my take on abortion:

[FreeinChrist]

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[Paidiske]

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[Dave-W]

Lives are measured from the time of their begetting by their fathers. A father's participation in "begetting" lasts a very brief moment: when sperm joins with egg. It does not speak of life from birth, but from begetting by the father. So yes, the Bible does state that life begins at conception.

While I also believe human life begins at conception, I do not see the bible supporting (or denying) that. Your logic here is extremely stretched, beyond the breaking point IMO.

 

[Hank77]

Look at Genesis, the lineage of the patriarchs. Lives are measured from the time of their begetting by their fathers. A father's participation in "begetting" lasts a very brief moment: when sperm joins with egg. It does not speak of life from birth, but from begetting by the father. So yes, the Bible does state that life begins at conception.

Would you show me in Genesis where you are seeing this. When I do a word search I am only finding where beget is speaking about children who are actually born alive.

 

[Vicomte13]

Would you show me in Genesis where you are seeing this. When I do a word search I am only finding where beget is speaking about children who are actually born alive.

Sure. I'll have to do it tonight or tomorrow.

 

[Hank77]

Sure. I'll have to do it tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks a bunch.

 

[redleghunter]

Sure. I'll have to do it tonight or tomorrow.

Look forward to it.

 

[Douglas Hendrickson]

Vicomte13 said: ↑
Look at Genesis, the lineage of the patriarchs. Lives are measured from the time of their begetting by their fathers. A father's participation in "begetting" lasts a very brief moment: when sperm joins with egg. It does not speak of life from birth, but from begetting by the father. So yes, the Bible does state that life begins at conception.

Would you show me in Genesis where you are seeing this. When I do a word search I am only finding where beget is speaking about children who are actually born alive.

Seems it takes a very long night to come up with, from Scripture, actual support for the idea that "begetting" only means "providing the sperm."

 

[Goatee]

For me, life of a human begins the very moment of conception. It is at that very point, as far as I am concerned, that God gives that little life a unique soul.

 

[Douglas Hendrickson]

For me, life of a human begins the very moment of conception. It is at that very point, as far as I am concerned, that God gives that little life a unique soul.

Threads at CF are supposed to NOT be "all about you." NOTHING PERSONAL. Especially not attacks of another person, not addressed to them personally.

They are to be discussions of the issues involved, not anything about private concerns and speculations without any basis other than "for me."
The OP is probably wrong to even phrase the title of the thread in the way it is.

That said, please give us more than simply your conclusions, without arguing for them.

 

[Goatee]

Threads at CF are supposed to NOT be "all about you." NOTHING PERSONAL. Especially not attacks of another person, not addressed to them personally.

They are to be discussions of the issues involved, not anything about private concerns and speculations without any basis other than "for me."
The OP is probably wrong to even phrase the title of the thread in the way it is.

That said, please give us more than simply your conclusions, without arguing for them.

Sorry but you are wrong buddy. We all can have 'personal' views and beliefs.

 

[SPF]

For me, life of a human begins the very moment of conception. It is at that very point, as far as I am concerned, that God gives that little life a unique soul.

Not only for you Goatee, but also for all of modern science and biology and medicine! We know scientifically now that new human life is formed at conception. Thankfully, it's no longer speculation or guesswork.

And Douglas, that's quite rich of you to call someone out for a "personal" view. Your entire position is held, without support, VIA your own personal thoughts.

 

[Douglas Hendrickson]

Sorry but you are wrong buddy. We all can have 'personal' views and beliefs.

Sure we can have such views, I certainly would never say you cannot have personal views and beliefs.

However, generally they are, and especially the fact that you hold them, irrelevant around here; the reasons for holding them is what is relevant.

 

[Goatee]

Sure we can have such views, I certainly would never say you cannot have personal views and beliefs.

However, generally they are, and especially the fact that you hold them, irrelevant around here; the reasons for holding them is what is relevant.

Only irrelevant to you! Lol

 

[Douglas Hendrickson]

Not only for you Goatee, but also for all of modern science and biology and medicine! We know scientifically now that new human life is formed at conception. Thankfully, it's no longer speculation or guesswork.

And Douglas, that's quite rich of you to call someone out for a "personal" view. Your entire position is held, without support, VIA your own personal thoughts.

There you go SPF, total personal attack. I know you can do better than that, but I also know how you love to appeal to authority (especially without any specifics).

Do you really want this thread to be shut down again? (Probably, would be my guess.)

 

[Goatee]

There you go SPF, total personal attack. I know you can do better than that, but I also know how you love to appeal to authority (especially without any specifics).

Do you really want this thread to be shut down again? (Probably, would be my guess.)

I don't see it as a personal attack buddy. You need to look at it differently. People don't 'have' to agree with you. This is a forum.

