LittleNipper
Gold Member
- Jan 3, 2013
- 5,613
- 839
- 130
Exodus 21:22-25 ESV / 87 helpful votes Helpful Not HelpfulFrom a Christian perspective, abortion is genocidePerhaps you can explain why people who claim to be Christians were willing to elect the antithisis to Christianity in exchange for their choice of judges. Obviously that was an effort to force what you consider to be Christian values on the country through the courts.
It was the exact OPPOSITE of that.
I do not want to force what I believe on anybody, not ever.
So you oppose Christians supporting the very unChristian like Trump just to gain political power through the courts? That is a yes/no question.
So if you were a Christian in Nazi Germany, who would you vote for? Would you vote for the National Socialists and all of their swell social programs that gave away free everything while systematically murdering Jews, or the one lone voice in opposition to the genocide who tweets stupid stuff and chases tail?
People who claim to be Christians are definately against abortion, yet neither the Old Testament nor the New mentions abortion—not one word.
It’s not that the Old Testament is reticent about women’s bodies, either. Menstruation gets a lot of attention. So do child- birth, infertility, sexual desire, prostitution (death penalty), infidelity (more death penalty), and rape (if the woman is within earshot of others and doesn’t cry out . . . death penalty). How can it be that the authors (or Author) set down what should happen to a woman who seeks to help her husband in a fight by grabbing the other man’s testicles (her hand should be cut off) but did not feel abortion deserved so much as a word? Given the penalties for nonmarital sex and being a rape victim, it’s hard to believe that women never needed desperately to end a pregnancy, and that there was no folk knowledge of how to do so, as there was in other ancient cultures. Midwives would have known how to induce a miscarriage.
A passage often cited by abortion opponents is Exodus 21:22–23:
If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life . . .
Contemporary abortion opponents interpret this passage as distinguishing between causing a premature birth (fine) versus causing a miscarriage (death penalty), which is indeed what most modern translations suggest. Unfortunately for abortion opponents, at least one thousand years of rabbinical scholarship say the fine is for causing a miscarriage and the death penalty is for causing the death of the pregnant woman. If anti-abortion exegetes are only now finding in this rather obscure passage evidence for an absolute biblical ban on abortion, you have to wonder why no one read it that way before. The Talmud permits abortion under certain circumstances, in fact requires it if the woman’s life is at stake.
The New Testament was a second chance for God to make himself clear about abortion. Jesus had some strong views of marriage and sex—he considered the Jewish divorce laws too lenient, disapproved of stoning adulteresses, and did not shrink from healing a woman who had “an issue” (vaginal bleeding of some sort) that had lasted twelve years and would have made her an outcast among Jews. But he said nothing about abortion. Neither did Saint Paul, or the other New Testament authors, or any of the later authors whose words were interpolated into the original texts.
“When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman's husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
The passage is speaking of BOTH the mother and the baby. The killing of a baby is "harm" in my book ---- you can try to explain it away; however, you are simply trying to cover yourself.