Jesus DID sin. He picked corn on the Sabbath (a sin) He told the crowd not to stone the woman for adultery, when stoning was the law (he told the crowd to break one of Yahweh’s laws–which is a sin)

If the Romans did not think him a sinner, they would not have hung him on the cross. Please give a reference to your claim that the Romans were in agreement with Jesus not being a sinner. You won’t have one, because there isn’t one, as the Romans kept no records of him. The claims you make are ad hoc nonsense.

Let’s take a moment to analyze these comments.

First, we should notice how the two claims made in her first paragraph are factually incorrect. She states that Jesus “picked corn on the Sabbath.” This is false; the relevant texts (Matthew 12:1, Mark 2:23, Luke 6:1) specify that it was the disciples who picked and ate the grains, not Jesus. Next, in regards to the stoning of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11) again a factually incorrect statement is made. Notwithstanding that for several hundred years it’s been common knowledge among scholars that those verses are likely a later addition to the text (and are noted as such in any modern translation) nowhere does Jesus tell “the crowd not to stone the woman for adultery.” So unlike what is claimed, he never tells them to “break one of Yahweh’s laws.”

Second, in regards to the Romans being in agreement that Jesus was sinless, in addition to the reference given by The Lord God Exists website author (to Pilate’s declaration in John 18:38 that “I find no basis for a charge against him”) we also could consider the centurion’s declaration recorded in Luke 23:47 after Jesus’ death when he said “Surely this was a righteous man” (or “Certainly this man was innocent” in ESV). But is what is being requested here actual “Roman records” stating that Jesus was sinless? Does it sound at all plausible that the Romans would keep records of crucifying an innocent man?

Finally, the greater problem I see with this general approach is the following: It’s totally arbitrary. The accusation above that Jesus committed sins is argued for from the biblical texts. But if a person considers those biblical text accurate -and they must, because why would a person use texts that they think are inaccurate as the sole basis to build a rational case for anything- then why ignore the many references to Jesus’ sinlessness in the Bible? (Ex, 2 Corinthians 5:21,  1 John 3:5, 1 Peter 2:22, et al.)

This cherry-picking approach, that grasps hold of certain verses while arbitrarily ignoring others, is misguided at best. Why treat certain passages as authentic and others as inauthentic? It doesn’t seem to be for any reason stemming from textual criticism; it’s a capricious method to conveniently ignore whatever doesn’t fit into the person’s paradigm. This method is in entirely “ad hoc” … the exact thing the commenter claims about the original post!

A response that I’ve seen is that atheism is not a worldview because it is not a belief, rather it is merely a “default position”. The rationale given sometimes compares belief in God to unicorns or some other such mythical animal, in the sense that unbelief in such things (or anything, really) is the default until convinced (or proven) otherwise.

While I can certainly see the reasonableness of this line of thinking and its general applicability, I wonder if it applies equally well to the question of God. There’s at least two reasons to think in this specific case things might be different. First, the vast majority of people throughout history have believed God (or gods) exist(s), a phenomenon which remains the case today. Should a belief be regarded as a default position when the majority believe the opposite?

And secondly, related to the above, if Richard Dawkins and those who agree with him are correct that human beings have evolved a natural proclivity towards belief in God(s) as some sort of survival/social assistance mechanism, should not belief in God be considered the default position, since we are supposedly “hard-wired” for such belief? Shouldn’t such naturally impelled belief be considered the default? Although I would agree with Dawkins that human beings seem to have an innate proclivity towards belief in God, I would suggest that there is different reason why so many people seem to have an innate awareness of God.

Christian:  The cosmological argument is strong evidence that God exists. If the universe was made, it needs a maker; if it was created, it needs a creator. That creator is God.

Skeptic:  Ah, but this merely raises the question “Who made God?” which Richard Dawkins himself asks in The God Delusion.^* It just pushes the question back one step further.

Christian:  This seems to me to be a category error; it confuses the uncreated creator with His created creation. God doesn’t need a maker because God was never made; He was and is eternally existing.