 

[Vicomte13]

Vicomte13 said: ↑
Look at Genesis, the lineage of the patriarchs. Lives are measured from the time of their begetting by their fathers. A father's participation in "begetting" lasts a very brief moment: when sperm joins with egg. It does not speak of life from birth, but from begetting by the father. So yes, the Bible does state that life begins at conception.



Seems it takes a very long night to come up with, from Scripture, actual support for the idea that "begetting" only means "providing the sperm."

Funny you should mention that, Douglas. Because last night WAS a very long night for me. See, I was on a plane from Warsaw to New York for most of the night. And as it happens, I had the Torah open on my little folding table and was writing out a response on a yellow pad on just this very subject, going knowing - conception - bringing forth by knowing - conception - bringing forth through Genesis to demonstrate the Hebrew word pattern and make the point very clearly.

I am sorry that I could not get to it the day before, when I was flying from Budapest to Warsaw. Or the day before that, when I was occupied in Budapest, or the two days before that, during which I had to fly from New York to Lisbon. And then go from Lisbon to London. And then again from London to Budapest.

And I apologize for not getting right to answering your surly question the first time, because I was preparing for this very trip and all of the things I would need to do while on it.

I do apologize that my life and its many responsibilities and travels got in the way of a prompt response to you.

Having reviewed the material and notated it, I was prepared to sit down and type it all out nicely for you, to prove my point and bounce the rubble with it.

But I think I'll just leave you in darkness on the matter rather than set aside such precious time as I have in my busy life to communicate with the likes of you. Go walk in the shadow. You're wrong - you can even see that in English if you go look and think about what you are reading.

It is not my job to teach you anything, and I regret having taken the time on my business trip to actually give a care about getting back to you and preparing it. I would have gotten more out of just sleeping.

In short: go boil your head.

 

[Douglas Hendrickson]

Funny you should mention that, Douglas. Because last night WAS a very long night for me. See, I was on a plane from Warsaw to New York for most of the night. And as it happens, I had the Torah open on my little folding table and was writing out a response on a yellow pad on just this very subject, going knowing - conception - bringing forth by knowing - conception - bringing forth through Genesis to demonstrate the Hebrew word pattern and make the point very clearly.

I am sorry that I could not get to it the day before, when I was flying from Budapest to Warsaw. Or the day before that, when I was occupied in Budapest, or the two days before that, during which I had to fly from New York to Lisbon. And then go from Lisbon to London. And then again from London to Budapest.

And I apologize for not getting right to answering your surly question the first time, because I was preparing for this very trip and all of the things I would need to do while on it.

I do apologize that my life and its many responsibilities and travels got in the way of a prompt response to you.

Having reviewed the material and notated it, I was prepared to sit down and type it all out nicely for you, to prove my point and bounce the rubble with it.

But I think I'll just leave you in darkness on the matter rather than set aside such precious time as I have in my busy life to communicate with the likes of you. Go walk in the shadow. You're wrong - you can even see that in English if you go look and think about what you are reading.

It is not my job to teach you anything, and I regret having taken the time on my business trip to actually give a care about getting back to you and preparing it. I would have gotten more out of just sleeping.

In short: go boil your head.

Nice guy. (Or gal? Wouldn't even want to think a gal could be so awful.)

Seems he obviously could not come up with a good answer.

It was not my surly question, at least not originally. Just wanted to hold the guy to his promise to answer "next day."
Because I would sincerely like the answer to "How begat" means "giving sperm," if anyone has one.

 

[Vicomte13]

Look forward to it.

Ok, Redleg, let's go through this.

The story of human reproduction begins immediately after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. In the Torah, in the portion that we have designated as "Genesis 4:1", we are told, "ve-ha-adam yada AT hawwah istov va-tahar va-teled AT qayin", which is literally "And-the-Human he-had-Know AT Living Woman-him and-she-will-Conceive and-she-will-Bring.forth AT Acquired"

Although ancient Hebrew names are words that carry meaning, we are accustomed to names being mere monikers that label people. This causes us to lose a great deal of the meaning of the text, because we do not see the words. Example: That the name "Methuselah" is the expression "his-Death-shall-bring" is full of meaning, given that the longest-lived man in Scripture also, by mathematical count, died in the same year as the Flood, is fraught with meaning. God decided to doom the world, but God tarries in carrying out such destruction - expressing through the name of this man that his death shall bring the Flood, but also through the exceptionally long life of the man, his desire to stay he hand. The name paints the picture carried by the rabbinical midrash, of the raindrops beginning to fall just as the hoary old man on his death bed closed his eyes and exhaled for the last time. God is patient, he tarries, but his judgments are sure, and what he foreordains, shall be. Methuselah's death did indeed bring - the end of the old world - just as foretold by God with the assigning of that name at the beginning of his life over nine-and-a-half centuries in the past.

