If you’ve read my writings, you’ll know that I believe in “The Age Of Accountability”.
Well you shouldn't. The bible nowhere states that age explicitly or even implicitly, and it's very controversial, so that as a conservative you should pay more heed to the conservative hermeneutic 'where the bible is silent, we are silent' instead of trying to answer a question Christianity hasn't given a consistent answer to in 2,000 years.
By the way, suppose some atheist girl reaches the age you say is the age of accountability. then afterward she goes to church, rejects the gospel, and dies in a car accident on the way home. Does she go to hell?
You've got serious problems if you set the age of accountabilty too high, such as 16-18, because most parents are quite aware that kids know the difference between good and evil long before that age, so it will look like you arbitrarily increase the age merely to avoid making god look sadistic.
If you agree with most Christians through the centuries that the age of accountability is somewhere between 7 and 13, then you necessarily create the high probability that many of the people in hell went there before reaching age 14.
Can you really stomach the idea of God wanting a 12 year old girl to suffer mindless agony in eternal flames? Or are you one of those fanatics that that thinks correct theology is more important than common sense? Guess what happens when other people think that way? The stupidity of flying jets into buildings doesn't slow them down at all from barging ahead anyway. Since sacrificing common sense for the sake of "theology" appears to lay a foundation for more unnecessary violence and willful stupidity, I choose common sense, and use the bible to practice kicking 80-yard field goals.
Exactly. Well said.(snip)This blog post is meant to address the number 1 objection to the age of accountability that skeptics often bring up. They argue that if babies go directly to Heaven when they die, then it would be more moral to kill people before they ever have a chance to grow up. After all, if they’re allowed to grow up, there’s a good chance they’d sin and reject Jesus Christ as their Savior. If they reject Jesus Christ as their Savior, then they’d go to Hell. Therefore, it’s more loving to be pro-choice.
Ok, then you are not addressing the skeptic's challenge...you are merely giving other bible-believing Christians a biblical excuse to duck this challenge. You are essentially saying that the common sense that would otherwise make the age of accountability doctrine appear to evince a sadistic god, doesn't, because the bible says thus and so...This is the argument the skeptic makes; that The Age of Accountability logically entails an absurd view (i.e that infanticide/abortion is moral) and therefore, The Age Of Accountability must also be absurd. This is what’s known as reductio ad absurdum. However, if we reject The Age Of Accountability then we must conclude that God is evil. After all, it’s obviously unjust to punish someone either for something they couldn’t help, or for something they’ve never done. Babies can’t do anything sinful, so how can it be just for God to send them to Hell? So we run into a dilemma here. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t (pun intended).Is there any way to accept The Age Of Accountability without running into this problem? Obviously, any view that logically entails the conclusion “infanticide is moral” must be rejected. Does the skeptic’s reductio ad absurdum succeed?I don’t think it does…for several reasons.God Is Sovereign Over Life And Death, We Are NotThe Bible explicitly tells us
Well, that's not very convincing to a skeptic, and they are reasonable if they consider your bible quotes at that point to constitute your surrender.
The fact is that people of normal common sense normally do refrain from having kids if their circumstances make them feel any kids born into the situation will stand a good chance of failure, hurt, misery, starvation, etc. Refusing to have kids because of fear of their going to hell is about as "unreasonable" as the strung out crack whore who refuses to have kids because she doesn't want them to become homeless bums.
But it also tells you God is responsible for all murders (Deuteronomy 32:39). So when a woman has an abortion, the bible requires that this is much more than merely a doctor and woman committing a murder...this is also, quite literally, God causing that baby to die. If that is the case, then God demanding that we refrain from murder is logically equal to God demanding that he himself refrain from taking life by the act of murder.The Bible explicitly tells us not to murder innocent people (see Exodus 20:13).
Which would then mean God is evil since he takes full credit for all murders, Deuteronomy 32:39.God tells us not to kill another human being. This is one of The Ten Commandments. As such, abortion and infanticide are both moral abominations, they’re evil.
