“Quantifying Christianity in the US”
“Good news Pastor, seat-butt surface area has continued to trend in a positive direction.”
Heh… we just count. Though a measure of surface area would certainly help to counter declining counts of church attendance since the size of the average butt seems to be ever increasing.
When asked, is the US a christian country, is Christianity the biggest religion in the world, etc. Suddenly everyone is christian.
When asked, are christians who go to a gay church christian, the answer will be a resounding no
1 Like
Pff. You’re an actuary! You can’t look at enrollment, you need to sumproduct the pbpm!
FWIW I was thinking of “Does Christianity get preferential treatment?” for the thread title as that seemed to be the tone of the original tangent that has gone a few different ways at this point.
How Christianity controls US politics?
Or something like that?
1 Like
“One Nation, under only the Christian God.”
I think it is.
- Judaism is pro-fecundity (the first commandment given to Adam and Eve was “be fruitful and multiply”) but the fetus isn’t considered to be a human life until it draws it’s first breath (as God breathed life into Adam) and the mother’s health is always more important than that of the fetus.
- Buddhism holds that the fetus is ensouled around the time of quickening, so I’m going to assume it’s okay to abort it before then.
- Re Islam, i think they also look to quickening. I don’t have a handy reference, but i read a book on the legal history of abortion that described an Islamic slaveowner who had impregnated a slave. If she gave birth to his child, he would have to marry her, and he wanted to sell her. So he tried to have the baby aborted. But they’d been on a long voyage at sea, and by the time they got to a place where he could do that, the pregnancy was too far along.
- The Chinese seem pretty gung ho on abortion, so I’ve assumed it is not banned by confucianism, but i guess i don’t know for sure.
- Maybe Hinduism opposes abortion? Hinduism opposes killing animals for food, so that seems pretty plausible that it takes a hard line on killing in general.
- I don’t know the Shinto stance, either, but for a lot of the reasons i think it’s plausible that Hinduism opposes abortion, i bet Shinto prioritizes the woman and her social and economic welfare over the life of the fetus.
China has several religions, including Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.
2 Likes
I’m pretty sure that the historically most common roman catholic view is that abortion before the quickening is a sin but not murder. I assume it would be a venial sin, not a mortal one that puts you in danger of hell, but i don’t really know.
i’m not sure when roman catholics started popularly saying abortion is murder from conception. i believe the catholic encyclopedia says only that abortion might be murder, or becomes murder at some point in pregnancy, but specifically notes that only god can know exactly when.
the southern baptist convention supported the roe vs wade decision. that was back when baptists were still staunch supporters of separation of church and state, and would not have stood for a catholic moral teaching being issued from the bench.
1 Like
Didn’t grow up in China but did grow up in Asia.
Must say, I didn’t know abortion was even controversial until I got to the US. It was a completely natural thing to me. People talked about it like it’s no big deal. And I was a kid.
It just made intuitive sense to me that if you don’t want to be pregnant, you can stop being pregnant.
The whole you can’t abort stance sounded completely batshit crazy to me when I heard about it once I came to the US. And that’s on top of all the religious justifications backing it.
1 Like
I honestly think a lot of the emotional baggage around abortion is related to women being thought of as a man’s property for the purpose of making the man’s babies, and women taking control of that and killing something that belongs to her man is abhorrent. The idea that an embryo at the point when “I don’t want it” abortions usually take place is a person seems bizarre. And the conflation of typical abortions with killing babies about to be born is dishonest. The only reason that’s ever done is when something goes badly wrong. Like preclampsia. I’ve had two friends who had to have the baby removed ASAP. One was able to have a c-section, and the other wasn’t far enough along for that, and had to have an abortion of a fetus she’d worked REALLY hard to get.
2 Likes
It looks pretty illegal in Muslim Countries. Religiosity is a reasonable guess about the cause, though obviously correlated with all sorts of other things, including lack of female empowerment.
The flip side of this would be that, as women were recognized as deserving more autonomy, the argument against abortion had to gain more “force” to overcome this additional cultural resistance to that control. Hence the need to remove the “quickening” and emphasize abortion as nothing less than murder over the entire pregnancy. Or even before pregnancy, if personhood starts at conception, but the pregnancy doesn’t technically start until implantation.
Although all the places where abortion is strictly outlawed, without exceptions, seem to be Christian. Some countries in central America, some city states/islands in Europe (including Vatican city) Madagascar, the Philippines, Abkhazia (which I’ve never heard of before, isn’t recognized by most nations, but is majority Orthodox Christian)
I would be surprised if Islam wasn’t the reason for abortion bans in a number of places where Islam is the dominant religion and abortion is illegal, even if Islam itself may or may not have a stated position on abortion.
I believe that the christian opposition to abortion started back in the roman empire. In that case, a baby had no legal status until it was picked up by its father. Otherwise it could be left out in the elements to die.
in that case, opposing abortion meant giving more intrinsic value to the human person.
so i think this opposition to abortion also reflects christianity’s unique emphasis on the individual person. i think this emphasis is even more greater in western christianity as opposed to eastern. i wonder what the greek, russian, and coptic churches think about abortion.
Here you go:
TLDR: Abortion is always ok to save the life of the mother. In some traditions it’s not allowed at all for any other reason, and others it’s ok in the first 120 days (roughly corresponding to quickening).
Not sure if all Orthodox churches are in agreement, but they submitted an amicus curriae to the SCOTUS supporting abortion being illegal except to save the life of the mother.
A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything contradicting this, although it was mostly Orthodox and Coptic churches located in the United States.
1 Like
Not Islam being more reasonable than Christianity
1 Like