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5 Recommendations to the Pro-Life Movement

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abortionIt’s easy to assume that pro-life proponents are decent people who honestly want to see good done in the world. The problem is that their arguments are out of touch with reality, so let me make some suggestions that I think will make the discussion more effective for everyone.

It may be odd for a pro-choice advocate to offer suggestions to the pro-life movement, but I want them to be more in line with reality, and I can critique from a very different perspective than an insider can.

1. Don’t Deny the Spectrum; Embrace It.

When trying to shock someone with the downsides of abortion, would a pro-life advocate discuss the horrors of the “morning after” pill rather than talk about a late-term abortion procedure? Of course not. There is a spectrum of personhood from a single cell to a newborn baby, and pro-life advocates know it. Their “it’s a baby” claim for the fetus at every stage of development ignores the glaring fact of the spectrum.

If a pregnant woman sees her fetus as a baby or a gift from God, that’s fine. The problem is when that view is imposed on women who may have very different circumstances and good reason to see their pregnancy differently.

Today, the pro-life movement minimizes information and discourages all abortions. The result is that the abortions that happen are often delayed, resulting in the death of an older fetus. If the pro-life movement acknowledged the spectrum and worked with it, they would instead encourage early detection of pregnancy and a prompt discussion of next steps so that any abortion is done as early as possible. An early abortion is better than a later one from every angle. Of course, pro-lifers could put forward their argument against abortion, but making abortion a taboo subject delays addressing the problem and makes any abortion later than it needs to be. Instead of a naive zero-tolerance approach to abortion they would focus instead on minimizing the harm. (Let’s not pretend that overturning Roe v. Wade would end abortion. It would only allow states to regulate it themselves. Some would make it illegal, but even that would only end legal abortions in those states.)

Recognizing the spectrum would also free stem cell research from nonsensical constraints. (You’re delaying research into treatments that could improve public health because of a worry over the rights of cells?! Get serious.)

2. Embrace Allies.

While I’m pro-choice, I don’t like abortion. The pro-life advocate doesn’t like abortion. In fact, the scared teenage girl going to the clinic doesn’t even like abortion. No one ever said, “Gee, I’m feeling kinda gloomy today. I think an abortion would perk me up.” Some people see abortion as the greater of two evils and others see it as the lesser of two evils, but everyone sees it as a bad thing.

Why focus on the disagreement when both sides of the debate are actually in agreement? And here’s the really important agreement: no one likes the primary cause of abortion, unwanted pregnancy. Instead of the current conflict, all sides should be marching arm in arm toward a better way to minimize unwanted pregnancy.

3. Focus on Education.

Whatever we’re doing to discourage unwanted pregnancies in the U.S. isn’t working. Half of all pregnancies are unintended, and evangelical young adults are about as likely to have had sex as any other group. A no-sex-before-marriage attitude leads to early and less-viable marriages.

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the U.S., the annual birth rate was 56 per 1000 women aged 15–19. Compare this to 8 in the Netherlands. The U.S. abortion rate for that group of women was 30 per 1000, while it was 4 in the Netherlands. Clearly, there’s tremendous room for improvement.

The goal of the pro-life movement has been to stop abortion. Instead of swimming against the current with this approach, they should work with the current by stopping the need for abortion.

Teen sex is a bit like teen drinking. When a kid gets to be 15 or 16, the parent warns their child against underage drinking. But the wise parent gives a part 2: “If you do drink, or the driver of your car has been drinking, call me. I’ll pick you up anytime, anywhere, with no questions asked. Your safety is the most important thing.” The lesson: underage drinking is bad, but getting hurt while drunk is really bad (and avoidable).

Likewise, if a parent wants to tell the kid that sex is bad before marriage, that’s fine. Just give the part 2: “If you do have sex, you need to know how to have sex safely and use a condom.”

The results show that abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work:

A 2007 Congressionally mandated report found that, on average, students who participated in abstinence-only education had sex at the same age as students who had comprehensive sex education. They also had similar rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and used birth control at similar rates as students who had comprehensive sex education.

