Twitter chatter after Roe

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What does the public think about the recent rejection of Roe protections for abortion? My last article responded to a Christian tweet that made overblown claims about Christian generosity. Now I’d like to use that same tweet to sample public opinion. I read the several hundred replies, and several themes emerged.

The hypocrisy of Christianity and conservative politics

Here’s the tweet that started this.

Many are saying that now Roe is overturned Christians need to care for pregnant women, foster and adopt children, provide counseling, etc. In other words, they are saying that now Roe is overturned Christians need to keep doing all the stuff they have been doing all along.

Yes, Christians will keep doing all the stuff they have been doing all along, and that’s the problem. Christians will keep voting for conservatives to make sure that Uncle Sam never reduces the burden on pregnant women, whether that pregnancy is wanted or not. They’re determined to avoid policies like universal healthcare, affordable housing and daycare, free preschool and kindergarten, free lunch to needy public school students, paid parental leave, a serious effort to reduce gun violence, or any other policy where the state makes it easier to be a parent. These initiatives are all pro-life and pro-child, and conservatives who turn their backs on them are obviously not. “Pro-life” is a nice-sounding label, but that’s not an accurate description—they’re just anti-abortion.

(Audience participation time! Now that conservatives have torn down Roe protections, what will be their next goal? Will it be making the path easier for women to raise a child with new parent-friendly programs, or tearing down additional civil rights? Discuss.)

You say these policies would be too expensive? I think the results in much of Europe show that they are practical, but let’s imagine you’re right. Then call yourself pro-business or anti-tax or whatever, because you’re clearly not pro-life.

Another Supreme Court decision that showed Christians avoiding their social responsibilities was the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision. It allowed a corporation to opt out of regulations that offend its religious beliefs. That’s right, the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores now has religious beliefs, and as a Christian corporation, it didn’t like paying for contraceptive care for its employees. (This is more irony: reliable contraception would be an excellent way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, which would reduce the demand for abortion.)

Of course, any new pro-parent policy won’t fix the problem of a girl getting pregnant in high school or a woman who is pregnant following a rape, but this illustrates how unconcerned Christians often are about their own hypocrisy.

One final item to add to the Christian hypocrisy list is how a conservative church community treats an unmarried woman who’s pregnant. Given all their anti-abortion bombast, you’d think such a woman who carried her pregnancy to term would be a saint. But how many are instead shamed as sluts?

Assaults on crisis pregnancy centers

A crisis pregnancy center is an organization that tries to persuade or trick women with an unwanted pregnancy to not have an abortion. They can provide useful information or resources to someone who would like to keep the pregnancy, but to someone who wants an abortion, they sometimes lie about the dangers (in fact, an early abortion is much safer than a delivery) or pretend that they can arrange an abortion (they won’t).

There are about 2500 CPCs in the U.S., and more than a dozen have been vandalized since the leaked Supreme Court opinion two months ago. One popular slogan has been, “If abortions aren’t safe, you’re not either,” though I’ve only heard of property damage, not attacks on staff.

To the anti-abortion Christian, I say: I agree that this damage is wrong. Peaceful protests are fine, but violence is not the answer.

Yes, Christians will keep doing all the stuff they have been doing all along, and that’s the problem.

But you understand what drives the rage, right? CPCs often lie. Pregnant women come in, fooled by the signs in the window and seeking an abortion, and they find supportive staff eager to provide sonograms, nutrition advice, and future appointments. Their unstated goal is to keep the woman in the dark as they run out the clock to make her ineligible for an abortion.

Think of the stark warning label on a pack of cigarettes. Every CPC brochure or billboard should have an equivalent that makes clear that they don’t provide abortions. One hundred percent of women leaving a CPC after their first visit should be clear on this, if not from the large, unambiguous signs in the window, then from the clinician saying, “You realize you can’t get an abortion here, right?” in their first meeting.

