#im sorry if i sound callous and cruel. that's because it is what i have been fed over these last few days

[bastardwhoisnamedrat]

people really do beg you not to transition! like i’m not asking YOU to go on t and go set up a million doctors appointments and find a therapist. that’s all shit i have to do. you just have to learn a different name bro

[apenitentialprayer]

hi! i have been, in light of the recent us news, been seeing a lot of posts that argue that christianity is not pro life, and then they site mostly the old testament as evidence of this. this strikes me as not only ignorant, but perhaps anti semitic? i would love to hear your response to this type of uninformed statement. i have also seen people argue that it is prochoice because of john 3:16, and the idea of jesus as a human sacrifice. with the divinity of christ aside (as it evidently would not carry much weight in an argument with a nonbeliever) is there a way to communicate the sheer difference between a sacrifice of a consenting grown man for all of humanity versus a sacrifice of an infant for one woman's comfort? (im not even entirely prolife, i just feel uneasy with the comparison and dont know how to address it)

Okay. I have already talked about Numbers 5 here.

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Next argument I see is usually based on the fact that God kills all the firstborn in Egypt, or drowns the world in the early part of Genesis, or when David's firstborn son dies as a result of his sin. But, honestly, we don't even need these examples to show that God causes or allows the deaths of children; pick up a newspaper. Children die all the time. The Biblical examples I listed may be particularly striking, but they're essentially of the same kind of phenomenon that we see every day.

We need to remember that God is the Author of life and Creator of everything; He is not one cause among many, but the ultimate Cause of everything. And because of this, He is held to a different standard than we are. When grandma dies, it is in some sense His fault. But because God can strike grandma down in old age doesn't mean we get to strike grandmas down in old age. And any sane human being would be mad to discover that another human being has put down grandma because she was inconvenient or a burden to the rest of us.

One can get mad when someone we love dies; one can even get mad at God. But the rules of the universe we live in, no matter how callous or cruel or incomprehensible they seem to be, are not analogous with moral behavior expected of human beings. God may have a lot of explaining to do on Judgment Day. Or maybe He won't. But we're not God, and the reality of death does not in itself give us permission to kill.

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I'm going to ignore Psalm 137 for reasons stated here.

But what might be the strongest "God is not pro-life" argument may be the fact that God orders the wars against the Canaanites. This is no longer miraculous intervention or ordinary consequences of nature (of which God is author of both), but permission given by God to the Israelites to kill and conquer.

War does represent a fundamentally exaggerated set of circumstances, but I don't think that I can in good faith formulate an argument where the taking of a life is always wrong, and that we somehow misunderstand these stories. We can maybe mitigate the influence of these stories by remembering that the Bronze Age is a particularly brutal time in human history, and that a time of war would elevate levels of brutality even further - but I'll concede this one.

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As far as John 3:16 is concerned? Honestly, I wouldn't even bother addressing this one, anon. I think that only the most ideologically motivated would even think that the consenting self-sacrifice of a grown man is in some way equivalent to an abortion. It's a stretch, and if they don't see it, if they genuinely somehow think this is a good argument, you're probably better off not engaging anyway.

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One final thing, anon? I know you probably didn't mean to come off like it, because you yourself said that you're not entirely pro-life (and I'm sorry for sounding like the tone police here), but if I were you, I probably wouldn't frame abortion as something "for one woman's comfort." Abortion is a huge decision often borne of awful circumstances, and to play that down (even unintentionally) may just cause more hurt and suffering and the further breakdown of communication. You know?