As children grow into adulthood, they get adult bodies. Wishing it weren’t so doesn’t help. Why wouldn’t we want to give them the owner’s manual that goes along with those new bodies? It’s like kids having access to the car keys without being given driver’s education.

Don’t our children deserve the best training for minimizing unwanted pregnancy? Abstinence-only training has been given a shot, and it doesn’t work. If you oppose the frank teaching of how to not get pregnant in Health class, avoiding abortion must not be the critical issue you say it is.

4. A “Pro-Life” Movement Should Treat Threats to Life in Priority Order.

There are roughly one million necessary abortions per year in the U.S. But around the world there are ten million deaths per year of young children that are not necessary.You want to protect life? Then do so by focusing on this much larger number of children in the developing world who die of mostly preventable causes. Jesus said nothing about abortion, but he did talk about helping the poor and sick.

5. Tell Politicians to Leave You Alone.

Politicians buzz like flies around the pro-life cause, eager to solve the problem. At least they say they want to solve the problem, but they have little motivation to do so. A solved problem doesn’t get votes, and as long as it’s unsolved, the problem remains a vote getter. Politicians benefit from the controversy, not a resolution, and they would stand in the way of the pro-life movement working in harmony with pro-choice advocates.

The Christian can become a marionette to the politician who can say “If you’re truly a moral person, you must vote for me.” Christians should just say no.

There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot,
to suffer it like Christ’s Passion.
The world gains much from their suffering.
— Mother Teresa

Photo credit: macropoulos

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/4/12.)

God Creates Evil

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unfalsifiableWe’ve recently seen that God has a hard time following his own Ten Commandments, but he has other moral lapses that aren’t covered by that list.

Slavery

Slavery is first on the bonus list of God’s immorality. I’ve written a lot on this issue already, so let’s keep this brief. I’ll summarize by saying that Old Testament slavery of foreigners was just like American slavery of Africans (more here and here).

Rape

God also has no problem with rape (Deut. 22:28–9), sexual slavery (Numbers 31:18), or forced marriage (Judges 21:11–12). The Bible has a long list of odd ideas about marriage and sex.

Homosexuality

God is on the wrong side of this issue, too.

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads. (Leviticus 20:13)

(More here, here, and here.)

A better source of morals than the Bible

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. Consider some highlights to see if mere humans can do a better job than God’s holy book.

  • Article 2: These rights apply to everyone
  • Article 3: No genocide
  • Article 4. No slavery
  • Article 5. No torture
  • Article 16. Marriage allowed regardless of race, nationality, or religion. Both spouses must consent. Divorce is allowed.
  • Article 18. Freedom to reject one’s religion

We can thank Western society for these principles, not the Bible.

Not only is the Bible on the wrong side of these moral issues, it also shows its early Iron Age origin on political issues. Again, some highlights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

  • Article 10. Fair trial
  • Article 11. The accused is innocent until proven guilty
  • Article 19. Freedom of speech
  • Article 20. Freedom of assembly
  • Article 21. Universal suffrage
  • Article 26. Right to education
  • Article 29: Democracy.

None of these come from the Bible. (I’ve written more on the Bible vs. the U.S. Constitution here.)

God creates evil

When bad things happen, where was God? Was he not paying attention? Was he powerless against the intrigues of Satan? No—the Bible makes clear that God creates the evil himself.

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, Jehovah, do all these things (Isaiah 45:7).

Is it not from the mouth of El Elyon that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:38)

When disaster comes to a city, has not Jehovah caused it? (Amos 3:6)

Of course, there’s always a Christian apologist eager to show how this is actually a good thing. Megachurch pastor John Piper says:

God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. … Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?1

With a god like this, who needs Satan?! And in times of trouble, you’re supposed to turn to the guy who brought you the calamity in the first place? Talk about an abusive relationship!

God is like the guy who sets a fire in the basement of an apartment building and then plays the hero as he sounds the alarm and rescues people.

The ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis?

