On Radio

I have a habit.  Usually, I listen to NPR.  In this rural area, it is hands down, the best choice for radio and it has a decent amount of transmitters so you can get it most anywhere.  However, the car I use has a bad radio, and when I have to go north to our main office, it ends up fuzzing up.  Additionally, sometimes I am not in the mood for music, but talk.

I willingly listen to some of the Christian talk radio.  Sometimes this is because I have pent up other anger and want something to yell at.  Sometimes, it is because I am trying to understand the thought processes of the people I live with.  Sometimes I can take the barrage of judgmental, group-think, as a point in cultural anthropology.  Sometimes I can only take so much before I slam that radio off in frustration.

But recently, something stood out to me as particularly deserving of exposing: the need for fundamentalists to engage in not only group-think, but retroactive justification of the bible, even when it directly contradicts what they say in other forums.

I am one of those rare atheists/agnostics who does not believe there should be a right to choose to end a person's life except in self-defense.  The term is pro-life, a though that term has so much baggage, I'm not sure it applies.  Logically speaking however, I've never really seen this as a religious issue though.  When we talk about individual rights and doing harm that exceeds the crime (if any even existed) as unjust. these concepts were born of an increasing tendency of secularization.  God of the OT has absolutely no problem with killing and maiming people just to make a point to other people.  God has no interest in the individual as a concept (he plays favorites, randomly loving some and not others, but not the general "individual"), and has had no trouble with killing kids just because they were taunting one of his bros.

And even if we choose to believe that God did have a personality change with the New Testament, killing really doesn't seem like that big a deal if that child will just be going straight to heaven, or for Buddhists or Hindus, that the child will be reborn at a later time.

So it has always been a strange thing to me that the most fundamental Christians are often the most fundamental pro-lifers.  It is not the believer, but the non-believer who sees this life as the only thing we have and will ever have, and thus this life as the most deserving of being protected and sustained.  So similarly it baffles me that more progressive, atheists are not pro-life.

Anyway, back to this radio, the christian pastor was talking about the second book of Samuel, 11:2-5 and 12: 13-19

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.”  Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness.) Then she went back home.  The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, “I am pregnant.”
....
Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.”Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die.”
After Nathan had gone home, the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill. David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in sackcloth on the ground. The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them.
On the seventh day the child died. David’s attendants were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they thought, “While the child was still living, he wouldn’t listen to us when we spoke to him. How can we now tell him the child is dead? He may do something desperate.”
David noticed that his attendants were whispering among themselves, and he realized the child was dead. “Is the child dead?” he asked.
“Yes,” they replied, “he is dead.”

I had just tuned in, so whatever lessons the pastor was attempting to communicate to his flock, I don't know, but at this point he tries to make the case that God was being kind and merciful to the child, which he killed to spite David (so much for individual rights and justice), using language that was eerily familiar to language used today by a certain group of people.  (This is paraphrased as closely as I can remember):

"God knew the child was unwanted."
"God knew the child would suffer hardship and he was saving the child from that."
"God knew the child would be taunted and tormented because he was born out of wedlock if he had survived, so this was better for him in the end."

Wow... that kinda sounds like the rationale for women to seek terminating their pregnancies, something touted by the pro-choice movement.  Let's just replace the term God with The mother:


"The mother knew the child was unwanted."
"The mother knew the child would suffer hardship and she was saving the child from that."
"The mother knew the child would be taunted and tormented because he was born out of wedlock if he had survived, so this was better for him in the end."

And the pastor included what I would see as rationale for why religious people should be more pro-choice:

"For the child, he just closed his eyes one night and woke up in heaven, so no real loss for him.  He just got a ticket to the ultimate happiness and paradise."


I don't really know what to make of this, except some frustrated christian perhaps responding to this by saying "you don't understand, killing children, the un-born, etc is ok, but only when GOD does it."  Well, I have a million problems with that sort of god, not to mention, well, how does anybody know when god wants it and when he doesn't.  That asshole never bothers to write or send an email.

It just amazes me, and hints to the idea that fundamentalist Christians are not completely unable to make and understand the rationale that pro-choice people have, but they choose not to apply that same logic when it comes to a woman making that decision for herself.  On the other hand, I do understand the arguments pro-choice people make, and in a nutshell, I don't think it is right for anyone to make a decision for me whether I should live or die based on what they project my future happinesses to be, and I don't think it is just for me to die when I haven't committed a serious/ lethal crime.  But that christian fundamentalists make both this statement, and the reverse, just depending on who is inflicting this death, is frankly, amazing.

Amazing.