Skeptic:  That’s special pleading at best, hypocritical at worst. Why is it okay for God to be “eternal, uncreated” but not the universe?

Christian:  Because we have good reasons, both philosophical and scientific, that the universe is not eternal, whereas no such reasons exist to believe that God is so. God is not subject to the same limitations of the material world He created. The cosmological argument proposes not that everything requires a cause, but whatever begins to exist requires a cause; if God did not begin to exist (since there is no reason to believe He did, unlike the universe) He requires no cause.

Skeptic:  Even if we agree that the universe is not eternal, why must its cause be God? Why not some other explanation?

Christian:  Whatever created both time and space must transcend both time and space. Also, there are numerous other attributes which can be discerned about whatever created the universe that imply a personal entity (that is, it possesses volition among other things). So the creator of the universe is an entity which is beyond time and space yet still possesses certain attributes and is personal. This sounds to me a lot like God.

* In The God Delusion Dawkins is attempting to apply the question as a defeater to the design argument (p.109), not the cosmological argument (which Dawkins shockingly dismisses in less than a page). I’ve personally heard it applied more often to the cosmological argument, at least in the realm of Internet banter.

The question “If God made everything, who made God?” is like asking “Who made circles square?” It assumes a self-contradiction: that an uncreated Creator is a created creature. It extends the law about changing things -that every change needs a cause- beyond its limits, to the unchanging Source of change. God does not need a cause, or a maker, because he is not made or changed. He changes other things, but is not himself changed by anything. There is nothing that comes to be in him, nothing that needs a cause for its coming-into-being. (Peter Kreeft, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 105)

So essentially, Kreeft suggests that the question commits a category error; it overextends the general law that “things that exist require a maker” from the physical, created world, to the non-physical uncreated God.

A further question that may arise: “If God can be ‘uncreated & unchanging’, why not the universe too?” The answer would be that we have good reasons to believe that the universe is not eternal, as per the Cosmological Argument (including at least scientific and philosophical reasons), while no such restrictions would apply to God.

While it is indeed lamentable that such things occur, what does this prove about whether the Christian faith is true or not?

I was thinking about this yesterday while spending some time with a friend who is very distrustful of “organized religion”. I don’t know the exact reasons for this distrust, but perhaps it’s because my friend has been exposed to many stories of religious abuse, scandal, and charlatanry. But while this may prove something about humankind, it proves nothing about God.

While I was walking to the mall today (in the brisk -16C Toronto weather) I thought … “Just because people cause problems, does that mean that God is not great?” The latter doesn’t follow from the former.

The latter (“God is not great”) also happens to be the title of a book by Christopher Hitchens, who in my humble opinion is a skilled orator and rhetorician but not necessarily a precise thinker or researcher of facts, which will make his upcoming debate with William Lane Craig very interesting. I hope that Craig realizes this debate will be much different than his usual debates against his philosopher peers.

The basics of Lewis’ “Trilemma” argument can be found at the following Wikipedia entry: Lewis’ Trilemma Argument. Unfortunately, it is only quoted in part, and reading the full chapter from Mere Christianity (full text here, see chapter 8) and the preceding material in the book might make things clearer. Nevertheless …

The Wikipedia entry describes the trilemma as below … Asylum Seeker, the author of the blog post linked above, takes issue with every part of the argument. (Hereafter I’ll refer to Asylum Seeker as “Asylum”, since his real name is not given; and although I am unsure of their gender I will refer to Asylum as “he” for the sake of ease.):

(P) Jesus claimed to be God.
(Q) One of the following must be true.
1. Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he believed that he was.
2. Liar: Jesus was not God, and he knew it, but he said so anyway.
3. Lord: Jesus is God.
From these premises it follows logically that,
(C) If not God, Jesus is either not great or not moral.

I have edited (Q)1) to remove the word “mistakenly” since, as I explain later and Lewis himself made clear, Jesus’ claim is not the sort of thing a person can make an “oopsie” about.