What could God do and not be moral? Not killing, lying, and causing evil—he’s already done all these things. Not genocide, slavery, stealing, and rape—he’s already advocated these.

It’s an odd dictionary that has an exception to allow anyone to do these things and still be called “moral.”

God is like a petulant and pampered heir who’s always gotten his way and careens through life, oblivious to the harm he causes, with a train of Daddy’s minions to clean up the damage. In God’s case, it’s Christians who clean up after him, assuring everyone that whatever happens—from suicide for anti-gay bullying, to slavery and genocide in the Bible, to natural disasters—God gets only credit and never blame.

God is good; evil exists; God is all-powerful—
pick any two.
— Anon.

1 quoted by Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God (2011), 65.

Hoare’s Dictum

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simplicitySir Charles Hoare was a pioneer in computer science. He observed:

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

This applies to intellectual arguments as well: you can make the argument so simple that there are obviously no errors. Or you can make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.

You ask if radium exists? Pierre and Marie Curie gave a procedure for producing it. Refining radium from pitchblende is a lot of work, but there are no difficult philosophical impediments.

You ask how old the universe is? The scientific literature documents the experiments and data by which cosmologists conclude that there was a Big Bang. Again: lots of work, but we laypeople can easily access the conclusion.

You ask if God exists? I suggest: “Of course God exists. He’s sitting right over there!” or something equally straightforward. But no—we get convoluted, complicated arguments that fall on the wrong side of Hoare’s Dictum. There’s the Transcendental Argument, a long philosophical dissertation puzzling over what grounds logic and whether a mind must exist to hold it. If you break free by showing how it fails, there are seemingly endless variations that the skilful apologist will throw out, like Donkey Kong throwing barrels.

The Ontological Argument is another convoluted argument. First we define “God” as the greatest possible being that we can imagine. Two: consider existence only in someone’s mind versus existence in reality—the latter is obviously greater. Three: since “God” must be the greatest possible being, he must exist in reality. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t meet his definition as the greatest possible being. Here again, there are myriad variations that the apologists expects the atheist to rebut, ignoring the fact that they have the burden of proof.

Many arguments for God’s existence claim to be simple and straightforward—“the Bible is obviously correct” or “nature proves God exists” for example—but are mere assertions rather than arguments backed with evidence. Or, we’re told that the Bible says so: “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20).

To the rest of us, this sounds like, “Of course the Emperor has new clothes!”

When hit with convoluted argument like these for the first time, you’re left scratching your head, unsure what to conclude. These arguments are effective not because they’re correct (in fact, they fall apart under examination) but because they’re confusing.

The colloquial version of the argument is: If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, then baffle ’em with bullshit.

I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God,
“for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
— Douglas Adams

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/22/11.)

Why the Gospel of Mark Is Likely NOT an Eyewitness Account

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How do we know that Mark wrote the gospel of Mark? How do we know that Mark recorded the observations of an eyewitness?

The short answer is because Papias (< 70 – c. 155) said so. Papias was a bishop and an avid documenter of oral history from the early church. His book Interpretations was written after 120 CE.

Jesus died in 30, Mark was written in 70, and Papias documents Mark as the author in 120 (dates are estimates). That’s at least 50 years bridged only by “because Papias said so.”

Looking through the wrong end of the telescope

But how do we know what Papias said? We don’t have the original of Papias, nor do we have a copy. Instead, we have Church History by Eusebius, which quotes Papias and was written in 320.

And how do we know what Eusebius said? The oldest copies of his book are from the tenth century, though there is a Syriac translationfrom 462.

Count the successive people in the claim “Mark wrote the gospel of Mark, which documents an eyewitness account”: (1) Peter was an eyewitness and (2) Mark was his journalist, and (3) someone told this to (4) Papias, who wrote his book, which was preserved by (5) copyist(s), and (6) Eusebius transcribed parts of that, and (7) more copyist(s) translated Eusebius to give us our oldest manuscript copy. And the oldest piece of evidence that we can put our hands on was written four centuries after Mark was written.

