Here’s Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who apparently has some sort of direct line to God, talking about abortion and rape at a debate earlier tonight:
I just struggled with it myself for a long time but I came to realize: Life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.
Mourdock has now put out a statement trying to sort of retract what he said, and a spokeswoman for Romney, who has endorsed Mourdock, has distanced the presidential contender from Mourdock’s remarks. See Politico for more details.
@dirtyhippiefeet – love that idea of Mary being the sixth or so girl the angel asked! Because as the story stands, well, her saying “I consent with all my heart” doesn’t mean a whole lot given it’s an angel and God who’re telling her they want her to be pregnant. Free will? Yeah, right. Massive power imbalance, anyone? I mean, saying NO to a God with a track record of drowning the whole world, demanding prisoners of war be slaughtered, killing an entire country’s first-born childern, etc, isn’t something I’d expect of anyone, let alone a young teen.
Unless of course she was a teen with ATTITUDE. Now there’s a scenario worth picturing … Mary telling God what a useless old fart he is and to piss off.
Preferably in a Lunnon accent, innit.
The Kitteh’s: But there is also Abraham bargaining with God about Sodom and Gomorrah.
@pecunium
Abortion is specifically mentioned in the Talmud. The subject is adressed without ambiguity. As are c-sections, and other things. If G-d made a world that would advance, why wouldn’t he have given us the tools to address those issues?
I feel your pain here, lauralot. That’s how I feel about Akin running for Senate in MIssouri. But in the ballot booth, we Missourians will have a way to shut that whole thing down.
Oh, and the Lord says it’s his will for everyone in Indiana to vote for Donnelly. It’s a good thing there is an all powerful, omniscient deity that always agrees with me!
By the way, I think a great way to entertain kids in public is to bring along handheld games like Leapster or Nintendo gameboy. They’re easy to carry and you can bring along extra games. However, when you do that, there will be the self righteous scolds who will gripe about “parents nowadays using electronic gadgets as babysitters”.
As a parent of 2 small children, I must say I have spent a great deal of time agonizing over the amount of noise they make in public. I still do actually. I want to stab my eyeballs with a fork when my kids are screaming, tantruming, or otherwise being ridiculously loud in public. There have been many times when I know everyone in the restaurant, airplane, waiting room hated me. What I’ve gained through all this is an incredible empathy for parents with loud out of control children in public. You can generally tell the difference between the parents like me (cringing in horror from embarrassment) and the ones that are oblivious.
Apropos of nothing, but this somehow makes me think of MRAs:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=485638561458135&set=a.282737008414959.69905.282718838416776&type=1&theater
Author Sara Douglass did a fantasy/alternate history series that does away with any notion of consent for Mary, and got rid of God, and instead just has angels running around raping women everywhere, and then forcing their illegimate children into Hell, It was an interesting(if horrifying) spin on the story, and explained the basis for the blatant woman hating in Medieval Christianity(the Angels despised women, and victim blamed them for their rapes).
But yeah, Jesus was the result of a gang rape by angels, as per this story, specifically created to start a religion worshiping a false God that stood in place of the raping angels. Instead though, Jesus found the love of humans to be divine, and had to be crucified before he ruined everything for the raping angels.
This guy belongs in that book.
On the Mary giving consent idea, there is an example from the old testament where god controls a person’s thinking: he harden’s pharoah’s heart against letting the Israelites leave Egypt, thereby directly causing the Egyptians to have yet more plagues occur – which is psychopathic. Therefore, even if Mary “consented”, how could one tell that it was true consent and not god making her consent?
On the children in public point, I have given up going to the movies now. It was bad enough when 8pm or 10pm sessions had people with babies, but then they started letting toddlers in too. Although, that said, adults talking loudly about the plot or not having their damn phones turned off is at least as annoying. When I was on-call, back in the day of pagers with 1-mile radii and when they only gave you the extension that the person called from, and I had a 10-minute response time back to the hospital, I pretty much stayed in the hospital for the whole on-call period. So did everyone else. Saturday night on-calls in hospitals = drink drive crashes and suicide attempts. I can’t believe that most people taking phone calls or texts in a movie are that type of on-call, particularly as I never see them damn well leave once the call comes through. 🙂
Kiwi girl: This comes up at Passover, and it seems to be some translational error (no… say it ain’t so), the English might better, read, “And God strengthened his convictions”. The idea is that Pharaoh wasn’t making a decision out of reasoned thinking, but abject fear, and God made it possible for Pharaoh to act on his wishes, not his fears.
Diogenes: You aren’t paying attention. The Talmud isn’t Mosaic. Moreover, it postdates Hippocrates, and so isn’t relevant to the asinine “logic” in that piece I referred to.