Re (P), Asylum claims that “that Jesus did not necessarily refer to himself as the “Son of God” and he was only claimed to be after the fact by followers” and later claims that “As mentioned above, Premise P is suspect”. However, no reason is presented for denying that Jesus thought of Himself as God. Even if Jesus never referred to Himself as “Son of God”, the name “Son of Man” still carried similar connotations for his first century listeners. The Wikipedia article contains several suggested reasons that might be given for concluding Jesus didn’t consider Himself to be divine, but also presents equally forceful reasons (I would say, better) for believing Jesus did in fact claim to be God. See for example Glenn Miller’s summary or more comprehensive articles (on the synoptics and John) on the subject. If we take the biblical texts seriously, I don’t see how a case could be made that Jesus considered himself to be anything less than divine.

That’s IF we take the biblical texts seriously, of course. What if, however, as several commenters to Asylum’s original post suggest, that we should not take the biblical text seriously because they are not trustworthy? This is a more popular was of avoiding the conclusion (C) of Lewis’ argument: By positing a fourth way, a fourth “L”, namely Legend. Asylum suggests early in his post that “Jesus could be fictional [and/or] the Gospel could be inaccurate”.

Regarding Jesus being fictional (ie the “Jesus never existed” hypothesis) this hypothesis is dismissed by nearly all serious scholars on the subject, G. A. Wells being the main notable exception. For more details on this topic, see Dr Gary Habermas’ article commenting directly upon Wells’ hypothesis A Summary Critique: Questioning the Existence of Jesus, or a more general article Christ Myth Refuted. Whether the New Testament is accurate, however, is more open for debate. This is certainly a worthy objection to Lewis’ original argument. Of course, Lewis was operating under the assumption that the New Testament is trustworthy. If that assumption is removed, it must be argued for, as I believe I have done in my free ebook on this subject, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament. I encourage you to download a copy and check it out.

There are, in fact, good reasons to believe the New Testament is trustworthy; especially in contrast to some of the other works commonly mentioned by skeptics of the New Testament such as non-canonical documents written in the second century AD and later. In the comments section of Asylum’s post one of the commenters Richelle says “it would have been nice to know what all the other stories of jesus were before they all got destroyed by the church once they decided jesus was going down in history as a superhuman.” Here she is referring to another commenter’s mention of the Council of Nicaea. Of course, the Council of Nicaea did not discuss which books would be included in the New Testament at all, and we have plenty of information about what the earliest Christians thought about Jesus, first from the New Testament documents themselves, and then from the early Christian letters (some from the first century). Larry Hurtado‘s recent book argues that in fact “perhaps within only a few days or weeks of his crucifixion, Jesus’ followers were circulating the astonishing claim that God had raised him from death and had installed him in heavenly glory as Messiah and the appointed vehicle of redemption.” So such ideas are hardly inventions by a church council in the 4th century!

Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that the New Testament is generally untrustworthy and contains numerous errors, Jesus’ divinity is proclaimed or assumed throughout, so it still would be difficult to escape the conclusion that the authors believed Jesus claimed to be God unless we were to discount the entirety of the New Testament as being totally and utterly untrustworthy; as even most ardent skeptics won’t do, for good reason.

This leads us to (Q)1): “Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he mistakenly believed that he was.” This is a major point of contention for Asylum, who says: “A “lunatic” is hardly crazy about everything. People who have such a delusion can still have insight.” This is true. A person may be perfectly sane in one regard, and completely delusional in another regard.

Yet think for a moment what you might say if someone you know, let’s call him Joe, claimed to be God. Not just for a laugh, but seriously and continuously. He seemed normal in certain other respects (he was able to dress himself and engage in normal social conventions) yet he claimed he was in fact God. Now what if a group of people got sick of Joe’s ranting and decided they’d kidnap him and, if he didn’t stop with this God nonsense, that they would kill him in the most painful way imaginable. What would you say about him if he steadfastly refused to recant and was killed in the most excruciating manner for his claims? I, personally, would not call him sane. Would you?

When Lewis wryly remarks that “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell” he is saying, with his ‘poached egg’ remark, that Jesus’ self-claims are not trivial, they are entirely foundational. A person calling themselves God is either true, or, if false, akin with claiming to be a poached egg! This is not the sort of thing a person could make an “oopsie” about and we would still call “sane”.

