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.
Heretic!
The topic has made the NZ news media: http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/7858312/Rape-pregnancy-Gods-will-Republican-candidate
Completely off topic, I clearly need this otherwise my Java learning will come to nothing, because of my lady brain and lady hands: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/7861675/The-ladies-get-their-own-laptops
How can I possibly learn Java on a normal black desktop?
Kiwi girl: I was unclear. If one accepts an activel interventionist God one cannot assume any act wasn’t caused by that God.
That’s the imponderable. Blagovitch commuting all death penalties… might’ve been God. Bush laughing at a condemned woman… might’ve been God.
My deciding to by a baguette this afternoon, might’ve been God.
That’s the problem with an actively interventionist God, it’s completely destroys the theologic underpinnings of free-will. Which is why the meaning of that passage of Exodus is so important. If what God did was make it possible for Pharoah to exercise his free will, that’s one thing. If what he did was jerk him around like a puppet on a string, that’s another altogether.
And, to make the shitheel this post is about even worse.
1: He’s the only senate candidate for whom Romney did a television add.
2: He thinks no insurance company should provide birth control.
Not that it ought not be covered by co-pay… it ought not be covered at all.
If you want birth control, you have to pay full-freight, out of pocket.
So, he not only likes the idea of rape victims being forced to bear the rapists’ children, he wants to make women that much more vulnerable to it happening.
Colour me unsurprised.
@pecunium ah, my background leads me to automatically presume an actively intervening god, and I thought the bible leads to that belief also, as god is written as intervening everywhere. For the other possibility, I cannot see how one tell the difference between a non-intervening god and having no god at all, because there would be no difference in outcomes, i.e. god could not be invoked as a reason for any outcome. So this latter situation doesn’t even produce the “god of gaps”.
So I was reading the reaction from Republicans and basically they have no idea why people are upset but they do know people are upset and damn it, stop being so upset!
It is almost as if they want to lose.
Kiwi Nothing in the bible require an active (i.e. regular/ongoing) intervention. Part of the point of the bible is to point out the places/times/situations in which God did intervene, and by extension context to understand the otherwise inexplicable.
God’s intervention is supposed to be shown as extraordinary… miraculous.
Maybe he’s not an arsehole, maybe he’s just a Calvinist. Oh wait, that’s the same thing.
The Bible loses me at the point … actually as a story, with God as a character, it loses me from the get-go; but if nothing else, the Flood would be the last straw. It’s not even the matter of wiping out humanity, it’s wiping out all the land animals as well. Yes, of course the story takes the moral stance and the attitude towards animals of its time, I’m well aware of that. But literalists still push the idea of it actually happening – slaughter on an unheard-of scale – and in the same breath tell us this psychopath is perfect, loving, etc etc. It sickens me.
Cushions Not Crucifixions!
(I am so stealing that, kiwigirl. 😉 )
Kitteh’s: There are two things there: one is the probably reason for the flood story: The infilling of the Black Sea, about 7,000 years ago. While it was happening the water was movig as much as three miles a day. At it’s narrowest point it’s about 148 miles across, so the rising waters would have chased refugess for about 25 days. At the wider parts it’s about twice that, so it could have been 50 days of fleeing the rising waters (a “flood from the deep”).
So the oral history/mythology had to account for everything in the known world being wiped out.
@ Kittehs
Child me always felt like the Bible had started out with God as a terrible and frightening force and then they’d tried to sanitize it by adding the love stuff later. So basically, like what happens in families when there’s a resident abuser and everyone tiptoes around them trying not to piss them off and tries to convince themselves/outsiders that the abuser is a good person really.
Yes, I knew about the Black Sea flood, but it’s the “God is perfect but slaughters animals because he doesn’t like human behaviour” tale we’ve received through so many generations that pisses me off. If it was still at the level of “god/gods are powerful and can be complete arseholes and nobody expects anything better of them” it would make more sense. It’d be almost like Odin, who for me is less horrible than Yahweh because he wasn’t all powerful; he was trying to stave off Ragnarok however he could. Doesn’t make him good but for me it highlights what a tow-rag the fundy God is. He didn’t need to do any of this stuff. The oral traditions of ancient peoples trying to explain a calamity are one thing; taking them as literal truth, and pushing it as the actions of a wonderful, perfect, loving, moral being just don’t work.
Cassandra – that’s a perfect comparison! Dressing up bald power, abusive power, as some sort of love.
I much prefer the way kitties mess with one’s mind.
if anyone had said that twenty, ten, hell, five years ago, it would have been career suicide. Seriously. What the almighty flying fuck is happening here?
Any trolls, btw? I has a sad today and could use a verbal punching bag.
Troll alert on the GGW thread. Pell, probably.
I mean GWW.
Weeee, gww is so cray zeeee!! thnx cassandra!!
Kitteh’s: We are the products of our past. Those who built that narrative to explain a world ending catastrophe (dude grabs what he can of his animals onto a boat and manages to keep just far enough behind the traps of submerged trees, hills, buildings, to survive) are gonna tell a pretty fucked up tale if when they try to rationalise it.
Put him in a world where all the gods are angsty, abusive, ideas, and you’ll get one like that. Move forward, and make it a story in a mythos where the godhead has become all-powerful, and you have a recipe for built in cognitive dissonance.
All too true. Couldn’t get a better example of cognitive dissonance than a fundy of my acquaintance whose only retort to “God committed mass murder on several occasions” is “God is perfect.”
And I say that as someone who has plenty of beliefs that could fall under the cognitive dissonance umbrella! :/
This guy knows that women, you know, vote and stuff, right?
Captainbathrobe – yeah, but they’re working to fix that bug.
I can’t find it now, but someone said in this thread that Mary wouldn’t have free will if she didn’t have original sin… At least according to Saint Augustine, free will AFTER the fall merely means freedom to follow one’s desires, which are tainted by original sin. BEFORE the fall humanity had a deeper kind of free will. You could say, in contemporary philosophy speak, that humanity had some kind of libertarian free will before the fall but merely classic compatibilist free will afterwards.
According to that interpretation, Mary being free from original sin would mean she had MORE control over her decisions than any other human being.
The whole free will business is sort of problematic when you’ve got a God who’s ready to zap you for not doing things his way. It’s a perfect example (as CassandraSays pointed out upthread) of an abusive relationship.
And sticking the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden and saying “Don’t Touch” to a couple of beings with the moral development of toddlers? If God had had a stove, he’d have left a boiling pot with the handle sticking out where any two-year-old would grab it and get scalded, I swear. As a straight story, it’s either entrapment or incompetence, neither of which is appealing.