@pecunium thanks for pointing out another translational error (LOL perfect word of god). One question: from the alternative translation, it still appears that god was dicking around with the pharoah’s mind, so does my point still stand: how can one possibly tell if any decision / consent was freely given without god interference?
This is so much more fun than incorporating peer review into a journal article… 🙂
There is a movie theater in the state capital here that offers Baby Day on Tuesdays. Every show before 7:00pm is A-OK for babies, and since it’s clearly stated that it’s Baby Day, people who aren’t cool with it know to stay away. It’s a great compromise. People with babies and toddlers get to have a day out with their kids, and nobody who doesn’t want to be in the theater with babies has to put up with it. Perfect.
They also don’t put up with inconsiderate assholes in their theater. They have hilarious PSAs before the movie that say clearly “no talking, phoning, texting, etc. because it disturbs other people.”
Here’s one of their actual PSAs:
And here’s an actual voicemail some little [censored] left for them after being kicked out for breaking their clearly stated rules:
It’s very much worth the drive to go there for a movie. They serve food and beer (wine too), show movies in 3D, and offer an annoyance-free movie experience. Uncool to plug them I know, but my local theater chain is overrun with those who like to talk amongst themselves and light up the theater with their cell phones. I prefer to drive for awhile and make a fun event of movie going since I have the option.
Plus, Baby Day.
@freitag235 so if you don’t arrive with a donkey, they give you one so they can take it off you? It’s arse, not ass, dammit! Admittedly, you can sit on both. And we kiwis do put the “r” sound in there like the Brits, so they’re not homonyms.
You North Americans and your funny ways. Oh, and when you come to NZ, please refer to “fanny packs” as “bum bags” as fanny has a completely different meaning over here (similarly in Australia and the UK)….
So I lost my mind and ranted about this on a social networking site on which I partake with my home town childhood friends and family. I deleted it, but it went something like, See who you’ll vote for to save a buck? Wow what you people will do to save a buck MAYBE! (and you probably won’t even get a dollar back in taxes.)
etc. sooo. Hopefully I’m not disowned by anyone. I did delete it.
kiwi girl: One can’t. It’s an imponderable. If one argues for an actively interventionist God. The argument, re Pharoah, is that God was only making it possible for Pharaoh to do what Pharaoh wanted. God didn’t want Pharaoh to be able to say, “I only did it under duress.”
@pecunium re the imponderables, these only seem to occur when a situation could be interpreted as god being a psychopath. There never seems to be an imponderable where the situation is clearly interpreted as god being good. This appears to be a way of giving god a free pass on horrible outcomes.
I was also thinking about mistranslations in the bible, based on our previous short conversation. What I was wondering was this: if god is omnipotent,then god would have foreseen the mistranslation occurring, so god must have wanted the translation to happen otherwise he would have stopped it from occurring. So why didn’t god just get the correct word transcribed in the first place? Did he want people to be wrong in their translations for only a few hundred years, but was fine with things being corrected after that? What’s the point of that?
Back onto the original topic: pregnancy isn’t the only possible outcome from rape, so are STIs, PTSD, physical damage, etc. So that would mean that any person who was raped who got an STI (with or without pregnancy), for example, that was god’s intention. god the psychopath strikes again.
I feel a Monty Python intervention is necessary at this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBqe5xvYnNc
All of which is a reminder of why Ceiling Cat is a totally superior deity to
NugganYahweh. 😉Cushions not crucifixions! 🙂
Now there’s a slogan I could get behind! 😀
Freitag, are you in ATX? Every time Mr. HK and I try to go see something at Alamo it’s sold out.
🙂 The other thing with the OT is that it is a regression back to the lowest stage of moral development (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development). So much of fundamentalist xtianity is based on stage one, not stage four – and stage four isn’t even the highest stage – it’s still at the concrete reasoning stage of human cognitive development (if you follow Piaget).
“How can I avoid punishment” (and therefore the converse: anyone who is punished deserved it) is hardly positive advertising for developed moral thinking.
It would be an interesting legal defense. “Yes, your honor, I did rape that woman. But she got pregnant, therefore I was doing God’s work and shouldn’t be punished.” And in 34 US states he can legally sue for parental rights and that’s current fact, not some politician’s theological belief. It’s true. Thirty-Four fucking US states give parental rights to rapists, so they can continue to torture their victims some more.
Dear Dog but I do so hate these people. I do not believe in the malevolent and vicious god they worship. I can’t do it.
@hellkell, I’m not in the capital itself, but it’s a couple of hours drive and that’s not so bad. You and Mr. HK can buy tickets online and they’ll be waiting for you at the box office. I do that so I don’t make the drive for nothing. And it is so worth it not to have the yapping and texting, plus have someone bring me dinner and a drink. (Great place to take a date, too. Just sayin’.)