On Creationism

Evangelical Christians in the US are very strongly anti-abortion. However, it was not always so. As recently as 1970 the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) - the largest Protestant denomination in the US - advocated for legalising abortion. A Complete Reversal The landmark law case in the US was Roe v. Wade, in 1973, and abortion has been legal since that time. Jane Roe was the pseudonym of the woman wanting the abortion; Henry Wade the district attorney who stood for the state, prohibiting it. Roe was represented by two attorneys; one was Linda Coffee, a member of the SBC. The Baptist Press interviewed her after the successful conclusion of the trial. The decision of Roe v Wade was generally regarded as a good one by the SBC. To evangelicals of that time abortion was seen as a Catholic issue. You can find a list of abortion-related resolutions made by the SBC from 1971 onwards  here . It is clear that in 1971 they saw abortion - quite reasonably - as undesirable, but it ...

Understanding Psalm 137 Psalm 137: 9 How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones Against the rock. For reference, the Hebrew can be found here: http://biblehub.com/text/psalms/137-9.htm Why was it written? Perhaps a bit of historical context is in order. When the Psalm was written, the Jews were in exile in Babylon. Clearly they were not happy about it, and what we read in Psalm 137 is the glee one of the captives feels at the thought of the Babylonian children getting bashed against rocks. However, as this page makes clear, a lot of good actually came of the exile. The Jewish people developed a strong independence that it is still apparent today, and allowed them to survive the best part of two millennia without a homeland. Furthermore, the Jewish faith was re-made at this time, explain why this tragedy had befallen the people, and to some degree borrowing concepts from the Babylonians (and consequently the Christian faith would be quite differen...

Abortion is a tricky moral subject, one I am thankful I have never had to deal with on a practical basis. It is also a topic Christians like to trot out whenever their are floundering in a moral discussion. They assume all atheists are pro-abortion, and so, whatever the topic, say atheists cannot be moral if they condone the murder of humans. Is a single cell with human DNA a human being? We all shed skin daily, and that skin is dead cells with human DNA. No one sheds a tear for those cells, so why shed a tear for a fertilised cell? The fertilised cell has the potential to be a person, but is not itself a person. It has none of the attributes that we value in our fellow man. Nevertheless, Christian fundamentalists insist that a fertilised cell has the same rights as an adult, and specifically that killing a fertilised cell is murder. What they do not seem to realise is that a huge number of fertilised cells never make it to the second week of pregnancy: Here is a page at Medl...

When do you achieve personhood? Many Christians (but certainly not all) say a fertilised human egg is a person, and use this to argue against abortion. Putting this in perspective, up to 75% of fertilised eggs - or "people" as these Christians call them - never make it to term; many never even get embedded in the womb. I am not talking about abortion, but nature taking its course. That means that for the 130 million people born each year, there are nearly 400 million "people" who die before they are even born . And if Christianity is right, this is a system God has engineered. God is causing 75 "people" to die before they were even born every minute ! Of course, Christians argue God slaughtering million, billions even is perfectly moral - they have to to excuse the genocides like the Flood. I disagree. What the Bible actually say Let us see what the Biblical situation really is. Exodus 21:22 “When men strive together and hit a pregnant ...

An interesting philosophical discuss revolves around the issue of when a human becomes a real person. You could argue that it is not until 18 in a legal sense, as this is the age you can vote, but I guess most people would say an earlier age. How about 10, when you are judged capable of telling right from wrong? One thing that sets us apart from the beasts is our self-awareness. Perhaps we are only really us once we become self-aware, at 15 to 24 months . Earlier still? Back in the womb, perhaps, when the brain forms: Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. http://www.scientificameri...