Abortion To Save The Live Of The Mother

[Kevin]

Whenever I read about the response of the church to cases like that of Margret McBride I feel very worried about the legitimacy of the Church itself. The Church's position honestly seems to be that, if there was a case in which there was 0% for the child to live, and that unless an abortion, and not an indirect abortion but a straight up abortion was performed, there was a 100% chance the mother would die, the only moral choice for the mother to take would be to simply die.

 

I am aware of arguments that there are no actual scenarios like this, that it is never an issue of 100% chance a mother will die, but I am confident that a 0% chance for the survival of the fetus can be established. So, if there is a 0% chance of fetal survival, and performing an indirect abortion will create, say, a 50% chance that the mother will die, whereas a direct abortion will create a 0% chance the mother will die, then how does make any sense for the woman to have to imperil her life so for what is essentially a matter of semantics. Or, if 50% is too little, what if it was 90%?

 

This objection, I think, is just one of reason. If the Church believes people to be self-excommunicated because of this, I have trouble understanding how the Church can still be thought of as legitimate if it put a semantics above life - if the child is as sure to die  if a so-called "indirect abortion" is performed as they would be if a real abortion is performed, then the indirect abortion is no different from an abortion, and those who attempt it and thereby bring the life of the fetus to a premature must also be held culpable.

 

But what about a case were there is a small chance for the fetus to live, but the mother will almost certainly die, if a birth is attempted. Doesn't requiring the mother to die go against 2264 "Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow". I have heard it said that this is treating an unborn child like a disease, or like a killer, and that this cannot be legitimately called self-defense since the child is innocent. But this seems extremely hollow to me: if, for example, a person with a brain tumor like the U. of Texas shooter Charles Whitman who might be called an innocent with no control over the fact the he is imperiling the lives of others approaches me with a gun, then am I obligated to let the lethal blow fall on me, contrary to 2264. At the very least, if this is the case, 2264 must be changed to reflect the fact that self-defense is only legitimate against those who are responsible for their actions. I am not being sarcastic here - I simply want the law to be consistent.

 

When I posted this on the Ask a Scholar section of the board I got this response:

 

There are a lot of people walking around today who were given 0% chance of living. I'm one. The doctors told my mom I was dead in her womb, and she'd die without an abortion. She felt me move when she was being wheeled in to the OR. I've always had good timing.

Humans are great at rationalizing stuff so that we can get what we want. If you don't want a child bad enough, you can come up with a million excuses. How about this one? If I have to carry this child to term, I will kill myself. So that means the baby is legitimately endangering the health of the mother.

Another great one is the child is the product of rape. Lots of people want to make that an exception. Next thing you know, and women will convince themselves they were raped because he refused to wear a condom or because he got me to have sex with the promise we'd marry, or because she'd had too much to drink.

What doctors don't want to admit, even to themselves, is that there are no 100% or 0% in medicine. My mom was told having children would kill her. She had half a dozen that came to term. I was told I'd die if I got pregnant. I survived 5 miscarriages and am quite alive. We can discuss hypotheticals until the cows come home, but the bottom line is that where there is life, there is hope.

What is so hard to accept about conception to natural death? Anything else is playing God and none of us, even doctors, have the skills for that job.

 

With all due respect to the responder, this sounds to me like a lot of Just-So-Story. There was a case in Ireland just a few months ago where this scenario happened and the woman died. If doctors are so unreliable, why do we even bother going to them at all? Why don't we simply rely on prayer to heal every illness we get? Isn't going to a doctor showing we don't trust God?

 

Or we could even say, this is all based on the conditional premise that doctors do not really know if there is 0% - okay, I'll play ball and say this might be the case, and there might be some rare cases where it turns out they were wrong. But that's just a contingent fact on how matters supposedly are (even though I really doubt the number of cases where doctors are completely off base is more than a drop in the ocean) - supposing that they were 100% certain the child would die, or at least could say so with the same certainty as a ball falling to the ground when you drop it. That is, unless the laws of nature themselves were overturned, the child would die. Would the mother still be obligated to die for the sake of semantics? Or maybe the problem is that, if we say "Where there is a life, there is hope" 2264 is invalidated, and should rather say "If some one attacks you for whatever reason, you have to just lay back and let them kill you and hope God will suspend the laws of nature to save you."

