Replies to post #6491 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[brainlessone]

mlsoft 30 % of all conceptions abort spontaneously, mostly during the first trimester. Do you differentiate between spontaneous and non spontaneous death of the fetus?

It has recently been found that implantantation and fetal growth is controlled by certain sugars and their receptors available on the lining of the womb and on the egg. It is also thought that correction of these sugar/receptor interactions will decrease the number of aborted yet perfectly fertilized eggs. If this medical therapy is instituted, does this mean that doctors are playing god by not allowing what would otherwise abort?

[Zeev Hed]

There is clearly a difference between various faith as to the point of "life starting". I always thought that the basis of the "lifers" argument is that the unborn is deprived of its constitutional rights (life freedom and the pursuit of happiness), rather than the physician carrying on the abortion be accused of murder. Is that the case? If that is the case, I may want to turn this argument around a little.

Zeev

[goodluck]

<<What is not precluded is that God, in his infinite foreknowledge, obviously knows which fetus will be born alive and which will not and that would suggest the possibility that those which He knows will die before birth are not ensouled.>>
Mlsoft,
Once you travel down the road of God's "infinite foreknowledge" and his goodness than I don't think you can truly and with appropriate humility say that anything that is is wrong. Everything, past and future, is known and somehow accounted for on God's scale of justice. I'm not trying to be cute here, but what people do, they do, and what happens happens. We can't judge why it happens or what the justice or the goodness of it is, we can only react to it humbly and with gratitude to God for giving us life in the first place. This is what Dostoevsky meant in The Brothers Karamazov when he had Jesus respond to the Grand Inquisitor with silence and a kiss, predictably infuriating him. All the rest of it--anger or righteous ingignation or even simple punishment--is just a kind of pride that you (the righteously indignant one, that is) can actually judge God's creation, which to humans is ultimately unfathomable. To a true believer, even death isn't a calamity--it means union with God, presuming of course that you have accepted Jesus in your heart.