If you want to save deaths into the millions, stop abortions. Those accounted for
913,000 in the US in 2016 alone.
True that.
And if you want to stop abortions, understand that in a democracy where half of the population lives hand-to-mouth, there will never be the political ability to stop abortion unless there is already in place first a robust social welfare net, so that every one of the babies of the poor, which is about 750,000 of those abortions, and his mother, has secure housing, food, health care, child care and income for the next 26 years of his life, and the rest of her life. He needs to have a full education - and his mother will never have the means to provide it - and if she lets him live and takes care of him, that's going to be 26 years in which she is not going to have the flexibility to climb out of poverty, because of the overwhelming burdens of child care on a single parent.
People can moraliise all they want to, but the bottom line is that abortion cannot be, and will never ever be, stopped without substantial socialistic wealth redistribution from the top to the bottom, in the form of housing, food, education and health care on a permanent basis. Otherwise, the public will always keep abortion in place as an escape from calamitous poverty and endless suffering.
And no matter how much that is verbally abused by the Christians who disagree with it, the needle will never move until the Christians agree that piety will not save the baby, hard coded legal wealth redistribution: socialism, is the only possible way to deal with it. Everything else has been tried, nothing else has ever worked, there is nothing new under the sun. If the lives of the babies are important - and they are - then Christians have to choose what is to many of them an unpalatable legal and tax structure. It's a question of what people love most: money and power, or babies and poor people.
BECAUSE Christian societies, at their hearts, demonstrably love money and power more than they love babies or poor people, THEREFORE we will have abortion until the end of time. We always have the power to stop it, but in democracy, the only way to stop it is to redistribute enough wealth that the poor women can afford to raise the babies, not having their bare needs met, but to have a full fair shot at society - and THAT is massively expensive.
Evolution is small, cheap beer compared to this issue. If Christians want to save lives, accept a heavy social safety net and redistributive taxation. Otherwise admit that you serve mammon and leave off the Christian moralising, because it's completely hypocritical and the substantial majority of people see it for what it is, see right through it, and take all the steps we see to marginalise what amounts to hypocrisy and deceit in society.
Consider: No willingness to redistribute and have a social safety network AND a desire to suppress the teaching of scientific evolution AND a relentless moral pressure to marginalise gays and non-traditional relationships. In other words greed, ignorance and fanatical puritanism: that is what people suppress - by driving it from the schools, driving it from the public square, marginalising it, and ignoring it, on all fronts.
And they're not completely wrong.
If Christians want to turn the tide, they have to actually surrender their belief in unregulated free market capitalism, because THAT is serving mammon. To save the babies, you MUST have socialism, Nothing else ever has, or ever will, work, and it's just more self-deception to pretend it will. Raising children is enormously expensive and requires greater stability, for a lifetime, than low-IQ people who have made mistakes and who have marginal skills can achieve. That will ALWAYS BE dependents, and if you want to stop them from killing their babies to avoid deeper poverty, then you have to provide a working class lifestyle to them, securely, for life - THAT IS THE PRICE. It's high. Those who love money more than babies will refuse to do it - and that's every society on earth, including all of the Christian ones. Until that changes, we will always have abortion on demand in this country. And we will continue to prohibit prayer in public schools, and the gay agenda will continue to expand.
There is an old and true military adage: to defend everything is to defend nothing. Traditional Christianity has been a moral failure on matters of money and power since the Fourth Century. It has sapped the strength of the Church everywhere, and ultimately led to its apparently terminal decline in those parts of the world that have the alternative of secular science in which to believe. IF Christians were good about money and power, it would be a very powerful attractor to their religion.
But we're not good. We tolerate slavery in various forms. We secretly consider the domination of the rich over the poor to be the natural moral order. And in this belief, which is contrary to everything Jesus taught on the matter, and contrary to the thrust of YHWH's laws for the Hebrews in the Torah as well (and no, they didn't live up to the standards either), we doom our religion to its decline.
Catholics, for example, can crow about our traditions and lines of authority leading back to Christ, but everybody else - and many Catholics (and former Catholics) only see rolling wave after rolling wave, generation after generation, of raped boys, and make the judgment that if the structures that have propagated that and protected it do not, cannot and will not change, it would be better that the Catholic Church utterly perish from the earth, than that for another five generations of boys be raped in order to protect a deficient and unworkable power structure, EVEN IF that was the way Christ did it. Christ did it that way, and it doesn't work. Change it, or - in this democratic age - face what you face: the abandonment of the Church, it's hollowing out and eventual death. The gates of Hell may never prevail against the Church externally, but people will walk away from the Church en masse rather than let their boys be raped. That's the way it is, and ultimately the people are right.
That's true with Christianity as a whole.
So yes, save the babies by stopping abortion. Which MEANS wealth redistribution through taxation and the erection of a much more robust social welfare state. That's the price for saving the babies, and for saving Christianity.
For my part, I do not believe that Catholics will give up on priestly celibacy, and that it will be upon that stubborn rock that the seeds can find no root and the Church will die out. And I do not believe that the Christians as a whole will change their unholy love of money concentrations and traditional power structures, and that Christianity will dwindle to 10% of the population as it has in Europe.
It doesn't have to, but ultimately God is not going to protect the rape of boys, and God is not going to protect the socio-economic structures of the West either. Both things are contrary to what Jesus taught, and therefore both things are poison at the root of the Church.
That's the way it is. How the universe got here is really small beer compared to these things. But it's a lot easier to talk about.
