Hold me

[keira]

So, for those not in the calref chat this evening, I watched Armageddon for the first time ever. I think I need an adult

 

How did everyone else's day go?

Edited May 28, 2013 by A Closer Yell
my two favorite parts were 1) where the Mir-analogue was only referred to as "Russian Space Station" the entire movie, and 2) the 61.45 km/s delta-v burn they did during the lunar slingshot.

[Death Knight]

So, for those not in the calref chat this evening, I watched Armageddon for the first time ever. I think I need an adult

 

How did everyone else's day go?

 

Im doin good. I had a pretty bad experience when I watched Aliens at age 9-I threw up all over the place. I watched it again a year ago and I didn't throw up but it still bothered me. Im too emotional with regards to extreme violence and if women or children are getting brutally hurt I have to turn the show off. I just cant handle that kind of stuff for some reason. One of my buddies asked me to watch the movie-"Last house on the left", it was disturbing to say the least. I sometimes don't understand why they need to show all that stuff in a game/movie. The world's violent enough as it is.

 

Also one of the reasons why spiderweb/basilisk/redshift are some of my main favs for game companies. Mature in nature but doesn't actually show any of what is going on-how it should be.

[Tirien]

Watched Life of Pi a few days ago, which was a incredibly good movie, since this seems to be a movie thread now.

[Actaeon]

Don't we already have a movie thread? Since the last time I posted in it, I've seen "The Company you Keep", "On the Road", "Silver Linings Playbook", "Trance", "Django Unchained", "Promised Land" and "North by Northwest". Yes- one of these things is not like the other. Anyway, they were all decent (which means about as I expected and not a waste of two hours). Of these, "On the Road" was the biggest positive surprise and "Trance" was the most underwhelming- although I got paid for it and consequently can't complain.

[Goldengirl]

Actaeon, tell me more about the On the Road movie. I'm a big Kerouac fan and have been dying to see it. Since it's more of an indie film, though, I haven't had the chance to do so.

[Actaeon]

I have heard it said that no film could capture "On the Road". I thus went in with that expectation and was pleasantly surprised. It seemed, to me, a faithful adaptation. That said, there was something a little... stilted about the whole thing. Part of the allure of the novel was it's off-the-cuff, unedited format. With more than half a century of analysis and impact in the mean time, there's an odd sort of distance to the performances and writing. I think it's fun to see it come to life- but I suspect someone who had not read the book would wonder what all the fuss was about.

[Balladeer]

*volunteers to hold Sy*

 

I watched an old end-of-the-world movie today, too. Core or The Core, something like that. Kids complained that people kept dying. The rest of today has been pretty meh. I finished editing Randy's book yesterday, though. Should be published by September in time for Dragon Con.

[Student of Trinity]

Oo. A book?

[Balladeer]

Indeed. Sequel to Rise Of The Magi. I gave him a rather thorough critique of <- that one (big on imagination, but lacking in wording and thesaurus usage) and he asked if I'd help edit the next. AFTER I said yes, he gets into Dragon Con and wants #2 published in time for it. He pumps out 60K more words in a month and I get one month to pour over all 80K before he sends it to the Publisher's editor. Talk about a hack and slash... The deed is done and the wheels are turning. For better or worse the publisher's got it now. Just hope the rush didn't mean he ignored some needed (imho) changes.

[Student of Trinity]

Sounds like an interesting book. I admit to some trepidation about overtly Christian fantasy fiction, though, where answered prayers affect the plot. I just couldn't do that. I believe it could possibly be pulled off artistically, though it seems as though it would be very hard, but I just couldn't do it myself, psychologically. It would feel blasphemous, to me, to sit down as an author and decide how God should act.

 

Editing really heavily might approach co-author status. Maybe you two should collaborate? Co-authoring can certainly be tricky, but some teams have definitely pulled it off well. And you know, for the Christian fantasy fiction market, a husband-and-wife team of authors might also be a selling point. That's obviously not a decisive factor, but hey, it's a real one. A couple percent more in sales might be the last little lift you needed, to get over a threshold into bigger attention.

[Balladeer]

I think it's like an exercise in studying the nature of God. Asking questions like 'What would God do?' and 'What would God want to happen?' and 'What is God's ultimate desire/end goal?' really set the pace for writing about Him. To me it's just like writing about any other character only the back story has already been written.