Asylum notes in the comments that he is “not sure if Jesus’s behavior is inconsistent” with Schizophrenia, though he is careful to note he does not think it is per se. It’s worth noting that to be able to suggest that Jesus was Schizophrenic, a person would have to get their information from … the New Testament, so they must be claiming that it is essentially reliable. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. But is there evidence within the New Testament that Jesus had some kinda of mental illness? In fact there doesn’t seem to be anything about Jesus’ behavior which suggests mental illness, let alone Schizophrenia. (Compare for example with what is know about Muhammad, where, while far from conclusive, there are at least suggestions that he suffered from epilepsy or a similar mental illness.)

Gary R. Collins, PhD in psychology from Purdue University, concludes that “I don’t see any signs that Jesus was suffering from mental illness.” Asylum’s point prior in his post is that a person may be sane in some areas of life and insane in others, but as noted above claiming to be God (and willing to be put to death for that conviction) is not the sort of claim that is distinct from a person being sane.

So, if we take the New Testament seriously and Jesus’ words seriously when he claims to be God, and if Jesus shows no signs of mental illness, we are ruling out the Legend argument, (Q)1), the lunatic argument, and (Q)2) the liar argument. Are there other possible alternatives? Kreeft and Tacelli note at least one additional option in their book (available here BTW, with a much nicer cover than my copy has): Maybe Jesus didn’t mean he was literally God, maybe he was just being really mystical and symbolic. They call this the Guru objection. This is rejected, in part, because of the context in which Jesus spoke and lived: He was Jewish, and directed his own ministry primarily to the Jews, no doubt because they (perhaps unlike some of the non-Jewish people around) would not have understood his claims to be mystical. (Certainly those who committed Jesus to death for His perceived heresy did not see the claims as being mystical!) For more on the “mythical Jesus” see for example here: The Persistent New Age Jesus (and other articles on the CAFA site).

All that said, I don’t see Lewis’ argument as an iron-clad proof that Jesus was who he said he was. It is, I think, a more powerful argument than Lewis is given credit for, especially since he was not a philosopher by trade. And the version put forth by Kreeft and Tacelli is I think a definite improvement (expansion) of Lewis’ original. But it is not airtight by any means. When I first read of it, before I was a Christian, I did not drop to my knees and become a Christian immediately afterward.

What’s the point, then? It is one of several arguments that I believe suggest that Jesus, and the Gospel message, are actually true. No one will be convinced to become a Christian by rational arguments alone (because the nature of the trust of faith is not merely rational, but also volitional and emotional) but they may at least convince us that such ideas are worth thinking about.

Related reading:
- A better article on one of our sites than the testimony linked by Asylum’s blog post: Who did Jesus think He was anyways?
- Peter Kreeft’s brief article on the topic on his website: The Divinity of Christ
- Stand to Reason: Christianity worth thinking about

The following is an excerpt from one of the essays I wrote for the Biola Certificate in Christian Apologetics program, which I highly recommend. (I’m almost done now, just have to finish up part 3!)

The Moral Argument is an argument for the existence of God. This argument could be proposed like this:

#1 Objective moral laws exist.
#2 A moral lawgiver, God, is the best explanation for the existence of objective moral laws.
#3 Therefore God exists.

An important distinction that should be made at the outset is that the argument does not claim that a person who does not believe in God cannot be moral, but instead claims that non-theistic explanations of morality can describe what is moral but cannot explain why it is moral. If this argument is true, a non-theist may still live a better life than a theist, but would not be able to explain how a moral obligation could exist merely by observing how things are.

Regarding premise #1, there can be only two possible options with regard to moral values: they are either objective or subjective. A synonym for subjective morality is moral relativism, and there are many serious problems with this view of morality. Besides the fact that  practically speaking, when pressed, few people honestly hold to true subjective morality , if there is no objective right and wrong, many concepts such as fairness, guilt, tolerance, altruism, and shame become meaningless.  There are many other serious logical and practical problems with relativism.  Therefore, almost no one accepts the idea that morality is relative.

