Theocracy Watch

The Appalling Morality of Supernaturalisms

I — Abortion

What’s moral about this?

I don’t know if there was any test (ultrasound or amniocentesis or other) that had been run that could have identified this serious birth defect in advance. Nor do I know the fate of this poor child. For every Joseph Carey “Elephant Man” Merrick who overcame a curse of biology (or his Maker, pace the supernaturalists), persevered through countless cruelties and managed to have a period of happiness in an abbreviated life, there have been millions of others who only suffered.

The pain of the parents, especially the mothers, does not need expounding.

The utter moral incoherence of Paradisian¹ supernaturalisms starts with infinite punishment for finite sin². That absurdity is compounded by either the Free Will or Predestination speculations.

To wit, a hypothetical Maker/Creator makes a being, which from the instant of birth (or conception? … which is it? Rome kinda punts) at its first independent breath is doomed to *eternal* perdition, agony and suffering, unless at some point in the future he or she exercises that free choice (in the case of the former) simply to think a little twittering sized thought in his or her head “I submit to [insert name of deity]”.

In the latter case of Predestination, there isn’t even a choice … the Maker has made a creation knowing full well it’s going to Hell.

What sort of evil fiend does that? Isn’t that the very definition of sadism? Here, I’m going to birth you in sin and now you may or may not have a chance to avoid *infinity* in the Inferno. Spin that wheel and discover your destiny, little one. Muahahaha.

No wonder Jefferson called it Dæmonism.

Staying within the Paradisian frame, the risk event, then, is birth. An aborted baby/fetus/embryo/zygote/blastocyst is guaranteed infinity in the Good Place. Why would any loving parent who subscribes to that metaphysics and theology take the chance??? (Jr High math refresher: anything times infinity is infinity … meaning that even if you’re the most loving, saved Christian parent, and so you think the chance of your child *not* being saved is teeny-tiny, say, 0.0001%, guess what: the Expected Value of the “Amount of Time in Hell” scenario is … INFINITY.)

And now watch the theologians wiggle and squirm. Well, they say, maybe such unborn persons don’t have a guarantee of eternal life in Heaven. Really? See “fiend” above.

If that’s their morality, that anything bad can happen to a person that’s never even been awake … to the main point of this short series: how morally absurd. What sort of abomination is that? And yet they strut about in their priestly garb and red beanies, pointy hats and shepherd’s crooks, prating at every opportunity about their ethical hauteur. How the rest of us are the immoral, bad, fallen, doomed ones.

Ply us not with your cherishment of Life. Supernaturalists cherish their hypothetical SuperLife — Life Eternal — the one that comes after the end of the finite window of actual, biological life. On the other side of death. Wojtyła stated it neatly in 1995, in pronouncing Rome doctrine in his encyclical, Evangelium vitae:

“Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence.”

This life, the earthly real one, they demean and revile at every opportunity. Far from sanctifying it, to them it’s a horrible wretched state, a swamp of sin, a slough of despond. A muck to be escaped. Total depravity. Flesh that should be denied and mortified. Suffering and asceticism celebrated and venerated, leading to rich reward anon in Paradise/Jannah, the life that far exceeds the earthly/real dimensions.

How plainer could Rome spell it out (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2015 … [emphasis added]):

Spiritual progress entails the ascesis and mortification that gradually lead to living in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes

And so they have no qualms against wars they consider just, nor (in many cases³) capital punishment, nor the suffering of “lower” life forms, nor the devastations of pandemics. They celebrate martyrs, especially suicidal ones.

They try to make “sentience” somehow an important line in their propaganda to codify their concepts of the “sanctity of life” into Law. But who cares about sentience? A fern is sentient. A sunflower is sentient. And let’s not even start on dogs and pigs. Bacteria and even viruses can sense and react to their environments.

Babies are asleep until birth, never even conscious until that first smack to shock them awake. If you want to draw a line, either leave it at the Roe viability, or, better, draw no lines and leave the matter entirely up to medical ethics, free of political involvement.