 

Randy's already locked into contract to do the series himself, and I knew that going in. But he's offered co-authorship in something else he's thinking about. Unfortunately, I don't plan on getting a divorce, moving to Georgia, and trying to convince him to marry me so we'll just be out that couple extra percent. I met Randy through his FB marketing of his first book. Got a signed copy hot off the presses. Too bad he didn't number them... I was in the first hundred to buy. My critique of it was my first correspondence to him.

[Student of Trinity]

I guess that's just a theological difference. I've been able to frame my own understanding of God in terms of authors and fiction, but what I say is: Human beings are not to God as fictional characters are to their author. Human beings are not even to God as semicolons are to the author. Human beings are to God as semicolons are to God.

 

That's an exaggerated statement. We are worth many sparrows, and a sparrow is worth many semi-colons. But in exaggerated form it expresses something I believe is important. I think it would be unhealthy for me to think about God as a character, and I'd feel that expressing the idea that God could be a human author's character would be such a big theological error to convey, that it would outweigh whatever truths my writing might otherwise express.

 

Sorry I got confused about your relationship with Randy. I hadn't seen you mention him by name before, had seen you talk about your husband, and so I somehow assumed they were the same. More logical would just have been to ask, Who the heck is Randy?

[Balladeer]

Hmm, I've neve felt that way about Christian fiction, whether miracles happen in them or not, or whether God is portrayed as taking some action in them or not. In fact, I instead feel like it takes incredible courage to be a 'Christian fiction' author, not in the sense that they are mocking God to be His puppet master, but that they are committing to write at a different standard than the world, submitting to God to write at His standard.

 

I suppose there are some Christian fiction authors at either end of the spectrum in their mindset. I personally would not try to write Christian fiction unless with the latter. And with Exodus and the Song of Solomon as my guide, what a bouquet that could be, eh?

 

More logical would just have been to ask, Who the heck is Randy?

To which I would have answered, "Just some bloke I met on the internet." I've only mentioned Randy to Sy before, I think... Unless it came up in chat, can't remember. Anyway, my wording was in answer to her direct question. No apologies necessary; it was understandably informal.

[Alorael at Large]

I actually don't think God would be the harshest of critics unless you believe in a particularly vengeful God. All He'd really want from you is that your writing is intended to be good (in morals, not quality) and inspire, if not goodness, then no badness. I can't imagine God really disliking most sword and sorcery schlock fantasy. Sure, it's not particularly deep or meaningful, but it's harmless and entertains people. Writing about God might get you held to a higher standard, though. Not the standard of showing Him realistically; you can't. But showing Him well, so that He might appeal and readers would find themselves drawn to Him, or have their faith in Him confirmed? That's hard.

 

—Alorael, whose major issue with works of fiction in which big-G God appears, and to a lesser extent when little-g gods intervene, is mostly theodicy. It's hard to have a God who can intervene and does intervene be all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent without making Him and His plans utterly incomprehensible to the human point of view. Which is part of the ineffable God, maybe, but it makes Him hard to really relate to or like. And then thinking about all that makes theodicy stand front and center and get in the way of enjoying the fiction.

[Student of Trinity]

That's kind of my concern as well. If you've got an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent character in your story, then either there's not much suspense, or your God has to be pretty inscrutable. But this may depend on theological perspective. Some people think that God's will is pretty clear, to the point where the power of prayer isn't so much different from the power of gravity. It's a reliable effect, that characters can use. Suspense comes from other things.

 

I'm not sure I fully buy this, myself; I can accept all kinds of basic reality rules in fictional universes, but I think that reliably efficacious prayer may be a broken magic system. My own experience is that the real God has not implemented it in the real world, and the idea that it's a broken system is part of my own theodicy. Other people seem to have other experience, though, and different understandings of God.

 

I think I can understand the market appeal. If you believe that God always grants the prayers of a righteous man, then stories in which prayer is not implemented just seem unrealistic. You can suspend disbelief to enjoy them, but you're happy to find something that takes seriously the things you know are real. Soldiers often like military fiction, and scientists often like hard sci-fi; they're disappointed if the author gets something wrong, and pleased if things are accurate.

