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c659smith
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in the case of Abortion it is deliberate on the women’s part, those who paticipate including medical staff, and those aiding and abetting by encouraging such an act or paying for it.
Can someone help explain why abortion is much worse than the Iraqi War?
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c659smith
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When then would you defend and fight for the life of another. The Iraqi people are not innocents for the most part. They allowed a terrible dictator to control their lives. To kill unarmed civilians deliberately after Desrt Storm and to not abide by the truce signed after Dessert Storm. Do you forget they were still shooting at our Jets. All the U.N. violations, and the breaking of the truce signed by Sadam ten years later.With all due respect, friend, that’s a fairly simple view of a much more complex issue. No one knows how many civilians have died in Iraq–our own government admits to close to 100K. Civilians aren’t out to hurt anyone; they are simply trying to survive in a war zone. War is evil, and results in the deaths of innocents. Let’s not confuse terrorists with the overwhelming vast majority of the dead in Iraq: just people. Innocent people.
There is very little in the Iraq war that I would call righteous, but…people can disagree on this issue.
Welcome to CAF, by the way. Be nice
They made a mockery of the civilized world for ten years and there were mass graves for those murdered by Sadam during that time period.
To try to relate that to abortion issue issue is morally wrong and rediculous.
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Michaeljc4
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I didn’t compare abortion to the war in Iraq; someone else did. I merely pointed out that, in modern war, the majority of those who are killed are noncombatants. No reasonable person will argue that Sadam Hussein was anything other than a blight on the world. However, since our war in Iraq began, tens of thousands of innocent human beings have been killed. You may not like that reality; you may not want it to be true, but none the less, that’s how it is.
Really, God? Thanks for telling us.
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c659smith
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Were innocent Germans killed in WW2?
Were innocent Japanese killed in WW2?
They may not have had blood on their hands but were complacent in knowing or watching defenseless–hands tied or starved, men, women and children unable to defend themselves being slaughtered. Sadam and Hitler are not very far apart nor are their peoples.
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Michaeljc4
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I say this to you in all seriousness, c659smith: I will pray for you (in fact, I already have). I don’t even know where to begin to address your way of thinking.
I–literally–don’t know what to say to you.
I–literally–don’t know what to say to you.
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Beltany13
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It’s no more simple than yours, with all due respect.With all due respect, friend, that’s a fairly simple view of a much more complex issue. No one knows how many civilians have died in Iraq–our own government admits to close to 100K. Civilians aren’t out to hurt anyone; they are simply trying to survive in a war zone. War is evil, and results in the deaths of innocents. Let’s not confuse terrorists with the overwhelming vast majority of the dead in Iraq: just people. Innocent people.
There is very little in the Iraq war that I would call righteous, but…people can disagree on this issue.
Welcome to CAF, by the way. Be nice
Had we not intervened, how much longer would Saddam have oppressed his people? How many more would have died under his rule, without ever tasting freedom? How many more terrorist families would he have paid to attack Israel?
Nobody, I don’t care how liberal you are, can argue that the world isn’t a better place without him.
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Michaeljc4
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Well…good news! No one is this discussion is making that arguement, at least as far as I can see.
My point remains: innocent people die in wars, including Iraq. That is a horrible tragedy. I’m not morally comfortable saying, “Yes, but they are all so much better off because Sadam is gone!” If you or anyone else wants to think that way, it’s between you, your conscience, and God.
All human beings–those we perceive as our enemies, the unborn, those on death row, those in hospitals hooked up to machines, the homeless, the drug addicted, the mentally ill, the violently insane, the desperately poor–have inherent worth and dignity. They are human beings created in the image of God. War kills human beings, most of them innocent of any real wrong doing. War falls especially hard on the poorest and the most vulnerable. War is evil, and while I fully admit that war may be necessary at times, it is never good.
I am no pacifist, but I have come to hate war. May God grant that we never have to fight another one.
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Beltany13
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Well, if your point is that when people get shot or blown up, they die, then you got me. Other than that, I fail to see your point. Yes, innocent people die, and yes, it’s tragic. However, the fact that innocent people are caught in the crossfire does not, in any sense, render the war unjustified. I’m sorry you think it does.
Innocent people died in the American Revolution, in the Civil War, in WWI and II, yet few people would argue that those wars were unjustified. And, like it or not, those wars were necessary and yes, the world was better off afterward.
Who the hell is arguing that war is good? Certainly not me. I’m arguing that it’s necessary and, yes, innocent people die. But when a war is complete, we can obtain at least a modicum of comfort knowing that those still alive are better off.
And I’d rather we didn’t have to engage in war anymore either.
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c659smith
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I am very upfront and you know where I am coming from but you have not spelled out your opinion so just answewr this one question.I say this to you in all seriousness, c659smith: I will pray for you (in fact, I already have). I don’t even know where to begin to address your way of thinking.
