Perhaps he should have told Russia to have the "courage" to stop murdering people.
(well except ofcourse the corrupt dictator in ukraine, so it naturally falls on deaf ears)
* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.
* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.
* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.
Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230326034459/https://www.reute...
If an aggressor attacks your country, it takes courage to surrender. Churchill was a coward it seems. He could have surrendered to the Germans and saved so many lives on both sides.
/s
A very good man indeed.
His trick was hiding the conservative positions behind the mask of the beloved communicator.
I think maybe it's just some progressives (and related groups) who liked Francis a lot for many of his positions.
He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
Feel free to google for more details. There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
Which would be bad, had he done so, but he didn't actually say that; the white flag comment was specifically and explicitly about being willing to directly negotiate with Russia, not about surrender.
> There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
He certainly called on multiple occasions for all parties to negotiate, but he was also consistent, both before Russia invaded, after the invasion and before the "white flag" comment, immediately after the "white flag" comment, and since that the invasion by Russia is (or "would be" before it occurred) unjustifiable, immoral, an act of aggression, and that Russia has the primary obligation to stop it.
It's hard to blame all the catholics that are sighing in relief hoping for a better successor.
You can't simply assume that your own position on this issue is the correct one, and argue from that point. That is begging the question (and yes, that goes just as much for the GP as for you).
Are there any developed countries where there arent year long queues for those wanting to adopt infants? I doubt many of them (if they are healthy) grow up orphans.
Obviously, if you make an artificial womb, then the conversation is moot since there doesn’t exist anyone that wants to kill fetuses for fun.
It’s very amusing when an organization (Catholic Church) that doesn’t even believe in equal rights for men and women has an opinion on human rights.
I don't mind being candid (not least because I am not an important person and this is not an important discussion, the stakes are low so there is no pressing need to lie), so I'll say one of the quiet parts out loud for the side I mainly sit on: I think there is plausible social benifit to aborting pregnancies caused by rapists. Not only because rapists might carry genes for aggression, but also because rape circumvents the valuable social/physical fitness selection which women normally perform when choosing who to have babies with. Pro-choice advocates will almost never admit to believing anything like this, because it essentially validates the criticism antiabortion advocates have, that their opponents are eugenicists. To be clear, many pro-choice advocates aren't, and I don't think this particular argument would make or break the debate (it doesn't for me), but it is a potential source of contention pro-choice people might have with my artificial womb proposal.
Because it’s insane. The reasoning explained above to preserve a woman’s rights is sufficient without delving into weird stuff like eugenics.
If there's ever a disagreement or debate about anything, then there are literally always two sides.
You might disagree that the thing that the other side is prioritizing is as important (e.g. the lives of fetuses vs. the right to bodily autonomy for women), or that the thing the other side believes is even right (e.g. people who believe in racial hierarchies and other literally racist ideologies), but that doesn't detract from the fact that two sides do, in reality, exist.
In my experience, it's way more effective determining the thing that the other side cares about, then finding common ground if that's something that you also care about -- from there, it's a lot easier to make the case that while both priorities are good, your priorities might be more justifiable.
Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.
(On the topic, this was a thing that Pope Francis was exceptionally good at: he actually listened to the concerns of people and spoke with them where they were at, even those who he vehemently disagreed with).
> Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.
When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution. The only thing left is to sway those on the fences.
> or you think women should not be in control of their bodies in some situations.
In almost all countries where abortion is broadly legal there are still limitations. For elective abortions without committee approval or medical necessity there's a limit of 24 weeks in the UK, 12 in Germany and Italy, 14 in France, 20 in Sweden... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#Grounds_for...
Opinion polling in the US mirrors this nuance:
> "The same poll found that support for abortion being generally legal was 60% during the first trimester of pregnancy, dropping to 28% in the second trimester, and 13% in the third trimester."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#...
Clearly there is plenty of room to quibble over the details without being some sort of Victorian boogieman. Having no limitations at all is a fringe position which most pro-choice people don't agree with.
[End of pasted response.]
By the way, this ties in with what I'm saying about both sides presenting the worst possible arguments of their opponents. Extremists on one side say that the others all want to perform "partial birth abortions", killing babies mere seconds before it is fully born (this is a lie.) Extremists on the other side frame all of their opponents (including anybody who supports abortion in principle but not unrestricted) as being religious extremists who want to lock up women and turn them into breeding cows.
