I think there are two major issues involved in today’s party split.
The big one for many conservative Christians is abortion and support for gays. Indeed it may be that for many people nothing else matters. From my perspective, abortion is a non-issue, and Jesus' teachings support acceptance of LGBT.
There is no Biblical position on abortion. There are hundreds of irrelevant passages, but nothing real. For me the problem with the anti-abortion position is that it has moved to regarding human life as possessed by anything with human DNA. I would define it in terms of the image of God. That is not yet possessed by a fetus. The idea that there is a soul at conception is hard to deal with. There’s nothing in the Bible saying so. Furthermore, it leads to implausible results. Less than half of fertilized eggs become viable. If they al have souls, and if the conservative assumption that only 10% of adults are saved is right, heaven is going to consist mostly of souls associated with bodies that never actually developed. That’s not impossible, but there’s no reason to think it’s true. The Catholic tradition mostly acknowledged that we didn't get souls until the body was somewhat developed. With today's knowledge, I think that would be later than in the early Catholic tradition, when there's a working brain.
The current conservative position is actually self-defeating. States are passing anti-abortion laws based on false claims that they are concerned with the safety of abortion. This is leading Democrats to conclude that allowing any control of abortion is politically unsafe. The result is likely to be that we abandon the compromise of the last few decades (no restrictions before viability) for unenforceable prohibition in a few states and no restrictions at all in the ones with the most people.
Gay issues can’t be discussed here under the rules. I think, however that the conservative position is again based on bad exegesis. Jesus generally rejected the OT purity rules, and the typical reading of Paul confuses his own view with his opponents’. If you want more details, you’ll have to post in a group where discussion is allowed.
The second major issue is how we deal with social problems. When I was growing up in the 60s, Democrats seems to want to throw money at problems, and their solutions were a bit naive. In recent decades that has reversed. Today Republicans seem to produce bigger deficits, and seem to think you can fix any problem with arresting people. Using welfare to solve problems is no longer the main Democratic solution.
There’s also a more general problem. Look at postings in Current Events, or just “new posts.” CF has been taken over by indignation. You can always find people doing unreasonable things, and in particular you can always find mistakes caused by people trying to deal with problems. I’m not going to get into specific issues, as that would make this posting too long to be practical. But I think in general Republicans are using indignation over both real and imaginary mistakes to make people afraid of doing things that need to be done. Meanwhile they’re changing the system to favor their super-rich backers.
It’s very hard to believe that only in the US can we not do universal health care and higher education.
The big one for many conservative Christians is abortion and support for gays. Indeed it may be that for many people nothing else matters. From my perspective, abortion is a non-issue, and Jesus' teachings support acceptance of LGBT.
There is no Biblical position on abortion. There are hundreds of irrelevant passages, but nothing real. For me the problem with the anti-abortion position is that it has moved to regarding human life as possessed by anything with human DNA. I would define it in terms of the image of God. That is not yet possessed by a fetus. The idea that there is a soul at conception is hard to deal with. There’s nothing in the Bible saying so. Furthermore, it leads to implausible results. Less than half of fertilized eggs become viable. If they al have souls, and if the conservative assumption that only 10% of adults are saved is right, heaven is going to consist mostly of souls associated with bodies that never actually developed. That’s not impossible, but there’s no reason to think it’s true. The Catholic tradition mostly acknowledged that we didn't get souls until the body was somewhat developed. With today's knowledge, I think that would be later than in the early Catholic tradition, when there's a working brain.
The current conservative position is actually self-defeating. States are passing anti-abortion laws based on false claims that they are concerned with the safety of abortion. This is leading Democrats to conclude that allowing any control of abortion is politically unsafe. The result is likely to be that we abandon the compromise of the last few decades (no restrictions before viability) for unenforceable prohibition in a few states and no restrictions at all in the ones with the most people.
Gay issues can’t be discussed here under the rules. I think, however that the conservative position is again based on bad exegesis. Jesus generally rejected the OT purity rules, and the typical reading of Paul confuses his own view with his opponents’. If you want more details, you’ll have to post in a group where discussion is allowed.
The second major issue is how we deal with social problems. When I was growing up in the 60s, Democrats seems to want to throw money at problems, and their solutions were a bit naive. In recent decades that has reversed. Today Republicans seem to produce bigger deficits, and seem to think you can fix any problem with arresting people. Using welfare to solve problems is no longer the main Democratic solution.
There’s also a more general problem. Look at postings in Current Events, or just “new posts.” CF has been taken over by indignation. You can always find people doing unreasonable things, and in particular you can always find mistakes caused by people trying to deal with problems. I’m not going to get into specific issues, as that would make this posting too long to be practical. But I think in general Republicans are using indignation over both real and imaginary mistakes to make people afraid of doing things that need to be done. Meanwhile they’re changing the system to favor their super-rich backers.
It’s very hard to believe that only in the US can we not do universal health care and higher education.
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