Then God must be evil because he chose to torture a baby with sickness for 7 days before killing it:It is evil to kill a baby or anyone else for that matter.
15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.Minton continues:
16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. (2 Sam. 12:15-18 NAU)
But that just creates a problem for you: How can God be the one "taking" life during a murder, if the act that causes that life to be taken, is "evil"? What exactly is God doing while the sinner is in the act of pulling the trigger?Now, God is the author of life and as such He has the right to take life as He sees fit (See Job 1:21, 1 Samuel 2:6, Psalm 75:7, Deuteronomy 32:39).
You seem to be implying that if a woman has an abortion, she is therefore sending that child into the afterlife sooner than God intended.God has a right to decide when we enter the afterlife, we do not.
Is that what you are saying, yes or no?
Since He's the author of life, He has the right to take it. The Bible even says that God has ordained the date of our deaths (see Job 14:5 and Psalm 139:16). Therefore, only God can decide when a fetus or an infant comes into the afterlife. Not us. We are human beings. We are not the authors of life. God is.
If those bible verses are theologically correct, then the reason a woman has a successful abortion is because your God decreed that this baby not live any longer than the date the abortion gets performed.
You could escape the dilemma by saying we can cause human life to be shorter than god intended, but that turns you into a liberal, and we can't have that. When the bible says God ordained the days you will live, it means he ordained the exact amount of days that all persons shall live, and that this decree cannot be deviated from by the sin of human beings. Therefore if a woman has an abortion, it is because God ordained that this infant not live longer than this.
That doesn't make your problem disappear: When you murder somebody, this is proof that God didn't want the victim to live any longer than they did. I'm afraid your bible is contradictory: It tells you that God decides how long people shall live in all cases, but then tells you it is "wrong" when you commit murder. Gee, I didn't know it was wrong to fulfill God's eternal decree!Whenever a human being takes a life, he is putting himself in the place of God.
God is the author of life and therefore only He has the right to take it.
A sentiment that makes people who are already Christian feel comfortable, but does precisely nothing to disturb the skeptical position.
And according to your bible and your own interpretation, he is doing that every time a woman chooses to get an abortion. You don't have the biblical option of saying abortion cuts life shorter than God intended...so abortion is no less in fulfillment of God's will, than is the natural death of an elderly person.God has the authority to bring His children home when He wants to.
The question, then, is whether only a sadistic lunatic would insist that it is immoral to carry out his will exactly the way he intended? And the biblical answer to why God faults people for doing what he wanted them to do, is "shut up", Romans 9:20. In light of such desperate anti-intellectual answer, I call victory. Gee, how many other heresies can be successfully refuted by simply telling the heretic "who are you to answer back to God?" ?
We do not. God has not made us the judge over them.
That changes nothing. Abortions only cut life short in harmony with the length of life God decreed from all eternity that such persons should have. Labeling abortion as "sin" at this points is sort of like saying "you are breaking company policy when you do what the company wants you to do". Only in theology would such inconsistency be tolerated.
Wow, who'd a thought conforming to God's will only makes things worse!God Has A Plan For Every Human LifeIt’s true that if everyone had an abortion, or killed their infants, that they would send them to Heaven, but they would also be likely radically altering the future for the worse!
And according to your earlier bible quotes, like Job 14:5, his plan for the aborted baby was that it be aborted right when it actually was.Yes, they (the babies) would be far happier in Heaven than they ever would be living in this horrible world, but God has plans for those babies.
