Mourdock: 2+2=5

[WindFish]

Love isn't a chemical effect. It's too encompassing a word to be reduced to psychology.

Not really, there is certainly enough evidence to suggest love is a series of biochemical reactions in the brain

 

[LightSpectra]

Not really, there is certainly enough evidence to suggest love is a series of biochemical reactions in the brain

Love isn't psychological.

 

[WindFish]

Love isn't psychological.

Yeah, you're going to have back that claim up

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, you're going to have back that claim up

Could you clarify which of the godawfully broad uses the English language attributes to the word "love" you are speaking about? You're demanding a fair bit of detail and providing a pretty mealy word if we are going to get into that detail.

 

[AlpsStranger]

This isn't even funny because its so untrue.

If almost all men were pro-life and almost all women were pro-choice, I'd see what you were saying.

However, the reality is that the pro-life movement is close to even between the two, with a slight leaning, believe it or not, towards women. In other words, there are a (slightly) higher percentage of prolife women as prolife men. At least in the US, that is.

I think you miss the point a little. The quote is implying that Christianity itself would change to accommodate abortion if both genders could become pregnant. I don't really expect someone with your worldview to accept the premise

 

[WindFish]

Could you clarify which of the godawfully broad uses the English language attributes to the word "love" you are speaking about? You're demanding a fair bit of detail and providing a pretty mealy word if we are going to get into that detail.

The Emotion

 

[LightSpectra]

Yeah, you're going to have back that claim up

Anything that reduces it to the psychological is restricting its meaning.

You're assuming that "love" is the subject of inductive reasoning, and that we should define it to match an objective thing as we observe it in nature. It's rather the subject of deductive reasoning: we give it a meaning, and anything wrongly classified as "love" discredits the classification, not the definition.

 

[LightSpectra]

The Emotion

Not what we are discussing.

I think you miss the point a little. The quote is implying that Christianity itself would change to accommodate abortion if both genders could become pregnant. I don't really expect someone with your worldview to accept the premise

Men can be impregnated, and it is just as much a crime for them to kill babies as it is for women. Just as it's a crime to kill the baby whether the baby is male or female, though abortionists favor themselves feminists either way.

 

[galdre]

Men can be impregnated, and it is just as much a crime for them to kill babies as it is for women. Just as it's a crime to kill the baby whether the baby is male or female, though abortionists favor themselves feminists either way.

Did you actually read that wiki? There has never been a man that has been impregnated.

 

[Borachio]

Not yet.

The theoretical issue of male ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy outside the uterine cavity) by implantation in biological males has been addressed by experts in the field of fertility medicine, who stress that the concept of ectopic implantation, while theoretically plausible, has never been attempted and would be difficult to justify – even for women lacking a uterus – owing to the extreme health risks to both the parent and child

 

[Farm Boy]

The Emotion

Helpful(this isn't really snide, English uses "love" to specify what are likely several different emotions). Well, let's roll with the premise that all emotion and reason have physical, measurable, roots in the brain. What does that change in your assessment? I know it changes nothing in mine.

I think you miss the point a little. The quote is implying that Christianity itself would change to accommodate abortion if both genders could become pregnant. I don't really expect someone with your worldview to accept the premise

I got that point at least, and I'll still join in GW's assessment of its worth.

 

[LightSpectra]

Did you actually read that wiki? There has never been a man that has been impregnated.

I was being a bit facetious.

To be serious, the article says that it will be possible in the future with certain technical advancements. I wonder if pro-life folk will be called misandrists if we say that abortion is wrong for men in the future?

 

[Borachio]

Not what we are discussing.
.

What? I mean what? Love, in all its forms, is not an emotion?

That's stretching things a bit, I must say.

 

[WindFish]

Helpful(this isn't really snide, English uses "love" to specify what are likely several different emotions). Well, let's roll with the premise that all emotion and reason have physical, measurable, sources. What does that change in your assessment? I know it changes nothing in mine.

.

I dont understand what you mean

You're assuming that "love" is the subject of inductive reasoning,

It is

and that we should define it to match an objective thing as we observe it in nature.

We do define it to match an objective thing since its testable.

