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An influencer couple announced that they aborted their pregnancy because the fetus had Down syndrome. This upset a lot of people including some fine congressmen.
However, it's actually very common. Screening for genetic disorders is generally performed between 10 and 20 weeks, giving plenty of time for a reasonably early choice. "As a result of these elective terminations in the U.S., there was a 37% reduction in the numbers of babies with Down syndrome born in 2018. This means that in recent years there were 37% fewer babies with Down syndrome than could have been born". In Iceland, almost all such diagnosed pregnancies are aborted after testing.
People with Down syndrome are clearly generally capable of living "happy" lives. They have the equivalent intelligence of an 8 to 9 year old. Most 8 to 9 year olds seem happy enough to me, and it would not be a horrible curse to live decades in such a condition. Perhaps we might ask if such a life is fulfilling, but a young child can't comprehend what that means; as well ask your dog if he's fulfilled by sniffing butts and digging holes.
For the caretakers of course, life may not be so rosy. Taking care of a small child indefinitely, knowing all of the joys and sorrows of adulthood that they will never experience, does not sound fulfilling, to say nothing of the physical and monetary toll. It's therefore unsurprising that most parents choose not to condemn themselves to such a future.
God in His infinite wisdom creates babies with far worse afflictions. Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth. Down syndrome, as a patently survivable condition, lies on the edge of this boundary.
I was hoping someone had already posted about this so I can ride on it. Let's say they did have the downer, what would happen?
Let's now talk for a second about suicidal empathy. I think suicidal empathy is just christianity + technology. For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive. Better to help someone when they are down on their luck, it's probably temporary, it probably helps the whole village not to let them die for a temporary thing. The upside is probably worth the downside of helping irredemable people some of the time.
Your neighbor now is everyone who lives in a 10000ft radius of the earth surface. You can easily know how they are doing no matter where they are, you can go there within a day or two at a (relatively) irrisory price and you can also make them come to you at the same low price. The somalian sitting of the coast of lybia in a repurposed fishing boat? Your neighbor. The same somalian living in your country definitely your neighbor. His family? Your family's neighbor. Kicking them out as illegals? Definitely not helping them.
And that's how the Catholic Church pushed for regularizing half a million immigrants to spain this year.
This and the downer's story are actually the same category of error. Had the downer been born in the Christian Dark Ages the downer would have died of some retarded accident within 10 years and if not he would have been given the, relatively cheap, life of the beast of burden, not the simulacron of life of an intellectual that we try to give them now.
Euthanasia is also in the same category. Not killing the sick is a good idea because sometimes they get better and otherwise it's like, an extra two weeks. Not so much when we can keep them alive for 60 more years without much effort. Christianity + technology = suicidal empathy.
What's the solution to suicidal empathy? More cruelty, we need to start liking cruelty. The problem is that nobody is willing to do it, you have to trick people by saying "you're not helping them IT'S AN INVASION!!!!1!!!!!!1!!!11!!11!!!!". But it only goes so far. The downer would basically be happy we have to give as much as we can to the downer.
In the time of Christ and the early Church, the key neighbors in question were the Romans who tried and failed across the next >350 years to torture, rape and murder Christianity out of existence. It wasn't be nice to your immediate neighbors, everybody does that, it was show love to the men leading you to the pyre. If purely for reasons of history and epistemic hygiene, should your primary understanding of Christianity have come from American Scripturalists and the modern atheism they spawned, you are lacking 1800 years of empirical record.
In the US, which means far more in Europe, 83% of employees of such charities are either atheists, members other religions, or cultural Catholics excommunicated latae sententiae. This is irrelevant, though, because none of these charities could operate without the prevailing interest of their governments in overseeing demographic replacement. There is the point that the government gives charities large amounts of money and the charities give it back to favored politicians, but the charity industry is the domain of leftists and there are expressly nonreligious charities doing the same work. Regardless of that, it is, also, not as though charities are the bottleneck. Demographic replacement is top-down, charities, any charity, may influence where foreigners are finally placed once in a country and the privileges they enjoy, but those foreigners would be in the country regardless, because that's what power wants. Everything else is set dressing.
