1. Innocent people ought not be killed. Children are innocent people. Therefore, children ought not be killed.
2. What is conceived in a woman is an innocent young human being. Young human beings are children. Therefore (given syllogism #1) children in utero ought not be killed.
Those syllogisms can lead to emotion, but they are not based on it.
- At what point do you believe it becomes a person? Viable to survive outside of the womb, heartbeat, insemination?
- How do you define innocent, as one who does not have actions that cause harm to another, one who does not have intent to harm another, or something else?
- If defined as one who does not have intent to harm another, how do we know what the unborn child's intent is? Do you assume that the child is not developed enough to have intent? At which point does the child develop intent?
- What if you would consider the child already dead from other causes and needs to be extracted, should the mother be allowed to have it removed? What if the baby is an ectopic pregnancy, growing outside of the womb and likely to cause significant harm or death to the mother, is the assumption that the mother is not as innocent as the unborn child and therefore we should prioritize the child?
I'm ok and even excited to take a reason-based approach (ironically stating how I have have feelings about taking a reason-based approach), I just hope if you want to go down that path, that you will go deeper down it with me.
Or is it about wanting the mother to also go to heaven, and believing that if she did this, she would not go?
I appreciate you pointing out there may be a deep existential fear and doubt of the existence of heaven that drives people to this and oh how I wish we people talked more about our doubts, especially as they relate to religion. One of my favorite TED talks was about how doubt is essential to faith: https://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essentia...
According to a lot of American Christian doctrine, yes. The Bible teaches that humans are sinful beings not because of what they do, but because sin is an immutable part of human nature. There's no such thing as an "innocent" baby where the doctrine of original sin is concerned - all humans deserve hell by default. So unless the baby is born, baptized and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (which can only happen through their consent and free will, you can't "save" an unborn baby as a loophole) it will burn in Hell for eternity like any other unsaved soul.
Although I'd suspect most Christians simply believe life, in terms of a divine soul and part in God's plan, begins at conception. To accept that a fetus is simply a "clump of cells" would be too close to accepting a naturalistic (non-theistic) view of biology. To interfere with procreation and birth is to commit murder for the same reason that shooting someone in the head is committing murder - only God has the right to decide when and how life can be taken.
> The Bible teaches that humans are sinful beings not because of what they do, but because sin is an immutable part of human nature. There's no such thing as an "innocent" baby where the doctrine of original sin is concerned - all humans deserve hell by default. So unless the baby is born, baptized and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (which can only happen through their consent and free will, you can't "save" an unborn baby as a loophole) it will burn in Hell for eternity like any other unsaved soul.
As someone not born into or raised by a Christian family, I sometimes struggle to understand how deep some of these beliefs are.
So is the idea that one does not receive unconditional love from God unless one first consents to believe in God? And babies don't have the ability to consent?
Maybe this is too off topic for HN but I'm quite curious.
Of course that said, there have been plenty of Christians who believe in infant baptism or a state of grace for infants and all sorts of things - Christianity isn't a monolith. But when it comes to the intersection of religion and pro-life politics in the US, the more hardline strains of faith seem to dominate.
Ah, so do they believe that if and only if one goes through baptism, then they have asked for God's forgiveness and then will be forgiven? I seem a bit confused by that, does it mean that the love is unconditional only after the one specific condition is met? Or maybe it's that unconditional love and forgiveness are separate things?
Also maybe you don't know and that's ok, too, I'm just grateful for you helping me reflect on this more.