Your religious rights end with your own body. You have no right to expect or demand that all will do as you believe all ought to do.
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
with the emphasis on the expectation; one can, of course, “demand” anything one likes, but no one need heed those demands
Ne'er have I heard words so succinctly demonstrate the schism between the Roman church from the rest of the catholic churches.
ReplyDeleteBut they're never LESS THAN your own body, either. [Which, for those who have uteruses, includes them, their function, their contents.]
ReplyDeleteTo be clear, I'm agreeing w/ you, Tobias. I just heard a possible opening re "...but what about the 'body of the unborn child' [sic]?", and I wanted to be emphatic.
Thanks Tim, and JCF. The "unborn child" issue is a part of this picture; and ultimately I think the decision has to be the woman's, in conversation with physicians and spiritual advisers, as it is a very serious decision. And the advice has to be free of any coercion or threat! I say this because it seems to me that the arguments about the nature of the embryo or fetus are inconclusive on both sides -- and it is this very ambiguity that demands agnosticism and leaves the decision in the hands of the one most directly concerned.
ReplyDeleteI'm always astonished how very little attention we pay to Free Will.
ReplyDeleteWhenever anyone questions the state of the world the standard answer is that, in his loving wisdom, God has given us free will. Free will must be supremely important to him.
And yet, we spend most of our time denying others the right to their free will.
We are all answerable for the choices we made. That should be enough.
Thanks, Erika. This is one of the reasons the Bonhoeffer's Ethic of Responsibility is so important. I don't know the German term for it, but the sense in which we have to engage with reality as adult persons is very powerfully expressed in his Ethics. This had a big influence on my own ethical thought.
ReplyDelete