“This is children being raised in abusive homes, being sold into prostitution at young ages, being sent to live in children’s homes that already have too much on their hands.”

Really?

I must be on the wrong thread, because I thought the thread was on abortions and its biblical support, of lack thereof.

How this thread morphed from abortion to child abuse is something you’ll have to explain to me….

Sorry, but what I “advocate” would not “take away the rights of not only [your]self, Becca, and Neffs, but every woman in the United States.”

Believing what it is that I “advocate” (and doing so without any foundation that I can discern) may make it easier for you to argue a certain point, or believe that your views are the correct and proper ones, but you couldn’t be more possibly wrong about what you think it is that I “advocate.”

This isn’t some abstract intellectual theory. This is children being raised in abusive homes, being sold into prostitution at young ages, being sent to live in children’s homes that already have too much on their hands. We need to fix the problems we already have before creating more for ourselves.

I think your argument there is pretty much exactly what Neffs was speaking out against in one of her previous comments. You speak of intellectual honesty, but this is not just an intellectual debate; it involves, depending on the separate viewpoints, life and death, liberty and enslavement. You’ll notice Becca did not say that her point of view should be used for every argument concerning voting rights ever. This is not just an abstract matter that we can discuss along with the necessity to preserve our environment today for tomorrow’s children. This is happening today, right now, and what you advocate would take away the rights of not only myself, Becca, and Neffs, but every woman in the United States. Talk about lack of intellectual honesty and the fallacy of Becca’s argument all you want, but the fact of the matter is that this issue concerns us and our bodies, not you and your abstract argumentation theories.

To me, it all comes down to whether an unborn infant is a human life, equal in weight to you or me. If that’s the case, in my opinion, then abortion isn’t justified, regardless of a woman’s rights (we got into this earlier).

So basically, it all hinges on what rights a fetus should have.

I think a fetus is a human, as “valuable” as your or me, and if you read the post I linked to way up in my first comment and skip past all the Bible stuff, you’ll see why.

Neffs,

I’m sure that sometimes you are right. I can’t answer for all people that might be drawn to churches of Christ, only for myself.

And in this specific case, while I believe the Bible teaches that an unborn infant is a human and should be treated accordingly, I don’t bring God/The Bible into abortion debates anyway unless I’m talking to other Christians who claim to believe what the Bible says.

(1) From the beginning, I said I thought the passage referred to barrenness, not to a curse about stomach and legs. However, there’s a difference between barrenness and abortion, especially since not all barrenness involves miscarriage at all. Even the TNIV, which you quoted, says “so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries…” which implies some uncertainty.

My point from the beginning has been simply been that this passage is not as clear as you have portrayed it, period.

For the record, I appreciate the Baptizo-Baptism reference (and actually thought about it in this case during all of our translation discussion), but if you really think that virtually every major translation chose to avoid the interpretation you want because they were afraid of the implications, then you’re much more cynical than I am, and I don’t really know what to tell you.

(5) For what it’s worth, I agree with Kolby, your intellectual life would be much simpler if you’d just drop this religion bit—but I hope you don’t.

The argument “[d]on’t vote against abortion unless you’re going to take that baby in yourself and don’t vote against gay couples adopting unless you’re going to adopt one of those children who just lost a home because of you” is completely ridiculous because, if you are going to be intellectually honest, it is an absurd rationale for voting / not voting for something.

Essentially, the argument is: “Don’t vote against X, which affects Y, unless you are going to make Y whole for what X would have otherwise allowed Y to do.”

If you were to logically apply this same argument outside of the immediate issue being dscussed in this thread, hopefully you would realize how absurd the argument is, and the ridiculous rationales that would result for someone voting / not voting for any particular piece of legislation.*

That being said, when you sidestep the absurdity by essentially claiming “oh, the argument only applies when dealing with human life, not with income generation (or whatever else to which you could apply the argument),” it highlights how intellectual honesty may not one’s strong point when it comes to the issue of abortion.

*Note, also, that the argument fails to consider the possibility that someone may wish to vote / not vote for X because the voter, for whatever reason, believes that Y is not entitled to X. (If you were to apply the argument to other issues beside abortion, perhaps this point becomes clearer). But that is another matter altogether.