Pro-life = compensation?

One of the things that always strikes me about the pro-life movement is how incongruously materialistic it is. Here you have people who, for the most part, fervently believe that people have souls and/or spirits, made in the image of God, and that these souls/spirits are “the real us,” the part of us that lives forever and for which the fleshly body is merely a temporary abode (and not infrequently a snare and a source of soul-threatening temptations). In almost any other context, this supposed “immortal soul” would be what makes us people, individuals with value and worth and significance, at least in their eyes.

Let the subject of abortion come up, though, and suddenly these same people have the most materialistic and reductionistic definition of personhood you can imagine.

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Belief versus knowledge

Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between knowledge and belief: Christians believe that Jesus loved them so much he was willing to lay aside his divinity, descend from heaven, and spend 33 years growing up in poverty and preaching the Gospel and ultimately dying a horrible, painful death for them. But they know that if they drop their pencil on the floor, Jesus will never pick it up and hand it to them.