[Alorael at Large]

The most elegant solutions I've seen rely on limiting the omnipotence, usually by restricting the means of action. If gods must work through human intermediaries, who are themselves fallible and quite possibly not up to the task of channeling endless power, their limitations make more sense. This is how I make D&D-style clerics make sense, really. It's not that gods can't spew amazing power (although they aren't omnipotent and may not want to), it's that they can't do it through a level 1 cleric without causing the poor fellow to explode. The Curse of Chalion and its sequels touch on this in a very well-handled way.

 

But God doesn't have clerics and he's supposed to be truly omnipotent. In the real world, where prayers are not flashily granted and the era of great miracles seems over, we're all at least accustomed to God's apparently hands-off approach. As soon as you have God intervene you raise the uncomfortable question. Why only in this way? Why only in this place?

 

Granted, that loses significance if you do believe that God is intervening frequently, everywhere, and that's not an uncommon belief. But there still aren't pillars of fire, plagues of locusts, and dead men rising. Loaves do not multiply. And it's a big leap from God who works subtle miracles through the everyday world to God whose hand is obvious and immediate.

 

—Alorael, who can only reconcile it by imagining that the entire world is something like a four-dimensional bit of a much larger and more important reality, and the consciousness humans experience no more than a fragment of greater entities. Atrocities happen because of limited perspective, not because they are atrocities. But even this is uncomfortable; it still includes self-perceiving entities, even if they're deluded fragments of larger entities, to suffer.

[Student of Trinity]

The best theodicy I know — and I don't consider it a knock-down argument, just one that seems to me the best you can say — is the one Jesus made. You can look it up in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, but my personal summary is that bad things exist because fixing them can be leveraged immensely. Now, part of this is just the flat claim that the bad stuff is worth it, trust me; and ultimately I think that's the bottom line, from God. But the problem with that, when that's all it is, is that it seems pretty quietistic; just grin and bear it. What Jesus says is better than that, in this way: he implies that the big pay-off comes precisely from remedying the bad things, so get off your butt and do something to make things better. With that, I feel a lot better about the whole theodicy thing. It's not just me trying to prop up my theory of God, any more; it's motivation to work.

 

Of course the tricky thing about the healing of the man born blind is that the story only works with a miracle. Ultimately that's honest, too, though, I think. If God really won't do anything whatever, no matter how low the chips fall, then even the cleverest theodicy is beside the point. There's a promise there, that if you do try to make bad things better, then not only will the pay-off for success be greatly disproportionate, but you may get some help with the effort.

 

I could see writing that sort of thing into a story, but I'd have to take pretty much the whole book to work up to it, and even then, I'd be very uneasy.

[Balladeer]

I think one of the most often used draws for suspense in Christian fiction is man's refusal to believe in or submit to God. You have a main character who's rough around the edges but not that bad a person and you help the reader fall in love with them. Their journey and inner struggle on their way to Christ resonates with people who have struggled before or are struggling now. Miracles rarely have to be in the forefront of these types of books because they are more about the emotion and thought process of the characters.

 

One of the standard cannons that I reconcile 'magic prayer' with is that sometimes the answer is Yes, sometimes it is No, and sometimes the answer is Wait. God is still in the business of performing miracles, but he's not going to do something where people are not receptive. A giant pillar of fire in America? You'll have thousands of scientists and meteorologists and master illusionists explaining it away as natural phenomenon or a hoax. Do the same thing in the heart of Africa in front of a small tribe that has no means to communicate it to the outside world or prove that it happened afterward? Could change some of their lives. If you spend time reading reports from missionaries, you'll see more 'big' miracles.

 

Otherwise answers to prayer often come in a more conventional form. Educated doctors being able to fix a lethal ailment, a friend deciding to give you a monetary gift when the mortgage is past due, a rescuer in the right place at the right time to save someone's life; all of these can be explained as skill, good luck, or coincidence. Those who are receptive to power in prayer might see it otherwise.

 

The tricky part in writing sy-fy/fantasy is in balancing how much of the normally impossible is given over to a different set of physics or new science and how much is intervention.

[Dikiyoba]

A giant pillar of fire in America? You'll have thousands of scientists and meteorologists and master illusionists explaining it away as natural phenomenon or a hoax.

