Place in the Public Square

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Kishkumen
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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Gadianton wrote:
Wed Jul 20, 2022 2:19 pm
Isn't that blog another DCP outlet?
That would make a whole lot of sense.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Kishkumen
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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Doctor Scratch wrote:
Wed Jul 20, 2022 2:22 pm
The article asserts that Jewish religious beliefs "don't hold up":
Ortner wrote: For instance, many Jews interpret Jewish law (which holds a complex view of the status of a fetus in the womb, but generally holds that the spirit enters the body at birth) to allow abortion if a pregnancy would be psychologically traumatizing to a woman, while many states post-Roe will not allow abortions absent the risk of serious physical harm.

This religious freedom argument is one pro-life people of faith need to grapple with carefully. We certainly should not be gratuitously restricting the religious freedom of others. But ultimately this argument does not hold up.

We all have a right to the free exercise of our religious beliefs, but not to inflict direct harm on someone else in the name of religious worship. Obviously, if someone felt that his faith compelled him to perform human sacrifice, the state could properly ban such a ritual. If you accept that an abortion is an act of direct violence on another human being, then it seems quite clear that the state could block such harm and indeed perhaps even has a moral and ethical obligation to do so.
Unfortunately, Ortner does not really explain how Jewish beliefs do not hold up. That, or he does not see the obvious and glaring double standard he engages in here. Jewish law allows "abortion if a pregnancy would be psychologically traumatizing to a woman." And yet, according to Ortner, people do not have a right "to inflict direct harm on someone else in the name of religious worship." The example he provides is an absurd extreme, human sacrifice, and one assumes that in saying "direct harm," Ortner is excluding psychological trauma, which presumably is not sufficiently serious to justify abortion in his view.

Ortner is also forgetting(?) that Catholic thought in the Middle Ages seems to have distinguished between Canon Law and sin in the matter of abortion. Gratian's Decretum of the twelfth century stipulated that killing a fetus before the spirit had entered into it was not murder. Pope Gregory IX upheld this distinction in the next century. In other words, this is not just "Jewish belief" we are grappling with here, but an entire tradition in which the personhood of the fetus is not assumed from the time of conception.

But the bigger problem here is Ortner's disingenuous move to define abortion rights with a limitation of the speech rights of pro-life advocates. A woman's right to an abortion does not infringe on someone else's religious belief that abortion is a sin. People were perfectly free to teach that abortion was a sin under Roe v. Wade. Other people were free to believe it was not a sin. Now, one group's definition of sin has become the law of the state, and frankly I find that frightening.

I don't take abortion lightly, but I think the best response to my own distaste for abortion is not to get an abortion. Luckily, I don't need to worry about that. I just don't think another person's choice on the uncertain and grave matter of abortion is my personal business. Anti-abortion extremists, who are in large supply among those of the Religious Right, have pushed to define personhood as the point of conception and to restrict abortion until it is almost always illegal. The sad byproduct of this bizarre stance is the endangerment of the lives of women, both in terms of their physical health and psychological well being.

It is discombobulating to read Ortner bloviate about not having a religious right to harm others, when the overturning of Roe results in precisely that. The state's removal of a right to abortion guarantees that women will be harmed, all because religious extremists feel a moral imperative to shove their beliefs down the throats of everyone else.

When in doubt, allow people to make their own decisions. No one knows exactly when a fetus attains personhood, and because of that greater latitude should be allowed in making the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Gadianton
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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If you believe that wearing a mask is an act of violence against other human beings, which many of those who are the most vocal pro-lifers do, then it would make sense for the state to prosecute people who wear masks -- it may be morally obligated to do so.
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Doctor Scratch
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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This thread really ought to be in the main forum as it has some direct ties to Mopologetics.
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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Gadianton wrote:
Wed Jul 20, 2022 8:51 pm
If you believe that wearing a mask is an act of violence against other human beings, which many of those who are the most vocal pro-lifers do, then it would make sense for the state to prosecute people who wear masks -- it may be morally obligated to do so.
How I hope we are able to keep the kooks at bay.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Kishkumen
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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Doctor Scratch wrote:
Wed Jul 20, 2022 8:51 pm
This thread really ought to be in the main forum as it has some direct ties to Mopologetics.
Yeah, I was uncertain where to put this. I ultimately decided to post it here because the topic is ordinarily found in Spirit Paradise. I have no problem with others requesting it be moved.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Doctor Scratch
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Re: Place in the Public Square

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There are a number of striking / interesting things about this site. For one thing, they openly declare that they subscribe to the "Way of Openness," which attentive readers will recall was a rallying cry for the extremely ill-advised "World Table" project. That said, there are other postings where the name of the author does not even appear to be listed, such as this "review" for Under the Banner of Heaven. Also intriguing is the review for the 6th episode of the miniseries, especially this part:
Allen says he “tried to defeat the Church in my mind and see what was left.” He tells Pyre about a red book in his house that tells “a truer story of our people.” Pyre takes Allen’s book home and is reading it in the car and sobbing when his wife discovers him. He admits that he’s struggling, and she asks him to pray with her. He tries but he can’t. She tells him that she refuses to struggle through this with him and demands that he bear his testimony in church to strengthen their children’s faith.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the omission is striking. The Wikipedia page for the miniseries states directly that the "red book" is the Tanners' magnum opus, Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? but every Mopologetic summary of that episode fails to spell out what the book is. (Some summaries don't even mention the book at all, and yet in the show, it is arguably *the* final straw that destroys Pyre's testimony.) Mopologists have spent decades claiming that the Church doesn't "hide" or "whitewash" or "cover up" the truth, and yet this omission seems very much to fit with those kinds of descriptions. If their apologetics are so effective, after all, then what do they have to hide?
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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Re: Place in the Public Square

Post by Philo Sofee »

Dr. Scratch
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the omission is striking. The Wikipedia page for the miniseries states directly that the "red book" is the Tanners' magnum opus, Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? but every Mopologetic summary of that episode fails to spell out what the book is. (Some summaries don't even mention the book at all, and yet in the show, it is arguably *the* final straw that destroys Pyre's testimony.) Mopologists have spent decades claiming that the Church doesn't "hide" or "whitewash" or "cover up" the truth, and yet this omission seems very much to fit with those kinds of descriptions. If their apologetics are so effective, after all, then what do they have to hide?
Spot on! Perfectly spot on! Is it perhaps because they NOW know, now that their own church has been sharing the Joseph Smith Papers more openly that that evil red apostate book is actually telling far more truth than lies, and their own church is proving it to the world? Mormonism: Shadow or Reality is to be feared now due to the actual truths it tells, since there are vastly more lies from Mormonism than anti-Mormonism, and vastly more true historical truth in anti-Mormonism than in Mormonism. The irony is Celestially rich.
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