Is God Really Pro-Life?

[doubtingdaniel]

Is God really Pro-Life? Well let me state some facts and or at least what Christians believe and what is in in the Bible. This is not an anti-religion or anti-God reply. Its not even a pro-life or pro-choice, I’ll just be stating the facts.

Now we don’t know God’s true nature or if he/she even exists (which, despite claims to the contrary, no one really knows. That’s why its called faith.) the question is impossible to answer. Lets think about this logically. If the Judeo-Christian God does exist then we can assume the nature of God from the Bible and why people die. Essentially God is all powerful, all knowing, all present, all loving, and unable to lie. Now remember that this is the God who told us “Thou shall not kill,” and then gave us the book of Leviticus. (Or what some atheists, like myself, like to call “101 Reasons to stone your neighbor and his goat,” Lev 24:13-14, but that’s neither here nor there.) Now according to Christianity when someone dies its all part of God’s “plan” and he/she takes them to heaven or hell. So in essence God IS responsible for when people leave this world. You with me so far?

Second, an abortion is defined as the premature exit of the products for conception (fetus, fetal membranes, placenta) from the uterus resulting in the fetus’s death. Miscarriages are defined as abortions prior to 20 weeks of pregnancy. So by definition miscarriages are abortions. So if God is the one who decides who lives and dies then God is responsible for all miscarriages therefore causing an abortion. This is just a logical assumption as opposed to leaving it up to natural order.

So lets look at the record then. You can compare the number of reported abortions in the U.S. to the number of estimated miscarriages each year. Careful scientific and medical studies have reported that nearly 35% of all pregnancies end in miscarriages. Therefore if you know the total number of pregnancies for any given year we can estimate the number of miscarriages of that year:
1980- God’s Abortions= 2,643,773/ Human Abortions= 1,297,606
1990- God’s Abortions= 3,019,825/ Human Abortions= 1,429,247
2000- God’s Abortions= 2,647,233/ Human Abortions= 857,475
and the second latest study I could find:
2003- God’s Abortions= 2,658,984/ Human Abortions= 848,163
God has clearly chose to perform more abortions than we have and those are statistics from a first world country with modern health care and prenatal care. In 2007 there were an estimated 75,913,462 miscarriages worldwide. In the past decade alone estimates a total of 750,000,000 miscarriages worldwide. So…is God really pro-life?

Think About It.

If this was offensive I do apologize but just know I was simply making reasonable assumptions and stating the facts and was not trying to insult or unintentionally insult you, Christianity, God or “God’s Plan.”

 

[fermat]

Here is the key to your problem: Free Will.

We are all God’s creation and we are all subject to Him. If Gods says, ‘Do not kill’, you should not kill. Abortion, in the context that you are using it in, is the willful destruction of a human life against the will of God. Do we know why spontaneous abortions happen? No, we don’t. We Christians refer that as a mystery. All we know is that for whatever reason, God decided to call one of His children home a little early. As our creator, He gets to do that. It is His right to decide when we go back to Him. An abortion is when we decided to send some back.

There are plenty of times in scripture when, by the command of God, someone dies. There are also plenty of times when someone dies counter to the command of God. He gave us the ability to disobey Him and that is what is so great. We can all thumb our noses at the Lord and seem to get away with it, but at some time we all will be held accountable for those actions.

To the point of your signature, He did all those things because we freely rejected Him and He freely gave us a way to get back.

I highly suggest that you spend some time researching the context of Christian teachings. I suggest you start with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. There is a rich history of thought and intellect and your question betrays your ignorance in this subject. Ignorance of any kind is not bad so long as you try and do something about it.

I pray that your line of questioning here will lead you to spend sometime learning about Christianity and I know that we always welcome skeptics who want to know more about the truth. Keep in mind that you asked a very complex question under the guise of a simple one. Don’t stop here. Keep digging and challenging and asking more questions. Just be open the answers and the possibility that God might just exist after all and that He might just love you more than you can possibly imagine.