I–literally–don’t know what to say to you.
So if you were a German citizen in Germany in 1944 and watched your Jewish neighbors being loaded unto rail cars and knew they were going to their death and did nothing but wring your hands out of fear for yourself.
would you call yourself an innocent if an American Bomb killed you in order to rid the world of Hitler and the nazi’s?
Would you put yourself as innocent as a baby in the womb being burnt alive and blided when a saline solution is injected in the amniotic sac and at the same time a scapel is hap-hazardly cutting off your toes, legs, arms. As that is being accomplished imagine the salt getting into those open wounds. Then a vacuum sucks the the baby parts out and each of the segments of the small baby is seperated and accouted for before this small human being is tossed into the garbage.
Or how about as innocent as a partial birth abortion. Imagine being 7 or 8 months in the womb. It is nice and warm. All of a sudden somehow through inducement drugs you are being forced down the birth canal. You for the first time feel the cold hands of someone grabbing your head and turning your head the opposite way. The cold hands now have your feet and are pulling on them and all of a sudden you feel the cool air of the outside world over your toes, legs, buttocks, back, and then all of a sudden your progress from exiting the womb is stopped just as your head is all that is not in this new world. Only one of these hands now hold your head in place in the birth canal, why your little feet are jerking and kicking the outside air, you then feel the cold blade of a scapel pressing at the base of your skull, you pull away but those cold hands are forcing you down onto that blade. The blade now cuts you and you feel the sharp pain of being stabbed. A small vaccumm is then inserted into where the incision is made and yes the pain stops as you are killed instantly as your brains are being sucked out. The head is then removed from the birth canal as the rest of you was already outside the womb during this process.
This is done purely because you are an inconveinece or maybe an embarrassment, maybe your not as smart as others or cannot walk or run.
That is an innocent not the one who hides to protect themselves as their fellow neighbors are being placed in harms way, being gassed, burnt alive, starved to death, shot with no way to defend oneself as they have already been immprisoned.
I really do not know what to say to you. I do not know what you would say when you one day will meet your maker.
A sheperd is one who fights the wolf to the point of laying his own life down for one of his sheep and does not run away when the wolf comes a calling.
the other is a coward or does not love his neighbor, or has their own selfish agenda and really does not care.
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Michaeljc4
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And there we agree again.
c659smith, I’m not sure why you just provided such a long and graphic description of abortion. Abortion is a grave moral evil, and if I’ve written anything, anywhere in this thread that implies that it’s something other than horrifying, I can’t seem to find it. Congratulations on winning the argument we weren’t having.
My problem with your thinking is that you are blaming innocent people for things that their government does. When children die in war, c659smith, are they to blame for Hiltler’s, or Sadam’s, policies? When people live in a brutal dictatorship, where they lack any of the freedoms you and I are blessed with, are they responsible for what the powerful elites in their countries do? Do you truly believe that the average Iraqi bore culpability for the reign of Sadam Hussein?
*Half a million *children died in Iraq between the first Gulf War and the invasion in 2003. Were they responsible for Sadam Hussein’s actions?
In the 1980s, the United States backed various bad guys around the world, and trained soliders who then went and murdered thousands of innocent people in Central America. By your resasoning, you and your family were not innocent–you knew about it, right?–and your deaths would be justified if some soliders from El Salvador or Hondorus managed to attack the US.
If I am misreading your statements, c659smith, please clarify. There are many ways to justify the war in Iraq, but saying that civilians are responsible for Hussein’s evil actions is morally incomprehensible to me.
During the 1990s, while I was in the service, I had front row seats for the war in Bosnia. I was also on hand during the US/UN sanctions against Iraq where an estimated 500,000 children died. And I wasn’t too far away when the Rwandan genocide occurred. I was in Israel the day their prime minister was assassinated. I helped to monitor the civil war in Algeria. Those events–my own personal experiences with war–have colored my thinking about what war is, and what it isn’t. Perhaps you have had some experience that’s led you to your beliefs about the collective guilt people in dictatorships bear for the crimes of their governments?
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Sair
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You seem to know an awful lot about the experience of aborted foetuses. Have you interviewed them? Or are you merely indulging in speculation? It is all very well to take the emotive path to persuasion, but without hard facts, you will always have people questioning you. How far back in your life do you remember any of your experiences? Can you recall anything you thought or did in utero? I’d wager most people can’t.
If your theoretical shepherd gets himself killed by the wolves in their first attack, where is he when the wolves come back? Sometimes it’s necessary to preserve your own ability to do good.