"We need more cruelty." How do you think we got here? It wasn't a superabundance of love. In cruelty we destroyed the structures that could support such people and standing in the wreckage we say now tear them apart in the womb.
There are verses that call for cooperation with and forgiveness of state authorities, though they may be oppressive.
But, in the time of Jesus or at least the writing of the Gospels, it's just as if not more likely that it meant Jews, actual neighbors who persecuted Christians who tried to stay in the same communities. Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one. It's dubious if the Romans recognized it as anything other than a cult led by a rabble rouser.
I don't think you're wrong about the Jews as primary antagonists, at least up to the destruction of the Second Temple. Still, by 70 AD, Peter and Paul had been martyred by Rome. We also see a certain prototype in the Passion account. Jesus asks forgiveness for the Roman soldiers, and now in the nearly 2000 years of martyrs since, where we have their last words, we at least very often read of them forgiving and asking forgiveness for their murderers.
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The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians. Suetonius also mentions Jewish riots in Rome during the reign of Claudius instigated by a man named "Chrestus" (possibly Christ), which resulted in their expulsion. Tacitus famously describes how Nero fed Christians to the lions after burning Rome.
The Roman problem with Christians was that they refused to participate in local and state cultic sacrifices, which was the kind of thing that brought disasters and plagues and general suffering from the gods. Unlike Judaism, Christianity was also obviously a new religion, so it didn't get any respect for being ancient. Also, the Romans thought they were getting up to weird stuff in their private sessions, like having giant orgies and eating babies.
Rome didn't really have a formal criminal system. The governor was basically allowed to do whatever he wanted in the name of keeping the peace. So Christianity was rarely "illegal", but they caused general disturbances and that led to persecution.
Notice in this story that he didn't already know what to do and, iirc, was basically told by Trajan to not go looking for problems just handle them when they came up.
But you're right. I was thinking that the systematic persecutions came much later under Diocletian which long postdates the Gospel's likely dates (and that at the time of their writing the Romans were just hostile towards Jews in general and had no interest to pick apart their endless ideological debates*), which is true. But forgot about Nero's opportunistic behavior. That shows they were at least known and/or distrusted by pagans as well.
* Which explains some of their conciliatory gestures.
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Jews in the Bar Kochba Rebellion killed many Christians that refused to join them in the revolt against the Romans.
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The most famous example Jesus used was a Samaritan, who were the Jews' outgroup.
Yeah some people here have a deranged understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The 'neighbor' is a member of the hated outgroup, and not respected members of the ingroup.
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"far more in Europe"? Is there a missing word there? I don't understand. Also your link doesn't look to me like it's supporting your assertion. It says "The study of campaign contributions from 2018 through February of this year showed that 83% went to Democratic candidates or political-action committees" the 83% is donating to a party, it doesn't say anything about their religious affiliation. I also followed the link at the top and searched for "atheist" and found no hits.
I could have clearly worded that better. Europe is more progressive than the US, so if we look at a field, such as NGOs in the US, and we find it dominated by progressives, then we should expect an even greater degree of progressive control of charities in Europe. But that's an issue, one of two here I've produced. The first is I am just assuming the European NGO employees are more progressive, and the second is the data references a study of American Catholic charity employees who donated to political causes. I didn't look further to check what percentage of employees donate, so 83% must be wrong, and really it's that 83% of those politically-active donate to leftist causes in the US. Helping women get abortions, which includes donating to and voting for pro-abortion politicians, also incurs automatic excommunication.
So in the studied Catholic NGOs, 83% of their politically active employees are either:
Atheists / Non-religious
Members of other faiths
Catholics who have excommunicated themselves
This isn't an argument about those non-practicing Catholics not being Catholic. They are still Catholic, and they are taught they will be judged more harshly for what they know. This is an argument against aspersing teachings because of the behaviors of people who do not follow those teachings. Is this a useful distinction? POSIWID and all? I think in some things it might not be useful, but here it is useful because it's the governments that are doing this, and they don't need charities to help.
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Religiosity is higher in US than Europe, so absent other considerations, if most US employees are essentially atheist or Non-Judgemental Therapeutic Deity then in Europe it will be more so.
Not quite sure that checks out - religion is more controversial in US than in Europe precisely because religiosity is higher, and South Europe is more Catholic.
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