Who do you love more?

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Most seem to favor saving the child.

What about that child’s siblings who will all be orphans now? Doesn’t that factor in? What if there was one sibling younger than the child in question? What if there were six younger and two older?

People who like to ponder this sort of stuff might like to see the movie “I Robot,” whose plot is partly about a decision a robot made whether to save a child or an adult when only one could be saved. The Robot weighed a number of options and chose the one that seemed logically correct.

Really I think if my human mind was telling me there was no way to save them both, I would pray that my eyes be opened so that I can see the solution God has laid before me. All things are possible with God. Don’t give up on either one until it’s too late and the proverbial fat lady has sung. Until then hang on to the faith for mortal and eternal life.

Alan
 
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Chrismasfetus:
If you happened to be in a situation where you had your child hanging off a cliff clinging to your hand and your husband/wife clinging on to the other, which would you let go? The child or spouse?
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Since we are making up imaginary situations, i guess I would just drink a redbull, grow wings, and save us all …
:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
 
I’m not sure that you can say who you “love more” in this case, but rather where should your priorities lie and what are your duties to your family? I believe that the Church teaches, albeit unofficially, that our duties are first to God, then to spouse, then to children (as been stated by a few posters here). I think I have heard Scott Hahn say the same (i tend to trust his teaching 😉 ).

If you absolutely forced me to make a decision, I would regretfully have to let go of my child… REGRETFULLY AND PAINFULLY.

I believe in the family… and loving your family… and I believe that the families’ success in holiness lies in the love the spouses have for one another. If they do not love each other deeply in front of their children they more or less have failed as parents. You have to teach by example and an unloving relationshiop in front of children is one of the worst things one can do.

That being said, if I were the kid in this situation and knowing what I know now as an adult… I probably would have wished my dad to let go of me rather than my mother. It would be hard for me to grow up knowing that the saving of my life costed my mothers and that the family couldn’t have grown further because of that.

Basically, I think when the mother/father is let go, you are also sacrificing the OTHER possible future children and family. Besides this, children who grow up in single parent households or with step-parents tend to have a greater chance of falling by the wayside or getting into drugs/alcohol as a means to get over the loss of a parent. What about the other children that you possibly have in the family that have to deal with the loss of their mom/dad.
I tend to think that they would have a harder time losing their parents rather than siblings. Not that they love their siblings less, i just think it is “different”.

God .
Spouse.
Children. 👍
 
Actually, if the decision to let go was truly up to me, I would let go of my husband. After all, he would be really ticked at me if I didn’t. :rolleyes:
 
This thread brings up an interesting situation. It appears that there is an argument for:

God
Spouse
Children

However, by letting go of you child are you not killing them? The right thing to do is not to let go no matter what. You shouldn’t make a decision knowing that your decision will cause the death of another human being.

This same situation could be extended to the abortion arena which is a more realistic real world situation that ultimately poses one with the same question. Should the spouse be saved or should the child be saved? When a woman is pregnant and her life is in danger we technically have a choice of saving the spouse or the child. The Church’s position is that we can not abort the child to save the spouse. So this seems to contradict the argument that the spouse should be saved. Basically, the only moral choice in the situation mentioned in this thread would be to not let go of either the spouse or the child. Just hold on an pray.

BTW, was this a trick question from the start? 🙂
 
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gavin52:
This thread brings up an interesting situation. It appears that there is an argument for:

God
Spouse
Children

However, by letting go of you child are you not killing them? The right thing to do is not to let go no matter what. You shouldn’t make a decision knowing that your decision will cause the death of another human being.
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I would have to disagree. I don’t think the decision of letting go is the cause of the death of another human being. The cause is whatever got those people into that situation in the first place.

For example, if you are holding on to two people during a flood and you know that by attempting to hold on to BOTH of them for too long, you will most likely get everyone killed. You realize the best chance of survival is that you MUST let go of one. By doing this YOU did not kill that one person, you did not cause the situation, you tried everything in your power to save them, but couldn’t hold on BOTH any longer. If you tried to hold on to both and ended up losing footing because of all that weight, and you all got swept up by the waters, did you kill everyone?

