According to "Irish cabinet expected to decide on abortion bill", Irish abortion law is set to be amended following the death of a woman denied an abortion last year (2013). The report says that there is strong opposition from the Catholic Church and some politicians to any move that might allow women "abortion on demand" (¶ 3), which the proponents of the new changes to the law say will not happen.
Although religions have their uses, providing valuable social and psychological support, their persistent opposition to abortion proves that they are not, and never have been, reliable guides to moral, just and rational behaviour and thinking. In fact, as the Catholic Church's popes forever remind us, and have done so for two thousand years, much of the teaching of this major religion is not just false, but is seriously immoral and dangerously, murderously, irrational. Why do Christian churches so often oppose abortion? They argue that it is wrong for no better reason than that some very ancient collection of texts, the Bible, written in primitive times by simple, despotic and pre-scientific people must be right. It is hard to believe that intelligent, decent people today could believe such a thing, but they obviously do. Indeed, my family were good Catholics and I went to Catholic schools from the age of five to seventeen, when I escaped to university. And I did sincerely believe what everyone around me believed at the time, at least in primary school, although by the time I left high school, I was having serious problems taking a lot of Catholic and Christian beliefs seriously - they make outrageous claims about what is true with zero supporting evidence, and in many cases the evidence is less than zero. There is a heaven. Where? How big is it? Souls exist. What colour are they? How much to they weigh? God exists and is a thinking, moral being. Why only one? How big is he? Where is he? Why does he love and command blood and killing? And so on.
The Christian opposition to abortion seems to be based on the notion that every cell that could become a human being is in fact a human being. And this is totally wrong. A human being is a living human thing which possesses some minimum set of abilities such as feeling, sensing and perhaps thinking. This requires a sufficiently well developed brain, and that, as human biology tells us, does not exist until six months into a pregnancy or later, so before the sixth month of a pregnancy, there is no human being to be killed by abortion. There is a living object with human cells bearing DNA, but that is not enough to make something a human being. If it were, every cell I scratch from my skin would also be a human being - and we would be mass murderers every time we take a bath and scrub off some living cells from our skins along with the dead ones and the dirt. I'm pretty sure we are not all serial mass murderers.
Religious teachings do not show abortion to be immoral. On the contrary, religiously based opposition to abortion on demand for women proves all such religious teachings to be false, irrational and seriously immoral. The Catholic popes and all religious leaders who teach the same continue to have the blood of innocent women murdered by their false, intolerant and unjust teachings on their crowned heads.
__________
Reference
And as an example of a couple of definition paragraphs, paragraph 3 above summarizes my argument against the wrong definition that a human being is "any cell or collection of cells that is both alive and human".
ReplyDeleteParagraph 2 also suggests the serious flaws in the Christian (and Buddhist?) definition of human being as "a cell or cells which are alive and contain a human soul".
As we see from the appallingly unjust laws based on such bad definitions, these questions matter very much in the lives of women and men everywhere: in far too many countries, bad reasoning leads repeatedly to great actual evil against citizens who are denied safe, legal abortions for no good reason.