This post on Well Spent Journey got 73 likes from bloggers.
Here’s the first one:
I’m writing this post primarily for my own convenience. During my online journeys to r/atheism, “freethought” blogs, and beyond, I encounter the following arguments so frequently that it seems sensible to fact-check them all at once.
The Claim: “Religion has been the primary cause of war and oppression throughout the history of mankind.”
The Truth: In their comprehensive Encyclopedia of Wars, Phillips and Axelrod document the recorded history of warfare. Of the 1,763 wars presented, a mere 7% involved a religious cause. When Islam is subtracted from the equation, that number drops to 3.2%.
In terms of casualties, religious wars account for only 2% of all people killed by warfare. This pales in comparison to the number of people who have been killed by secular dictators in the 20th century alone.
I’m surprised that these Internet atheists have never heard of The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, either. 100 million deaths were caused by atheistic regimes in the last century. One Hundred Million Deaths.
Anyway, here are the other challenges in post:
- The Claim: “Thanks to modern science, the days of religion are numbered. Humanity’s superstitious belief in miracles and sky gods will soon be replaced by an era of atheism and rationalism.”
- The Claim: “The dark ages were a time of ignorance and superstition, thanks to religion’s negative influence on scientific progress.”
- The Claim: “Jesus was a mythical figure. The New Testament stole most of its stories from other ancient sources.”
All are dealt with in the post on Well Spent Journey. When I look at these arguments, and compare them to our good, deductive, science-based arguments for theism, it does make me feel sorry for atheism.
Questions for pro-abortion people
This post was too short, so I thought I would link to Well Spent Journey’s “Twelve Questions to Ask Your Pro-Choice Friends“.
He’s got a list of twelve in the post, but I like these ones because they really put the pro-abortion person on the defensive:
3. Pro-choice philosophers typically define the value of a human life in terms ofutility (development of brainwaves, consciousness, etc.). If this is true, then why is it morally acceptable to sacrifice pigs and dogs for the purpose of medical/scientific research, but not human infants? Neurologically speaking, it’s not at all controversial to say that pigs and dogs are in many ways “more advanced” than human infants. Yet society only accepts sacrificing the former for experimental purposes. Do you? If so, why?
4. Do you support paternal child support laws? (Consider this quote from Dr. Michael Pakaluk: “[Suppose] that the reason the woman has sole right to decide to have an abortion is that the status of the fetus somehow depends upon how she chooses to regard it: thus, the fetus is not a child until the mother decides that it is, say, at some point later in pregnancy. But then a consequence of this is that the man, through having intercourse with the woman, does not conceive a child. Rather, he conceives only a fetus, and the fetus at some later point becomes a child, only because of the woman’s deciding that it is. But then the man’s role in intercourse is not a cause of a child. He brought into existence only a fetus, and it was the woman’s decision to ‘continue the pregnancy through term’ that made it a child. But if so, it is not clear why the man should have any responsibility for the child. How could the woman bring a claim for paternity support against him? After all, he could rightly reply: ‘You decided to regard the fetus as a child; so the child is your responsibility.’”)
7. What is your position on “two-minus-one” abortions? Are they ethical? Should they be legal?
8. Many of those who identify as “pro-choice” are particularly concerned with issues of inequality and discrimination. Are discriminatory abortions (such as sex-selective abortions) legally or morally defensible? Suppose that scientists developed a prenatal test to determine whether or not one’s child will be homosexual. Would you support a woman’s legal right to abort her fetus solely because of his homosexuality?
By the way, I added Well Spent Journey to my blogroll. For some reason, it was not already there!
WINTERY KNIGHT 
The comments on the NY Times article on Abortion Question #7 reaffirmed all of my preconceived notions of pro-choice argument. It boiled down to “true for you but not for me” and “I’m pro-choice -but- not in this case for irreconcilable reasons”.
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Can you paste a couple of the worst ones here? One of the reasons why I am so pro-life is because there is nothing good morally about abortion. It’s very much “I’m going to screw around and kill anything that stops me from feeling happy”. That’s not moral. I want nothing to do with it. Or with premarital sex for that matter.
