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Notes -
Christians and the Killing of abortion doctors:
I'm well aware that a strong case can be made for absolute Christian pacifism or more moderately for employing violence only with the consent of the ruling authority. Yet these positions are clearly not majority ones. Imagine if I posed to the average Christian the following hypothetical:
Tomorrow, the government passes a law declaring that blacks, being subhuman, are no longer entitled to any protection under the law. While the law allows you to kill a person who threatens the life of a regular person, killing a person who threatens a black is now murder. Mark 1.0 disagrees. While he is not black himself and has no special relationship with blacks, he consider them to be regular humans entitled to defense. As such, he goes to a black extermination center and kills a few of its exterminators. Are Mark 1.0's actions morally justified?
I think the vast majority of Christians would say that Mark was not only acting justifiably but commendably. If he started a revolution that overthrew the government, they would celebrate him as an example of Christian courage and dedication. If, however I replace Black with fetus, and exterminationist with abortion doctors, fundamentalists suddenly discover the value of 'giving unto Caesar', talk about how their belief in the sanctity of life is incoherent with killing abortion doctors and condemn Mark 2.0.
Once again, my claim is that there is no deontological theological justification that allows for Mark 1.0's actions, but not Mark 2.0's. Thus, when Christians claim to disown anti-abortion violence on religious grounds they are almost always either making a best methods utilitarian calculation (which given 60 Million abortions since Roe v. Wade seems rather specious) or demonstrating that their worship of the flag, trumps their commitment to God.
I feel like this topic, why don't Christians act more like utilitarians, seems to come up every couple months (usually in regards to abortion) and the fundamental mistake that guys like you always seem to make is trying to model Christians as utilitarians who are bad really bad at utilitarianism, or deontologists who are too stupid to grasp deontology, rather than as people sincerely trying to implement Christian principles.
Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.
If you ask the average Christian for the fundamental principal underlying all questions of morality you're likely to get one of two answers A) Mark 12-30: Love God with all your heart and love your Neighbor as you would yourself. or B) the recurring theme from Deuteronomy, Jerimiah, Luke, Et Al of "Choose Life". The strict pacifists will cite A but there are many others who will point out that loving your neighbor doesn't preclude putting a bullet in their head. See Old Yeller. At the same time there are also a lot of Christians out there who subscribe to B and the Augustinian principle of "just war", the TLDR version of which being that the set of things worth killing for is a subset of the set things worth dying for.
I think you are giving too much credit to the content of their beliefs. History has shown that Christianity can be compatible with and used as justification for any number of completely contradictory actions. I think @4bpp has the right idea, the average person simply doesn't believe things with 100% confidence and logically follow them through to conclusions that are not openly endorsed by their social group and peers. They just sort of pick up their morality from social cues, while texts are used on an as-needed basis to post-hoc justify conclusions they had arrived at by other means in a sort of parallel construction.
Christianity is not [the set of beliefs held by people who call themselves Christians]. For any reasonable definition of Christianity you'll run into the issue that when people make certain decisions they are not being good Christians. Christians can justify anything; Christianity cannot.
There is no such thing as "Christianity", there is about 40,000 current Christian denominations and much more historical ones, every one claiming to be "one true church".
Anything you like, you can find church that praises it as the most Christian thing ever, anything you do not like, you can find church that damns it as the most unchristian thing ever.
What looks reasonable to you is not reasonable to another person and vice versa.
Was it reasonable thing to torture people to death to save their immortal souls?
Christians in third century would say no. Christians in thirteenth century would say yes.
Let me rephrase:
People are allowed to call themselves whatever they want. If your definition of Christianity is just [people who call themselves Christians] then you are by necessity making more of a point about general human nature than about Christianity, because of course there's at least one [person who calls himself a Christian] who believes literally anything.
If you instead narrow your definition to be more sensible, however you define Christianity, then your point starts to target the ideology rather than just normal human nature.
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And my reply to this is basically "what @Jiro said". Christianity has some fairly well established doctrines over when and where violence is justified, and while individual Christians might disagree on whether a given set of circumstances meets the required threshold, the overall shape of the debate-space is widely agreed-upon. Accusing them of being contradictory or insincere (not really holding their beliefs) for failing to follow through on what you believe the utilitarian implications of their beliefs are only makes sense if you assume they are a utilitarian. Most people are not utilitarian. As such I see you as having made the same mistake as the OP; "trying to model Christians as utilitarians who are bad really bad at utilitarianism, rather than as people sincerely trying to abide by Christian principles."
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The average person isn't a utilitarian in the first place; this doesn't justify treating Christians like utilitarians and then claiming that they're inconsistent because they won't murder as utilitarianism demands.
Jiro, it's the old old argument I've seen too damn many times by now. The people who put it forward don't give a damn about underlying moral principles or coherent philosophies. Any stick will do to beat the dog, and their main problem is religion, especially Christianity. Maybe they're atheists, maybe they were never any particular faith tradition to begin with, maybe they're from fundamentalist families and are now very very ex-Christian. What they do have in common is, Christianity Bad.
So Christianity Bad, Christians Bad, Christians say love but commit atrocities and wars, yadda yadda yadda. Abortion is just one of the fields they like to play on. If it wasn't "pro-lifers Christians, Christians bad, pro-lifers bad" it'd be something else.
That's why I say this is a trap. "If Christians believe abortion bad, why not stop abortion by force?/Christians use force/Aha we told you Christians murderous hypocrites!"
Speaking as someone who does hold a weaker form of the opinion expressed in the OP ("If you really, truly believe abortion is mass-murdering babies, why don't you respond the way most people would to the mass-murder of babies?"), no, it's not an unprincipled stick to beat Christians with. (Christians aren't the only pro-lifers, you know.) It's gauging how serious someone is about their stated beliefs.
When a pro-lifer does actually blow up an abortion clinic, I don't say "Hah, I knew Christians were murderous hypocrites!" I say, "That guy actually believed his own rhetoric."
FWIW, I do not think Christianity is particularly "bad," and I strongly suspect the OP of being a troll.
Yeah, well, you hang around here, you're an exception.
Take Trump (yes, unhappily, I have to go there). A lot of comment was about "if the Republicans truuuuuuly believed what they say about abortion (fill in the rest yourself)". Many times it was "then they'd make abortion a crime and prosecute doctors who perform them".
Trump comes along and does an interview where he goes "yeah, criminalise it". Cue all the shocked, shocked! faces. Here's a brief story from the BBC:
Some other Republican politician or other, I can't remember the guy's name and I can't be bothered Googling, went much stronger. Again, shocked pikachu from the "if they really believed what they say..." crowd.
Nobody went "They believe their own rhetoric", they went "We told you they were cruel misogynists who hate women and want to control them".
So I'm burned out on the "if pro-lifers/Christians really believe abortion is so wrong, why don't they..." type of questions.
OP may be a troll, but he/she/they/it/xe may be the type of troll that usually poses this kind of question everywhere online. "I ask this so if you say 'no' I can call you a hypocrite who only wants to control women's sexuality, and if you say 'yes' I can call you a monster who only wants to control women's sexuality".
"but he/she/they/it/xe" - I rarely feel insulted by an internet comment but this kind of hurts my feelings.
" Donald Trump on abortion - from pro-choice to pro-prison": This was one of Trump's finest moments. Notice how the willingness to say the obvious seems anti-correlated with personal Christianity. It's not Fundies leading the fight against woke depravity, but de-facto pagans who'd have been libertarians (or communists) in a different world.
If you don't want to get lumped in with the stereotype you shouldn't trying so hard to live up to it.
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