That’s an exceedingly tenuous chain.

The sequence of people could have been longer still; we simply don’t know. Papias was the bishop of Hierapolis, in western Asia Minor. Mark might have been written in Syria, and no one knows how long the chain of hearsay was from that author to Papias. No one knows how many copyists separated Papias from Eusebius or Eusebius from our oldest copies.

Trash talk

It gets worse. Eusebius didn’t think much of Papias as a historian and said that he “seems to have been a man of very small intelligence, to judge from his books” (Church History, book III, chapter 39, paragraph 13). Evaluate Papias for yourself: he said that Judas lived on after a failed attempt at hanging and had a head swollen so large that he couldn’t pass down a street wide enough for a hay wagon. Who knows if this version of the demise of Judas is more reliable than that in Matthew, but it’s special pleading to dismiss Papias when he’s embarrassing but hold on to his explanation of gospel authorship.

Even Eusebius’s Church History is considered unreliable by modern scholars.

The story is similar for the claimed authorship of Matthew. A twist to this story is that Papias said that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew (or perhaps Aramaic), which makes no sense since Matthew used Mark, Q, and the Septuagint Bible, all Greek sources.1

The other gospels besides Mark

What about the other gospels? That evidence comes from other documents with simpler pedigree but later dates.

  • Irenaeus documented the traditional gospel authorship in his Against Heresies (c. 180). Our oldest copy is a Latin translation from the tenth century.
  • Tertullian also lists the four traditional authors in his Against Marcion (c.208), but he doesn’t think much of Luke: “[Heretic] Marcion seems to have singled out Luke for his mutilating process.” Our oldest copy of Tertullian’s book is from the eleventh century.
  • The oldest manuscript labeled “gospel according to Luke” dates from c. 200.
  • The Muratorian fragment, a Latin manuscript from the seventh century, may be a translation of a Greek original from the late second century (or maybe from the fourth). It lists many books of the New Testament, including the gospels of Luke and John.

Evidence arguing that the gospels document eyewitness accounts is paltry. Perhaps only faith will get you there.

If we submit everything to reason,
our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element.
If we offend the principles of reason,
our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
— Blaise Pascal

1Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? (Millennium Press, 1997), 41.

 (This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/20/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Inevitability of Gay Marriage

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gay marriage rightsA century ago, America was embroiled in social change. Some of the issues in the headlines during this period were women’s suffrage, the treatment of immigrants, prison and asylum reform, temperance and prohibition, racial inequality, child labor and compulsory elementary school education, women’s education and protection of women from workplace exploitation, equal pay for equal work, communism and utopian societies, unions and the labor movement, and pure food laws.

The social turmoil of the past makes today’s focus on gay marriage and abortion look almost inconsequential by comparison.

Christianity on the right side of social issues

What’s especially interesting is Christianity’s role in some of these movements. Christians will point with justified pride to schools and hospitals build by churches or religious orders. The Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century pushed for corrections of many social ills—poverty and wealth inequality, alcoholism, poor schools, and more. Christians point to Rev. Martin Luther King’s work on civil rights and William Wilberforce’s Christianity-inspired work on ending slavery. (This doesn’t sound much like the church today, commandeered as much of it is by conservative politics, but that’s another story.)

… but maybe not on same-sex marriage

Same-sex marriage seems inevitable, just another step in the march of civil rights. Two years ago, before the tsunami of legal wins for the gay rights side, Jennifer Roback Morse (president and founder of the Ruth Institute for promotion of heterosexual marriage and rejection of same-sex marriage) was asked if she feared being embarrassed by the seeming inevitability of same-sex marriage. She replied:

On the contrary, [same-sex marriage proponents] are the ones who are going to be embarrassed. They are the ones who are going to be looking around, looking for the exits, trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with them, that it wasn’t really their fault.

I am not the slightest bit worried about the judgment of history on me. This march-of-history argument bothers me a lot. … What they’re really saying is, “Stop thinking, stop using your judgment, just shut up and follow the crowd because the crowd is moving towards Nirvana and you need to just follow along.”

