(Cross posted @ God Is 4 Suckers!)
(hat tip to Rob Boston @ Talk To Action)
The word ‘unbelievable’ comes to mind. Donohue makes some sort of distinction between practicing Catholics and non-practicing Catholics, the former allegedly agreeing with him (oh hey, they don’t eat hagus either, right?), he also carries on about how the ‘bishops are energized’ about Obama receiving a degree at Notre Dame.
At 6:48, the blonde tries to fire Boston up about honoring pro-death penalty speakers at the university – and Donohue spewing ‘It’s not intrinsically evil’. So…abortion is intrinsically evil, but putting people to death isn’t? I smell the fresh new-fallacy smell of special pleading.
An old post of mine, illustrates a number of problems with the modern religious viewpoints on abortion:
Still even Jerome - while saying some of the most awful garbage about women in recorded history, was not as hardcore about abortion as today's Religious Right, writing "The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs ("Epistle" (121, 4))"
Neither were early church organizational meetings unanimous. The Synods of Elvira and Ancyra (306 ACE, 314 ACE) explicitly called abortion a sin, while the Apostolic Constitutions (380 ACE) disallowed it only after the fetus took on a "human shape."”
(Snip)
“In the early 7th Century, the Church began codifying what it considered sexual sins and abortion made the list, but was well behind the "sins" of birth control, oral sex, and anal sex. In fact, the punishment for oral sex was at least 7 years of penance, while the punishment for abortion was a mere 120 days.”
(Snip)
“Even St. Thomas Aquinas himself - arguably the most influential theologian in Roman Catholic Christianity, did not consider a fetus human until the quickening.
This was the way it was for the most part until - and are you sitting down for this? - 1869. That's when Pope Pius IX declared all abortion to be homicide. That's right, for nearly the entire history of Christianity, the Catholic Church was officially tolerant of first trimester abortion. The change was well after the Enlightenment, after the Civil War, and into the modern scientific era. In fact, it was only as recently as 1983 that all vestiges of the distinction between the "fetus animatus" and "fetus inanimatus" were quietly purged from Canon Law. (Yes, that was 1983... only 23 years ago)”
The entire argument hinges upon (and fails miserably) ensoulment. It fails because there is no substantial proof that there is anything resembling a soul – and when evidence is demanded, we become subjected to innumerable personal anecdotes, retrofitted laws of conservation, and anything else under the sun, excepting any sort of solid proof.
Tell me that I as an individual will survive death, and I will hold up a DVD (or CD-ROM), cut it twice with scissors, and quietly request that the claimant retrieve the information on it.
In the meantime, we are yoked by the superstitions of the populace overly fond of their precious little fables, who will spend copious monies as well as time and energy to protest in favor of something unprovable, rather than address the root of their grievance, that of poverty, lack of education, and improved living standards for their fellow human beings.
It is to weep, sometimes.
Till the next post then.
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