tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post7550770427684899042..comments2024-03-27T06:28:06.962-05:00Comments on Homeward Bound: Abortion and the Breath of LifeChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04611311820554248004noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-10016693082255619932012-06-08T15:36:53.009-05:002012-06-08T15:36:53.009-05:00None of the arguments presented here give clear vi...None of the arguments presented here give clear views on a biblical view on abortion. I contest that there are 'loopholes' to find if - anyone is trying to find them. As far as i can see it is simply that both views are based on individual moral values and not actually on any knowledge of God's wishes, simply assumptions that God is probably in line of what we (in both cases) think/ feel is true.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-73945776328774149682011-10-23T08:04:04.662-05:002011-10-23T08:04:04.662-05:00gumby,
God also plays the part of nothing happen...gumby, <br /><br />God also plays the part of nothing happening if the woman was faithful. <br /><br />Why all of this drama and ceremony? How else would you know what has happened? Unless you knew it was God getting involved and punishing adultery, it would have no deterrent value.ChrisBhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04611311820554248004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-66768181700968515572011-10-23T07:47:48.064-05:002011-10-23T07:47:48.064-05:00So...
It's clear the god is the agent in the...So... <br /><br />It's clear the god is the agent in the miscarriage/abortion, we just need a man to suspect his wife of an affair, then get a priest involved to create a concoction for her to drink, then god does all his sole agency bit by preventing future pregnancies (and likely inducing a miscarriage/abortion). <br /><br />That crazy god - so agentful and powerful to manage all that on his own, without the need to rely on humans!gumbynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-90123762594548634912009-02-14T23:39:00.000-06:002009-02-14T23:39:00.000-06:00"The life of the flesh is in the blood." Babies ha..."The life of the flesh is in the blood." Babies have their own blood supply, their own heartbeat and brain functions. They also "breathe" the amniotic fluid before they are born.<BR/><BR/>Excellent study!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-85313646116777655842008-08-30T14:26:00.000-05:002008-08-30T14:26:00.000-05:00Jeremy,You keep comparing this to specific situati...Jeremy,<BR/><BR/>You keep comparing this to specific situations where God caused or directed a specific response or result, but that is not what you have here. In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead for withholding money from the apostles. That was a specific response to a specific situation that may only provide limited insight into how God wants the church to deal with believers who renege on pledges. However, you would have a very different case if Peter were to pronounce a general rule along the lines of “thus says the Lord, anyone who fails to honor a pledge to the church shall be put to death.” That would tell you much more about God’s priorities on the question.<BR/><BR/>Here you have a general rule to be applied whenever a husband suspects his wife of adultery but lacks proof. (I assume she gets stoned to death if he has the proof.) In such cases, a procedure is to be followed that will result in the termination of any existing pregnancies. There is big difference between God directing a single action in one specific situation and God directing the same action in all similar situations. The latter implies a general principle at work while the former may not.Vinnyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08955726889682177434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-79398109538386111822008-08-30T13:56:00.000-05:002008-08-30T13:56:00.000-05:00I don't think that's Chris's point at all. He says...I don't think that's Chris's point at all. He says that the passage is clear that God is the agent, and it doesn't actually matter if God does it through either method or if the reader or hearer didn't see the distinction between the two methods. The point is that God is the agent, and they would have gotten that. This is a procedure given at God's command, and the result is something God is ultimately responsible for, with humans responsible only for doing as he commands.<BR/><BR/>That means it isn't a case of deciding on your own to kill someone or to have an abortion. It's more like the case of Jehu being commanded to take out the family of Ahab than David reasoning his way to the conclusion that Solomon will eventually have to kill Joab and explaining to him why. It's a case of following a direct command of God, with God ultimately responsible for the results, so it's more like cases where God administers justice directly than like cases where we have to reason through a case based on the relevant moral principles that apply to us as humans.Jeremy Piercehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03441308872350317672noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-39209588853006490252008-08-30T13:32:00.000-05:002008-08-30T13:32:00.000-05:00Jeremy,I don't think that I disagree with you. Ho...Jeremy,<BR/><BR/>I don't think that I disagree with you. However, it seems to me that Chris is trying to draw a distinction between the priest using the bitter water as an abortifacient to produce the miscarriage as well as the subsequent barrenness and God producing the same result through supernatural intervention. I don't think that the Israelites would have recognized that distinction.Vinnyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08955726889682177434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-91780886469564005262008-08-30T12:37:00.000-05:002008-08-30T12:37:00.000-05:00Vinny, I'd be more inclined to expect pre-moderns ...Vinny, I'd be more inclined to expect pre-moderns to expect the opposite. They would have seen this procedure as a way to access God's supernatural intervention to answer the question. Remember that the pre-modern view in the Greco-Roman world included assuming any case of the symptoms of epilepsy meant the gods had produced these effects in the person directly. It wasn't until a later disciple of Hippocrates that an alternative view arose.