Perhaps a clearer hypothetical situation would be: You are on a hiking trip in the southwest, a snake bites two of your loved ones (child and spouse), but you only have enough antidote to save one. Which one do you choose? And if you choose one over the other did you kill one, as you suggest, since you made the decision NOT to give the antidote to that one?

God Bless.
 
James_2:24:
I would have to disagree. I don’t think the decision of letting go is the cause of the death of another human being. The cause is whatever got those people into that situation in the first place.
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We could go back further and say the cause was them getting up in the morning and deciding to go somewhere were they could get themselves in that situation. The most direct cause would be the letting go of one of them. It would be a decision to knowingly allow the death of one human being to save another when we don’t know for sure that all could be saved.
James_2:24:
For example, if you are holding on to two people during a flood and you know that by attempting to hold on to BOTH of them for too long, you will most likely get everyone killed. You realize the best chance of survival is that you MUST let go of one.
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“Most likely” is the operative term here. You have no way of knowing for sure if everyone is going to get killed. By God’s hand all of you just might be saved. Miracles do happen.
James_2:24:
By doing this YOU did not kill that one person, you did not cause the situation, you tried everything in your power to save them, but couldn’t hold on BOTH any longer. If you tried to hold on to both and ended up losing footing because of all that weight, and you all got swept up by the waters, did you kill everyone?
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By letting go your decision directly caused the death of another human being. You would be taking it into your own hands in deciding who lives and who dies, playing the part of God in a way. The correct thing to do would be to hold on “for dear life”. If one, both, or all of you slips it was not your choice.
James_2:24:
Perhaps a clearer hypothetical situation would be: You are on a hiking trip in the southwest, a snake bites two of your loved ones (child and spouse), but you only have enough antidote to save one. Which one do you choose? And if you choose one over the other did you kill one, as you suggest, since you made the decision NOT to give the antidote to that one?

God Bless.
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That is not a good hypothetical situation because your spouse would be capable of making a decision and I bet most spouses would choose to use the antidote on their child.

Also, the situation you gave and the choice of saving the spouse would for all practical purposes lend support to being able to abort a child to save a spouse. Same premise to the question. Pregnant spouse will die but child will live if the child is not aborted. Pregnant spouse will live if child is aborted. Same question, save the spouse or the child? Your choice? Your answer, based on your previous posts, is to save the spouse. For you to say otherwise would be to contradict yourself. Choosing to abort is against Church teaching. The correct thing to do would be to allow the pregnancy to continue and pray that in some way God will allow both of them to live.
 
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TheGarg:
God & His Church
Wife
Children

in that order…
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👍

Exactly! There are sound reasons for this. If the parents can’t stay together, the family falls apart.
 
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gavin52:
That is not a good hypothetical situation because your spouse would be capable of making a decision and I bet most spouses would choose to use the antidote on their child.
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Ummm…in the first situation the spouse would have a choice also. He/she could just say ‘drop me’. I really believe this comes down to a decision you do not make. You hold on unless your spouse says let me go. Even then it could be sinful to let him/her go knowing that it will cause their death. I think it’s morally wrong to ‘knowingly’ sacrifice one human being to save another. If that was acceptable then the abortion to save a mother’s life situation gavin52 mentioned becomes a problem. Why wouldn’t you sacrifice the baby to save the mother using the mentality of spouse over baby?
 
The love for a spouse and the love for a child are too totally different types of love so I couldn’t really say who I love more.

As for who would I let go? I wouldn’t let either of them go. I’d hold on.
 
Also, the situation you gave and the choice of saving the spouse would for all practical purposes lend support to being able to abort a child to save a spouse.
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There’s a big difference between the two scenarios. In the case of abortion, you’re doing something directly to kill the child. That is the intention. That is what makes it wrong. In the cliff situation, you’re doing something that will allow you to save one person’s life which unfortunately, but not intentionally, also leads to the death of someone else. The two situations are like self-defence as opposed to murder. It is not playing God, it is using the rules and reason He gave us. It is, of course, important to remember that according to the conditions of the scenario, one or both people will die and the lesser of those two evils is for one only to die.
 