To the anti-abortion Christian, I say: now it’s your turn. Can I get an Amen? Agree with me that if CPCs can’t do their work without lying, then they shouldn’t exist.

The Twitter conversation touched on several more points, to which I’ll respond next time.

The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing:
that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses
to morality and to truth in this country
if you will just get yourself called “reverend.”
— Christopher Hitchens, about Jerry Falwell

Christian generosity after Roe?

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Amid all the debris from the recent Supreme Court’s discarding of the Roe protections for abortion, I came across a smug Christian tweet.

Many are saying that now Roe is overturned Christians need to care for pregnant women, foster and adopt children, provide counseling, etc. In other words, they are saying that now Roe is overturned Christians need to keep doing all the stuff they have been doing all along.

Are there millions of Christians helping care for needy Americans? I’m sure there are. America has lots of social problems—homelessness, lack of decent jobs, drug addiction, poor nutrition, poverty, poor education and more—and I appreciate all donations of time and money Christians make to this cause.

My complaint with this tweet is that it suggests that donations through churches have been both adequate and substantial. They are not.

Follow the money

Americans are generous. We give almost half a trillion dollars in philanthropy every year. Of that, religion gets $136 billion. And of that, churches get about a third and religious organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse and World Vision get the rest.

I’d like to focus on donations to churches because the offering plate that Christians see at every service is a tangible symbol of their ongoing contribution to their church’s budget (even though most donations probably come as checks in the mail or electronic transfers). Let’s round up and say that U.S. churches get $50 billion per year.

The problem is that churches are terrible examples of charities. A well-run charity spends about ten percent of its income on administration and fundraising (overhead), with the rest spent on programs (operating the soup kitchen or after-school tutoring program or whatever the charity does).

The church’s “program” is conducting church services. Shoehorning a church into the mold of a charity makes a poor fit. Churches have enormous overhead—far more than ten percent. A study done by Christianity Today estimated 43 percent of the church budget for salaries alone. In terms of mission and finances, a church is more like a country club than a charity.

How much income passes through this inefficient machine to operate the charity on the other side—five percent? Two percent? We don’t know because almost all churches hide behind a loophole that requires all U.S. nonprofits to open their financial records to show how they spend their money, except for churches.

What about the larger fraction of the $136 billion that goes to religious nonprofits? Some goes to no-strings-attached good works—clothing or feeding the needy, for example—but this category also includes missionary programs convinced that people in central Africa are desperate for Bibles but are good in the malaria, jobs, and peace departments.

Based on the scanty information we have, I’m going to estimate that the church offering plate produces $1 billion per year in good works in the U.S. Again, that’s a lot more than nothing, and I applaud Christians for it. But to return to the original tweet, how big a contribution is that?

Is charity local?

Many Christians hold the quaint notion that local charity will cover local needs. This works if there are plenty of wealthy congregations in an area but not so well if a poor region is trying to help its poor residents.

Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia

I remember driving through the poor, predominantly Black neighborhood of Church Hill in Richmond, Virginia. I was struck by how many churches there were—the map above shows twenty churches in about one square mile. Who supports all these churches? The residents who attend them, of course, and they probably have much better things to spend money on. Many parishioners in these congregations are the needy.

My complaint with this tweet is that it suggests that donations through churches have been both adequate and substantial. They are not.

Government charity

The other source of money to help those in need—a much larger source—are the federal, state, and local governments. Remember that “government” is not some foreign overlord but is another word for us. It’s a lot more us than a church is—there are 380,000 churches in the U.S., and none of them are me.

Let’s run through the biggest government contributions to social welfare. Social Security provides over one trillion dollars per year as income to retired and disabled people.

Medicare provides $776 billion per year for medical insurance for 60 million Americans, mostly older people.

Medicaid provides $600 billion per year for medical insurance for 74 million low-income people.

State and local governments invest $57 billion in housing and community development. Temporary Aid for Needy Families (colloquially called “welfare”) is another joint project. Its annual budget is $31 billion.