<BR/><BR/>Most scholars just assume from the gospel accounts that any such symptoms in Israel were taken to be the result of demons, and even if the biblical authors treat some of those as actually being the result of demons in some sense, the pre-modern assumption did seem to be supernatural causes for unexplained phenomena. All the Catholic miracle stories for justifying canonization work the same way, assuming a supernatural miracle every time there's no natural explanation.Jeremy Piercehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03441308872350317672noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-26821123339082164302008-08-30T10:35:00.000-05:002008-08-30T10:35:00.000-05:00ChrisB,It may be obvious from our twenty-first cen...ChrisB,<BR/><BR/>It may be obvious from our twenty-first century perspective that there must have been some supernatural intervention in order for the bitter water to cause suffering in only guilty women, but I don’t think that the ancient Israelites would have understood it this way. I think they would have understood it as God directing them to follow a procedure that terminates pregnancies got through adultery.Vinnyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08955726889682177434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-1529938022388018222008-08-29T12:51:00.000-05:002008-08-29T12:51:00.000-05:00Vinny,Assuming this procedure was ever carried out...Vinny,<BR/><BR/>Assuming this procedure was ever carried out, I'm sure some of the women involved would have had a pregnancy the husband doubted was his. If this procedure made the woman miscarry, it would be the hand of God doing so (hence my point above), not the hand of man. We believe God is responsible (in some way or another) for all deaths and all miscarriages, so this is just more of Him running the universe as He sees fit. <BR/><BR/>The point is, the human agent delivers the same substance to every woman. It is NOT, then, an abortifacient, so it does not provide biblical support for abortion.<BR/><BR/>(And don't spend too much energy worrying about the alternate translation. I can't find another that says that including the JPS.)<BR/><BR/>Jeremy, I love your last point about the "attitude toward adults." And thanks for linking to my piece.ChrisBhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04611311820554248004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-75238854326894587642008-08-28T20:07:00.000-05:002008-08-28T20:07:00.000-05:00The passage says the woman will be able to have ch...<I>The passage says the woman will be able to have children if she is innocent. Doesn't it logically follow that she won't be able to have children if she's guilty?</I><BR/><BR/>Actually, it doesn't follow logically. You've just committed the logical fallacy of <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent" REL="nofollow">denying the antecedent</A>. It may carry the <A HREF="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/" REL="nofollow">conversational implicature</A> that she won't be able to have children, but it certainly doesn't logically imply that.<BR/><BR/>Nitpicking aside, it's technically possible that the curse of not being able to bear children can take effect later on. It doesn't say when her stomach would swell. You might expect it to be immediate, but it doesn't exactly say that. Keep in mind that it can't be about the issue of being childless, since women who already have children would be immune. It has to be about becoming unmarriageable once divorced out of the inability to have future children. That's compatible with contracting the condition much later, since obviously the water itself doesn't cause the condition. God does.<BR/><BR/>More likely, since God isn't exactly trapped by an inability to know what people will do in the future, he could simply prevent conception in the cases that he would judge in this way. Or he could do what he did with David and Bathsheba's first child. I don't see how your response to that touches my point. It's true that it's an individual case, but it's a case that shows that God obviously would be willing to do something like that, which means the biblical authors don't take it to be immoral for God to do it. That doesn't mean it would be ok for us to do it. It wouldn't be ok for us to kill someone for lying about how much they gave to the church, for instance.<BR/><BR/>As for this showing God's attitude toward the unborn, that may well be. But keep in mind that Aaron's two eldest sons, Uzzah, David and Bathsheba's oldest child, and Ananias and Sapphira demonstrate just as fully what God's attitude to adult human beings is. That doesn't give us permission to murder adult human beings. So why should Numbers 5 tell us anything about the moral status of the fetus as compared with the moral status of adults?Jeremy Piercehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03441308872350317672noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-22402429200111933502008-08-28T09:50:00.000-05:002008-08-28T09:50:00.000-05:00Jeremy,The passage says the woman will be able to ...Jeremy,<BR/><BR/>The passage says the woman will be able to have children if she is innocent. Doesn't it logically follow that she won't be able to have children if she's guilty? Moreover, if the alternative translation is correct, the term "miscarrying womb" is superfluous if it does not apply to an existing pregnancy.<BR/><BR/>The difference between the story of David and Bathsheeba is that God is not dealing with a specific situation here. He is laying down a procedure for his people to follow in all such situations that will result in the termination of a pregnancy when one exists.<BR/><BR/>As Chris notes, the Biblical position on abortion is not nearly as explicit as either side would like it to be. You have to infer God's attitude towards the unborn. In Numbers, you have God promulgating a rule for dealing with situations where unborn children will frequently be present.Vinnyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08955726889682177434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-89913069190555509082008-08-28T06:46:00.000-05:002008-08-28T06:46:00.000-05:00Vinny, the passage doesn't say it will happen imme...Vinny, the passage doesn't say it will happen immediately. Also, the issue is whether it's ok for a human being to deliberately abort a fetus. The Bible is clear that God can abort anyone's life without it being immoral, even if the person is innocent. God is clearly the agent in this passage. Why would we have different standards for this sort of case than we have for David and Bathsheba's first child?Jeremy Piercehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03441308872350317672noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-45847327007193499492008-08-27T10:49:00.000-05:002008-08-27T10:49:00.000-05:00I have never really looked for proof texts on the ...I have never really looked for proof texts on the abortion issue so I was not familiar with that passage in Numbers, but it seems to me that it creates a lot of problems for your argument. Isn’t it logical to assume that some of the women whose adultery is revealed by this process would be pregnant? How can we conclude anything other than that those women would miscarry as a result of this process? In fact, the footnotes to the NIV give “causes you to have a miscarrying womb and barrenness” as a possible alternative translation to “causes your thigh to waste away and your abdomen to swell.” It seems pretty clear that the bitter water will abort any pregnancy.Vinnyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08955726889682177434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8196630391794341478.post-51622438803827604162008-08-26T13:36:00.000-05:002008-08-26T13:36:00.000-05:00Excellent!Excellent!Nancyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03127927719002627674noreply@blogger.com