She brings together three women who are followers of Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism to ask them how well what their religious books actually say about abortion aligns with what we are told about by the anti-choice movement. Very little, it turns out. In fact, they suggest that the current proposed restrictions on abortion actually violate the tenets of their religion.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
But since the holy books have little to do with what people believe, and what they supposedly believe has little to do with what they actually do, who the hell cares?
I can argue theology better than most believers, but it doesn’t matter, because they don’t actually care. If they did, you wouldn’t have to point these things out to them; they’d already know. How come they didn’t bother studying the supposed Word of God? Because they’re not taking their religion half as seriously as they pretend to.
Funny enough, even as an atheist, I pretty much agree with the women. I like the analysis that abortion restrictions have their origin in ‘weak men projecting their weakness onto (their imagined) God’.
Abortion was described by an anti-abortion protested as thwarting the will of God. I told them they imagine a very weak and limited God.
The OT recommended poison-induced abortion if the husband suspects his wife has been made pregnant by another man. So Zod has no objection.
And about holy books… if memory serves, when king David was diddling the already-married Bathsheba, an embarrassing pregnancy ensued. So the king did away with her husband Uriah by sending him on the battlefield with no support, then added the lady to his harem. But the boss in heaven was displeased by such actions, and killed the baby in B’s womb. So yes, abortion as a punishment, meted out by the boss himself. Nice.
(It’s the basis for Joseph Heller’s fourth novel “God knows”).
LykeX, at least in Judaism the belief is that the Torah as written is only part of Yahweh’s words. He also gave an unwritten complementary piece that is the really important stuff. This was handed down through the generations, and eventually written down in the early 2nd century. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishnah What Jews are supposed to do follows interpretations of the Mishnah, in the form of Talmud, Rabbinical responsa and so forth, codified in the 16th century in the Shulchan Aruch (the set table), and so forth.
outis: Yahweh killed the baby after it was born. (But never mind, babies under a month old don’t count anyway.)
@6: quite right, my mistake.
And you are also correct in saying that it’s only infanticide, an ordinary occurrence then… (I wonder how that point would fly in a bible study class).