A significant percent of those scientists and meteorologists (and illusionists, although I'm not sure why they're rushing in to explain the fire, unless the fire started in a magic shop or something) would be Christian, of course. Plus followers from numerous other religions with a God or gods or some other agent capable of supernatural intervention.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Alorael at Large]

The claim that God cannot perform miracles capable of convincing everyone that they're miracles rings very hollow to me. Of course God can do it! He's God! For that matter, He can manifest in some incontrovertible way to every human being and state His own existence unequivocally.

 

God clearly should be able to cure the disease without doctors as an intermediary. Why doesn't He? God actually can't have your friends give you a loan, not unless He's violating their free will or they're a kind of divine puppet (d-zombie?). Why does evidence for miracles require us to choose to believe in miracles over mundane explanations?

 

We deal with it because we're accustomed to the way the world is. Those of us who believe do so; those of us who do not don't. But bring in an activist God in fiction and it all falls apart. Once I see a God willing to act directly sometimes there's something deeply uncomfortable about His unwillingness to act in other times and places. Is He trying to let people remain damned by their disbelief by providing insufficient evidence? Is He playing favorites? Something always seems wrong about it.

 

—Alorael, who emphasizes that this is in fiction. The result is that he too often feels like the author is accidentally portraying a malicious, capricious, petty god unworthy of the real God the author believes in. It's hard to write perfection well. Trying to do so is gutsy, but it may also be excessive hubris.

[Goldengirl]

In my opinion, the best theodicy is the one concisely summarized by Voltaire in Candide, 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.' I support this particular theodicy (loosely; I'm an atheist and thus don't actually support any theodicies) as it is flatly revealing that human reason can't fathom divine motive and condition. It incorporates, I believe, Jesus' theodicy from the Gospel of John, as relayed here by SoT, but is not dependent on it. Suffering is necessary to reveal the goodness of God, but there may also be further reasons we cannot fathom; we don't always know in what ways the goodness of God is being revealed.

 

I actually believe it was SoT who originally introduced me to Candide after I initially expressed such a viewpoint.

[Balladeer]

@Alo

 

Capable, sure, but some people just don't want to believe. Look at the ten plagues of Egypt and how little they moved pharaoh. Yes, God can but the fact that he doesn't tells me it is unnecessary for his end goal. Curing without a doctor is more prevalent where there is no doctor. God can't make people give you money, but he can prompt them to. An answer to prayer often comes through someone doing something they just 'had a feeling' they should do. If you do not believe in miracles, or rather if you refuse to believe in them, you will look for a different explanation even if there is none. The evidence for miracles is already there, it's a choice of free will to call it one.

 

Ironically, 'a God willing to act directly sometimes' and a God that plays favorites pretty much sums up the Old Testament.

[Student of Trinity]

It's true that Candide summarizes that viewpoint, but I think the standard reading of Candide is that this is satire; I hope I didn't mislead about this. I believe Leibniz originated it as an earnest position.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm not sure it's so easy even for God to perform miracles great enough to prove that God is God. I'm thinking of Q, from Star Trek. Q isn't God, and certainly doesn't deserve anyone's worship; monotheism, at least as I understand it, implies that even Q is just a semicolon to God. But it seems to me that Q could perform anything that humans could experience. Hence it seems to me that there is no miracle possible which could prove to us that God exists: it's easy to imagine things that couldn't be faked by human agency, but pretty hard to think of things that couldn't be done by a merely cosmic, but non-divine, power.

[Lilith]

judging by the Book of Job, god's idea of good theodicy is less "all's for the best" and more "shut up and look at this huge-ass fish i made". that book is a pretty devastating takedown of the whole idea of theodicy

[Student of Trinity]

Yeah, pretty much. Though actually it's more kind of, "Come back and tell me again how to run the whole universe, after you can make even a tiny-ass fish." That is a point.

 

Job has indeed always been understood mainly as a takedown of theodicy. It's not that people didn't notice that. It's the party line.

[Alorael at Large]

Capable, sure, but some people just don't want to believe. Look at the ten plagues of Egypt and how little they moved pharaoh. Yes, God can but the fact that he doesn't tells me it is unnecessary for his end goal.