States’ biggest contribution is education to give people skills to make a living: $316 billion per year for public school and $167 billion for higher education.

Do the math—that’s a lot more than the perhaps $1 billion that comes from the church offering plate. Christian charity is great, but let’s not delude ourselves with how large it is or how the needy are helped in this country.

There’s more to say in part 2.

The God of the Bible
is pleased by obedience,
not by independence.
That’s why his people
are called “followers.”
— Neil Carter, OnlySky columnist

25 reasons we don’t live in a world with a god

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Christians are sometimes asked what evidence supports their views, and they’re often forced into embarrassing answers. For example, Creationist Ken Ham admitted that his mind was made up on scientific questions, and nothing will change it.

Christian apologist William Lane Craig made the same admission and tipped his hand about the motivation for his work. It’s not been an honest exploration of the evidence but a quest for rationalizations to soothe the fears of the little boy that he was, decades ago, when he first discovered that people die.

Christianity had its chance to create a Christian utopia with Europe. Spoiler: it wasn’t so great.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander

Now we turn the question around. Atheists, you demand that the Christians be open minded, but what about you? Are you open minded? What evidence would it take for you to say that God exists?

I want to pursue some new ideas, but first let me summarize the answer I’ve given before.

For me to have a personal epiphany of God’s existence won’t do. There are so many conceivable natural explanations for such an experience—drugs (recreational or medicinal), mental illness, hunger or mental stress, someone playing a trick, and so on—that I couldn’t trust such a thing as genuinely supernatural. The answer is to crowdsource it. That is, it’s not just me evaluating this evidence, it’s everyone. On one day, everyone in the world sees “Yahweh exists” spelled out in stars or pebbles or lines in the sand in a way that they could understand. Or, one night everyone has the same dream in which a god explains his plan. (I’ve explored this idea more here.)

This still falls victim to Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Sufficiently advanced aliens could dupe us into imagining the supernatural when we were just seeing technology. Still, this would be convincing evidence that some amazing intelligence is out there, which would be vastly more evidence than we’ve seen to date.

Clues that we don’t live in God World

Since God won’t provide this evidence, we’re on our own, looking for clues for God’s existence. What would we need to see to know that the Christian god exists? Said another way, how would we know that we’re living in God World?

My answer: if we lived in God World, we would expect to not see things that argue that this god does not exist. This is a cumbersome way of putting it, but we need to see it that way. We are swimming in so many clues that we don’t live in God World that my answer is: I might conclude that God exists but only if all these clues didn’t exist. You Christian apologists who care more about our belief in God than he does need to go back in time and erase these deal killers from our reality, because they must be resolved before I can consider your positive arguments for God.

Here’s a way to see it. Imagine a used car salesperson pointing to a “real beauty” on the lot and telling you how fast it can go, noting its gas mileage, praising its roomy back seat, and so on. You walk around the car and notice one tire is flat. And one wheel is missing. And one window is smashed. And on and on. Obviously, these fundamental problems must get fixed before you have any interest in the top speed and gas mileage. Each of these problems is a silver bullet that kills any car sale.

Similarly, these problems with the God hypothesis are each a silver bullet, a deal killer, to belief in God. The difference is that a flat tire can be fixed, while we can’t fix a trait of reality that wouldn’t exist in a world with a god.

The first clue that we live in a godless world:

1. Because we’ve seen what Christian society looks like

Christianity had its chance to create a Christian utopia with Europe. Spoiler: it wasn’t so great.

Christianity was in control of Europe for 1500 years. During that time, mystical creatures populated the world, there was little besides superstition to explain the whims of nature, and natural disasters were signs of God’s anger.

Christians might say that Christianity has no goal for humanity to learn about nature. It has no goal to create the internet, GPS, airplanes, or antibiotics. It has no goal to improve life with warm clothes, safe water, or plentiful harvests. It has no goal to eliminate diseases like smallpox, polio, or covid.