But we are accustomed to just reading names as labels, and there is no greater meaning that bears on the issue of childbirth in being exacting about the meanings in this case, so let's substitute the traditional English transliterations of the names into our base Hebrew here: "And-the-Adam he-had-Know AT Eve Woman-him and-she-will-Conceive and-she-will-Bring.forth AT Cain"

Secondly, the "AT" Alef-Tav...the first and the last of the Hebrew letters - as A-Z in English or Alpha-Omega in Greek. This combination of letters which appears throughout the Hebrew Scriptures - first appearing after the first appearance of the word "Powers" (which we translate as "God") in Genesis 1:1 (God Alpha-Omega in the Greek) - this pictographic sentence of a bull being lead to the mark, and of El to the Cross - so utterly fraught with meaning in its first appearances, has by this point simply become the routine designator of the direct object of the verb, the "mark" to which the bull walks. It's such a stunning thing to see the bull walking to the mark - and God walking to Cross - with each occurrence of action in the text that it is almost a shame not to pause and expound upon it every time it appears, so relentless does the text beat in that tattoo. But it is not central to our narrow topic at hand, so we will let it pass with a mention and strip its clutter out of our base Hebrew here, leaving us with "And-the-Adam he-had-Know Eve Woman-him and-she-will-Conceive and-she-will-Bring.forth Cain". It is painful for me to do that.

Likewise, the nominative indicator "the" - and its pictographic denoter "H" - "Hey" - a man standing arms raised in Hallelujah - a puff of breath/wind, which is spirit - all of this rich color we may strip from the text too, to get to the point. Leaving us with the meaning our English-programmed brains are comfortable seeing: "And-Adam he-had-Know Eve Woman-him and-she-will-Conceive and-she-will-Bring.forth Cain".

Having hyphenated the language to show that the connecting tent peg, the Waw, the vav in modern pronunciation, is part of the word, we can dispense with that too, to help us see English clearer still, emerging from the Hebrew, always with a fading of color. "And Adam he-had-Know Eve Woman-him and she-will-Conceive and she-will-Bring.forth Cain". There is greater loss than that in removing that hyphen and making those "ands" stand alone, for they become more important, just as sentence structure in English is more important than in the ancient Hebrew. For in the Hebrew, the "W" is the tent-peg, the Waw/Vav that links related idea to related idea. There are no periods or punctuation, so the Waw serves to link the suite of ideas, one to the other, in the way that paragraph structure does in English. We pretend that we are translating "literally" when we write this word as "and", but it's still an echo.

And the one single time that we DEVIATE from calling Vav "and" occurs in a place where we want to change the meaning of the text by doing so. Later, when speaking of Isaac and Ishmael and the convenant, the standard "W" link is there in Genesis 17:21, which speaks of the good things that God will give to Ishmael, and then says that his covenant is with Isaac. We have decided that "...and my covenant is with Isaac", a conjunctive link using the "W" that has before in the text always been rendered as "And" - there, suddenly, our English translators choose to change the word from "and" to "but", creating a disjunctive, in English, that says that God will give good things to Ishmael, "BUT my covenant is with Isaac." This disjunctive "but" has been used by English speakers to signify a cutting off that "but" does indeed signify in English. Trouble is, the word actually IN the Scripture is not "but", it is the same "and" that has appeared hundreds and hundreds of times before. There is no basis in the text to cut Ishmael and Isaac apart. God does not do it. God uses "and". WE have changed "and" to "but" in order to suit a theology we prefer. So this "And" is a pretty important little prefix, in a malor context 13 chapters later. Still, for our purposes here, it is superfluous so we can cut the hyphens and the links.

In a similar reduction, with less fraught consequences, we can reduce the cave-mannish sounding (to our ears) inverted word order and pronominal case agreement of "Woman-him" and render it as two words "his woman", which is not more simple, really, but which is less jarring to our eyes.

This leaves us with: "And Adam he-had-Know Eve his woman and she-will-Conceive and she-will-Bring.forth Cain", which has three remaining verb structures: he-had-Know, she-will-Conceive and she-will-Bring.forth. This is the marrow of our discussion, a pattern repeated relentlessly going forward in Genesis, with some minor variations, all of which evince the same thing: the life of the human being is marked from the time that the child is conceived (in this structure), and even more clearly "caused to be brought forth", by the FATHER in each case, with the subsequent process described in the verbs that follow.

Now we need to take an aside with regards to Hebrew verb tense, because it emphasizes the key details. There are two verb tenses in ancient Hebrew: perfect and imperfect. Modern Hebrew is a time stream language because it was purposely created in the 19th Century from the vocabulary of ancient Hebrew using the grammatical base of the Western European languages that were the native tongues of Eliezer ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. All Western languages, and all of the modern Semitic languages, use time-stream based verbs, and have many tenses: past-of-the-past (pluperfect), past, present, future, future past, etc., etc. In this way, two actions can be distinguished by their relation in time.