It's rather the subject of deductive reasoning: we give it a meaning, and anything wrongly classified as "love" discredits the classification, not the definition.

What?

 

[LightSpectra]

What? I mean what? Love, in all its forms, is not an emotion?

That's stretching things a bit, I must say.

I should be specific and say that it's not "just" emotion, because there is certainly an emotional part to it.

Consider the case of a father forgiving the person who murdered his son. The father is emotionally hateful of the killer and perhaps wants to kill him, but genuinely forgives him out of intellectual awareness that mercy is better than vengeance. He is contradicting every feeling in his body to do what he knows is right.

 

[Farm Boy]

Not really, there is certainly enough evidence to suggest love is a series of biochemical reactions in the brain

I dont understand what you mean

I guess what I mean is roughly, "so what?"

 

[Crezth]

I agree with you on that second part (That it isn't OK.) Its just the lesser of two horrible evils.

It seems to me that not getting pregnant after getting raped would be the least evil outcome of all.

If almost all men were pro-life and almost all women were pro-choice, I'd see what you were saying.

Women can be and are party to their own oppression. It comes with being raised in a patriarchy.

But unconditional love is frequently against the norm. If the norm was that rape was acceptable because it gives pleasure to many at the expense of one, an unconditional lover would step forth to defend the oppressed minority. And together they would be persecuted by the majority, as has been the case at many points in history.

I'm not quite sure I understand your argument. "If the norm was that rape was acceptable..." Well, it isn't. And that's partly because emergent behaviors in the evolution of human society have eliminated rape as a desirable social paradigm. It has done this in two ways:

This was originally the case at least so far as biblical thinking goes because women were regarded as property, and to rape a woman was to violate a man's property. In the western world, rape was considered unacceptable only to this end: most women could not bring cases against their rapists, they had to rely on a male representative such as a family member or spouse to do so for them.

In the United States, women gained more rights 19th century. One such was that a woman could be permitted to bring a man to trial. And sure enough, once this was the case, women started bringing men to trial for rape. It was then when rape was unacceptable because it was a violation of a person's human rights as opposed to unacceptable because it was a violation of somebody's property.

To suggest that this idea that rape is wrong because it is hurtful to women is a product of unconditional love i.e. God's work seems rather ludicrous when God's workers had thousands of years prior to hammer that thing out in advance. I'm sure you can argue that at some points in certain countries, people saw rape as an awful thing to do to a woman, and some of these people were most probably Christian, but the prevailing social and legal architectures of the western world maintained that the real issue with deflowering a woman against her will was that it slighted the men tied to her in some material way.

In short: there is no evidence to suggest that God's work nor God's workers represent an exceptional circumstance whereby rights are affirmed against the vagaries of an uncaring society. It has not done so in any explicit way; or we cannot draw anything conclusive from correlation.

Something has to exist for it to be good. Nothing would exist without a First Mover, whom we call God.

You called Him self-diffusively good, and claimed that His existence and nature of being self-diffusively good were required for there to be any "goodness" at all. So I must ask what you mean by that.

I could, for example, call Him self-diffusively evil for the creation of a world in which there is rape and suffering. It is certainly the same world in which there is love and charity. I guess what I'm asking is what makes Him intrinsically moral, and furthermore why is this expression of morality something we humans should be bound to?

Your only grounds for saying that God, all-good, is not a moral being is because He created evil. My argument is that He is not culpable for the evil that His creations have freely chosen to do; He didn't create evil, He only created an environment for which evil can be created by others. Thus I can correctly call Him all-good on those grounds.

The bolded statement is untrue. I have several grounds for saying that God is not a moral being. This is, for example, the person who is the greatest mass-murderer in history, who is capricious and jealous and who is on record as having ordered his followers to commit bold acts of murder and even outright genocide in His name. The only reason we are given to believe that He is good is that He is supposed to "love" us.

My argument is that He must be culpable for all the actions that his creations have freely taken, because any difference between "good" and "evil" is a contrivance on His part and both are necessary for the other to exist.

Only in an extremely indirect and irrelevant application of the word "originate".

Would there be evil without God? If so, how?