That child might also have grown up to be a Hitler. All of your above argument is thus defused by an equally powerful counterpoint. Smart people don't look only at the benefits, they also consider the risks.Each human being radically effects the lives of those around them. This was beautifully illustrated in the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Each human life affects the lives of those around them…either for better or for worse. Think about the possible consequences of ending the life of an unborn child. That child might have become a firefighter who would have saved many lives in a burning building, one of those lives being that of a child who would grow up to be a police officer, and that police officer would save the life of a child from a serial killer, and the child saved from the serial killer would grow up to be a scientist who discovers the cure for blindness or cancer or something. By ending the life of that unborn baby, yes you’d be sending them to Heaven, but you would also rob the world of a great gift. In this illustration, you would prevent the cure for blindness being discovered. If only you chose not to have the abortion.Or even worse; what if the child would grow up to be the next Billy Graham? In this case, hundreds or thousands of souls who would have been saved actually end up damned because the child wasn’t able to grow up and become a preacher! So yeah, you sent that child to Heaven. But at the same time, you’d ended up sending far more people to Hell…because perhaps the only possible world where these people would have given their lives to Christ is a possible world where that unborn baby grows up and holds Billy Graham type crusades.Would you really want to risk the souls of hundreds or thousands just to send 1 person to Heaven?
Think about it...do you really want gangsters, thugs, and mentally retarded people, getting pregnant? I can be honest enough to say that whenever such women get abortions, I think this is better than their giving birth in circumstances that will more than likely result in a child that thinks gangs and violence are the highest ideals in life. If could have my way, I'd sterilize everybody living in the "poor" section of every city. They have no more business procreating than do the starving teens of Ethiopia.
And once again, unless you accuse married couples of stupidity for citing their poverty as a reason to avoid pregnancy (and thinking the chances are too great their child will amount to nothing) then you are forced to agree that if the couple reasonably anticipate a horrific future for the child, yes, it is better to just avoid having kids.
Well gee, you are a conservative Christian, and thus are not permitted to have any other view of the world than the negative cynical one expressed in the NT. See Romans 3:10 ff and 1st John 5:19. Having kids because of the chance that they'll turn out to be good saved Christians, is about as gullible as going to Wal-Mart expecting to find high-quality products. Possible? Barely. Likely? Not in the least.
That might be a good idea if the specific pregnant mother you are talking to lives in circumstances sufficiently comparable to the shitty state of affairs the bible says humanity and earth are currently in. But for couples who have decent income and life-style, the possibilities of the child's suffering are quite diminished and become comparable to the risk of getting hit by a car as you walk to the store . Most children are not born with cancer or genetic defects. Sorry, but the reasons abortion are preferable under Christian theology, are not analogous to the reasons abortion is preferable under atheism.If The Swords Cuts At All, It Cuts Both WaysMost of the time, I receive this objection from Atheists. It usually happens after I tell them that the Canaanite children went to Heaven. So this next objection wouldn’t affect the Calvinist who makes this same argument.But for the atheist who makes this argument, I would like to tell them that they could justify abortion even on the atheistic view (in which there is no such thing as Heaven or Hell). Think about it, since we all go through great suffering in this life, every time a baby is born into the world, abort it. Why let it live? It’ll just go through a lot of suffering.
Yes, but I would say they lack critical thinking skills, as it would have been less drastic if they have simply used protection or been abstinent. Either way, they are using common sense. This world is getting more and more flipped out every year. And I see nothing wrong with atheists preferring to be childless because of how stupid, strung-out, materialistic, overpopulated, consumerist and superficial this stupid world currently is.This is the rationale some women have for getting an abortion in the first place (i.e “I don’t want to bring a baby into such a horrible world”).
It’s also possible that they could grow up to be serial killers, burglars, or thugs who engage in gang violence. Maybe they should be aborted to ensure that that doesn’t happen. Oh sure, he or she COULD be next Stephen Hawking or Mother Teresa but let’s abort him or her anyway, after all, we would be doing the child a favor. The child wouldn’t have to live in a world of meaningless suffering (I don’t believe it’s meaningless on the theistic worldview by the way), and would also ensure that the next holocaust and the next 9/11 never happens. By robbing them of all the opportunities that this life has to offer, we’d be preventing them from living a life of suffering. We also might save lives just in case this fetus becomes the next Jack The Ripper. Tell me, would you seriously advocate the killing of children regardless of whether the theistic or atheistic worldview is true? I wouldn’t. As you can see, this argument, if it cuts at all, it cuts both ways.
