bella said:
With murderers and the like, my hope is that in the next life nurture overcomes nature and this person's potential for evil is nullified by love and compassion.
I believe there's the chance for that. But I also believe if someone leaves this life without atoning for, or coming to terms with their negative actions, something will be waiting next time round to beat a little humility into their aura; yanno? Next time you see someone suffering from a horrible injustice, perhaps it's just the karma catching up with their ass.
bella said:
If the notion is raised of preserving life to please God, it must also be said that the Bible is chock-full of heinous mass-murders and violence commited by the Almighty Himself. No one cites those icky parts about burning and drowning when supporting sin-free living. No disrespect to Christians, but you just don't read the Bible for parenting tips, y'know?
Quite true. I'd also like to know how these people "just know" that it's an offence against God? When was the last time God issued a press-release saying he was against abortion? If you take the Christian/Muslim/Judaic conception of God as literally true, then the Dude is the wisest, most knowledgable and most infinitely clever being in existence. Now when whasisname in the Bible was forever damned for withdrawing and spilling his seed on the ground, the world's population was a fraction of what it is today. The human race was hardly fighting for it's very existence, but there was a hell of a lot more room. Quite the scenario for an omniprescent deity to get a wee bit narked if someone wasted some life-force, with so much area to spread to.
Today the world is chockfull of people. They're quite literally banging on the door of the third dimension to get in here. Isn't it just the tiniest bit possible for God/Allah/Yahweh to have gotten the opinion that quality was more important than quantity now? Isn't it even the remotest bit feasible to think He might prefer people to well and truly establish
themselves in the world, before they bring others into it? Far-fetched? Quite possibly, but I'm playing Devil's advocate here, not postulating a seriously thought-out opinion. The point I am making is that there is no way in Creation people can know "that it against God's will" or "is an offence in the sight of God" because the Man hasn't said as much. What they actually mean when they say that, is "This is something I
think would be against God's will, because I've put my own interpretation on a set of writings that are millenia old, contain nearly 50,000
admitted translation errors, and a lot of people on Earth don't think are true, or have a different spin on anyway."
If someone believes that, they're perfectly entitled to. There are people with belief systems that are a hell of a lot more destructive and negative than that. Someone living their life as a
true Christian does a hell of a lot less harm than someone living their life as a druggie, wino, drunkard or politician. Good luck to you my religious friends, but please do not ever try to dictate to the rest of us that what we believe in is wrong and we should be forcibly stopped from doing it, because of how you believe the spiritual world is structured. No-one in this thread has said such yet, at least not outright. But I just
know that some will be thinking it. There are some people who have a saviour "complex" who think that only by running the rest of the world's lives for them, can the world be happy. Those are the sort of people who launch lawsuits to put medical clinics who do abortions or sell the morning after pill out of business, or who publicly lobby to stop rape victims having a termination. They scream their self-righteousness through every portal the media opens to them, and forcibly kick open the ones they don't. They act as if their questionable beliefs are established fact. Okay, so do I, I'm aware. But unlike these people I don't try to run others' lives with my belief system.