[Nihil Obstat]

I guess what it comes down to for me is "would you pull the trigger on an innocent person if it might save other innocents?" No, I would not. Not even if the situation is hopeless. For some things, we simply cannot compromise for any reason.

[Kevin]

I guess what it comes down to for me is "would you pull the trigger on an innocent person if it might save other innocents?" No, I would not. Not even if the situation is hopeless. For some things, we simply cannot compromise for any reason.

 

However, the Church itself says otherwise, according to canon law. This may be your personal decision, but according to the dictates of the Church itself (and I think they are reasonable on this point) it is not illicit to do so, even to the point of pulling the trigger.

[Nihil Obstat]

However, the Church itself says otherwise, according to canon law. This may be your personal decision, but according to the dictates of the Church itself (and I think they are reasonable on this point) it is not illicit to do so, even to the point of pulling the trigger.

 

This is very false.

[Kevin]

This is very false.

 

If that is the case, please explain Canon Law 2264 "Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow".

[Nihil Obstat]

If that is the case, please explain Canon Law 2264 "Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow".

 
This needs to be understood in context. Specifically that the death of the aggressor is unintended. Also you are quoting the Catechism, not Canon Law. That is an important distinction.
 
Immediate context to CCC 2264 is 2263:
 
2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not."⁶⁵

Now, honest question, because unless you are conceding here I will need to understand where you are coming from: do you understand the principle of the double effect? If you are conceding the point, then we are doing fine.

[Kevin]

I guess what it comes down to for me is "would you pull the trigger on an innocent person if it might save other innocents?" No, I would not. Not even if the situation is hopeless. For some things, we simply cannot compromise for any reason.

 

I should have added - what if the innocent person is already dying and beyond the point of possibly being saved? So, even by not resisting him, he will still die. In such a case I cannot fathom how it can be said pulling the trigger is an intrinsic evil when, without the trigger pull, more people will certainly end up dead.

[Nihil Obstat]

I should have added - what if the innocent person is already dying and beyond the point of possibly being saved? So, even by not resisting him, he will still die. In such a case I cannot fathom how it can be said pulling the trigger is an intrinsic evil when, without the trigger pull, more people will certainly end up dead.

 

The morality of an action is judged by three criteria: object, intention, and circumstances (check this with Veritatis splendor). If the moral object, the actual action one is taking, is intrinsically evil, then the entire act is evil. Since the direct, deliberate killing of an innocent is an intrinsically evil moral object, no circumstance or intention can ever make the direct, intentional killing of an innocent anything besides evil.

[Kevin]

 
This needs to be understood in context. Specifically that the death of the aggressor is unintended. Also you are quoting the Catechism, not Canon Law. That is an important distinction.
 
Immediate context to CCC 2264 is 2263:
 
2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not."⁶⁵

Now, honest question, because unless you are conceding here I will need to understand where you are coming from: do you understand the principle of the double effect? If you are conceding the point, then we are doing fine.

 

I know what double effect is, and I say it is pedantry - at least, when the principle is applied to the abortion scenario considered, the "preservation of one's own life and the killing of the aggressor" are considered to be one and the same. That is to say, since the principle is borrowed from self-defense in terms of weapons and killing, it basically that it should always be possible for you you to, as it were, aim for the legs or the hands, but if you happen to hit the heart it wasn't your fault since you didn't mean to. But in the abortion scenario, if the double-effect law is in play, it can be compared to being required to shoot at the hands or the feet (the indirect abortion) of an aggressor who will die from any wound to any part of the body. So the whole things is a false dilemma.

 

However, shiver to think that the Church has boxed itself into the insane position of requiring a mother to die in even in a zero-sum game of being required to die in order that it will not be said that he had any direct action taken against the life of her unborn child, even if said child was going to die anyway. If this is what the Church is obligated to, I think it certainly means the Church is expressing an untrue position and therefore all of the rest of its doctrine is just as likely to be wrong.

[Nihil Obstat]

I know what double effect is, and I say it is pedantry - at least, when the principle is applied to the abortion scenario considered, the "preservation of one's own life and the killing of the aggressor" are considered to be one and the same. That is to say, since the principle is borrowed from self-defense in terms of weapons and killing, it basically that it should always be possible for you you to, as it were, aim for the legs or the hands, but if you happen to hit the heart it wasn't your fault since you didn't mean to. But in the abortion scenario, if the double-effect law is in play, it can be compared to being required to shoot at the hands or the feet (the indirect abortion) of an aggressor who will die from any wound to any part of the body. So the whole things is a false dilemma.

