Holy Blasphemy

I’ve been thinking about life, death and abortion recently. Maybe because I’m home in Oregon and the weather is dark and dull and powerful, or maybe because there are a lot of little children in my family or my sister is pregnant or my mom keeps reminding me of how I should’ve died in childbirth due to a problem with my umbilical chord.

I’m not very passionate about the subject and don’t particularly care to get involved in debates, but the label ‘pro-choice’ pretty much sums up my opinion about every controversial topic. This is because I think life is hard and we all do the best we can; and more importantly, God doesn’t care enough about our mistakes to get his panties in a bunch. Would I have liked to have been aborted? Of course not! I’m firmly ecstatic about my life. So what if I was born a month early and should’ve had brain damage… that didn’t stop me.

Killing babies or embryos might be bad. It might be good. I don’t know. You are free to your personal and moral interpretation. However, to say that God doesn’t like abortion is ridiculous. God loves those embryos more than he loves the mother who couldn’t support it or love it or provide for it? God wants and needs that baby to be born and has so little control that when the mother and doctor conspire against God and end the life of that child, he sulks? I cannot conceive of a God like that.

Moreover, is human life so vastly preferred to all other species on the planet that God turns a blind eye to our rampant murder and destruction of animal life? We eat millions of eggs every day worldwide – what about the innocent chicken life that will never get to be born, has God no feelings about that?

Much more interesting is the reason Christians argue against abortion: babies are ‘innnocent’ – they claim. Innocents are free of sin and have a right to live; more of a right than the mother, who, having been alive for awhile, has accumulated sins. Now I can easily accept that babies are innocent. But Christian Dogma teaches that all humans are born into sin, through Adam’s seed and the Original Sin. We need Jesus because we are born into sin. We are baptised as infants because even babies have the stain of sin upon them. This is the center of Christian faith. Babies are not innocent.

Actually, in the early years of Christianity, babies were considered innocents and adults were baptised towards the end of the lives, preferably just before death. It wasn’t until St. Augustine, re-interpreting a Latin based translation of the Greek Bible, that we came to the idea of Original sin. St. Augustine is also the one who claimed that ‘the road to hell is paved with infants’. Obviously – all those babies that died before baptism would go to Hell. Unfortunately, this is the Christian God as he stands today. If baptism for the forgiviness of sins, through the grace of God mediated by the death of Jesus Christ, is necessary for salvation, then it means all babies in the world who die before baptism go to Hell.

Could God be such a hypocrite, as to be anti-abortion while at the same time refusing salvation to unbaptised babies? Who is worse, the mother who sends an embryo to the grave, or the god that sends it to Hell forever? And what difference does it make? If babies are not innocent, then why not kill them? What’s the difference between a sinful embryo with no experience, no consciousness, no memories, and a fully devoped sinful person with all of those and the ability to be aware of their own death?

Who knows, killing babies might be a sin. Is it a sin that God cannot, in all his grandeur, understand and forgive? If he can’t, then he has no right being God and I ask him to give up the role to someone more humane.