It's not slavery or tyranny precisely because you have free will. You were created by God to unconditionally love Him and others. You can reject that if you wish, but you have to also accept the implications of that rejection, which is never fulfilling your reason for existing and thus never being complete, perfect.

The implications are far more severe, I'm afraid. We are continually reminded that rejecting his word is to face a terrifying oblivion. There is no "choice" in the matter at all, which is the ultimate paradox of free will. That is to say, I can exercise my free will however I choose, but if I choose to go against Him, then I will be punished, brutally, for all of eternity. That is coercion and tyranny. He is robbing us of our free will at point blank, and when we surrender ourselves to His will for the sake of rescuing our own soul, we are no more exercising our free will than a bank teller is when he is filling the robber's bags with the money. Yes, we technically have a "choice." But it is no choice at all for anyone with one iota of self-preservation.

How is that a wicked argument? It would have been better either way if the person were never sexually abused, I agree. But I believe it within God's power to make the suffering of it as if it never were at all. In contrast, a nihilistic worldview implies that if a rape survivor does not eventually find happiness, that all the pain would have been meaningless; and happy or not, at death, all of it was a grave injustice that can never be mended.

To the bolded point: then the suffering is meaningless! Is it not Christians who say that those who suffer are truly noble, because they are strong in spirit? Why does it matter at all if it is made as if it never happened?

A "nihilistic" worldview may be unpleasant, but that does not make it untrue. It is even only unpleasant if you feel the need to see the world as just. But it need not be just. There is nothing I can say to the rape victim to assuage the injustice perpetrated against her, but then that is only a matter of my being honest. The rapist was a wicked man and society will punish him. We can do no better than that. Some things are unjust, and rape is one such thing.

I consider this head-and-shoulders above telling her that her being raped was OK because it will be made better on. How truly wrongful it is to force her through that, I say; to say that there is someone who is all-powerful, who watched on with indifference because he believed that score will be settled later. What a terrible thing it is to think that her suffering through that rape is a just outcome in the long run.

I don't think it is up to divine externalities to reduce rape in the future. It's something we cause(do you disagree there?) and it's something we need to work to prevent(or there?). I also don't think forcing an unwanted pregnancy is fine, or anything leading up to it. I don't actually see a fundamental source of disagreement here other than a breezy hope on my part that we are strong enough to make good from bad.

I reject that God is actually "making good from bad" here, in any sense of the word. That's all.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

The much more universal commandment to love your neighbor as yourself certainly would forbid rape.

Excellent point. It in fact covers quite a few, if not all, other bases with regard to the to don'ts. Have a little empathy for God's sake. I wish the kind of Christians who go on and on about teh gay would be as zealous and vocal about this part of the Bible as they are about gay marriage.

 

[WindFish]

I should be specific and say that it's not "just" emotion, because there is certainly an emotional part to it.

Except you said it wasn't psychological at all. Stop moving the goalposts. I may not be a theologian but I am a psychologist

Consider the case of a father forgiving the person who murdered his son. The father is emotionally hateful of the killer and perhaps wants to kill him, but genuinely forgives him out of intellectual awareness that mercy is better than vengeance. He is contradicting every feeling in his body to do what he knows is right.

Whats that got to do with love not being psychological?

I guess what I mean is roughly, "so what?"

I see

 

[Farm Boy]

I reject that God is actually "making good from bad" here, in any sense of the word. That's all.

If wiki is to be believed here then it looks like only 50% of those raped abort, and 38% of women in that situation give birth. Now in a gross fit of overgeneraliztion, do we want to write off any and all good that comes from the child who is a result of a rape whether it is raised by its biological mother or an adoptive family? Is there no good that can conceivably made from and event which is in and of itself entirely and horrifically bad, or are you just divorcing the notion of a deity from this equation to fit your worldview?

Anecdotally - I have no information on the paternal history of my son. He could have been conceived either through consensual intercourse or something worse, I simply don't have the information. Would the joy I see in my wife's and my own life be lesser good if the event that caused his conception was one instead of the other?

I see

I truly don't see how it would matter. I am requesting explanation on why you think it might.