I believe that God not only exists and that Jesus is His Son raised from the dead and elevated by the Spirit, but I believe all this matters a lot. Jesus is the king of the universe and he will, one day, judge every creature–both the living and the dead.
So why do I find it so easy to agree with (some) atheists and secularists on the issue of abortion?
I’ve wondered about this before, but this article recently disturbed me with the question once again:
Kelsey Hazzard is a 24-year-old, pro-life University of Miami alumna and recent graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law. She was raised in the United Methodist Church, but as an adult began having doubts about God.
“I took a break from religion for a while, and soon realized that it had no impact whatsoever on my morals,” she said. She now describes herself as an “apatheist,” meaning she does not care whether God exists or not, although she says she finds God’s existence “highly unlikely.”
“I was pro-life the instant I learned what abortion was,” said Hazzard, who is a legal fellow at Americans United for Life. “But my position became much stronger in college, when I took a course on prenatal development.”
In 2009, Hazzard founded Secular ProLife (SPL), a group whose vision is “a world in which abortion is unthinkable, for people of every faith and no faith.” Hazzard, SPL’s president, created the group in part to attract non-religious people to the pro-life movement.
OK, unlike Hazzard, I think God’s existent is immediately evident, and so firm that there is no possible world in which he could not exist. I was raised by Christian parents and, unlike in the case of Hazzard, a temporary break from it was not conceivable to me except as self-conscious (and dangerous!) apostasy.
But on abortion?
I don’t remember my parents ever giving me a specific religious or theological objection to abortion. Exactly as Hazzard describes, I only remember opposing abortion from exactly the same time I learned what it was.
And then there is this:
Hazzard points to opinion polls showing the US becoming less religious but more pro-life as compelling reasons to use secular arguments to support the pro-life position.
What other arguments has anyone used? Do I even know an argument that is different from Hazzard’s?
According to SPL member Julie Thielen, who identifies as a gnostic antitheist atheist, the best ways to reach secular people with the pro-life message are through biology and an appeal to human rights.
“When the sperm meets the egg, a genetically complete human being is formed, and all that is required for maturation is time and nutrition,” Thielen said. “As complete human beings in the most vulnerable stages, there should be protections afforded. As a society we are judged by how we treat the most vulnerable—the young, the aged, the infirm, those who can’t speak for themselves. The unborn belong here.”
OK, this is just getting surreal. I’m so old, I can remember when another name for the “pro-life” was “right-to-life.” That statement about sperm and egg uniting to be a new person is the only argument I have ever heard against abortion. What makes that a distinctively “secular” argument? And when have religious believers not appealed to human rights? The comparison between protecting the unborn and the infirm is also straight out of the “religious” movement.
I have to admit, as one raised under the tutelage of Cornelius Van Til from my late teens, and thus a Kuyperian believer in the antithesis, all this disturbs me. There is, in my view, not supposed to be any “real” common ground in the beliefs of believer and unbeliever. And yet, on abortion, the issue that is a major piece of contested territory in the culture war, I find the thinking of these secularists completely familiar.
It is what I and all my insular religious friends have always thought.
For many, the historical argument for human equality is the strongest secular argument in favor of life.
“History has many lessons about human beings who were not legal ‘persons,’” said Hazzard. “What seems like common sense to one generation—‘Of course Negroes aren’t real people’—is horrific to the next. What criteria can we set that will prevent this from happening? Every criterion proposed to exclude the unborn can also be used to exclude others. Consciousness? Then it’s fine to kill someone in a temporary coma; they merely have ‘potential.’ Physical independence? So much for conjoined twins. Human appearance? Discrimination based on appearance has been some of the most insidious of all. Birth? Totally arbitrary; there is no ‘personhood fairy’ residing in the birth canal, conferring rights upon exit. At the end of the day, human rights are for all humans. If we don’t protect them for the weakest among us, they’re rather worthless.”
This is again, the only argument that has ever been used. Is there any non-secular argument against abortion that Christians or other religious believers have ever invoked?