 

However, shiver to think that the Church has boxed itself into the insane position of requiring a mother to die in even in a zero-sum game of being required to die in order that it will not be said that he had any direct action taken against the life of her unborn child, even if said child was going to die anyway. If this is what the Church is obligated to, I think it certainly means the Church is expressing an untrue position and therefore all of the rest of its doctrine is just as likely to be wrong.

 

 

the "preservation of one's own life and the killing of the aggressor" are considered to be one and the same.

 

No. They are certainly not. That is the entire point. They are entirely separate intentions, with very different moral implications.

 

 

 

That is to say, since the principle is borrowed from self-defense in terms of weapons and killing, it basically that it should always be possible for you you to, as it were, aim for the legs or the hands, but if you happen to hit the heart it wasn't your fault since you didn't mean to.

That interpretation is superficial enough so as to be simply incorrect. In a self-defense scenario, if we are assuming that you have a firearm and are justified in using it, you aim for the center of the body. You are aiming to incapacitate, and the most reliable way to incapacitate is shooting the center mass. Attempting to aim for the legs or hands is both reckless and ineffective.

On the flip side, if you were not justified in firing, but you shot someone in the leg or hand, you would be guilty, morally at least, of inflicting serious harm. That is mortally sinful as well, assuming the other criteria.

 

 

 

But in the abortion scenario, if the double-effect law is in play, it can be compared to being required to shoot at the hands or the feet (the indirect abortion) of an aggressor who will die from any wound to any part of the body. So the whole things is a false dilemma.

Your reasoning is very confused. You are not making adequate distinction between direct abortion and what some people rather dangerously refer to as "indirect" abortion. Therefore you are falling into that very same trap, and having difficulty distinguishing between the moral standing of the two.

 

 

 

If this is what the Church is obligated to, I think it certainly means the Church is expressing an untrue position and therefore all of the rest of its doctrine is just as likely to be wrong.

It is unfortunate that you are so quick to disregard Christ's promise to Peter.

[Kevin]

The morality of an action is judged by three criteria: object, intention, and circumstances (check this with Veritatis splendor). If the moral object, the actual action one is taking, is intrinsically evil, then the entire act is evil. Since the direct, deliberate killing of an innocent is an intrinsically evil moral object, no circumstance or intention can ever make the direct, intentional killing of an innocent anything besides evil.

 

If this is true, the Church is quite simply wrong wrong wrong.

 

Not to mention, isn't the similarly ridiculous doctrine that unbaptized infants go to hell (or Limbo - though this is just the same thing, a place to be denied the Beatific Vision even though you did nothing to deserve it) based on the idea that there is no such thing as an innocent?

 

Or heck, I'll bring out the big guns:

 

But the seventh day, rising up early, they went about the city, as it was ordered, seven times. 16 And when in the seventh going about the priests sounded with the trumpets, Joshua said to all Israel: Shout: for the Lord has delivered the city to you: 17 And let this city be an anathema, and all things that are in it, to the Lord. Let only Rahab, the harlot, live, with all that are with her in the house: for she hid the messengers whom we sent. 18 But beware lest you touch ought of those things that are forbidden, and you be guilty of transgression, and all the camp of Israel be under sin, and be troubled. 19 But whatsoever gold or silver there shall be, or vessels of brass and iron, let it be consecrated to the Lord, laid up in his treasures. 20 So all the people making a shout, and the trumpets sounding, when the voice and the sound thundered in the ears of the multitude, the walls forthwith fell down: and every man went up by the place that was over against him: and they took the city, 21 and killed all that were in it, man and woman, young and old. The oxen also, and the sheep, and the asses, they slew with the edge of the sword. (Joshua 6, 15-21).

 

So then, all the Lord ordered the Israelites to commit the intrinsically evil act of killing innocent children? By your definition, even if God ordered it, it should be intrinsically evil.

[Nihil Obstat]

If this is true, the Church is quite simply wrong wrong wrong.
 
