Let's
call it a 'Decalogue Rule'
Since
the term 'Absolute Rule' as something different to a blanket rule has
been hijacked and made to mean 'blanket rule' I need a
new word for a rule that brooks no disobedience where it applies, but
may not apply in every conceivable situation. So let's try this one:
the Ten Commandments are commonly known as the Decalogue (Ten Words)
– so I'll coin the tern “Decalogue Rule” and I will start with
our current project of applying “No Murdering” to abortion begin
to work out how a Decalogue Rule operates.
Looking
at the Decalogue Rule: No Murdering.
First
what is its extent as far life-forms are concerned
To
put it another way, are we forbidden from killing any and every form
of life.
No!
Definitely not. Even
a quick reading of the first dozen chapters of Genesis leaves no room
for doubt that the big moral divide is between humans and animals. By
chapter 9 this has crystallised into :
“The
beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air … will be
food for you.
So
we humans are not out of step with the rest of the natural world in
this regard. We too can kill animals for food.
Genesis
9 also
institutes a ceremonial pouring out of the blood of animals killed
for food – it seems to be a simple but dramatic acknowledgement
that the animal's life belongs to God and the hunter or herdsman has
only killed “under licence” so to speak.
I
believe this 'licence to kill' regarding animals extends beyond food
to what is necessary for our beneficial
management of the earth – exterminating locusts, rodents and feral
pests for instance. But
I shall not pursue that here.
Secondly
what is the extent as far as human
life is concerned?
Once
we have established that 'No Murdering' is about killing humans, the
next logical step is to establish which humans.
The
passage quoted from Genesis 9 continues “ … Whoever sheds the
blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed for in the image of God
has God made man.”
So
in
contrast to
the situation with animals, no
licence is
given
for one human being to terminate the life of another whose
continued existence is inconvenient.
God reserves that permission to himself. So serious is God about not
giving humans licence to wantonly
kill
other humans that he orders the death penalty (a killing that then
is
specifically
“licensed”)
for murderers.
To
me this seems to say that all life belongs to God, who alone has the
absolute moral right to kill. Humans
are permitted to kill animals “under licence”. Humans are
precisely not licensed to kill each other at
at
will.
Us
humans
being what we are, we
will naturally want to reduce this scope. We will
be happy for it to
prohibit
killing
“one
of us”
but not “one
of them”.
“No
murdering other members of our
tribe; but members of the next tribe are fair game”. “No
murdering people of our religion; but killing heretics and
unbelievers is OK (or even a sacred duty)”. “Look after your
comrades, but death to the aristocrats” and
so forth.
So
a Nazi SS
trooper might
have said “Jews are sub-human
so this is not murder”
as he herded whole families into the gas chambers. But ironically,
the
Nazi regime –
the very epitome of evil - was
still sufficiently aware that they really
had
committed murder to try to obliterate all evidence of their
death camps.
Uncle
Tom's Cabin
made its readers empathise with black slaves as human beings. Once
that mental jump had been made our treatment of them appeared before
us for precisely what it was.
My
point is that historically the human
tendency
has been to try to excuse a
whole swath of killings
by claiming that the human life in question falls outside the scope
of the command. It was
always
a lie
and one later generations generally scornfully condemned.
In
the abortion debate this particular
evasion of the command has been at
the forefront.
Academic
pro-abortion
moralists
tried to get away from “human” to some qualification like
“person-hood”.
“A
foetus is
undoubtedly at
all stages human
but it is not, in
the moral sense, a
person” they said. Indeed one noted philosopher was quite happy to
advocate
killing
unwanted children on a similar pretext. This whole line of argument
was never more than a poor ruse by so-called philosophers who while
posing as fearless thinkers were
really
only
propagandists for the mores of their social group.
In
my earlier works I engaged with their arguments as though they were
worthy
of serious
debate.
Not now. I
see now that heir
ideas were and are just pathetic
excuses
for the bad morals of their group.
Pro-abortion
polemicists of
the more populist variety consistently
play the “its my body” card to imply the life they are
terminating is not a human life. Once again one
only has to stop
shouting this
mantra and think for a moment to
see the inescapable
truth that it
is complete rubbish! Of course it is a human life – with DNA from
a mother and a father what else could it be. And since the whole
point of abortion is to avoid giving birth to a live baby it
is utterly
perverse to claim it is only
“my
body”.
A
foetus is human
rather than animal therefore killing a foetus is within the extent
of this Decalogue Rule
Thirdly,
does the Rule prohibit killing in all situations
.
No.
The rule does not
prohibit
killing in all
circumstances. We dealt with this in an earlier post, but to re-cap:
Capital
punishment
is specifically exempt.
War
is in general specifically exempt. Killing your enemy in battle
was
never considered
murder.