Ancient Hebrew thinking was not based in the timestream. It was, rather, based on the concept of whether a thing was completed or perfected (hence the "perfect" tense) or incompleted, ongoing or not yet complete, the "imperfect" tense.

To show the difference, the Hebrew perfect here is rendered in the English past tense when the action is completed, and then, relative to that action, the imperfect tense is used to demonstrate that the subsequent actions are not yet completed.

So, the first verb is the perfect tense "he did know" - we can render this in English as "he knew". The literal Hebrew really is "know", but the knowledge here is clearly carnal: "had sex with". We can tastefully stick with the choice of the ancient authors and use "know" in this case. The key, though, is that it is a completed action. The next action described is imperfect: she will conceive. Biologically, conception does not occur immediately with intercourse or [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse], but sometime later, usually within a day or two. The Hebrew here has put down a time marker of the "knowing", by the man, as a perfected act, followed in chain - linked by those Waw/Vav tent pegs to the following chain of actions: she will conceive and she will bring forth. Both of these verbs require a direct object, and they both have the same direct object, indicated by the AT: Cain. Adam knew Eve and she would conceive Cain and she would bring forth Cain - a linked sequence, rooted upon the perfected action with what followed, each step separately in chain.

Of crucial note in this text: when Eve was conceiving, she was not conceiving in a vacuum. The text says explicitly that she was conceiving Cain. The thing that would be Cain at the time of the knowing is the direct object of both the conceiving and the bringing forth. She conceived Cain after Adam knew her, and then she would bring forth Cain later. "Cain" existed from the conception.

This is not some tortured reading of the text. It's what it says. Now, if one decides to "play dumb" and refuse to accept that the direct object "AT Qayin" necessarily applies to all of the preceding linked verbs (it DOES, but any port in a storm), one could try to assert that "actually" the text only says that she brought forth Cain, because the "AT Qayin" is only after the second verb.

This argument is grammatically ridiculous, the equivalent of saying that "the gentle, big brown cow" only tells us that the cow is brown - but again, the statement of this text - that Cain was conceived, and that Cain was then brought forth - places "Cain" in existence at conception - which was the original point I made. And like I say "Any port in a storm" - the devious minds that don't like what that means for their desire to protect abortion rights will play Nelson here and put their blind eye to the telescope, and with a simple refusal to accept Hebrew grammar can perhaps maintain a flimsy defense of their position based on the way this first child bearing is described.

The text utterly closes the door on that at Genesis 5-3 when, in speaking of Adam's fathering of Shet (Seth) this way: "and-he-will-Live Human Three-s and-Hundred Year and-he-will-make-Bring.forth...Shet". Using the conventions we've already described above above, this is an imperfect verb (he will live) because he's still alive and"Human" is Adam. Three-s and-Hundred Year is 130 years.

So, our text reads "And Adam was living 130 years and he-will-make-Bring.forth Seth.

That verb va-yyoled - and he will make bring forth - is a third person masculine. it is Adam, the father, who is making Eve to bring forth.

Stop. Pause. How does a man make a woman to bring forth a child? He impregnates her. Here, Adam impregnated Eve with Seth. He fathered Seth. He did not fertilize an egg creating a zygote who became Seth. Adam's participation in the fathering of Seth was in "knowing" Eve, thereby causing Seth to be conceived.

This pattern is repeated relentlessly in the next pages of Genesis 5. The lives of the Patriarchs are each measured from the time they are FATHERED, and NOT from the time they are born. The lives of the fathers are measured on after they father their named children, and the lives of the children are measured from the time they are fathered.

The text speaks of the fathering, the male principle in reproduction. We all know that this is a specific point moment, a few hours or a day after intercourse. Seth came to be be when he was fathered - when his FATHER "made him to be brought forth", NOT when his mother actually brought him forth in the future.

Given THAT Hebrew verb structure, there simply is no way to argue the contrary. Lives are measured in Genesis from the time of their fathering by the male - from the time that the male father "causes them to be brought forth". That occurs at one single point in time: conception. After that - really after the intercourse that precedes it - the male can walk away never to be seen again in any trimester. HIS role in "causing to bring forth" a child is done. and Biblically speaking, the child exists.

All of the later passages in the Scripture, that talk about how God knew the person in the womb, or the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit, all follow the same structure.

Scripturally speaking, human life is measured from the time that the father causes the child to be brought forth, and that is either one moment in time: conception, or the short span of time consisting of intercourse and conception. The text is lucid and clear, and argument to the contrary is futile. Q.E.D.

 

[redleghunter]

See, I was on a plane from Warsaw to New York f

How'd it go?