But that's just my point. God could literally change pharaoh's mind; he does not, free will, etc. But God also can know what will convince pharaoh—and what will not. He did what would not. God's lack of persuasiveness got a lot of Egyptians killed. What is his end goal? The death of Egyptian firstborn? The death of the Egyptian army? A demonstration of His wrath that failed to even bring the Israelites in line (c.f. golden calf, wandering in the desert for 40 years)?

 

 

God did something, and presumably He succeeded because God's failure is unthinkable. But I can't wrap my mind around what He did. God is unknowable, sure, but that's an uncomfortable position for someone who would do as God would have him do.

 

 

Curing without a doctor is more prevalent where there is no doctor.

Is it? More people die where there is no doctor. And it is again a strange sort of God who acts only when unobserved by experts.

 

God can't make people give you money, but he can prompt them to. An answer to prayer often comes through someone doing something they just 'had a feeling' they should do.

God as the niggling voice of conscience I'll accept. Or rather, God as the voice inside saying, "You know that you should do this." That's no violation of free will, but it is a direct intervention.

 

If you do not believe in miracles, or rather if you refuse to believe in them, you will look for a different explanation even if there is none. The evidence for miracles is already there, it's a choice of free will to call it one.

The evidence is not compelling enough for many people. Unless you ascribe deliberate godlessness to them, it is because God is not being compelling, at least not beyond the convincingness of competing explanations. There's something off about that. Surely He could do better if He wanted to. Floating mountains, burning bushes, the gospel literally spelled out by the stars. Those are things He could do yet does not.

 

I'm forced to believe that God does not want everyone to believe in Him—not have the choice to believe but reject, but just think He's not there at all. No, He in fact wants many people not to believe in Him. As long as I also believe that God does not punish people for failure to believe, well, I can't understand it, but it's not for me to understand God. I can accept it, and that's probably enough.

 

Ironically, 'a God willing to act directly sometimes' and a God that plays favorites pretty much sums up the Old Testament.

God in the Old Testament is terrifyingly vengeful and capricious. The Book of Job is scary not just because God afflicts a righteous man for no real reason but because God kills innocent people, Job's family, in order to test Job. Kant would call that an essentially evil act. Not "essentially" as in "basically" but "essentially" as in to its very core.

 

—Alorael, who upon further consideration thinks that too much religious literature fails because it tries to humanize God, which makes Him downright malevolent. God is bad or God is very strange. The Good Omens handles it surprisingly well for a humorous work. Trying to understand God is fruitless, trying to explain God is fruitless, and quite possibly trying to obey God is fruitless. And so is rebelling against Him.

[Lilith]

The evidence is not compelling enough for many people. Unless you ascribe deliberate godlessness to them

 

pretty sure she's doing exactly that. her entire argument is basically Presuppositional Apologetics 101

[Dikiyoba]

Though actually it's more kind of, "Come back and tell me again how to run the whole universe, after you can make even a tiny-ass fish."

 

Done. Where is your huge-ass fish now, God?

 

And to save everyone else the effort, Dikiyoba already checked; there is no animal called an ass fish, huge or otherwise.

[Balladeer]

Yes, many have died at the hand of God or by his direction...

 

But why is death such a bad thing? I know from the standpoint of Athiesm its the end (unless you believe in spirit life w/out God), but otherwise, why would it be so bad? I have never understood the high value placed on corporeal bodies. A temporary shell, one way or another to oblivion or the afterlife.

 

I mean, we can shake our fist at the injustice of God ending a life, but what is He actually doing? And if we think it so terrible, why end so many lives before they've had the chance to start? For the benefit of the mother? For the benefit of the unwanted fetus? For the benefit of all mankind through avoiding overpopulation? Enough of the world thinks that there is enough benefit in ending potential life to justify ~50 Million instances every year. Might God not see benefit in ending others? With a perfect perspective who could argue? Still in line with SoT's perspective. Life, when given is a benefit. Pain, when experienced is a benefit. Death, when claimed is a benefit. Miracles, when revealed are a benefit just as is the lack of them.

 

Spinning that into fiction, though, does open up for quite a depressing read.

[Goldengirl]

Well, from the viewpoint of the living, it's not nice to die before you get to do other things you'd rather do. From the viewpoint of those close to the deceased, it's not nice losing a loved one. Not to mention that, most of the time, death is painful.