Not to mention, isn't the similarly ridiculous doctrine that unbaptized infants go to hell (or Limbo - though this is just the same thing, a place to be denied the Beatific Vision even though you did nothing to deserve it) based on the idea that there is no such thing as an innocent?
 
Or heck, I'll bring out the big guns:
 
But the seventh day, rising up early, they went about the city, as it was ordered, seven times. 16 And when in the seventh going about the priests sounded with the trumpets, Joshua said to all Israel: Shout: for the Lord has delivered the city to you: 17 And let this city be an anathema, and all things that are in it, to the Lord. Let only Rahab, the harlot, live, with all that are with her in the house: for she hid the messengers whom we sent. 18 But beware lest you touch ought of those things that are forbidden, and you be guilty of transgression, and all the camp of Israel be under sin, and be troubled. 19 But whatsoever gold or silver there shall be, or vessels of brass and iron, let it be consecrated to the Lord, laid up in his treasures. 20 So all the people making a shout, and the trumpets sounding, when the voice and the sound thundered in the ears of the multitude, the walls forthwith fell down: and every man went up by the place that was over against him: and they took the city, 21 and killed all that were in it, man and woman, young and old. The oxen also, and the sheep, and the asses, they slew with the edge of the sword. (Joshua 6, 15-21).
 
So then, all the Lord ordered the Israelites to commit the intrinsically evil act of killing innocent children? By your definition, even if God ordered it, it should be intrinsically evil.

 
 
 

 
Not to mention, isn't the similarly ridiculous doctrine that unbaptized infants go to hell (or Limbo - though this is just the same thing, a place to be denied the Beatific Vision even though you did nothing to deserve it) based on the idea that there is no such thing as an innocent?
 

This is maybe the silliest red herring I have seen in ages. I will not even bother responding to it.
 
 
 

So then, all the Lord ordered the Israelites to commit the intrinsically evil act of killing innocent children? By your definition, even if God ordered it, it should be intrinsically evil.

No.
If you want to prooftext, I can do that too. But it makes for boring and irrelevant debate and/or discussion. If you feel like trying that again, but this time with some real content, then I will be around.
Long prooftext:
[spoiler]

 

http://jimmyakin.com/2007/02/hard_sayings_of.html
 First, regarding the commands to exterminate particular populations, these are, indeed, horriffic from a modern-day point of view. Such commands are incompatible with the Christian age, and anyone today who would claim to have received such commands–such as the terrorists you mention–is wrong. God does not work that way today.

The question is whether he ever worked that way, and the answer to this question must be either yes or no. We will look at both possibilities.


Suppose that the answer to the question is yes: God did at one time
command the extermination of whole groups of people. How could we
possibly make sense of this?

It would seem that the point of departure for the discussion would be this: All life is a gift from God.

Because all life is a gift from God, it is up to God to determine
how much of that gift we receive. Whether he gives us a day or a
century, it is his gift to give, and because it is a gift, it is not
something we are owed. We therefore cannot claim that God is being
unfair if he gives us one amount of this gift rather than another.

In fact, he gives all of us an infinite amount of this gift because,
once we are created, we will endure forever. After the resurrection, we
will all–every one of us–have an infinite amount of physical life
ahead of us. What we are discussing, therefore, is whether some of us
receive an infinite amount of physical life plus a varying amount of
finite physical life as well.

In some cases, such as a person who dies one day after conception,
the person receives an infinite amount of physical life plus one day.
In other cases, as with a person who lives for a century, the
individual receives an infinite amount of physical life plus a hundred
years.

From a mathematical point of view, these two gifts are
indistinguishable. Infinity + 1 and infinity + 36,524 (the number of
days in a century) are the same. In both cases, a person is given an
unlimited (infinite) amount of life.

Further, we are also given non-physical life even in the space
between death and resurrection, and that is a gift as well, even if we
are not in our bodies at the time.

The question, it seems, is thus not how much life we receive,
because (a) it is all a gift from God that we do not have a claim to
and (b) it is always an unlimited gift, even if there is a temporary
period in which we don’t have the use of our bodies.

Instead, it seems that the question is whether we suffer unjustly in this time.

Here is where the problem of evil comes in, because it is clear that
God does allow suffering to exist in the world, including for the
innocent. Why he does so is something that we have some theories about
(e.g., that he allows it in part in order to allow a certain kind of
free will to exist in the world), but much of it remains a mystery.