And they’re right: Christianity’s goal is instead to convince people to believe in a story that has no evidence.

We find more data on this question of Christianity vs. social health today. U.S. conservatives tell us that loss of Christian belief has caused society to degrade, but is that true? If loss of Christian belief caused society to degrade, we should at least see a correlation between the two. That is, the better the social metrics (homicides, teen pregnancies, income inequality, suicides, and so on) in a society, the higher would be the Christian belief within that society.

In fact, we see the reverse. Social statistics in 17 Western countries show that Christianity is inversely correlated with measures of public health. While we can’t conclude anything about the cause—does higher Christianity lead to worse metrics or does a failing society provide a fertile environment for religion?—it’s obvious from this that more Christianity doesn’t cause a better society.

A 2017 United Nations list of the world’s happiest countries makes the same point. Norway, Denmark, and Iceland are at the top, followed by much of the rest of godless northern Europe. The U.S. is 14th.

To see this from yet another angle, American Christians aren’t a noticeably more noble subset of society.

When Christianity was in charge, Europe received no obvious supernatural benefit. Society progressed in fits and starts just like you’d expect in a godless world.

See also: How Christianity Retarded Modern Society by 1500 Years

2. Because religious beliefs reflect culture

Muslims unsurprisingly come from Muslim countries, Hindus from Hindu countries, Christians from Christian countries, and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but people predominantly adopt the religion (or lack of religion) of their culture. In the dozen or so countries that are 98 percent Muslim, what are the chances that a baby raised there will become Muslim?

Christian apologists will say that Muslims aren’t Muslim because their religion is correct but simply because they were raised in a Muslim environment, but they need to explain why the same criticism doesn’t apply to their community as well. (More here and here.)

Let’s take a step back to see where this series of articles is taking us. I’ve written many articles (1) arguing against Christian apologetics and (2) arguing for atheism. This series can be thought of as a prequel to the first category, clues all around that tell us we don’t live in a world with a god.

Continue with more reasons here.

Jesus wants to date you
but doesn’t want to put in any effort.
You should dump him.
— commenter Han Solo

Pro-life Christians as civil rights trailblazers?

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Take a look at how a pro-life advocate wrapped up his argument. I don’t know when I’ve been talked down to so overtly.

This is from “All Human Beings Are Valuable” by Tim Barnett (part 1 of my response to his article is here).

The debate isn’t over when life begins. That’s settled science. The debate is over when life is valuable. You see, pro-lifers argue that every human being, regardless of race, or gender, or size, or age, or ability, is valuable simply because they’re a member of the valuable human race. You don’t earn your right to life by having certain characteristics like the correct race, or gender, or size, or ability, or age. No. You have it in virtue of being human….

Folks, we’ve been here before. The Nazis referred to some humans as life unworthy of life. Does this sound familiar? Pro-life proponents, religious or not, believe all humans have a right to life, including unborn humans.

Wow. Just … wow. Do I laugh? Do I cry? Do I grab a barf bag?

I didn’t realize that conservative Christianity was the engine behind every U.S. civil rights improvement. With Barnett representing conservative Christianity, I now imagine him standing behind President Johnson as he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I see him arm in arm with African-American civil rights leaders in Selma in 1965. I’ll mentally place him at every major civil rights milestone since. I’m picturing him today as the Pride parade marshal sitting in the back of a convertible, draped in a rainbow flag and waving to admirers.

Yes, Martin Luther King was a Christian pastor, but modern evangelical Christianity doesn’t trace its civil rights roots back through Dr. King. Yes, a century ago Christians were at the forefront of social change—prison reform, child labor laws and compulsory public education, women’s suffrage, pure food laws, and more—but social improvements like these are of no interest to today’s Evangelicals. And yes, William Wilberforce was a Christian who led the anti-slavery movement in Britain in the early 1800s, but Southern pastors of that time had easy work making a godly pro-slavery argument based on the Bible.

A cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter.

Last time I checked, conservative Christianity was not leading the civil rights parade. Obergefell (same-sex marriage becomes legal nationwide), Loving v. Virginia (ditto mixed-race marriage), the racist policies of Bob Jones University—conservative Christianity seems to always be dragging its heels, forever on the wrong side of history for every civil rights issue. Conservative Christianity’s political wing, the Republican party, is right now behind gerrymandered districts and laws designed to disenfranchise people of color. We mustn’t forget that “conservative” means resistant to change.

Pro-life Christians, check back with us after conservative Christianity builds a track record of positive change aimed at improving lives. Until then, don’t compare us to Nazis or lecture us about the superiority of your moral position.

That’s not to reject the idea that all lives matter, but the lives we’re talking about are those you don’t need a microscope to see.

See also: Why Is Christianity Conservative? Shouldn’t it Be Leading the Charge for Change?

Summary

We’ve covered a lot in these two articles (part 1 here). Here are some takeaways.

  • The “But my argument isn’t religious, it’s scientific!” argument is bullshit if they’ve redefined words to support a predefined conclusion against abortion. That kind of biased thinking is how religion works, not science.
  • The attempt to reclassify these pro-life arguments as scientific rather than religious fails. With their argument back in the Religion bin, the conflicting religious opinions from Judaism, the Satanic Temple, and more are back in play. That means that the zero-tolerance Christian pro-life argument has no more standing than the Jewish argument that abortion is part of a complete program of health care.
  • The redefinition of “human being” to encompass zygote (single cell) to newborn and everything in between fails as a thought experiment, it isn’t common usage, and it fails as a dictionary definition. The spectrum argument shows that the focus is logically placed on the enormous difference between zygote and newborn, not the uninteresting similarity.
  • The spectrum argument is useful when it forces the anti-choice Christian to confront the many differences between zygote and newborn by naming that spectrum. Simply putting a name on it makes plain that, no, a single microscopic cell and an eight-pound newborn are not the same thing.
  • The example of self-righteous bluster for the moral high ground above may help prepare you for seeing it in your own discussions.

A Steinway piano takes as long to complete as a human baby. It’s not a piano on day one; at best it’s a stack of lumber. It’s only a finished piano when it comes out of the factory. In the same way, a cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter. And a fetus is not a baby.

Pro-lifers claim to be defending life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell and forcing that on society by law doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

See also: Five Emotional Pro-Choice Arguments

What harm would it do if a man told a good strong lie
for the sake of the good and for the Christian church
… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie,
such lies would not be against God,
He would accept them.
— Martin Luther

Do atheists just need a father figure?

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It’s Father’s Day in the U.S., so let’s take a look at an odd theory that attempts to base atheism on the lack of a good father figure.

Paul Vitz was a professor of psychology. His Faith of the Fatherless (1999) attempts to use Freudian techniques to conclude that “modern atheism originated in the irrational, psychological needs of a few prominent thinkers.”

Which Freud are we talking about?  

Presumably this is the same Sigmund Freud who concluded that, according to Karen Armstrong in A History of God, “a personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever.” Armstrong continues:

[Freud concluded that] God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshiped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.

I wonder if Vitz really wants to hold up Freud as a reliable critic of religion or if he wants to cherry pick just the bits from Freud that he likes. (I’m guessing the latter. Vitz does a lot of cherry picking.)

If I presented this defeater to his case, he would accuse me of biased selection of my examples. He’d be right, of course, but why is it okay for him but not me?

The defective father hypothesis

Vitz uses Freudian thinking to conclude that atheists are atheists because of the absence of a good father. Disappointment in one’s earthly father leads to a rejection of the heavenly Father.

He’s yet another Christian apologist who concludes that atheists don’t exist and are actually theists. They aren’t atheists because there’s no god; rather, they know that God exists but suppress or reject that knowledge for psychological reasons.