Just suspend your preconceptions for a minute and ask yourself which would be better for that poor baby pictured above: to have been aborted and sent straight into the loving arms of Jesus, or to have been birthed, and (likely) with some cognitive disabilities (not to mention the geographic and cultural constraints) never able in this life to choose Him freely as a Savior … so infinity in Hell, on top of a life of torment?

Those of us who aren’t supernaturalists would pose the question differently, of course: what quality of conscious experience/existence can that child have? Only we YOLOists believe that this Life, the one life, is in any way precious, or sacred to use the other side’s vernacular. The Only that each of us gets but Once.

Yes, there’s always a gray area. Yes, it’s possible that technology will come along that could offer that baby a quality life. Yes, perhaps the parents wanted to pamper and cherish and love him or her, no matter how disabled.

What’s the probability?

By the time a developing h. sapiens reaches something closer to unborn baby than embryo, there’s a difficult moral dilemma. Liberty and morality demand it be best left to the mother, with input from physicians, father and other family, or advisors as she chooses.

The hypocrisy of the Paradisians, making this their must-have, non-negotiable #1 issue, lays bare their immorality. They’re not concerned with the interests of babies, mothers and families here in this life on earth. They’re about political power, tapping into a hot button of the superstitious sheep, and pushing for a return to the theocracies of the Christianities⁴ that progress, civilization and our American tradition based on the secular Enlightenment had started discarding a couple of centuries *before* our Founding.

Fuddle us not with your hypocritical sanctimony. For those with any discernment, snap out of it and see how gaslit you’ve been by Rome. (Propagated through the yokel Evangelical Protestant leadership, indeed, drunk as it has become on the intoxicating idolatry of power … embodied best by the likes of the Jerry Falwells, Sr. and of Jr.) How their half-century stratagem broke our national consensus, and our tradition of reason over faith.

Sometimes there’s not only a liberty issue for the mother, but an outright duty to prevent suffering of the baby, the family and the community. True morality isn’t the simple theologians’ black&white flash card deck — “Abortion wrong” “(This or that) War good” “Eating XYZ bad” “Covering your head good”, “Football on Sunday bad”, ad infinitum. It’s wrestling with the difficult, non-trivial cases, like the Trolley Problem, and, yes, the cruel dilemma faced by the family of the poor infant above.

Coda

If you agree with (at least the gist) of the essay above, here’s one more little nugget you can use if you find yourself in a discussion with a supernaturalist who wants to ban abortion: the slogan “Life begins at conception” is just that, a slogan … a “Torches of Freedom” t-shirt/cap/poster/bumper sticker.

Life began over three billion years ago. Conception is likewise not an instantaneous event, but the opening phase of the later, slower fetal development process.

The only thing that begins with sperm and egg combining is an individual organism, which must progress through all of those developmental stages, in order to awaken at birth (= separation from the mother). But that’s continuation of life, not beginning of life.

If you jump into the supernaturalist frame and speculate that life is their eternal one (see above), and this earthly natural phase is just a blip (a second gestation, if you prefer), then, yes, it makes more sense to say “eternal life (= soul) is created, so begins, at the moment of the two germ cells combining their DNA”.

But that’s both a fictum and doesn’t fit on a baseball cap.

Notes:

[1] In contrast to Reincarnationist or Exaltationist speculations about what happens after death here on earth.

[2] Or an argument that John Locke said “shook the foundations of all religion” (though to be fair, he did not endorse this argument … but spot a flaw if you can):

“all Adam’s posterity doomed to eternal, infinite punishment, for the transgression of Adam, whom millions had never heard of, and no one had authorised to transact for him, or be his representative”

[3] To its credit, Rome modified its traditional doctrine, begun in the 300s with commanding torture and various forms of cruel and unusual execution, first fudging the question, then finally less than a decade ago, in 2018, bowing to the modern Western European sensibility, opposing capital punishment unambiguously. Universal and unchanging objective moral truths, indeed.

[4] A mantra for our side: “Which one?”