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Sair
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I deeply respect your experiences on the war front. Sometimes I wonder if it is possible to arrive at any objective view of warfare, and I couldn’t say whether it is less or more so if you have never been involved. I would certainly agree that civilians under the regime of dictators are not necessarily responsible for supporting said dictators. Can anyone be judged to be responsible for actions - or inactions - committed under duress? Maybe we would all like to imagine ourselves capable of heroic actions, but until we are faced with a situation - and in all probability, one in which more than just our own welfare is involved - we cannot know how we would act.
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kimmielittle
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Amen.!!
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kimmielittle
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kimmielittle
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The horrors of abortion repulses my soul. Just as I’m reminded of the picture of a little girl running toward cameras…on fire, covered with napalm, in the Viet Nam war.
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Michaeljc4
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They are both horrifying…but with abortion, there isn’t any real justification, while in war, there may be a justification. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about objective and subjective culpability in issues of ethics and morals. The results of war, or the results of abortion, may be the same, but the intention behind the two events are different. In war, for example, soldiers may not intend to kill children, but it happens because, well…that’s the nature of war. In an abortion clinic, the express purpose of the abortionist, and the mother, is to kill the child. The results are the same: dead children. The circumstances leading up to the results are very different.
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kimmielittle
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Hiyas Michael
You and Sair, know I’m in complete agreement with your statement. My Brother isn’t “targeting” babys, But he is the one that showed me the picture, to better help me understand, just how much he’s being ‘charged’ in his charge ] with, as a Soldier.
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c659smith
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Then we do have something in common and that is we were soldiers. I during Desrt Shield/Storm and other various conflicts during the 20 or so odd years prior.
To answer your question on culperability for the Iraqi people the answer is yes. They are responsible for not standing up to their dictator / murdering regimes by doing nothing or by taking some part in these events prior. As far as the children they have their parents to look at who watched, participated, or were such cowards that they allowed genocide to occur. I am sure you agree that sadom and gomorrea had children that were there when God destroyed it. I am sure there were children when the great flood occurred, I am sure Children died prior to the first Passover when the first born was killed that did not have the blood of the lamb on the door.
It was Adam and Eve and their actions that caused several thousand years of hell and no salvation for all their children till Christ paid for our sins.
All in all it was the leaders of these places and the populace going along with their actions that caused these horrible reactions.
It is horrible but their parents placed them in that predicament not the ones that were protecting other societies, Govt.'s, and possibly themselves.
The U.N. sanctions that caused the starvation was a result of the Secretary General’s son of the U.N. committing criminal offenses
by giving Sadam and his henchmen money instead of food as was the agreement signed for the truce to take hold and stop the U.S. forces from marching on to Bagdad then. It was the U.N. on the ground in Bagdad prior to the 2nd invasion and did little to help anyone starving. I wonder why?
I do not see him or any of his cohorts doing any jail time for causing the death of so many children or have you heard otherwise.
As a U.S. soldier you must live by a code of ethics as you know and if an illegal order is given or one that is going to cause purposeful harm to civilians you do not carry them out and have an obligation to report and / or fight those that give such orders.
But fighting in Iraq or Afganistan who is a civilian or who is a soldier-they do not fight by any code and will use their children to kill.
As far as your argument on the U.S. taking the side of some bad regimes you need to look at who was on the other side. We definitely took the side of the least evil. I am proud that my leaders took great pains at making the decisions they did.
If we all were prophets and could tell the future life would be dull.
In such conflicts children fight and would kill you quicker than take a candy bar. There were 11 and 12 year old boys in Sadam’s army and people in their 60s and 70s
In Gaza it is children strapping bombs to their bodies and throwing rocks at armed militia. It is the parents standing by and cheering as Hamas and Hezbollah day in and day out blast Israel with rockets.
Fundamentalist Islam starts to teach hate for Americans and the west starting in first grade along with how to kill.
War is tragic and at times horrible but at times necessary.
The reasoning i have in all this though is not an argment on if a war is just. War is horrible and tragic but on the massive scale of 50,000,000 people killed in torturous ways through abortion there is no comparison. It is the same as taking a 1 day old child and tearing him or her apart alive.
Remember the title of this forum:
Can someone help explain why abortion is much worse than the Iraqi War?
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c659smith
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There is no greater good than to lay ones life down for another. What you speak of is being a COWARD
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Sair
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There is no greater good than to lay ones life down for another. What you speak of is being a COWARD
If pragmatism is equated with cowardice, so be it. It’s all very well to risk your own safety to save someone else - however, if you die in the attempt, and fail to save the other person, then you have doubly failed. There is a big difference between courage and recklessness. And there is no point in dying for a cause if your sacrifice doesn’t further the cause. And then you have to ask whether you would have done more good to stick around to be there for the people who care about you. I could go on, but it’s kind of irrelevant to the thread, so I’ll leave it there.
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