The core of Vitz’s “defective father hypothesis” seems to be this observation from Freud: “[Freud] makes the simple easily understandable claim that once a child or youth is disappointed in and loses his or her respect for their earthly father, then belief in their heavenly Father becomes impossible.”

He then lists believers such as Blaise Pascal, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had present and loving fathers and atheists such as Voltaire, Freud, and (wait for it!) Hitler who had absent or unloving fathers.

(There’s reason to argue that Hitler was actually a believer, but let’s ignore that for now.)

This is the argument of a scientist? This is no comprehensive survey; it’s just cherry picking. This correlation that he’s selected can be easily turned around: it’s not that atheists are driven by a poor home life to petulantly reject the Father who is obviously there; rather, Christians are coddled by the strong and wise guidance of their human father, and when they mature, they remain too weak to face reality without the crutch of a father who’s far more powerful than they. They then project a supernatural extension of that caring father onto the universe.

I half expected to read Vitz saying that if atheists had had good fathers, their hearts, like that of the Grinch, would’ve grown three sizes.

Related: Daddy issues: Do ‘defective fathers’ lead children to reject the idea of God?

If I could provide the opposite list—famous Christians who had no father figure and famous atheists who did—would Vitz reject his hypothesis? For example, let’s take one of modern Christianity’s premier thinkers, C. S. Lewis. Here’s what Lewis said about his father: “God forgive me, I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel in the week.”

Would this cause Vitz to walk away from his poor-father hypothesis? Of course not. I’m sure he knew about this example but chose to ignore it. If I presented this defeater to his case, he would accuse me of biased selection of my examples. He’d be right, of course, but why is it okay for him but not me?

Uri Geller predicts the election

Uri Geller the mystic used the same empty reasoning in a Facebook post made shortly before the Trump/Clinton election. He declared that Donald Trump would win. Why? Because “Donald Trump” has 11 letters and “11 is a very powerful mystical number.”

Not enough evidence for you? Well consider this, Mr. Skeptic: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, and more also have 11 letters in their names!

Like Vitz, Geller simply ignores the inconvenient counterexamples such as George Washington (16 letters), Thomas Jefferson (15), Abraham Lincoln (14), and Teddy Roosevelt (14), just to take the faces on Mount Rushmore.

Epitaph

What I find personally obnoxious about Vitz’s claim—and again we’re in the realm of anecdote and not statistics—is that my own father was present, strong, and loving. He also emphasized education and reason, and I’m the result. I could argue that this and many other examples refute Vitz, but he and his hypothesis are a waste of time.

With Father’s Day in mind, I’d rather pass on a powerful story written by Charles Handy, an English economist and author. He describes the funeral of his father, a quiet and modest man who had lived his life as the unambitious minister of a small church in Ireland.

When [my father] died, I rushed back to Ireland for the funeral. Held in the little church where he had spent most of his life, it was supposed to be a quiet family affair. But it turned out to be neither quiet nor restricted to the family. I was astounded by the hundreds of people who came, on such short notice, from all corners of the British Isles. Almost every single person there came up to me and told me how much my father had meant to them—and how deeply he had touched their lives.

That day, I stood by his grave and wondered, Who would come to my funeral? How many lives have I touched? Who knows me as well as all of these people who knew this quiet man?

When I returned to London, I was a deeply changed man. Later that year, I resigned my tenured professorship. More important, I dropped my pretense of being someone other than who I was. I stopped trying to be a hot shot. I decided to do what I could to make a genuine difference in other people’s lives. Whether I have succeeded, only my own funeral will tell.

I only wish that I could have told my father that he was my greatest teacher.

What if the pro-life argument were not religious?

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Is the pro-life argument stronger if it’s not based in Christianity?