 

You don't even have to be religious for that to be clear, and oftentimes religion doesn't necessarily change that. Some people believe so fervently that they welcome, or even induce, death. That's a rare level of faith. Death prevents people from doing good works on Earth, which is surely an inconvenience. In some religious traditions, if you think someone you loved lived an immoral life, there's reason to be sad - they could have be reincarnated as a microbe, or suffering in Dante's Inferno; likewise, if you think you aren't getting into Heaven but they are, well, that's clearly a problem too.

[Alorael at Large]

Perhaps death isn't bad. I get hung up on the Kantian implications of God killing someone to give someone else a lesson. It's a callous use of people as means rather than as ends. But as you say, just of their bodies. Who am I to judge indeed? (Not sarcastic; you make an excellent point.) It's odd, too, because I am decidedly not a Kantian. The utilitarian in me should celebrate God's willingness to do what must be done; a religious utilitarianism more or less defines God's plan as maximum utility.

 

The viewpoint of the living and the dead is rather limited. The dead, if they go with God, presumably have all possible earthly cares wiped away by the wonders of Heaven. The living are sad, but it's a short sadness compared to eternity. And children are sad, too, when you inject them with vaccines or just make them eat their broccoli, but it is still for the best.

 

 

—Alorael, who is still left wondering why God would leave the unconvinced. Or, worse, the wrongly convinced. There are how many competing strains of Christianity alone? How many religions? Yes, pagans and heathens of various stripes have felt the divine call and been converted, but to many different faiths. The evidence for only one convincing God with convincing miracles is scant. (Again, supposing a benevolent divine entity not bound to tell the truth, or give a single scripture, might make everyone kind of right, but that's heresy to everyone and still a funny way for a god to operate.)

[Student of Trinity]

That's the uncomfortable bottom line, for me, the Kierkegaardian "either, or". An omnipotent God could make absolutely anything worthwhile. "You can't understand, but trust me, it's worth it," is an unanswerable defense for God. It may not be convincing, but it's entirely self-consistent.

 

To me, the unfortunate 'you can't understand' part is an unavoidable part of the self-consistency. It's never been conceivable to me that the universe should be easy to understand. I mean, if God made a universe that was all about guaranteeing that a few billion primitive creatures enjoyed safe, happy lives, fulfilling their primitive instincts, then somebody would have to come along, grab God by the shoulders, and say, "Dude — you're omnipotent. What are you doing, still living in the basement like this, playing computer games? Go out and set the world on fire, for God's sake! Do something!"

 

It has also always seemed rather arbitrary, to me, to suppose that God cares a lot about whether human beings manage to hold the right opinions. Yes, a lot of religions call that important; but to me it seems like an easy assumption to drop. With it, I find, an enormous weight falls off the whole discussion. Believers in God stop having to raise embarrassing defenses, and doubters stop having to stomp straw men into the ground.

[Alorael at Large]

Unknowable or evil. It's a terrible choice to make. But thinking God really cares what humans believe is to start tilting towards evil again, because the case isn't strong enough. Yes, perhaps some people overlook the common miracles, but they're just much less blatantly miraculous than pillars of fire, the dead living again, and that sort of thing. God can do it, yet He doesn't. He's not making the strongest case for Himself. So either he somehow values blind faith more than justified belief or He's not gunning for believers at all.

 

—Alorael, who always found the problem of Hell to be that it's a dangerous sort of God who gives the most compelling argument for believing in Him last, when it's already too late.

[Tyranicus]

But that's just my point. God could literally change pharaoh's mind; he does not, free will, etc.

Actually,

But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the LORD had said to Moses.

[Dikiyoba]

And if we think it so terrible, why end so many lives before they've had the chance to start? For the benefit of the mother? For the benefit of the unwanted fetus? For the benefit of all mankind through avoiding overpopulation? Enough of the world thinks that there is enough benefit in ending potential life to justify ~50 Million instances every year.

Strawmen are bad. Quit using them.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Alorael at Large]

That's not a strawman. A bit irrelevant, since supporters of abortion don't consider fetuses lives and don't consider them killing, but not a strawman.

 

The better comparison is euthanasia. Some people think that there are times when it is okay to end a life. Good, even. Or, if you prefer, putting animals down. Yes, we make that decision for our pets; they're not human, true, but we ascribe some value to them, and believe they value themselves. It seems reasonable for God to do the same. Especially when from our perspective death is final, but from HIs it's just a change in states.