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The top few are pretty good representations. The fourth can’t even get basic population growth facts correct, and finds a more pressing ethical concern in -having- children than in butchering them. The third one even includes “prayerful consideration”, but I’d be afraid to find out who the prayer was directed towards…
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“I am totally pro choice, but honestly, my reaction to this is “if you are not prepared to have twins, don`t use fertility treatment.” For that matter, if you are not prepared to have twins, don`t have children. I can understand with triplets or more, but with twins, it just seems a bit ungrateful and sad. Just my feeling, of course everyone can choose for themselves.”
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“I am pro-choice but this is clearly a case of someone using abortion to correct a mistake that she and her husband made. It’s one thing to be a stupid teenager who got pregnant and another thing to be a 45-year-old who spent thousands of dollars deliberately trying to get pregnant and then regretting the result. The way to avoid multiples anyway is to implant only one embryo, which they could have requested.”
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“At the end of the day, it is not my place to make a decision like this for anyone but myself.
If you’re “uncomfortable” with it, don’t do it. If you never have to make this choice (a choice I haven’t had to make either), be thankful and move on with your life.
I know a number of women who chose to have abortions. With only one exception, the decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was reached only after thoughtful (and yes, even prayerful) consideration. I can’t imagine facing that decision with respect to a wanted pregnancy with a healthy fetus.
Chances are that you’ll never know whether someone you know has a reduction of this sort. But the need to pass moral judgement on these women, the need in our society to pass judgement on strangers for a whole host of reasons, never fails to amaze me. ”
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“Everyone is focusing on the ethical question of killing one fetus to reduce a twin pregnancy to a singleton.
With the skyrocketing global population, though, I question whether it’s ethical to allow all these fertility treatments to take place to begin with.
The planet doesn’t need more people. Those who can’t conceive kids, be it for fertility issues or because they’re a same-sex couple, should adopt. Shut down the fertility industry altogether.”
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The absurdity and down-right stupidity of pro-choice arguments still amazes me. I guess it shouldn’t any more. They use the same “arguments” (aka sound bites) over and over. It’s not like they have anything new. It’s just that I can’t help but think, after all the many times we have debunked these stupid arguments, isn’t word going to get around and they’ll stop using them? Apparently not.
My favorite stupid pro-choice argument is the “Oh, but they’ll be poor” argument. Narcissism and selfishness disguised as compassion. Geez…I guess if it’s so horrible to be poor that we should kill those who MIGHT end up poor, what does that say about those who are ACTUALLY poor?
The overpopulation myth is closely related – pretending to care about future people and the planet to rationalize murder of the unwanted. Again, if there are too many people, according to these pro-choicers, and we need to eliminate some of them, then why stop at killing the unborn?
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8 might be my favorite for the amount of illogical angst and answers it would evoke.
Or, suppose they find a way to test for predisposition to atheistic or theistic beliefs. Or laziness. Or sociopathic tendencies. Or whatever. Should we be able to abort on those as well?
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What amazes me about the pro-choice people is that they actually seem to approve of abortion. I am pro-choice myself, but I’m totally against abortion. Yes, these are two very different things!
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Well pro-choice people and pro-abortion people agree that the unborn child deserves no more protection then cockroaches have under the law during 9 months of pregnancy.
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And actually it’s worse than that because we don’t subsidize people who kill cockroaches.
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And pro lifers aren’t forced to subsidized the killing of cockroaches with tax payer dollars.
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Also pro-lifers can’t be fired for refusing to kill cockroaches against their consciences.
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So what pro choice really mean it babies have no protection. Pro life people have to pay taxes to subsidize abortion. And pro life medical personnel have to kill unborn babies again their consciences. It doesn’t sound very pro choice does it?
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Wow, you really jumped on me. Why do you think pro-choice people must be just like “pro-abortion” people? I certainly do think unborn children deserve protection. Why did you assume I did not?
Somehow I get the impression that you didn’t really think about it. Here’s my message for you: Unless you think better, you’re not going to save unborn children. If you really cared about those children, you’d stop your knee-jerk black-and-white thinking and try to understand the issues a little better.
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