Where then did moral absolutes (laws) come from? Premise #2 above posits that the best explanation for this source is God. Since these moral laws remain valid and true whether anyone believes in them or not, they could not come from evolution, social consensus, or personal preference. These laws are standards that exist independently of our own human existence and must have a source in something that exists outside of our material universe (since they are immaterial). This “something” is God, a personal being who provides both the nature upon which the laws are based and the volition through which they have been instituted.

Further reading:
Why can’t morality have just evolved? – Read Monkey Morality by Greg Koukl.
A longer discussion of the argument – Read The Moral Argument for God’s Existence by Paul Copan.

So why does it seem like Christians so often do dumb things?

One reason is that when a Christian does something dumb, they’re often identified (in the media or colloquially) as being a Christian, but when an atheist does something dumb, they’re usually not identified as an atheist. Now certainly some Christians do dumb things in an attempt to follow their faith, but whether what the person has done is consistent with the Christian faith is often ignored.

A second reason is the fact that there’s a lot of Christians around. Millions in Canada alone, plus many millions more in the USA, and approximately 2.1billion in total according to Adherents.com. So you’d figure, out of all those people, if even 1% do dumb things, that it will seem like quite a lot of people. Of course, the actions of a few don’t necessarily reflect those of the whole. (See: Fallacy of composition.)

A final reason, extrapolated from the previous one, is that some Christians are dumb. (You’re free to make your own evaluation of me if you’d like.) In fact before I was a Christian I thought all Christians were dumb, or ugly, or both. (I thank Greg Koukl for putting into words so eloquently how I felt at the time.) Dumb because they were roped into a false waste of time, and/or ugly because they had to go to church to be accepted, since it’s the only place that people have to accept them.

And yes, many Christians are dumb (and/or ugly). But so what? So are many atheists, agnostics, and adherents of other faiths.

There are also many smart Christians … not myself, necessarily, but guys like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Alister McGrath, John Warwick Montgomery, Timothy Keller, John Lennox, and Dallas Willard to name a few. So whether any one of them is smart or dumb proves nothing about the truth or falsity of the faith.

If you currently have the opinion that Christians are dumb, or ugly, or both, like I used to, I invite you to investigate some of the sites linked above or in the sidebar to the right. I think Christianity is worth thinking about, even if its adherents sometimes do and exceedingly poor job of reflecting it.

And if you are a Christian, let’s try to reflect our Lord, Jesus, who as Dallas Willard describes, was and is the smartest man who ever lived (and lives).

Recently in an online discussion regarding the reliability of the New Testament, I asked a person engaged in the discussion the following question: “Let’s say, after a few more months on this forum, that your questions regarding the Christian faith and God were answered beyond a reasonable doubt. Not utterly completely proven 100%, but at least plausibly answered. Would you then put your faith and trust in God?”

His reply surprised me: “No, probably not.” He went on to list some of his objections (and straw-man characterizations of Christian beliefs) before concluding that “even if you did manage all that and managed to drive me insane enough to believe in an invisible man in the sky, my common sense would just tell me that that is impossible.” [Thread on SCAE]

I thought back to Russell’s response quoted above. Ignoring for a moment the question of “How much evidence is needed?” that is discussed at length in the linked article, I have to wonder about the honesty of Russell’s response. Let’s paint the scenario: Russell has spent his life arguing that God does not exist, and especially not the Christian God. Now he stands before this God and has been proven utterly and totally wrong. This just, holy, righteous, omnipotent, omniscient, and awe-inspiring God stands before Russell and asks him the question. Instead of being humbled, Hume says he’d flippantly respond by saying “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”

Given that (in the scenario) God is omniscient, it seems silly to assert that God hadn’t provided enough evidence. Wouldn’t God know better than Russell how much evidence was needed? Wouldn’t it be slightly insane to tell the almighty God of the universe to His face that you know better than Him?

Christians are often branded as being “closedminded” (sometimes for good reason) but often atheists or members of other non-Christian faiths are just as closedminded.