 

—Alorael, who finds the hardening pharaoh's heart telling. Among other things, God doesn't believe in applying free will equally.

[Dikiyoba]

That's not a strawman. A bit irrelevant, since supporters of abortion don't consider fetuses lives and don't consider them killing, but not a strawman.

It's a strawman because very, very few, if any, pro-choice people hold the position that abortions are a good thing. No pro-choice person goes around thinking, "Yay, 50 million unborn babies killed this year, what a great benefit to society!" Pro-choice people typically view abortion as a morally neutral thing, or as a bad thing--the least bad thing given the alternatives, but still a bad thing.

 

Dikiyoba decided to point it out because it is so ridiculously irrelevant.

[Balladeer]

The relevancy is in showing that the way we think we value life is flawed. It was to contrast a perceived injustice at God ending a life, or many lives. We, who can only see what our eyes show us, do not always see value in death of the already living, just like we do not always see value in life of the not already alive.

 

Quoting a recent PM stirred by more abortion discussion, "My perspective on life, now, is... of a bigger picture. Life in the world is a speck whether it lasts a few seconds before being flushed from the womb or whether it lasts 100 years. Just a speck one way or the other. I will make the most of the time I do have here, but I'm not going to obsess about when it ends. And I'm not going to shake my fist at a God who's in charge of deciding how long that speck will be. Futile, at best. It misses the entire reason for life."

[Alorael at Large]

It's a strawman because very, very few, if any, pro-choice people hold the position that abortions are a good thing. No pro-choice person goes around thinking, "Yay, 50 million unborn babies killed this year, what a great benefit to society!" Pro-choice people typically view abortion as a morally neutral thing, or as a bad thing--the least bad thing given the alternatives, but still a bad thing.

It's insane to argue that abortion is bad, not having abortions would be better, but we should have them anyway. Pro-choice people don't go around saying abortions are great, but when pressed I think we all have to acknowledge that they can be good and that's why we want them allowed.

 

I can't buy the argument that abortions are bad but should be allowed because freedom is good. We block freedom to do bad things all the time. At the very least the argument has to be that abortion is neutral.

 

—Alorael, who really thinks this thread is hitting all the high points now. Arguing religion and abortion! He feels half an obligation to lock it just because it's not something Jeff would want here even if it is still rather civil.

[Dikiyoba]

It's insane to argue that abortion is bad, not having abortions would be better, but we should have them anyway. Pro-choice people don't go around saying abortions are great, but when pressed I think we all have to acknowledge that they can be good and that's why we want them allowed.

It's perfectly logical to argue that abortion is bad, in an ideal world there would be no abortions, but legal abortions are less bad than forced births, children growing up unwanted or without proper resources, pregnancies that cause health problems or death, and the deaths, injuries, rapes, blackmail, and financial extortion that come with illegal abortions. But that's not my point.

 

It's good that abortion exists, but it's bad that it needs to exist (especially since it's so easy to bring the number of needed abortions down). You prefer the former perspective, I prefer the latter. But we both agree that no pro-choice people think of themselves as killing unborn babies, or take pride in the number of abortions performed every year. But it is fairly common among certain strains of Christianity to characterize pro-choice people that way. (Alas, I cannot find the Left Behind quote about the Planned Parenthood employees who were sad they could no longer perform abortions because of the Rapture.) That's what irks me.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Kelandon]

"Abortion is the lesser of two evils" is, I think, a pretty common view. This is part of why the youngest voting generation right now, the Millennials, is so ambivalent about it, despite otherwise trending so liberal on other social issues (such as gay marriage).

 

It's also possible to believe that life begins at conception, but even so, abortion should be legal until the fetus can survive as a baby outside the mother. The logic is that to do otherwise is tantamount to maternal slavery. Doing otherwise compels a woman into the service of her fetus against her will until birth.

[Tridon]

From movies leaving you want of holding, to abortions? I know fora tend to go crazy, but yikes...

 

When I and my lady watched Wall-E we felt like crap the entire movie, except the 2 last seconds. We couldn't bear to watch an animated movie for months after that. First time I've experienced that an animated movie grabbed my heart so brutally. Poor thing. And when

he ran over his roach.

Heartbreaking.

 

hastag whenanimationsbecometooreal