The reality is that most of the population is in between these two extremes, and if our democracy wasn't so dysfunctional, undermined by extremists on both sides we could compromise on abortion being legal for somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 24 weeks, as it is in most of Europe, and that would make most of the American public reasonably happy. But you wouldn't accept that, because any compromise is " controlling women", and antiabortion people wouldn't accept it because its "killing babies."
End result is we're doomed to have these fruitless arguments from now until a comet puts us all out of our misery.
Because it is. As your own link shows, later term abortions are for medical purposes. Any legislation restricting it is just adding liability for doctors, which results in harm to women because doctors are now second guessing themselves instead of focusing on the woman’s healthcare.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
The “issue” being legislated against is non existent.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
It is only politically popular due to disinformation and people liking the feeling of being morally superior to others. A tried and true strategy to winning votes.
I actually agree here, but only insofar as a resolution needs to be the ideal for both parties: a resolution could totally be rules and doctrine that both sides find partially objectionable, but the best feasible option.
I do want to point out that your point about one group exercising power over another is almost always where these disagreements arise: each party thinks that they've identified an unjust exertion of power that should be prevented.
The vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy was unwanted, not because the mother’s life was in danger or what have you. But why was the pregnancy unwanted in the first place?
This is the question you must begin with, because the answer cuts to the psychological heart of the matter. The reason is that we have redefined sexual intercourse in terms of sexual pleasure first. We’ve demoted procreation to secondary status instead of recognizing it as the primary reason for sexual intercourse with pleasure characterizing it rather than defining its function. The absurdity of it is apparent given the anatomical, physiological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sex. All of that for pleasure? This is like claiming the digestive system exists and the act of eating exist for pleasure. We would typically associate with such things gluttony, bulimia, and other eating disorders.
Historically, sexual self-restraint has always been a problem for some more than others, of course. Some have more trouble with restraint with respect to food or drink or whatever. Addictions have always existed. However, the cultural norms surrounding such questions have varied. Some cultures have been puritanical. Some have been depraved. Others have managed to channel sexual appetite in healthy ways that respect the dignity of those involved (which, given its nature, aims toward spousal love and the flourishing of the family, including the parents as parents). Ours is not the latter. In the 1930s, we saw the beginning of the normalization of contraception, and this normalization had the effect of splitting the pleasure of sex from the entirety of the act and promoted it to the status of primary end. This opened the door to the sexual revolution and the sexual exploitation of others, especially women. Abortion, paradoxically, only becomes relevant in this context, because only in a contraceptive context is pregnancy conceived as aberrant and contrary to the nature of the sexual act. So contrary to a successfully waged misinformation campaign by people like Margaret Sanger, abortion rates only rise in a society with a culture that normalizes contraception where it becomes a “solution” for the failure rate of contraception.
Is that what we want? Do we wish to continue to dehumanize ourselves by by outsourcing our humanity? Technology extends human ability or fixes broken human function. Do we want to put the cart before the horse and reinforce that error by building a culture and a technological ecosystem around error instead, and in doing so, entrench ourselves in that error? Instead of technology truly serving the human good, do we want instead to abolish the human in service to a dystopian ideology? This is what addicts do. They serve their addictions and build their lives around them.
I would love to believe the sexual exploitation of women started in the 1930s.
But for thousands of years, women didn’t have 10+ pregnancies with sky high maternal and infant mortality and morbidity rates because they wanted to.
The broader context of a woman being physically unable to protect herself and needing the protection of a man and the man’s allies played a big role.
I grew up unwanted, that shit stays with you forever. It's a lifetime of torture.
This comment is seriously disturbing, holy shit.
I think very few people who have religious opposition to abortion would actually be happy about the advent of "artificial wombs". They might view it as a lesser evil, but not as a good thing. Because, while belief in the wrongfulness of deliberately killing an unborn child is an important motivator, it generally isn't the sole motivator – another important motivator is the belief that God has a plan for the process of human reproduction, and wandering too far off script is wrong in itself, with artificial wombs likely to be seen as going quite a long way off – at best maybe tolerable as a lesser evil in some cases.
And trying to forcibly “cure” religion may potentially constitute the crime of genocide under international law
And I'm pretty sure I never suggested forcing anyone to do anything.
Yet in the same paragraph:
>What we do disagree on is whether an unborn child inside the mother's womb deserves moral consideration and has rights separate from the mother's rights (and if the two parties' rights conflict, how to resolve that conflict).
So either you are unreasonable, or you think women should not be in control of their bodies in some situations.
It’s really simple, a woman’s body is prioritized over a fetuses’ body. Otherwise, good luck getting fertility rates up without striking down even more women’s rights (which is obviously an ulterior motive for many).
He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.
Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.