But the fact that God allows unjust suffering does not strike me as meaning that God himself is unjust. It would
mean that he is unjust if he was inflicting it for its own sake. That
would be cruel on his part and thus unjust. But it seems to me that God
can avoid the charge that he himself is unjust if two things occur.

The first is if he is allowing the unjust suffering for a good
cause. We have already mentioned one reason he is thought to allow
this–so that he can allow us to have a certain kind of free will–but
this explanation may not explain everything–partly because we can’t
always be sure of what the good reason is that God is allowing
suffering and partly because we ourselves may not be the beneficiary of
that good reason.

Suppose, for example, that God allowed this to happen: He allows me
to be conceived in my mother and then, one day after conception, he
allows me to die. I never have the ability to exercise free will in
this life, and so I am not the beneficiary of the reason (or at least
the best-known reason) for which God is thought to allow suffering.

That much actually happens in the real world. Some people do die a day after conception. But what happens next?

If it were the case that God allowed me to simply be damned at this
point and suffer in eternity as well as in this life then it would
indeed be possible to charge God with injustice. I was an innocent, I
never got to exercise free will and thus could not choose for or
against God, and to automatically be sentenced to eternal suffering
when I myself was innocent would be to condemn an innocent person to
hell. (I know Calvinists have ways of trying to argue around this, but
I don’t think that they are successful). God would be unjust. Nobody
should inherit an eternal and thus infinite amount of suffering if he
didn’t choose this.

The Church shares this intuition and concludes, therefore, that this is something God does not do. Nobody will suffer in eternity unless they themselves have chosen it.

What are the alternatives, then?

It would seem that there are two:

1) God miraculously allows such a dying infant to choose whether to
embrace God’s offer of salvation or to reject it. In this case the
child would be in the same state as anybody else. If they end up
suffering in eternity, it is because they chose it themselves and thus
are not innocent. If they end up in eternal beatitude, it is because
they chose it. In neither case would God be unjust toward them, for he
enabled them to freely choose what destiny to embrace.

2) God does not miraculously allow the dying infant to exercise free
will and instead automatically grants the child a positive destiny in
the afterlife. This could be either a positive natural destiny (one
which does not include the full glory of heaven but which is
nonetheless positive, as the speculative state of limbo is commonly
understood) or it could be a positive supernatural destiny (one that
does include the full glory of heaven, as in recent speculations about
the fate of children dying without baptism). Once again, either way you
go, God is not unjust toward the dying infant because his destiny is
positive.

It seems, then, that God is not ultimately unjust as long as he
makes sure that the innocent do not get a raw deal from the eternal
perspective. As long as the innocent person ends up with a positive
eternal destiny then God has not been unjust to that person. Further,
since all eternal destinies are infinite in duration, a positive
eternal destiny means an infinitely positive one. Over the course of
eternity, those with such destinies will receive an infinite amount of
natural and/or supernatural happiness.

This means, as St. Paul says, that "the sufferings of this present
time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to
us" (Romans 8:18).

All of our sufferings in the present are finite and so cannot compare to the infinite beatitude that awaits us.

With these principles in mind, we are able to return to the
situation of the populations that God commanded the Israelites to wipe
out. What could one make of their situation?

First, in any population of human beings, some of them will not be
innocents. Some will be people who genuinely do deserve death (mass
murderers, to take an obvious example). Therefore, in the original
population of Canaan (i.e., the holy land), some of the Canaanites were not innocents.

I am sure that the reader recognizes this, as his question focuses on the suffering of the innocent
Canaanites, and we will discuss these in a moment, but it is proper to
note that some Canaanites had committed sins that were worthy of death.
Probably more than we realize, given the brutal nature of their
cultures.

Further, the Canaanites did have a relationship with God. It
isn’t the case that El (the Hebrew equivalent of "God") was a foreign
deity that they had never heard of. There are passages in Scripture
that indicate that the Canaanites were already familiar with El and
worshipped him. This is the case, for example, with Melchizedek, the
king of Jerusalem who was a priest of El, or Balaam at the time of the
Exodus, who was a prophet of El.