 

[rwoehmke]

You would have to assume that God created a perfect universe. He never said it was perfect, just good. To equate the spontaneous abortion to therapeutic abortion is to assume that all conceptions are perfect which they obviously are not. God does not necessarily will a spontaneous abortion, but he does allow it to happen. Who can say exactly why he allows any sickness or bad stuff to happen even to good people. That is the mystery. In a therapeutic abortion a human being assumes a power that God has not delegated to him and takes an innocent human life. The false assumption about the killing “ordered” by God in the Old Testament is killing the innocent is a canard. Whole nations or tribes were ordered wiped out because as a tribe or nation they were not an innocent people. The practice of idolatry and other offenses against heaven were a part of their “national” philosophy of living. More than one civilization has collapsed taking almost every member with it even the so called innocent.

 

[Newbie2]

Is God really Pro-Life? Well let me state some facts and or at least what Christians believe and what is in in the Bible. This is not an anti-religion or anti-God reply. Its not even a pro-life or pro-choice, I’ll just be stating the facts.

Now we don’t know God’s true nature or if he/she even exists (which, despite claims to the contrary, no one really knows. That’s why its called faith.) the question is impossible to answer. Lets think about this logically. If the Judeo-Christian God does exist then we can assume the nature of God from the Bible and why people die. Essentially God is all powerful, all knowing, all present, all loving, and unable to lie. Now remember that this is the God who told us “Thou shall not kill,” and then gave us the book of Leviticus. (Or what some atheists, like myself, like to call “101 Reasons to stone your neighbor and his goat,” Lev 24:13-14, but that’s neither here nor there.) Now according to Christianity when someone dies its all part of God’s “plan” and he/she takes them to heaven or hell. So in essence God IS responsible for when people leave this world. You with me so far?

No. You are sustitution your own fautly theology for the RCC’s understanding of the Almighty. As had been said, you leave out the Christian notion of “free will”. We choose our eternal destiny, God does not choose it for us. He knows what we are going to choose, but foreknowledge is different than predestination.

Second, an abortion is defined as the premature exit of the products for conception (fetus, fetal membranes, placenta) from the uterus resulting in the fetus’s death. Miscarriages are defined as abortions prior to 20 weeks of pregnancy. So by definition miscarriages are abortions. So if God is the one who decides who lives and dies then God is responsible for all miscarriages therefore causing an abortion. This is just a logical assumption as opposed to leaving it up to natural order.

Wrong. This is a non sequitur. Abortion in the context you use below is purposeful interruption of pregnancy. Above, you define it differently. Miscarriages are spontaneous abortions. You are comparing apples to oranges.

So lets look at the record then. You can compare the number of reported abortions in the U.S. to the number of estimated miscarriages each year. Careful scientific and medical studies have reported that nearly 35% of all pregnancies end in miscarriages. Therefore if you know the total number of pregnancies for any given year we can estimate the number of miscarriages of that year:
1980- God’s Abortions= 2,643,773/ Human Abortions= 1,297,606
1990- God’s Abortions= 3,019,825/ Human Abortions= 1,429,247
2000- God’s Abortions= 2,647,233/ Human Abortions= 857,475
and the second latest study I could find:
2003- God’s Abortions= 2,658,984/ Human Abortions= 848,163
God has clearly chose to perform more abortions than we have and those are statistics from a first world country with modern health care and prenatal care. In 2007 there were an estimated 75,913,462 miscarriages worldwide. In the past decade alone estimates a total of 750,000,000 miscarriages worldwide. So…is God really pro-life?

Using the same argument, “Death by the hand of God” far exceedes “Death by the hand of one’s fellow man”, so God doesn’t seem to be “Pro-life” outside of abortion/miscarriage either.

Life is God’s to give or take at his will; this is one of the most important theological cornerstones.

If this was offensive I do apologize but just know I was simply making reasonable assumptions and stating the facts and was not trying to insult or unintentionally insult you, Christianity, God or “God’s Plan.”

None taken. There’s fault in your logic. No offense meant.

 

[Bobby_Jim]

This is absurd. People die all the time. It is God’s will that we have a finite lifespan. That doesn’t make it ok for me to commit murder.

The fact that some (in fact many) humans die of natural causes before birth doesn’t make it ok for us to intentionally kill children before they’re born.

