{"id":113805,"date":"2019-10-22T00:02:22","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T07:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=113805"},"modified":"2019-09-17T19:23:11","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T02:23:11","slug":"yesterday-we-talked-about-meeting-pro-choice-people-on-their-terms-not-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2019\/10\/yesterday-we-talked-about-meeting-pro-choice-people-on-their-terms-not-ours.html","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday, we talked about meeting pro-choice people on their terms, not ours"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I used the example of Bernie Sanders since his Jewish tradition has a lot of room for a pro-choice position and it is idle to demand he accept Catholic moral premisses when he is not Catholic.<\/p>\n

The same thing applies to secularists.\u00a0 That does not mean no argument can be made.\u00a0 It means\u2013as always\u2013that if you are going to make that argument, you must start where your audience is, not where you are.<\/p>\n

Here is Kristine Kruszelnicki giving a sample of what that looks like in \u201cA Secular Case Against Abortion<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there really such a thing as a pro-life atheist?\u201d asked Marco Rosaire Rossi in the September\/October edition of the The Humanist.\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s next, Intelligent Design Agnostics?\u00a0 How about Secularists for Sharia Law?\u201d<\/p>\n

Atheists may not have a pope, but in the eyes of many there is still a proper dogma that all good atheists must adhere to.\u00a0\u00a0 To be an atheist is to support abortion.\u00a0\u00a0 Fail to do so and you will be denounced as \u201csecretly religious.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 When I joined an agnostic and an atheist from\u00a0Secular Pro-Life<\/a>\u00a0for an information table at the 2012 American Atheist Convention, a popular atheist blogger accused us outright of having \u201cactually lied about being atheist<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 [Edit: She also seriously misheard and misconstrued the point of my green banana analogy!<\/em>]<\/p>\n

There is an obvious reluctance to accept that non-religious pro-lifers exist.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But we do exist<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 While we differ somewhat in our approaches and philosophies, our numbers include atheist thinkers like\u00a0Robert Price<\/a>, author of \u201cThe Case Against the Case for Christ<\/a>,\u201d civil libertarian writer\u00a0Nat Hentoff<\/a>,\u00a0 philosophers\u00a0Arif Ahmed<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Don Marquis<\/a>, and liberal anti-war\u00a0 activist\u00a0Mary Meehan<\/a>, to name a few.<\/p>\n

The late atheist author\u00a0Christopher Hitchens<\/a>, when asked in a January 2008 debate with Jay Wesley Richards whether he was opposed to abortion and was a member of the pro-life movement, replied:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of quarrels with some of my fellow materialists and secularists on this point, [but]\u00a0 I think that if the concept \u2018child\u2019 means anything, the concept \u2018unborn child\u2019 can be said to mean something.\u00a0 All the discoveries of embryology [and viability] \u2013 which have been very considerable in the last generation or so \u2013 appear to confirm that opinion, which I think should be innate in everybody.\u00a0 It\u2019s innate in the Hippocratic Oath, it\u2019s instinct in anyone who\u2019s ever watched a sonogram.\u00a0\u00a0 So \u2018yes\u2019 is my answer to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secular pro-lifers include seasoned atheists and agnostics, ex-Christians, conservatives, liberals, vegans, gays and lesbians, and even pro-lifers of faith, who understand the strength of secular arguments with secular audiences.\u00a0\u00a0 The following secular case against abortion\u00a0 is one perspective, and does not represent any single organization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s much more here.\u00a0 Check it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting (for Christians) that this iron law of argument is rooted in the Incarnation.\u00a0 The entire process of revelation is one long act of God stooping down to our level since we could not come up to his.\u00a0 His final act of coming down to our level meant becoming human (at Bethlehem), poor (in Nazareth) and a corpse (at Calvary) in order come down as low as he possibly could to meet us at every level of human existence.\u00a0 To communicate any aspect of the Word to humans, such humiliation and humility is always required.\u00a0 Even atheists, as here, have to recapitulate it for the simple fact that this is how humans\u2013and especially we fallen humans\u2013have to communicate.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used the example of Bernie Sanders since his Jewish tradition has a lot of room for a pro-choice position and it is idle to demand he accept Catholic moral premisses when he is not Catholic. The same thing applies to secularists.\u00a0 That does not mean no argument can be made.\u00a0 It means\u2013as always\u2013that if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[772],"class_list":["post-113805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-be-more-prolife-not-less"],"yoast_head":"\nYesterday, we talked about meeting pro-choice people on their terms, not ours<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I used the example of Bernie Sanders since his Jewish tradition has a lot of room for a pro-choice position and it is idle to demand he accept Catholic\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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