The article goes on to describe to long-time atheist heroes of mine, the Randian (except on this issue!) Doris Gordon and Nat Hentoff. I had never heard Gordon’s story of how she dealt with the illogic and self-contradiction from the likes of the ever-disgusting Nathaniel Brandon (my opinion; not Gordon’s as far as I know). So reading this article was a treat for me. And I had never heard how Hentoff came to his views either. Quite fascinating.
Toward the end of the article it finally dawned on me that this was a Catholic article so perhaps “religious argument against abortion” is simply the Church’s or the Pope’s infallible declaration.
But I’ve seen an Evangelical Protestant seem to worry about the same kind of things–not wanting listeners to think she came to a pro-life position on the basis of a religious dogma even though her change of mind on abortion was related to her conversion from agnosticism to Christianity. When Kirsten Powers was interviewed by Focus on the Family, she said, about sixteen minutes in:
My views of abortion really have almost nothing to do with believing in God. It is a pure ethical/ scientific decision. I was very very pro-abortion rights before I became a believer. But I didn’t switch my position because I read the Bible and thought it was in the Bible. I did it because I started to meet all these people who were pro-life, and they kind of peaked my curiosity about it. And I thought, “Well, these people seem very smart, and they don’t seem like they hate women.” And I started doing research–a lot of research, a lot of scientific research. And I was shocked at what I didn’t know. I did not know that a fetus has a heartbeat at three weeks. I mean I learned that at the Body’s Exhibit, not in the Bible… You have to talk to people in their language. And if somebody doesn’t believe in God, that’s just not the way to approach it. You have to approach it from a pure ethical standpoint and say, “Look, what kind of society are we that we allow people to dismember a baby inside the womb, that if the mother wanted and gave birth to, we would do everything we could to save it?”
But Powers could have and should have universalized her experience. No one ever learned from the Bible that a fetus has a heartbeat in three weeks.
Of course, because abortion is homicide and God forbids homicide in the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue, one can articulate the case against abortion in a theological manner. Likewise, because there will be a Final Judgment for all people, and the Gospel tells us that we should think ahead to that Judgment Day in evaluating our own present character and conduct, a Christian can and often does invoke theological rationales in his ethical discussions and assertions. But surely any atheist can see that the basic affirmation, that abortion is homicide, is not a religious dogma but an application of a belief (in the case of believers, a religious dogma) that homicide is evil along with the scientific inference that a woman is pregnant with a baby human being if she is pregnant at all.
After all, everything said about about theology and abortion equally applies to Christian opposition to rape, theft, etc. Did any secularist say that Martin Luther King Jr arguments against apartheid in the United States were incapable of convincing secularists?
Of course, I could try to find the antithesis. Modern Darwinism seems like it should open up the ethical pandora’s box that we see most secularists embracing.
But as much as I think that Creational Monotheism and Trinitarian Christianity are the only rational foundation for life and thought–and that they are true to ultimate reality–I am frankly too happy to have any friends I can get to try to stop the homicides. I’ll certainly witness and try to persuade any unbeliever who will listen to me. But trying to draw a line in the pro-life movement between “us” and “them” does not strike me as a rational allocation of resources. Sometimes Christians get pagan companions who help them in an important area.
The proper response is to appreciate them and give thanks for them, even as you pray for their conversion.
But…
That being said, I think a lot of secularists and some Christians seem to think we’ve got a better chance of convincing secular people by using exclusively secular arguments. But the secular people themselves demonstrate to my mind that the arguments are out there, and even if they have some weird theological language attached, and secular person of reasonable intelligence should still be able to “get it.” I suspect one reason Christians don’t try that approach more often is because, while they are thankful for all the atheist/agnostic pro-lifers that are out there, they don’t find the response to such argumentation or presentation all that impressive. People want their legal homicides because they find it preferable to the constraints that would be imposed by acknowledging an unborn baby’s right to not be agressed against. So the appeal to God and Christ comes in the hopes that God will convert people to do the right thing. I realize that sounds silly to secular pro-lifers, but there it is.<>индексация а в google
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