The Stand to Reason ministry claims that its arguments aren’t religious but are firmly grounded by science. One such argument is “All Human Beings Are Valuable” by Tim Barnett. This video opens with Barnett opposite an unidentified woman who made an excellent and relevant addition to the abortion debate. Judaism has a clearer position on abortion than Christianity does, and abortion has a role in health care for a Jewish woman. I’ll add that the Satanic Temple makes its own religious arguments supporting abortion as a valid option. Why then should conservative Christianity get to impose its religious views on society? Why not Judaism instead? Or, let’s give every woman with an unwanted pregnancy the right to decide for herself how to handle the problem.

Barnett sidestepped the question and instead argued that his pro-life position isn’t religious—it’s scientific. It’s hard to imagine religion not being at the heart of his motivation when he works for an organization with a conservative Christian statement of faith, but let’s hear him out. He first quotes an embryology textbook that makes the unsurprising statement that each of us began as a single fertilized human egg cell.

Seen properly, persons aren’t killed with abortion, they’re prevented.

What is a human being?

Next, he quotes moral philosopher and atheist Peter Singer, who says that a single cell, because of its Homo sapiens DNA, is a “human being.” But read that quote in context to see that Singer is giving that as just one plausible definition of “human being.” And according to that definition, living skin cells that you scratch off are also human beings, since they also have H. sapiens DNA in them. Is that really the definition Barnett wants, a definition that gives a human zygote no more moral standing than scratched-off skin cells?

Let me push back in response to this broad definition. Here’s a thought experiment: picture a human being. You could picture just one or many, and you could picture ones you know or strangers. This thought experiment might bring up images of individual family members, people on crowded city sidewalks, or a newborn baby asleep in a bassinet. What it doesn’t bring to mind for me is an invisible cell you can’t see without a microscope. I haven’t done a poll, but I disagree that “human being” in common parlance includes the single cell that a baby starts as.

The dictionary agrees. Using Merriam-Webster, “human being” directs us to “human,” which leads to this definition of “man”: “a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning.”

So here’s what we’re looking for: bipedal primate, like great apes, brain development, speech, and abstract reasoning, none of which a single human cell has. Or move up a level to see human beings within the class of mammals. A mammal provides milk for its young and has hair, a neocortex, and three middle ear bones. Again, the single human cell strikes out.

He might respond with the Argument from Potential, that the zygote isn’t a human being yet, but it will be. He’d be correct, but by admitting the zygote isn’t a human being now, he would undercut his own argument.

Here’s a radical approach for a ministry looking to avoid a religious argument. They could argue that the Bible says little to support the anti-abortion argument. The Bible’s offering is meager when the highlights Christians point to are verses like “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” and “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” which does little to counter a god who cares so little for the “human being” in the womb that he aborts half of them through miscarriage. That modern Christians should shed tears over a single microscopic cell or equate that with a baby would be laughable to the patriarchs in the Bible.

See also: What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?

Also not a religious argument

Another article from the same ministry was written a day later and used the same template. This one is “Why Pro-Choicers Insist Pro-Life Arguments Are Religious” by Alan Shlemon.

Shlemon also says that his argument isn’t religious.

I began my debate by claiming abortion should be illegal for the same reason that it’s illegal to kill a fourteen-year-old, a four-year-old, or a four-month-old: It’s wrong to kill innocent human beings. If the unborn is a human being just like born children, then it’s equally wrong to kill the unborn….

Notice that when I make my case, I don’t cite the Bible. I don’t invoke God. I’m not making a religious argument.

He starts with the presumption that abortion is immoral (more on this later). His argument requires that the newborn baby and the zygote be in the same category so he can declare, “If it’s murder to kill the newborn, it must be murder for the zygote. How can it be otherwise? They’re the same thing!”

The argument begins to come apart when we list the similarities between the newborn and the zygote: they both have Homo sapiens DNA … and that’s it. I wonder what all the pro-life fuss is about if this is the core of their argument. Very little tender poetry is written about the kind of DNA in the cells of one’s beloved.

pro-life science - blue-green spectrum
(image by author)

My response: the spectrum argument

To see the newborn and the zygote from a more realistic perspective, consider the color spectrum above, which makes a smooth transition from blue to green. We can debate where blue ends and green begins, but it should be easy to agree that blue is not green. In other words, the two ends are quite different.