Our marriage started with the three of us. God and us two. Now there are three kids with us and one on the way.

I cannot say if I love my spouse more or my children more. i would hope I love and cherish all equally. My childern will see acts of love towards my wife, the occassional hug and kiss and like wise she will see acts of love towards my children. I would encourage always acts of love from my children towards her and she will encourage acts of love towards me. there is never any jealousy and that is the true test.

If there is jealousy present for any reason then you can sincerely say you love one more than the other. This is imbalanced.

I can sincerely say that I love God most of all and he comes first. We have had situations where my wife has asked me to consider a certain situation from a humanistic / wordly / secular point of view (not out of badness or malice or anything like that) without giving much attention to the desires of God for us. I chose to try and follow God’s desire for us she knew I would. I have stated it to her. It may prove a temporary difficulty but with God’s grace, love always conquers the difficulty.

Look we are together for life no matter how difficult it gets. That, to both of us, is the greatest comfort. Our marriage has come from God and is based on God and if I am asked to choose, by anyone including my wife of children, between God and man then I will choose God’s precepts first.

This is how i reveal my tota committment to the family that God has given me. I am responsible for the image I give the family of God. I am responsible for the exercise of the preceps of God and his Holy church within the family unit. Since the family unit is the nucleus of society I am therefore responsible for His precepts being exercised for the greater good of the family and the wider society in which we find ourselves.
 
I’d have to save my kids. My husband is my best friend and I can’t imagine life without him, but my children would have to come first in that scenario.

In regular life though, my husband and my marriage come first. The kids will be fine so long as my hubby and I are fine, so I get the best of both worlds!
 
I love them both, equally, but in different ways. You don’t love your children the same way you love your husband.
 
Most of us chose our spouse because we loved them.

We chose to have children because we loved our spouse (and God, of course!).

God gave us children to learn to love more than we could have imagined possible.

All that nice stuff being said… The answer really will be what is most
practical in the situation. Presumably, your spouse weighs more than your child, but could also hold on tighter. With this in mind, I assume both spouses would work together to save the child first.
 
Hard question. If my spouse didn’t drop me, I don’t think that I would ever feel quiet right with him again. My instincts are to save my child and I would drop my spouse. Luckily, when I showed this thread to my husband, he agreed. We would both want to die rather then risk the life of our child. I would want to be dropped and so would he. Saying all that, I think that my husband could pull both myself and one of our child to safety. He is a pretty strong guy and works out with weights. Myself, on the other hand, am over eighty pounds lighter then my husband. I don’t think that I could pull him up, not by myself. I don’t even know if I could hold onto my husband, even if it was just him alone that I was trying to save. So for the time being, I’ll agree with another poster and stay away from cliffs.
 
Hi Everyone! (I am new on the forum too and believe me, I have lots of questions and musings on my faith lol)

I am a newly wed and so I’ve read lots of books in the past year about Catholic marriage. From what I’ve read, (including Kimberly Hahn—AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME) the Catholic p.o.v seems to be much like someone else already addressed:
The relationship between a person and God is what the marriage is based on…the marriage and the love of the spouse is what the family is based on, so to cut that order is to create a schismed family unit.
So basically, God first, Spouse second, Children third. That is the logical and God created order.
I think the reason that the Church places emphasis on a strong relationship between the spouses is because it it is necessary for children to see and feel stability that their parents are always backing each other, which leads to the good of the children.
(P.S. This was a topic on Oprah the other day in which a panel of women discussed how sometimes mothers neglect their marriage to “supermom” their kids, which ends in the failure of the marriage and the disintegration of the family anyway)
But I am green at this–I don’t have kids yet…I am just trying to make a strong “rock” of our marriage to build our family on!
 
I’ll defer answering the question to ask a more relevant variant of it. When there is serious disagreement between a teenage child and one parent about discipline, should the other parent, as a general rule, side with the parent? What kind of conditions would warrant a parent to side with the child against the other parent?
 
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