No, in the atheist context, aborting the child does not increase the child's happiness. In the Christian context, it does (they go to heaven to live with Jesus forever). Big difference.
But regardless, whether to abort or not within the first several weeks of pregnancy, is the mother's choice. If that were not so, you'd have to come up with laws and rules by which sub-committees could decide whether a woman's miscarriage was accidental or intentional...which would mean a shitload of money would have to be spent monitoring pregnant women every moment of their lives, given how easy it is to move, fall, or eat something that will cause miscarriage. That's the political swamp of hopelessness you wind up in if you wish to push your "abortion = murder" sentiment to its logical conclusion. More especially so at this point in American history, where women are conditioned to think abortion is nobody's business but their own...thus increasing the likelihood they'd put forth effort to hide their intent to disobey such laws. Sorry, but in the current world, "abortion = murder" cannot be practically defended.
But under normative reasoning, we usually do conclude an act is 'good', if one of its effects is guaranteed to produce a good, or if its good effects outweigh its bad effects. That's why you think having a job, feeding your kids, making them go to school, and allowing doctors to operate on them, are "good" things. These can also and often do produce bad effects, but these are outweighed by the good intended effects.The same argument that the atheist uses against advocates of The Age Of Accountability also can be used against him.In conclusion, I don’t think that the view that all babies go to Heaven logically entails abortion and infanticide being good things.
At this point Romans 8:18 kills your argument. If the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory of the afterlife, it only stands to reason that the sins of the present time are not worthy to be compared to the morally good results those sins will achieve in the afterworld.
Now you can simplistically quote the bible and pretend that it makes sense to call murder a sin while acknowledging the other biblical truth that murder always achieves God's will for the victim, but in doing so you'll be ceding victory to the skeptic, and you'll only be giving an answer that makes Christians feel better about their current theological presuppositions, you won't be giving an answer that would intellectually compel the skeptic to change his mind.
As long as your theology guarantees a good outcome for all aborted babies, you are neglecting the more important spiritual/eternal perspective (aborted fetuses go to heaven) when you act as if the temporal/earthly perspective (abortion = murder) is all that counts in the moral analysis. Under Christian theology, abortion produces more good than evil (i.e., a child's guaranteed eternal salvation in heaven outweighs the temporal sin of murder).
It's funny but the NT even supports that type of reasoning. It would be sinful for Paul to become cursed of God merely to save Israel, yet Paul, while allegedly inspired by God, expressed exactly this sentiment:
3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, (Rom. 9:3 NAU)The same with Jesus' death: It didn't matter to God that the death was the unjust murder of an innocent man, God ordained that the greater spiritual benefits to mankind should be conferred in that specific sinful fashion:
23 this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. (Acts 2:23 NAU)Minton continues:
27 "For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,
28 to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur. (Acts 4:27-28 NAU)
To repeat: your bible is contradictory. If babies die exactly when God's prescribed number of days for them runs out, then God is no less involved in the abortion than the mother and doctor. In fact all they doing is fulfilling God's will by preventing the baby from living longer than God intended. Chuck your theological bullshit in the garbage, and such embarassing inconsistency disappears.They are still very much bad. God still prohibits human beings taking the life of other human beings (Exodus 20:13), This is one of The Ten Commandments.
They are also acts that fulfill God's will for every fetus involved. God is rather stupid to bitch about people who do the very things he wants them to do.As such, abortion and infanticide are both moral abominations, they’re evil.
Then God was evil for killing David's baby (2nd Samuel 12, supra).It is evil to kill a baby or anyone else for that matter.
That sounds like you are saying when a mother aborts a baby, she is causing the child to enter the afterlife sooner than God intended.Now, God is the author of life and as such He has the right to take life as He sees fit (See Job 1:21, 1 Samuel 2:6, Psalm 75:7, Deuteronomy 32:39). God has a right to decide when we enter the afterlife, we do not.
Is that what you are saying, yes or no?
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