The same is true for a spectrum of personhood. Imagine a single fertilized egg cell at the left of a nine-month-long spectrum and a trillion-cell newborn on the right. That’s already a huge gulf, but it gets wider. That newborn is far more than just a trillion undifferentiated cells. Its cells have specialized into 200 different types, and they are organized and connected to make a person—it has arms and legs, eyes and ears, a brain and nervous system, a stomach and digestive system, a heart and circulatory system, skin, liver, bones, and on and on. The newborn is a person, the zygote is not, and the gulf between them is enormous. By comparison, the difference between the newborn and, say, a young adult is trivial.

Contrast this long list of fundamental differences between the newborn and the zygote with the ways they’re alike, which is merely that they’re the same species.

I say that the newborn is a person, the zygote isn’t, and it’s a spectrum of personhood in between. I’ve argued with many anti-abortion advocates who have disagreed. No, they’re both persons, they say. They’re both humans, they’re both human beings, they’re both babies, and I’m sure they’d try to reclaim any other word I’d propose to highlight the difference. But we’ve already seen with the definition of “human being” that the dictionary can be an obstacle to those with the urge to redefine words.

I’m trying to find a word that describes the spectrum. I want a noun that the baby is and the zygote isn’t. I say the newborn is a person and the zygote isn’t, but I’m flexible. Perhaps my pro-life antagonist has a better word. It shouldn’t be hard. Think of the words we have in English for the new baby: newborn, infant, baby, kid, one-year-old, toddler, and more, each referring to a slightly different being. Surely we can think of a word to make clear the enormous difference between zygote and newborn. If “person” isn’t it, then I challenge anti-abortion advocates to offer something better.

Seen properly, persons aren’t killed with abortion, they’re prevented.

Is that really the definition [he] wants, a definition that gives a human zygote no more moral standing than scratched-off skin cells?

Going to extremes

I’m looking at just two points along the spectrum, the beginning and the end. I’m trying to simplify, and the anti-choice argument is most brittle when it insists that even back to the single cell, women can’t be trusted with power over their own bodies.

The Christians I’ve argued with online often demand to know where I draw the line beyond which abortion should be illegal. I answer that I have no opinion. That’s an important question, but I have no expertise or interest, and it’s been answered hundreds of times in legislatures around the world. Referring to the spectrum above, we can disagree on where the blue/green dividing line is, but surely we can agree that blue is not green.

The anti-abortion argument is indeed religious

Let me return to my claim that this anti-abortion argument is flawed because it doesn’t collect the facts and find the best explanation but begins with its conclusion that abortion is immoral. This is clear because of the focus on similarities (if they have the same DNA, they are morally equivalent) rather than admitting that this is tenuous and exploring the issue more broadly to search for a more sensible argument. In other words, they poked around the argument space, found an argument that gave them the conclusion they wanted, redefined troublesome words as necessary, and stopped. Why stop there instead of anywhere else? Because they had an agenda. Why is this agenda religious? Because both authors are writing for an evangelical Christian organization, and I’m certain they’ve made overtly Christian pro-life arguments before.

Returning to the opening of Barnett’s video, he quoted someone who argued that abortion fits in a Jewish worldview. I added that that’s also true of the worldview of the Satanic Temple, and that of additional religious communities. Barnett tried to sidestep these religious responses by recasting his argument as scientific, not religious.

But this dodge failed, and the challenge remains. The First Amendment prohibits government, whether federal or state, from “an establishment of religion.” Imposing the Christian anti-abortion views as law, which some state governments are poised to do, violates that Constitutional guarantee.

A few final observations in part 2.

You can’t eliminate abortion.
All you can do is make it more dangerous.
— paraphrase of a comment by Chris Charbonneau,
Fall of Roe podcast