Read the Holy Bible word by word from front to back and you will never once come upon the word abortion. No such situation is ever advanced as a “sin,” and considering the many denunciations labored over, that omission concerning abortion is bewildering if it is true that standing sentinel over sensible allowance of life production is a sin. So where do the overconfident “true believers” get all their divine memos?
When the sin seekers choose to ignore what the Bible does not say, but instead listen to some faith system hawker who cunningly incites naive followers to commit acts of protest, the seekers indulge themselves in judgment passing which holds no genuine spiritual benefit. The instigator of such rallies may possibly think that he or she is defending a holy principle, in which case he or she has not really read the Bible which, nonetheless, they often hold aloft like some battle flag. The spiritual benefit that the provokers really achieve from these demonstrations is ego stimulation, a kind of ego masturbation. To accomplish gratification they use as stimulants a few cherry picked verses that can be fashioned to slip-slide around their desire.
One of these spiritual lubricants used by the self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” is often lifted out of The Ten Commandments; the sixth one which says, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” That commandment is not at all specific, however. If that commandment is taken as an all-inclusive directive it would mean that we should not even squash a mosquito. The intent of that sixth commandment is that we are to revere the moral rights which are active within all conscious life. Considering that the “pro-lifers” murder doctors at women’s clinics, their stance is beyond hypocrisy. Nothing in the Bible equates a developing fetus as a cognizant human being. That is actually made clear in Exodus 21:22-25 where it is judged that even if a man should accidently kill a pregnant woman while in a conflict with another man, he is held to be guilty of murder. If, however, that pregnant woman is caused to miscarry–i.e. the fetus is killed–it is not considered, according to Exodus, to be a case of murder. Just as an acorn is not an oak tree, a fetus–a seedling or potential person–was not declared by God’s secretary-priests to be a comprehending entity which is equipped for directing authority over life.
Quick! Find another stimulant! Eager hands grasp at Psalms 139:13-16, allegedly the poetic work of David, which avows that God formed him in his mother’s womb. The claim is made that the Lord used some especial means to create a male who was preordained to be King of Israel. That was openly declared to be a special case carried out by God who apparently had nothing better to do in the universe, and so took up dabbling in the politics of Israel. Clearly that birthing method is not applicable to your average conception routine. In today’s terms, Dave was hot wired to play the lead role in a manufactured history. Oddly, most of his story in the books of Samuel pivots on his adulterous romp with Bathsheba and his arrangement to have her husband killed. Oh my, that wasn’t very pro-life of that glorious king.
Hey, there’s gotta be something in Bible tales for antiabortionists to use that seem almost rational. Ah, here it is; good old Jeremiah! It is clear here; it says that God knew him before he was even conceived in the womb. You mean even before the sperm and egg linked up? Jeremiah 1:5 declares that God told Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” And that must mean also that each and every one of us is preordained and sanctified to be a prophet! So how come so few of us know what is destined to happen around us? Oh, I remember: Jeremiah was pre-formulated to fulfill a designated purpose because God was once again dabbling in Israel politics. Even so, somehow that must indicate that God is right in there at the very instant of every conception and that He regards that undefined squirming mass that he is supervising to already be a full-term self-aware person, right? A rational person does not have to possess prophetic capabilities to know that God is not in every vagina at the very instant of conception. That claim is directly opposite to the Genesis command (1:24-25) that each life form is endowed so it may multiply “after its own kind.” Nowhere in the Bible is it ever claimed that God was going to be present to supervise over every act of “multiplication.”
Leaving the Creator’s alleged political obsession over 8th century BCE Israel politics to be checked only occasionally in the rearview mirror, let us focus on some vital clues concerning personhood that the Creator provides. Consider the brain. The organ of the brain does not begin to develop as a unit of definable energy substance until after the third week of conception. This initial unit of energy-substance is referred to in medical terminology as the neural plate, a discernable formation of around 125,000 cells from which the physical form is to develop (evolve). From this initial period of evolutionary development through the remaining months of gestation new neutrons then begin to appear at the rate of 250,000 per minute! As awesome as this is, it does not mean that God is right there overseeing every gene placement. It is simply energy-substance interacting within an energy field (the human body) which is the process by which every energy-matter form assumes visible manifestation.
At birth each human does happen to be in possession of all his or her nerve cells. Technically, however, the newborn baby can be said to be a mindless organism, for the cerebral cortex–the portion of the brain-matter which holds the seat of higher intellect–scarcely functions. The newborn’s actions are almost totally dictated by the lower brain stem, a portion of the brain which humans share in common with all primate animals and reptiles.
In the first days of separate existence outside the mother’s body, the situation changes very rapidly with the cerebral cortex then bursting forth with growth. The first few months of independent survival is the most crucial period of brain development for every human being. The intense network of interconnecting nerve fibers swiftly develops so that by the age of one year the infant’s brain has reached around fifty percent of its adult weight. Even so the infant cannot be said to be self-aware in a mindful sense. The entity does not yet have any consciousness of “I”; that self-awareness emerges around the age of three. The accelerated growth of the cerebral cortex reduces around this developmental time, and the brain then gradually acquires around ninety percent of its adult weight by the age of six years.
The first six years in general serve as the crucible where the child’s basic values and ethics are set into a pattern, and their interest, abilities and talents develop which shape their personhood and sets the direction of social behavior. Brain development, the structure that establishes personhood, reaches its average adult weight of about three pound around the time of puberty, when physical growth begins to taper off.
The brain of every individual is assembled from a narrow spectrum of genetic material provided by the parents. The interaction that will develop as a physical body is itself composed of only about one hundred thousand genes. This sounds like an enormous quantity, but is a relatively small amount considering that it is from this modest quantity of genes that the brain, the nucleus of personhood, produces in excess of one hundred trillion-trillion nerve cells. And each of these nerve cells may in turn form as many as ten thousand connections with its neighbor cells! All this is done “after its own kind” as commanded in Genesis. The physical brain is established with polar fields: the front portion is active with a “negative” charge, the back of the brain is active with a “positive” charge. In other words, every living entity is a charged energy pack, and that allowance of creative power is free to progressively define itself in limited expressions of personhood, all of which are valid before the Absolute.
So the broad aspect alluded to in the book of Exodus 21:22-25 regarding the accidental termination of fetal development was correctly understood as NOT the killing of personhood. And the alleged especial circumstances claimed for a few starring biblical characters who were said to be “chosen” for some special story line purpose clearly cannot be said to be applicable to circumstances of every conception.
Time Frames and Taboo Data Blog 