Archaeology confirms this. We have dug up religious texts written by
the Canaanites, and they confirm that the Canaanites did indeed worship
El. The problem is that they didn’t recognize him as the one true God.
They recognized him as the high god, the chief god of their pantheon,
but they also worshipped other gods and goddesses, such as Ba’al and
Yam and Ashera and Anat. Since El was the original, true God, this
suggests that they had departed from the true faith at some point and
become idolaters.

This may shed light on what God told Abraham in Genesis 15:16, which
was that he would not give Abraham and his descendants the promised
land immediately, because "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet
complete."

In other words, the Canaanite culture had not yet become so
thoroughly corrupt (through idolatry or other sins) that God felt a
clean start was necessary. He knew that this time would come–since
from his perspective outside of time he could see that the
Canaanites would become that corrupt–but he was unwilling to have
their culture be destroyed before it reached a certain level of
corruption.

That level of corruption, incidentally, is one the Israelites
themselves brushed up against. Not only did God repeatedly discipline
them in order to wean them away from idolatry (an effort that was
eventually successful, following the Babylonian Exile), but even at the
time of the Exodus itself their corruption reached a point that
Scripture says God was willing to let them all die and start over with
Moses.

How literally this language is to be understood is open to question, but the point that it makes is that the Israelites were not
better or morally superior to the Canaanites. What was different about
their situation was that God was determined to fulfill his promise to
bless the world through Abraham by creating a body of people who would
be vessels capable of conveying his truth to the world and so bringing
his light to all mankind.

God therefore allowed calamities to fall upon those who were
unwilling to cooperate with his grace and become vessels of light and
truth. This happened with the Canaanites. It happened with the Jewish
people in all their trials (including most notably the Babylonian
Exile). And it has happened to Christians as well. The reason that the
Christian community is fragmented and has suffered many setbacks is
that many of us have not been willing to cooperate with God’s grace and
have turned our back on God’s truth.

And yet, through the drama of the last almost forty centuries
(taking us back to the time of Abraham), God has progressively advanced
his program to the point that now fully half of mankind
(counting Jews, Christians, and Muslims) worships the Creator of the
World and the God of Abraham, even if they do not all understand him
perfectly. By the standards of the Old Testament, when the world was
swallowed in pagan darkness, we are living in an age in which the
ancient prophecy has been fulfilled and "the knowledge of the Lord
covers the earth like the waters covers the seas."

This has been with many setbacks and failures, and with the guilty
among Canaanites, Jews, Christians, and others suffering the
consequences of their actions, but through the sweep of history God has
still accomplished his promises of old.

And this sheds light, even if it does not address in particular the
question of the innocent who have suffered, on the overall purpose that
God is pursuing.

Now let us address the question of the innocent.

It is quite true that not all people in the Canaanite culture were
guilty, just as it is true that not all Jews at the time of the
Babylonian Exile were guilty and that not all Christians who have
suffered are guilty. So what of them?

Let’s look back at God’s plan of the ages for a moment. If we begin
with the premise that God wished to create for himself a distinct
people that could carry the knowledge of him to the world then it is
logical for him to give this people a homeland in which he could purify
them from the corrupting influences of the cultures around them. This
is what the Old Testament says he was doing with Israel, and it is what
history suggests has been accomplished, as illustrated by the vast
numbers of humans who now honor the Creator and the God of Abraham.

But if we put ourselves back in time and culture by thirty two or
more centuries, taking us to the time of the Exodus, what would have
been involved in giving the people of God a homeland in which he could
purify them?

It would seem–since there were already humans everywhere
(habitable) on earth–that he would need to remove whoever was already
living in the homeland that he gave them. Since these people would not
want to move, war would result.

War at this time also had a different character than it does now. In
the ancient world, when people were organized in a tribal fashion,
people’s primary loyalty was to their tribe. It was the tribes and the
protection that they gave to their members that allowed society to
function. Consequently, when people from one tribe went after those of
another, it often meant total war between the two tribes. If a person
in one tribe killed a person of another tribe, the tribe of the killer
had to be taken on in a general way. It was usually not possible to
extract just the guilty party for judgment.

This tribal reality shaped the mentality of the people of the day
such that they thought in terms of total tribe-on-tribe conflict. They
did not have the experience that we do of relying on a strong, central
government to carefully investigate matters and punish only those who
were personally guilty. For them, since the whole tribe could be
counted on to come to the defense of the guilty, the whole tribe was
complicit in the offenses of the guilty and it was legitimate to make
war on them all.

