Young Mrs. Wright and her Legalistic Atheist Friend
A controversial post this week from the lovely and talented Mrs Wright. She asks when is it right and proper to murder grandma?
http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/08/16/when-can-we-murder-grandma/.
She was Miss Lamplighter at the time when the events described took place. I wonder who the friend was with whom she was secretly in love.
Many years ago, I was driving down the highway, from North Carolina to Maryland, in the company of a friend, with whom I was secretly in love, and we were discussing abortion.
I had told him my stance. I was very pro-abortion. (I realize that, since then, someone came up with cute little terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice”, but this was before that. We still called it pro-abortion and anti-abortion.)
My reasons were as follows:
I believed that all life was sacred, that to kill would be to break a commandment. I believed that this was in direct disobedience to the will of God. So, I personally would never have an abortion.
BUT, I felt I had made this decision on religious grounds. Thus, abortion should be legal so that everyone could make their own decision based on their own religion.
I felt very strongly about this. So strongly that I had voted a pro-abortion ticket one year.
I felt this was about defending religious freedom.
But, as I chatted about the issue with my friend, he brought up the word murder.
“Abortion’s not murder!” I scoffed.
But I was a bit unnerved. Never had I before heard abortion referred to as murder.
“Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being,” quipped my legal-minded friend, who was an atheist just out of law school. He then listed the times when it is lawful to kill a human being: self-defense, defense of others.
Laws in favor of abortion, he pointed out, did not make it lawful to murder a human being. They merely defined an unborn child as “not yet a human being” and, thus, not covered by these laws.
Read the whole thing, and discover whether or not the dashing yet dark-hearted logical and legalistic atheist, using only human reason, without any resort to revelation or divine authority, can convince our innocent but sweet and young Christian idealist something about the inner nature of the moral code God Himself wrote with His finger on our hearts.
You may discover why the enemy hates logical and lawful thinking as much as he hate Christian love. Both point to the divine.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