As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. During my conversation with an Internet friend mentioned above, I decided to break off the conversation at that point. When a person states that they will continue to refuse to believe something even if they become convinced that it is true (!) there’s not much point in talking anymore.

Of course, to be fair, this situtation somewhat paraellels my own story, when I first became convinced that Christianity was true, but still wasn’t quite able to take that final step of faith (trust) right away. This is why I think that often issues of faith are, primarily, heart issues rather than head issues; intellectual objections are often legitimate and worthy of discussion, but in reality those sorts of questions merely scratch the surface while a person’s actual underlying concerns go much deeper.

Today I read an editorial in The Calgary Herald titled Morgentaler deserves Order of Canada by Catherine Ford, ostensibly about the award, but in practice a summary defense of abortion. Let’s examine her arguments to see whether they make sense.

(Click below for my commentary; it’s a bit long to put on the blog’s front page)

For [ensuring the rights of Canadian women to safe and legal abortions] alone — for the right of all women to be regarded as capable of making a decision whether to bear children — Morgentaler not only merits the Order of Canada, he deserves whatever accolades Canadian women can bestow upon him.

The weasel-wording of the underlined portion obscures that abortion has nothing to do with “the right of all women to be regarded as capable of making a decision whether to bear children.” Certainly both sides of the issue agree that women should have the right to choose whether they will “bear children.” A woman certainly should choose whether they become pregnant or not; we are talking here however about abortion.

We owe him our gratitude for his unswerving commitment to the cause of women’s health.

Except, of course, for the health of all of the would-be women who were aborted. Death is usually considered less healthy than life.

Few other men have fought so vigorously and so single-mindedly for so long on a principle.

I hope that this statement is referring to the pro-choice abortion issue only, because as a blanket statement about the male gender it is either profoundly prejudiced or shockingly ignorant.

That principle is simple: All women should have the right of control over their own bodies.

I agree 100%. Women should have control over their own bodies. Again, few, if any, would disagree. And again the real question is obfuscated: Is the unborn merely a part of the woman’s body, like a hand or a lung?

This puts the burden of responsibility — the consequences of any decision — squarely on a woman’s shoulders. That is where it belongs. It is her responsibility to make the decisions about reproduction.

I agree that, in one sense, the consequences of the decision fall “squarely on a woman’s shoulders.” That’s the nature of ethical decisions. But all of our laws are based upon ethics; stealing is against the law because it is wrong to steal.

In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the existing law on abortion, ruling it unconstitutional. Madam Justice Bertha Wilson said a woman’s decision to have an abortion “deeply reflects the way the woman thinks about herself and her relationship to others and to society at large. It is not just a medical decision; it is a profound social and ethical one as well.“

I’m glad that we recognize that the issue of abortion is multifaceted; it is not just a logical conundrum, it is also a social and ethical issue.

It is also, she wrote, almost impossible for a man to contemplate the dilemma of a pregnant woman thinking about abortion. Pregnancy remains outside any man’s personal experience and, wrote Wilson, “he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche, which are at the heart of the dilemma.”

While recognizing that it is impossible for a man to truly emphasize with a woman regarding the emotional issues involved with pregnancy, the insinuation that a man can then have no voice regarding such issues is a non-sequitur. Clearly according to the author of the article a man can have a right view on abortion, since she agrees with Dr Morgentaler and applauds him for his view. Dismissal of a viewpoint based on its source (the genetic fallacy) is prejudiced, unfair, and unhelpful.

Those who do not approve or condone abortion are free not to have one. What they are not free to do is insist, because of their personal beliefs, abortion should not be available for a variety of reasons.

Let’s do a simple search-and-replace on these statements: Those who do not approve or condone murder are free not to murder anyone. What they are not free to do is insist, because of their personal beliefs, murder should not be available for a variety of reasons. Do you see why this sort of argument doesn’t work? Pro-life advocates do not argue that since they have a personal feeling that abortion is wrong “for them” that everyone else should change their own personal beliefs to cohere with theirs. The argument is that abortion is objectively wrong for everyone.