This is one of the reasons that we today have so much trouble in
parts of the world where society is still organized along tribal lines.

And it is one of the reasons why God had so much trouble dealing with the whole of the world thirty or more centuries ago.

In other words: In working with the early Israelites, God was dealing with a blunt instrument.
He wasn’t working with a people who had already been broken of their
tribal mentality and who were used to distinguishing those who were
personally guilty from those who were fellow-members of the guilty
party’s tribe.

This may shed light on why God allowed a total tribe-on-tribe
warfare situation to result, because this was what the people of the
day understood. The development and purification of their ideas about
collective versus individual guilt and innocence had not yet taken
place.

The fact that God needed to shield the Israelites from idolatry adds
a further consideration here. If God allowed remnants of the Canaanite
culture to survive then this would tempt the Israelites–even more than
they were already tempted–to embrace polytheism and ruin their ability
to convey the truth of God to the world.

All of this deals with what God could have done if he had a way of making sure that the innocent were ultimately taken care of. It sketches a possible
reason for why God commanded what he did in the Old Testament, but this
theory is no good if it still results in the innocent–or even one innocent person–receiving a raw deal. If even one person gets the short end of the stick with God then God is acting unjustly.

So what about it? Given his commands in the Exodus, could God make
sure that all of the innocent Canaanites who suffered would come out on
the plus side?

Yes.

As we noted, all life is a gift from God, and it is his choice how
much of it we get. Further, he gives us all an infinite amount of life,
and no one will suffer in eternity without choosing this.

Suppose that there was a Canaanite child who was four years
old–young enough to still be an innocent, but old enough to experience
the horror of watching her civilization killed around her before being
killed herself.

From a purely human perspective, that is HORRENDOUS. My heart is SICKENED at the thought of what such a child would go through.

But is God–who is infinitely powerful–INCAPABLE of making it up to this child?

No, he is not incapable of making up to her the sufferings that she experienced on earth, however horrible they were. If he gives her an infinite amount of happiness (natural or supernatural) then that more than makes up for the finite
amount of unhappiness that he allowed her to suffer in this life. And
if he assigns her a positive destiny in the afterlife, an infinite
amount of happiness will be hers.

I know that if I myself were in her situation–if I
experienced a horrible, devastating, but still finite amount of
suffering in this life–and then God gave me an infinite amount
of happiness in the next that I would count myself fortunate. I would
say with St. Paul that–no matter how horrible they were–"the
sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory
that [has been] revealed to [me]."

As long as God makes sure that I receive more happiness than
unhappiness as an innocent then I cannot claim he was being unjust with
me, and as long as God compensates the innocent for the sufferings that
have come to them in this life then I do not see the grounds for him
being fundamentally unjust.

It thus seems to me that if we make the
assumption that God did give the commands to wipe out the Canaanites
that this would not prevent him from making it up to the innocent
Canaanites who suffered and thus he would not be unjust toward them.

But suppose that he didn’t do this. We mentioned earlier the question
of whether God ever gave this kind of command, and we said that the
answer to this question is either yes or no. To this point, we’ve been
considering what if the answer was yes. But what if it was no?

In this case the commands found in the Pentateuch concerning the
Canaanites would not be meant to be taken in a literal sense. We know
that the early history in Scripture contains symbolic elements as well
as literal ones, and these commands would then turn out to be symbolic.

Presumably, they would symbolize things like the need to be totally
separate from pagan culture, of how radically incompatible the pagan
lifestyle is with faith in God. On this theory the books of the
Pentateuch would have reached their final form some time after the
events they describe, and these stories about wiping out the Canaanites
(which the Israelites did not actually fulfill; there were still
Canaanites living later) were included to teach the later readers how
they must reject paganism, and that the original audience was meant to
understand the nature of these stories as cautionary tales from which
they were to draw a moral lesson (i.e., don’t be pagan; stick with God).

If this is the case then God never did command the extermination of the
Canaanites and we, because we are not familiar with the way literature
was written at this time, tend to take as literal something that was
never meant to be literal. (It’s certainly not the first time that’s
happened!) It is just that because we live in such a different age and
because our literature works so differently that we don’t easily
recognize which parts are literal and which are not.