The fact that “abortion” is a synonym for “miscarriage” is a red herring. The distinction is between a “spontaneous” or “natural” abortion and an “induced” or “procured” abortion.

 

[SFTor]

There are plenty of times in scripture when, by the command of God, someone dies. There are also plenty of times when someone dies counter to the command of God. He gave us the ability to disobey Him and that is what is so great. We can all thumb our noses at the Lord and seem to get away with it, but at some time we all will be held accountable for those actions.

Let’s take a look at this case:

"A young mother maintained that voices in her head told her to test her faith in God, causing her to repeatedly slam her infant son to the ground and down a flight of stairs. Jennifer Cisowski, 21, of Connecticut, killed her 8-month-old son Gideon Fusscas in his grandmother’s upscale Florida home on Aug. 21, later saying she believed he would rise from the dead if her faith were strong enough. Source: Tampa Tribune, Aug. 22, 2001

If this woman truly believed that God was speaking to her, how can people be so presumptuous as to punish her? Mustn’t we allow for the miraculous intervention of God even today? Maybe her son would have turned into the AntiChrist? These may seem like rhetorical points, but don’t they flow directly from Christian faith?

 

[SFTor]

Another case:

Washington State, 1998 - "Christopher Turgeon says that when God spoke, he listened. He listened when he was directed to go uninvited to area churches and publicly attack their teachings. He listened when he was told to prophesy a coming Apocalypse. He says he listened when he formed a small religious group called The Gatekeepers, and gathered its members around him, first in Snohomish County and later in Southern California.

Turgeon says he listened when he was commanded to kill. The 37-year-old, who claims to be a modern-day manifestation of the biblical prophet Elijah, went on trial Wednesday in Superior Court, charged with first-degree murder in the March 1998 shooting death of Dan Jess, a Mountlake Terrace man. His co-defendant in the case, fellow Gatekeeper Blaine Alan Applin, 30, also is on trial for the same charge.

During a jailhouse interview last month, Turgeon said he has no regret or remorse and truly believes what he did was right and ordered by God. “I can’t question God’s methods,” he said. “I just obey.”

How can we know that this person is not speaking the truth? God could surely return the soul of Elijah into this person. What makes us so sure he is insane, and not actually inspired and commanded by God?

 

[SFTor]

You would have to assume that God created a perfect universe. He never said it was perfect, just good. To equate the spontaneous abortion to therapeutic abortion is to assume that all conceptions are perfect which they obviously are not. God does not necessarily will a spontaneous abortion, but he does allow it to happen. Who can say exactly why he allows any sickness or bad stuff to happen even to good people. That is the mystery. In a therapeutic abortion a human being assumes a power that God has not delegated to him and takes an innocent human life. The false assumption about the killing “ordered” by God in the Old Testament is killing the innocent is a canard. Whole nations or tribes were ordered wiped out because as a tribe or nation they were not an innocent people. The practice of idolatry and other offenses against heaven were a part of their “national” philosophy of living. More than one civilization has collapsed taking almost every member with it even the so called innocent.

Two questions:

So if you are an innocent baby growing up around some bad people, whom God decides to destroy, you just become collateral damage, and that’s it?

And if it is so that God performs all the spontaneous abortions, and you seem to suggest that this is for the purpose of terminating imperfect conceptions, why are there still large numbers of babies born with serious disfigurement, brain damage and so on? Is it only important to God to terminate some of the bad pregnancies? Doesn’t this put God in the strange position of being less knowledgeable and efficient than a modern doctor, who can predict certain serious congenital conditions through testing?

 

[rwoehmke]

Two questions:

So if you are an innocent baby growing up around some bad people, whom God decides to destroy, you just become collateral damage, and that’s it?

And if it is so that God performs all the spontaneous abortions, and you seem to suggest that this is for the purpose of terminating imperfect conceptions, why are there still large numbers of babies born with serious disfigurement, brain damage and so on? Is it only important to God to terminate some of the bad pregnancies? Doesn’t this put God in the strange position of being less knowledgeable and efficient than a modern doctor, who can predict certain serious congenital conditions through testing?

