councilor.org
| Source | Michael Hoover |
| Date | 99/08/20/12:49 |
| I began but did not finish below comments yesterday, Michael Perelman has since blown whistle on abortion topic so if I may be allowed this trangression... Michael Hoover religious anti-abortionists like to quote Christian bible - generally a few verses from Psalms (139: 13-16), Jeremiah (1: 4-10) & Luke (1: 39-41) - to justify their 'moral' position...but biblical support for abortion can be derived from scripture as well, for example: King Solomon's point that we should be thankful for a good life is offset by one in which he says that it is better to end pregnancy before coming to term if quality of life is miserable: 'If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, "Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in obscurity. It never sees the sun and it never knows anything; it is better off than he."' Ecclesiastes 6:3-5 'Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. And behold I saw the tears of th oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun.' Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 Job, who lost his land, cattle, children, wife, health when God tested his faith, speaks too about ending pregnancy: 'And Job said, "Let the day perish on which I was to be born, and the night which said, "a boy is conceived." May that day be darkness; let not God above care for it, nor light shine on it.' Job 3: 2-4 'Why did I not die at birth, come forth from my womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me, and why the breasts, that I should suck? For now I would have lain down and been quiet; I would have slept then, I would have been at rest, with kings and with counselors of the earth, who rebuilt ruins for themselves; or with princes who had gold, who were filling their houses with silver. Or like the miscarriage which is discarded, I would not be, as infants that never saw light. There the wicked cease from raging, and there the weary are at rest. The prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master.' Job 3: 11-19 "Why then hast Thou brought me out of the womb? Would that I had died and no eye had seen me! I should have been as though I had not been, carried from womb to tomb." Job 10:18-19 some will note that I've removed the above quotations from their context, and they are correct, but that is my point...Christian bible is not an appropriate guide when it comes to abortion since neither the passages I've cited nor the ones extracted by religious anti-abortionists actually address the issue... the one passage in the Christian bible that does address aborting a pregnancy doesn't support the religious anti-abortionist view: 'And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise." Exodus 21:22-25 first, the matter at hand in above passage involves fighting...second, misacarriage in this circumstance is a civil offense...third, only injury to or murder of the woman is a criminal offense...fourth, nothing in passage addresses matter of a woman choosing to terminate her pregnancy via abortion... Michael Hoover |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho