside of normal time) has nothing to do with your existence at that moment. But that's another topic. (We can also go into whether or not God used abortion as a method of detecting adultery, why God imposed a lesser penalty for inflicting a miscarriage on a woman than for killing a child or adult, etc., etc., another time.)

But most pro-life activists use ideas like "DNA deines an organism" and "conception is the first creation of an new DNA code" to support the idea that conception is the beginning of human personhood, which is all very well and good except it doesn't jibe with intuitive definitions of what human personhood is about. Though, yes, like all definitions the definition of human personhood or human life is artificial and created for our own ends, it is also, like all definitions, based on an understanding of a real phenomenon, or at least can be; there *is* a difference between a person and a nonperson that can be extrapolated from scientific data, and I personally have found that to me the definition of human personhood that makes the most sense defines a person as an individual capable of thoughts or at least brain activity.

This is very different from pro-DP activists' arguments, though. I think an early-stage fetus can be killed because it is not a person, and there is scientific evidence to support that definition; no one ever seriously argues that murderers are not people. They can argue that murderers have given up their rights as people, or don't deserve to be treated as people, or even that murderers have become a special *kind* of person (rhetoric about the "criminal mind" and the "criminal element" as though crime were some sort of genetic disease we could eliminate from the population) but they can't argue that murderers aren't people, that they don't think, feel, remember, or understand. And I doubt one can seriously say murderers, or at least all or even the majority of murderers, are fundamentally psychologically different from the rest of us. There have even been murderers in the past who have repented, reformed and gone on to become as good or even better people than the rest of us. No one can say a murderer has truly lost his humanity or his potential to positively affect the world, even if one disbelieves greatly in the magnitude of such potential or the relative worthiness of such humanity. (Of course I have problems with quantifying things like that, but, again, that's the way I see it.) I believe that if it's human, it deserves to live, and nothing *deserves* to be killed. (It scares me to hear women talking about killing this "parasite" that's "invaded" their bodies, taking its sustenance from their food, taking its oxygen from their blood. I think they forget they were once "parasites" too, and in a way, they still are; we all are. All life depends on other life; that some life depends on you for survival and that this dependence is less than convenient for you is not justification to kill.) The only question is what is human; I firmly believe second- and third-trimester fetuses *are* human and should *not* be aborted under any circumstances other than clear and present danger to the mother's own life (when it really is choosing between one life or another, *not* choosing between one life and another's psychological health or calm state of mind). It's just first-trimester fetuses I'm iffy about, and I could still be convinced to follow a total pro-life way of thinking. But right now I'm more inclined to think of personhood as brain-based, see my other post. (Because if it isn't, then are we morally obligated to keep bodies alive for indefinite periods of time after the brains have died? But I don't want to open the euthanasia can of worms... Oh, no, might be too late.) And, of course, if it's not a human person and it's just a potential person, there's nothing wrong with killing it. After all, an ovum, in its own way a potential person, dies every menstrual period; millions of spermatazoa, all potential people, die every time a man ejaculates. Should men and women therefore have sex as often as possible to avoid unnecessary "deaths"? (I have heard this argument advanced before, actually, though, of course, always facetiously, and usually by younger men.)

Anyway, I've probably succeeded a little too well arguing for both sides here... :) But that's why I don't see abortion as being as clear-cut as DP. I hate to conform to your stereotype, but hey, that's how I see it. I guess pro-choice anti-DPers are motivated from the "liberal" point of view, which generally extrapolates and intuits right and wrong from scientific data and such rather than a literalist adherance to the Bible and church tradition. I don't consider myself a liberal of that sort, but I am in many ways more liberal than other Christians I know, simply because I feel that what people extrapolate on their own happens to come surprisingly close to the teachings of the Bible, though, of course, they can't replace the Bible itself. (The Bible talks about how we all have God's Word written on our hearts, so that no one is really without excuse when it comes to doing what's right.) I don't want to pick a fight with people who call themselves "literalist"; I'm a literalist too, in a big way, but I believe everything must be taken contextually; I talked about what I think the Bible says about DP in another post, though. I just don't think of the OT-based view of the Bible as a book of laws as consistent with the central message of Christianity... But, like I've said, that's me. :)