Protection
of self
or loved
ones
from real
threat of death. eg.
Killing
a thief is murder; but
killing the intruder during a home invasion in the darkness is not.
(Exodus
22.2)
So
in the case where an abortion is necessary to save the mother's life
the answer is simply that this is a situation where taking human life
is not
prohibited.
Fourthly,
is there a roughly similar situation the Rule is specifically
declared to cover
The
paradigm case is set out in Exodus 21:14, where after excluding
accidental killing the text cites “... but if anyone schemes and
kills someone deliberately” as murder. This would seem to cover the
most common case of modern abortion. However to be certain let us
look further.
We
would not expect to find direct reference to modern abortion
practice. The reason is blindingly obvious once you think about it:
children were immensely valued. Think about the conversations
recorded between Abram and God about Abram's longing for a child. Or
Rachel's desperation at being childless. An outstanding one is Tamar,
widowed without children she resorts to pretending to be a prostitute
to get pregnant by dead husbands' father and he declares “She is
more righteous than I”. Having children was hugely important.
Socially
children were important, economically they werevital – there was no
social service – if you did not have children to support you in
your old age you starved. Killing one's unborn child would have been
so absurd as to be totally incomprehensible in Biblical times. Even
prostitutes valued their children – remember Solomon's display of
wisdom settling a case where two prostitutes each claimed the same
baby as theirs.
So
to make anything of an absence of rulings about abortion as we know
it in the Bible would be so stupid as to be simply perverse.
But
were there predicaments or actions which we could legitimately use by
inference? Indeed yes. Here are just two examples:
1.
King David after he committed adultery with Bathsheeba. The problem
was that she became pregnant. Her husband Uriah was away at the war
against the Ammonites.
David
tried recalling Uriah on a pretext and scheming to get him to go home
and have sex with his wife so the child could be passed off as his
and the adultery concealed.
When
that failed David had Uriah placed in the most dangerous position in
an attack so that he was conveniently killed by the enemy.
We
know what God thought about this because the Bible records the
prophet Nathan confronting David.
2
Samuel 12 records Nathan's beguiling story to David about a rich man
taking the pet lamb of a poor man …. when David's anger is engaged
and he bursts out: “This man deserves to die!” Nathan springs his
trap with: “You are the man!” …. “You killed Uriah with the
sword of the Ammonites”
David
was in a position of even greater temptation than most women seeking
abortions. The child was going cause him great political damage by
exposing his adultery as well as placing Bathsheeba at great risk.
Many men were dying in the war, why not this one in particular? All
David's problems would go away.
The
“why not” was because it was murder.
In
actual fact it did not make David's problems go away – it
multiplied them – and three thousand years later we are still
talking about his crime. We should pause and consider that while many
women seek an abortion thinking it will make their problems go away
they may be just as mistaken as David was about the solution to his
problems.
2.
Human Sacrifices. This was part of Ancient Near East culture, but was
not meant to be part of the religion of ancient Israel. However it
did creep into popular worship – particularly of the pagan god
Molech. The parallel to abortion is that children were being killed
on the supposition that this was necessary for economic benefit –
perhaps in people's distorted thinking even necessary for survival by
ensuring abundant crops. We should not forget that the common people
lived very close to the prospect of starvation if crops failed.
So
the supposed benefits of sacrificing children to Molech were every
bit as great if not greater than the supposed benefits of the vast
majority of modern abortions.
Jeremiah
7:20ff “The people of Judah have done great
evil in my eyes, declares the Lord … They have built the high
places of Topheth in the valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and
daughters in the fire – something I did not command nor did it
enter my mind!”
2
Kings 23:10 “(King Josiah) desecrated
Topheth, which was in the valley of Ben Hinnom so that no-one could
use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.”
Child
sacrifices are condemned by the Bible, and condemned for their own
evilness as well as being part of pagan practices. If anyone tries
to get around this by maintaining that the condemnation is just of a
pagan practice one could say of modern abortion practice that it too
is part of the forbidden worship of idols – in our case we are
sacrificing our unborn children to the idols and false gods of our
culture!
Conclusion:
If
we leave aside the tiny proportion of abortions where there is real
risk to the mothers life – because in that case taking another
human life to save hers is justified; If we also leave aside the
“hard cases” because there is at least argument for making an
exception; we are left with this:
over
96% of current abortions are what the Bible calls “murder”.
As
I wrote at the beginning of this section, the only reason I dare say
this is because I can put it side-by-side with a message of
redemption!
There
is redemption, there is forgiveness, there is healing, there is an
antidote for guilt, there are new beginnings.
BUT
there
is also the moral necessity to warn people against taking this path.
THAT
is
precisely where modern moralists, radical feminists, and preachers
who care more for what people think than what God thinks of them,
have failed the women and men our our time