There are always a variety of reasons. Abortion for rape or incest might be permitted.

First we should note that, in any ethical issue (as the author has admitted the abortion issue is) there will be hard cases that are difficult to decide. However, the existence of such potentially morally ambiguous cases should not prevent us from deciding a general rule in the vast majority of cases. (Approximately 1% women cite rape as a reason for having an abortion, while less than 0.5% cite incest.) Moreover, the fact that certain unborn children may be unwanted (perhaps even for valid reasons) should not be enough to take their lives; the homeless or sick are often unwanted and burdens, but does that give us the right to take their lives?

But perhaps the author of the article is merely arguing for abortion in these few difficult cases like rape and incest?

One abortion — everyone should be allowed one “mistake” — could be considered acceptable.

Apparently not. Everyone should get one “oopsie”. Not only is this sort of attitude entirely cavalier towards the emotional issues involved with having an abortion (including all of the studies that have shown the extreme emotional distress often suffered by women who have abortions) but also demonstrates that she is arguing for abortion on demand regardless of the reasons why a woman wants to have one. Why then bring up the issue of rape and incest?

It is an absolute within the bounds of standard medical practice, as set by the College of Physicians and Surgeons in each province.

I’m not exactly sure what this ambiguous statement means. Medically, there is little debate that life begins at conception, as Dr Landrum Shettles, the first scientist who successfully achieved conception in a test tube, notes that conception not only confers but “defines” life. The unborn is, in fact, genetically distinct from its parents and is a separate human entity. (It has human parents after all so it is thus human.) I’m not sure it’s within the bounds of standard medical practice to kill human beings that we don’t particularly like.

He ensured our right and, indeed, our privilege, to make up our own minds about pregnancy — to be unfettered by the opinions of others or the pressures of society.

This merely assumes what the author is trying to argue for, as we saw earlier. Perhaps the argument would go something like this:

1) Women should have the right to make up their own minds about their bodies.
2) The unborn is a part of a woman’s body.
3) Therefore, women should have the right to do what they wish with the unborn.

Well, 1) is not in dispute, as I have no interest in telling women what they can or can’t do with their bodies. It is 2) that I take issue with. It is the unproved and undefended assertion by this author which flies in the face of logic and medical evidence.

Obviously, his detractors are legion. They include men who rail at the notion women alone should be permitted to decided [sic] whether to bear a child or not.

Silly weasel-wording and straw-man construction (no pun intended). As above, few, if any, men would take such a view. The issue is not a woman’s choice whether or not to become pregnant, the issue is what is ethical once they are pregnant.

They include a host of religions and their acolytes who demand unswerving obedience to a set of man-made rules.

I hope that the careful reader will notice that I have not made any appeal to religious doctrine during my discussion of abortion. (More on this in a moment.)

They also include women who, for whatever reason, believe their lives should be ruled by chance, happenstance and blind obedience.

Another straw-[wo]man argument. Pro-life advocates who are female are branded illogical nincompoops.

So be it. That is exactly what choice entails. Every Canadian woman can now say proudly, “My life, my body, my decisions.”

And again, the author loudly and proudly entirely misses the point. The entire editorial contained no justification for the view being presented, merely statement and restatement of the view and its fundamental underpinnings without any rational argument.

I will say that it can be easy to miss the point with a controversial issue like this one, especially when reason can quickly become clouded or overwrought with emotional issues. But all of the abortion questions can be reduced to just one: What is the unborn? As Greg Koukl says: “If the unborn are not human, no justification for elective abortion is necessary. But if the unborn are human, no justification for elective abortion is adequate.”

The best (short) online resource on this question is Dr William Lane Craig’s writing here, which is not, as Ms Ford might expect, based on religious reasoning:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6351

Please read and carefully consider the argument Dr Craig above. This is not merely an academic question, one where learned individuals sit around stroking their beards, smoking their pipes and waxing philosophically on their easy-chairs. As I’ve posted previously there are over one million abortions performed every month. If abortion really does, as pro-life advocates claim, kill human beings, that is one million morally reprehensible deaths each month.