SOME FEEDBACK
November 15th 1999
A lady, Melanie, has read some of these Atheist Thoughts and has been kind enough to comment as follows:
I would suppose that you might consider yourself a 'free thinker'?
If so, is there any place on your site to counter some of your arguments... in particular the one about honoring your father and mother as an excuse, albeit a poor one for abortion? If you are going to make a Biblical case, one can hardly do it from the perspective raised. After all, if one can kill a child because they cannot keep the commandment to honor their mother and father, then I suppose we should be shooting people who's parents are alcoholics? (or a host of other things.) As far as I can read from scripture... all have sinned...
We're all fair game now... huh? You could make some persuasive arguments, I suppose... but your article in that regard hardly qualifies.
Melanie
Eric Stockton to Melanie,
Thank you for your note. I will publish it in the next AT with a reply along the following lines.
The Commandment to 'honour thy father and thy mother' can only be absolutely sound, ethically speaking, on the presupposition that fertility is an attribute statistically related to qualities that are themselves honourable. That presupposition is plainly false; people whose qualities are quite other than those that most of us - religious or otherwise - would deem honourable are no less fertile than the rest of us. There is simply no correlation between fertility and those secular qualities - such as honesty, kindliness, respect for others, respect for the natural world of which we are part etc etc. Moreover if we see ethics as requiring a religious dimension, there is no correlation between fertility and love of God - no correlation between fertility and faithful acceptance of God's perceived will.
In short, parenthood can be accomplished, and is routinely accomplished, by people of very various claims upon our capacity to honour them - ranging from those whom almost any of us might honour to those whose honourabilty is very seriously in question in anyone's book.
The Commandment is therefore, in my opinion, unsound on the ground that those people who are outside of the fortunate majority who are born of honourable parents are put, by it, into a false position. Such unfortunate people have either to obey the Commandment or to compromise their integrity by honouring that which they would ordinarily deem unworthy of honour.
Moreover, in cases - such as no doubt yours and mine - the Commandment is superfluous; good (i.e. honour-worthy) parents will be honoured by their children in the natural course of events. The principle of 'caught not taught' is the best means of providing one's children with a sound ethical basis for their lives. My (now adult) son and daughter honour me (often more than I think I deserve) without ever having been taught explicitly to do so because, evidently in their experience, they see fit to do so. Being good cuts more ice than telling people to be good - whatever connotation one places upon the word 'good'.
I do not equate abortion to "killing a child"; I regard the (human) fetus as a potential person and birth as the start of personhood ..... the start, if you will, of the process of acquiring, learning, developing, personal maturity. It all depends upon what you mean by 'a person'. In any case, I go along with Ecclesiastes - from memory -'there is a time to heal and a time to kill'. This seems to me to make more sense than the Sixth Commandment -"Thou shalt not kill".
I accept, at once, that the above analysis is not, in itself a powerful case for accepting that procured abortion can be right; that is a far larger question.
Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, the two basic needs that a new baby has are 1) to be valued and loved and 2) to enjoy a fair chance of receiving the material support and practical care needed for its satisfactory survival. A notable proportion of the world's pregnancies seem destined to result in children enjoying no such good fortune.
I would go so far as to say that a pregnant woman who cannot, in good conscience, say that these two criteria are being met has, not so much a right as, a duty to consider termination of the pregnancy. It is immoral to saddle a child with the burdens of being unwanted, unloved and unsupported ...... unless of course you think that the feral street children of many of the world's cities exemplify what is humanly worthy (or what is pleasing to God - if you happen to view life in a religious way).
I hope you find this note to be of some value. In any case, I thank you for taking the trouble write to me and I trust that you accept my good wishes.
E.S
M to E,
I think the key is in how one defines the term honor.
I will still disagree with some of your arguments here, but at least they really seem better thought out and make more sense to me.
On one issue we can certainly agree.. it is better to "be good" than to tell someone to "be good."
Melanie
In later AT's, I intend to raise two questions:
1) what do we mean by 'a person' .... is a human fetus a human person?
2) what exactly is the reasonable connotation of 'honour' in the context of the Decalogue?
Send me your thoughts by e-mail and they will, subject to reasonable editing, be published on this site.
E.S.
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