Let’s first acknowledge that Morse could be striving to do the right thing simply because it’s right, without concern for popularity or the social consequences. I would never argue that someone ought to abandon a principle because it has become a minority opinion or that it is ridiculed. If Dr. Morse sticks to her position solely because she thinks it’s right, and she’s not doing it because of (say) some political requirement or because her job depends on it, that’s great.

Nevertheless, the infamous 1963 statement from George Wallace comes to mind:

I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

That line came back to haunt him. To his credit, he apologized and rejected his former segregationist policies, but history will always see him as having chosen the wrong side of an important issue.

Uh … no, we were on the correct side of that issue all along!

Christianity has similarly scrambled to reposition itself after earlier errors. Christians often claim that modern science is built on a Christian foundation, ignoring the church’s rejection of science that didn’t fit its medieval beliefs (think Galileo and Creationism). They take credit for society’s rejection of slavery, forgetting Southern preachers and their gold mine of Bible verses for ammunition. They reposition civil rights as an issue driven by Christians, ignoring the Ku Klux Klan and its burning cross symbol, biblical justification for laws against mixed-race marriage, and slavery support as the issue that created the Southern Baptist Convention.

Arthur Schopenhauer observed, “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as self-evident.” And then the opposition claims that it was their idea all along!

The same-sex marriage issue in the United States is halfway between Schopenhauer’s steps 2 and 3. Check back in two decades, and you’ll see Christians positioning the gay rights issue as one actually led by the church. They’ll mine history for liberal churches that took the lead (and flak) in ordaining openly gay clerics and speaking out in favor of gay rights.

If someone truly rejects same-sex marriage because their unbiased analysis shows it to be worse for society, great. But it is increasingly becoming clear how history and the public will judge that position.

Truth never damages a cause that is just. 
— Mohandas Gandhi

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/4/12.)

Photo credit: Spec-ta-cles

God is as Believable as Unicorns

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God UnbelievableA chapter in Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is titled “The Dragon in My Garage.” In the spirit of Sagan’s story, here is an imagined exchange between you and me about my unicorn.

Me: I have a unicorn in my garage!

You: Wow—let’s see!

Me: You don’t want to just take my word for it?

You: Of course not—I want to see.

(I open the garage door.)

Me: Okay, here you go.

You: Uh … this garage is empty.

Me: No … uh, the unicorn is invisible. They can do that, you know.

You: Okay … can you make him make a sound?

Me: No. He’s silent, too.

You: Can we see food vanish as he eats it?

Me: Of course not—he’s magic. He doesn’t need food.

(You wander through the garage with your hands out in front.)

Me: What are you doing?

You: Trying to feel for it.

Me: Uh … no—he’s really small and he scampers away.

You: Can you hear him running? Like the sound of hooves on concrete?

Me: No—I told you he’s silent.

You: Well, how about spreading flour on the floor so we can see the footprints.

Me: Nope. He can float. And I’m sure he would, because he doesn’t like to be detected.

You: Can we can catch him with a net and weigh him? Can we put a sheet over him so I can see him moving underneath? Could we spray paint and see it on his body?

Me: No—he’s … he’s noncorporeal. Yeah, that’s it. Noncorporeal.

Of course, by now you’ve lost interest in this “unicorn.” Still, you haven’t falsified my claim, and I win!

But no one would accept this conclusion. By slithering away from every possible test, this supernatural claim has no evidence to support it. Any unicorn that has this little impact in the world is the same as no unicorn at all. We can’t prove it’s nonexistent, but it’s functionally nonexistent.

“You haven’t been able to falsify my claim” is true but irrelevant. This is backwards reasoning. The proper conclusion is: There is no evidence to support this claim, so there’s no reason to accept this claim.

Isn’t this how Christians evaluate the miracle claims of other religions? Let’s handle those of Christianity the same way.

Jesus is Santa Claus for adults
(seen on a bumper sticker)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/17/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia