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Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
Good?
How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.
How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?
There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill. Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.
I don't think most people consider it "good" that veterans suffering from PTSD or homeless people are being offered euthanasia rather than mental health assistance or accomodation respectively, nor that their organs are being harvested for the benefit of wealthier Canadians.
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Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.
There is a sense in which it's worth weighing temporal things against eternal ones. But, ironically given the question, Christians usually apply that principle to endure the suffering such killings are meant to avoid. Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.
I don't know if I've managed to get at the underlying disagreement here. It's not a matter of weighing utilons.
Agreed. I am not a pacifist.
Why not?
(As an aside, the discussion started with the abortion of a Down syndrome child, and Down's patients usually do not want to die. But the principle is worth discussing anyway.)
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Innocent under the laws of man. As I understand it, nowhere in Christianity does it say "your neighbor (like yourself, and all people) has original sin, and therefore you should punish them".
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I have been a net payer to my country's healthcare system for over a decade now. Barring something catastrophic, I expect this state of affairs to continue for the next two decades.
What I am not looking forward to is to be nudged to kill myself the moment I cross the threshold of unprofitability. See, with the system strained under the weight of infinity imported thirdworlders, they just won't be able to just spend money willy-nilly on good ol' white-presenting me.
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Original Sin isn't a universal Christian belief.
... what? Then what's the point of Jesus if there's no original sin? I admit to not having kept up with my theological studies lately, but why do those other Christians believe Jesus died if not "for our sins"? Is it just "the sins committed while alive, so therefore in theory a perfectly virtuous person would not need Jesus"?
Yes, but no one is perfectly virtuous.
I was raised in the LDS religion, and in this theology infants explicitly need no redemption.
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I'm Mormon, and we believe that Adam's fall caused all his descendants to be of a fallen nature, but that we are not morally culpable for his sin.
The Methodists have a similar belief, as do many other Protestant denominations:
"Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually." - Article VII in the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church
You'll find similar wording used by the Anglicans and other denominations.
Nice to bump into a coreligionist on this forum🫡
Eh, I'm probably not the best at representing our faith on here but I try
Perhaps my recent Nibleymaxing may come in hand!
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Read St Athenasius "On the Incarnation" if you're interested. "God became man by nature that man might become god by grace"
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What do you think is happening there
Many Canadians are being proactively offered euthanasia for conditions which could not in any way be considered life-threatening (like "PTSD" or "being homeless").
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People think they can enforce their bright-line morality, but it won't work. You can denounce the "blood guilt" of others, but we all kill to live. We all kill those we love, and some of us kill quite a bit more than that. It works at the other end for assisted suicide too. Taken to the logical conclusion, we must all bankrupt ourselves every generation to eke even a single moment of continued brain activity because every nanosecond of life is so precious as to dwarf the world economy. Compromises with reality will be made, and if your morality can't handle reality, then it's not much use to anyone.
The slopes both ways are always slick.
I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.
When your next relative is terminal in the hospital, I want you to spend every single dime you can beg, borrow or steal in a fruitless attempt to extend their life until you have zero possessions left. You wouldn't want to murder an innocent, would you? You wouldn't put your personal belongings and finances above a human life would you?
There's millions of scenarios, mercy killings, long-term comas, brain death. Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die. Your buddy sustains third-degree burns over 90% of his body and will surely die in extreme agony within days. Best let him scream, you wouldn't want to murder an innocent! Your grandfather is trying to starve himself to death because he's taking way too long to die, so you hold him down and force-feed his withered form so you can be a heckin decent human bean. Wouldn't want a murder on your conscience!
This "hurr durr gotcha murder" is ridiculous and childish. The sort of thing people think right up until they actually have to make one of these calls for themselves.
On average, we will all, by your lights, murder most of our families until we in turn are murdered by them. Is this a useful way to think morally about life and family?
You seem to have a very strange, non-standard definition of murder here.
Choosing not to actively prolong someone else's life is different than choosing to intentionally end a life. Your hypothetical situation here would not be murder.
Wait, did he already fall, or am I cutting it to cause him to fall? Your scenario here is very confusing. The specifics of the scenario drastically change whether or not it would be murder.
I fully support letting doctors give him the best morphine available to numb the pain until his death. But still no murder required.
Not choosing to force someone to continue living != murder. This really isn't all that complicated. Your definitions of murder are, frankly put, real fuckin' weird.
Two people I heard from in person, off the internet:
Having a baby with Down's syndrome is probably fine, and it's a sin to kill it. But there are situations that medical science allowed and which it perpetuates, which are basically black holes of suffering, and which society should not subsidize.
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Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?
This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.
The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.
It’s also not clear to me that action vs inaction is a super bright line. I would certainly consider someone a murderer who stared down passively as someone else slowly lost their grip on the top of a cliff when the watcher could have reached down to save them at any point.
It doesn't meet the criteria stated above:
That may not be the only category in which some folks think something is acceptable, but it is the criteria stated that I'm comparing to for purposes of this sub-thread.
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Oh? But what if the cliff is unstable and the potential rescuer is maybe not strong enough to lift the other person? Say, a 100 pound woman and a 300 pound man hanging off the cliff?
Or even if the situation is reversed, but the man has a fear of heights. And so on. Inaction as murder or even hostile intent is a hard sell.
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Situations with the allocation of limited resources or in which a potential pregnancy is overwhelmingly likely going to be non-viable and/or life-threatening for the mother
I don't support abortion in either case, and there are plenty of other people (mostly other Christians) who don't either. If the baby has actually already died in the womb (as opposed to a doctor saying they're unlikely to survive), I'm not aware of any groups that oppose removal of the baby.
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