It thus seems to me that, either way one goes (assuming that the
commands were literal or that they weren’t), a rational account can be
offered that shows God was not acting unjustly.

Now let me go a step further and address the question of the reader’s potential loss of faith concerning this matter:

Whether or not one buys the above account, this is not going to change
the fact that suffering–including innocent suffering–exists in this
life. It just does, and us wanting it to be otherwise will not change
this fact. The question is how we interpret the existence of suffering.

It seems that we can interpret it in one of two ways: Either the
sufferings of the innocent are meaningless and can never be redeemed or
they are part of larger plan in which they do make sense and they can
be redeemed. It is belief in God that allows the latter possibility to
happen.

I, personally, would not like to believe that the innocent who suffer
are just out of luck, that their suffering was meaningless and that
nothing will ever happen to make it up to them. I’d rather believe that
there is a meaning and purpose to what happens to us–even if I don’t
fully understand it in this life–and that we live in a world in which
those who have suffered innocently will ultimately be comforted and
have their sufferings all made up to them.

So that’s what I do believe–that we’re not living in a
meaningless world in which people suffer to no purpose and they will
never be compensated. Instead, even if we can’t understand it all from
our tiny perspective, we’re living in a world that is guided by a
loving God who will vindicate the innocent who have suffered, who will
wipe away their tears and give them happiness, who will make sense of all the pain and anguish
that they have had to bear, and who will ultimately bring good out of
their sufferings–just like he did the sufferings of his Son on the
Cross.

When faced with the reality of innocent suffering, one can either suffer a loss of faith and suppose that the world is meaningless and cruel or one can make a leap of faith and believe in a world were suffering can have meaning and where the innocent will be compensated.

I choose to leap.


[/spoiler]

[Kevin]

No. They are certainly not. That is the entire point. They are entirely separate intentions, with very different moral implications.

 

Okay, so if there was a scenario where, unless you kill someone trying to attack you, you will 100% absolutely die. You may indeed regret it, but if you do not do it you will definitely die. Explain to me how on earth the intention can be separated?

 

Or let me just put the scenario back to you again, in as simple a way as I can phrase it - and this doesn't have to even correspond to anything medically likely: if there were a scenario in which a doctor could deduce there was 0% chance of the child's survival no matter what happened, and that if what we would call a direct abortion was not performed, there was a 100% that the mother would die, would the mother be obligated to die, lest she commit a self-excommunicating offense? I just need a simple yes or no answer.

[Nihil Obstat]

Okay, so if there was a scenario where, unless you kill someone trying to attack you, you will 100% absolutely die. You may indeed regret it, but if you do not do it you will definitely die. Explain to me how on earth the intention can be separated?

 

Or let me just put the scenario back to you again, in as simple a way as I can phrase it - and this doesn't have to even correspond to anything medically likely: if there were a scenario in which a doctor could deduce there was 0% chance of the child's survival no matter what happened, and that if what we would call a direct abortion was not performed, there was a 100% that the mother would die, would the mother be obligated to die, lest she commit a self-excommunicating offense? I just need a simple yes or no answer.

 

 

 

Explain to me how on earth the intention can be separated?

It is easy. We are not materialists. There is more to life than the material, what we can see and do and touch. Two actions with the same outcome can have radically different moral implications.

 

 

 

Or let me just put the scenario back to you again, in as simple a way as I can phrase it - and this doesn't have to even correspond to anything medically likely: if there were a scenario in which a doctor could deduce there was 0% chance of the child's survival no matter what happened, and that if what we would call a direct abortion was not performed, there was a 100% that the mother would die, would the mother be obligated to die, lest she commit a self-excommunicating offense? I just need a simple yes or no answer.

 

An innocent human being can never be directly and intentionally killed. Period.

 

 

I find it interesting that you started off here quoting the Catechism, and as soon as I demonstrated your reasoning to be entirely out of synch with the Catholic faith, you retreated to a pretty typical non-Catholic defense of abortion which includes attempting to discredit both the Church and the Bible. Very interesting.

[Nihil Obstat]

Frankly, all you are doing here is asserting that intention is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the outcome. The ends justify the means. If you want to argue that then fine. By all means, go ahead. But do not call what you are doing Catholicism, because it is not.