I suppose you could call it collateral damage, but another thought is that their innocence is contaminated by their fellow citizens. Adam and Eve sinned, but we, their “innocent” descendants still suffer from the fall out of that sin.

It is not so much that God “decides”, but he lets nature take its course and nature does not spontaneously abort every defective baby.

 

[Biggie]

Think About It.

If this was offensive I do apologize but just know I was simply making reasonable assumptions and stating the facts and was not trying to insult or unintentionally insult you, Christianity, God or “God’s Plan.”

I made myself think about it, no matter how dumb the argument and how big the print, and I concluded God performs miscarriages.

Only people perform abortions.

 

[Angels_Unaware]

This is absurd. People die all the time. It is God’s will that we have a finite lifespan. That doesn’t make it ok for me to commit murder.

The fact that some (in fact many) humans die of natural causes before birth doesn’t make it ok for us to intentionally kill children before they’re born.

The fact that “abortion” is a synonym for “miscarriage” is a red herring. The distinction is between a “spontaneous” or “natural” abortion and an “induced” or “procured” abortion.

This really says it all.

IMO, God is pro-love.

In all except a minisculue number of situations, such as the certain death of the mother coupled with the impossibility of survival for the child, it is *pro-love * and anti-selfish
to allow the life in the womb to continue to live, and to not willfully cause death.

 

[tm30]

If this was offensive I do apologize but just know I was simply making reasonable assumptions and stating the facts and was not trying to insult or unintentionally insult you, Christianity, God or “God’s Plan.”

Spontaneous, natural death of an embryo/fetus is a residual effect of sin entering the world. Sin caused nature to become defective, and subject to the possibility of death even before exiting the womb. God does not “abort” or “kill” during a natural death. The death occured because man turned away from God, and we all inherit the curse of Adam.

Abortion, however, is an election of the mother (and/or father) to end a life outside the processes of nature, and, as such, constitutes “murder”.

 

[tm30]

Let’s take a look at this case:

"A young mother maintained that voices in her head told her to test her faith in God, causing her to repeatedly slam her infant son to the ground and down a flight of stairs. Jennifer Cisowski, 21, of Connecticut, killed her 8-month-old son Gideon Fusscas in his grandmother’s upscale Florida home on Aug. 21, later saying she believed he would rise from the dead if her faith were strong enough. Source: Tampa Tribune, Aug. 22, 2001

If this woman truly believed that God was speaking to her, how can people be so presumptuous as to punish her? Mustn’t we allow for the miraculous intervention of God even today? Maybe her son would have turned into the AntiChrist? These may seem like rhetorical points, but don’t they flow directly from Christian faith?

But she clearly wasn’t listening to God. What she did was evil, and it’s made clear in Scripture…

Luke 4:12

And Jesus answering, said to him: It is said: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

As to your second point, the ends never justify the means. It is impossible that God would encourage/coerce evil to cause a good result.

 

[Angels_Unaware]

Let’s take a look at this case:

"A young mother maintained that voices in her head told her to test her faith in God, causing her to repeatedly slam her infant son to the ground and down a flight of stairs. Jennifer Cisowski, 21, of Connecticut, killed her 8-month-old son Gideon Fusscas in his grandmother’s upscale Florida home on Aug. 21, later saying she believed he would rise from the dead if her faith were strong enough. Source: Tampa Tribune, Aug. 22, 2001

If this woman truly believed that God was speaking to her, how can people be so presumptuous as to punish her? Mustn’t we allow for the miraculous intervention of God even today? Maybe her son would have turned into the AntiChrist? These may seem like rhetorical points, but don’t they flow directly from Christian faith?

No, they don’t flow directly from the Christian faith. Not at all. Never are we instructed to live our lives as if we are not fully subject to the physical laws of the planet Earth, or to give up good sense, or to behave in any manner as if the here and now are not real and important. Rather, when Satan tempted Jesus to fling himself down from a cliff so that God would send his angels to rescue him, he rebuked Satan, “Ye shall not put the Lord thy God to the test.”

As for punishing the woman, she’s very likely schizophrenic, and subject to the evil of this world, but that is an entirely different topic. Her actions certainly have nothing to do with faith.