A Universal Abhorence of Abortion

Wintery Knight links to this Reason to Stand post that gleans the anti-abortion statements from the great religious traditions - and, honestly, some are great not-so-religious traditions:

There are five kinds of evil Karma which are difficult to extinguish, even if one were to repent of them. What are the five kinds of offences? The first one is killing the father, the second one is killing the mother, the third one is abortion, the fourth one is to injure the Buddha, the fifth one is to create disharmony among the Sangha assemblies. These five types of evil and sinful karma are difficult to extinguish.” -The Dharani Sutra of the Buddha


“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.” -Hippocratic Oath – Greek, 4th century BC

“The law enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind.” -Josephus, 1st century Jewish historian

“Do not abort a foetus or kill a child that is born.” -The Didache – the first manual of the Christian Church, AD 100 (Ok, this doesn’t exactly fit the criteria of a secular source, but it does show that this isn’t a recent tirade of the religious right.

“You shall not kill your awlad [born or unborn children] due to fear of poverty. We provide for them, as well as for you. Killing them is a gross offence.” Quran 17:311

“It seems to me clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.” -Mahatma Gandhi

“They are killing the baby in the womb. How cruel! In this age of unwanted population, man is losing his compassion. That living entity must again take on that same life form to complete its designated life term in that body. And the killer must return to pay for damages.” -A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, founder of the Radha-Krishna movement

Opposition to abortion seems to qualify as something of a universal human truth, what C.S. Lewis referred to as the Tao.

Too true

Want to really learn something? 

Then teach it.

As Apologetics 315 explains:

The Problem: You think you know the subject. Your study it. You are familiar with it. You are immersed in it. But only when you attempt to teach the subject will you realize where you fall short. Everything changes when it is time to teach what you think you know. The fact is that deeper learning requires elements of teaching what you are learning.




The Tools: The teaching element of learning is not limited to the formal instruction of others, as a narrow use of the word teaching may suggest. Instead, the teaching element entails an intentional internalization and re-presentation of your subject. Here are a few ways that you can learn by teaching:

1. Writing about your subject causes you to put what you have internalized into your own words. It forces you to make your ideas clear. It is intentional, specific, and displays in black and white what you know.

2.  Talking about your subject, formally or informally, allows you to interact with the ideas in a way that forces you to verbalize what you know.

3.  Explaining your subject to others allows you to adapt your material so that it can be understood by people at different levels of understanding. Your focus is to bring others to a fuller understanding; starting simply and going deeper.

4.  Rephrasing the ideas within your subject is crucial. Seek to own the idea for yourself by putting it into your own words, using your own illustrations, and presenting it from a fresh perspective.

5.  Summarizing by formulating concise verbal summaries of certain points allows your subject to be distilled in its simplest and purest form in your mind.

6.  Reviewing books on your subject is useful in extracting the key ideas from authors. This forces you to summarize and rephrase the ideas of others, which helps make them your own.

7.  Formal Teaching is the truest test. This may begin with a few individuals or a small group, and then grow to something more substantial - but perhaps here is where you can learn the most. Do those listening grasp what you are saying? Are your ideas bringing clarity - or confusion? The real-time feedback and "post-mortem" feedback from teaching opportunities can be the most useful means of learning.

The Benefits: By incorporating these elements of teaching, you provide yourself with the opportunity to learn more deeply. All of these tools will help you make the subject your own - in a way that is simply not possible otherwise.

Absolute Morality

Peter Hitchens:

One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers' assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher's supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?


Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.

I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.

For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Alibis and Achievement

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life."

--- Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

Exactly!

Lane Core makes this pithy observation:

Two things America's enemies around the world have learned over the past 35 years: Republicans will fight America's enemies around the world, and Democrats will fight Republicans.

Reading Middlemarch

Lisa Schiffren at NRO asks "whether books are dead?", which really translates into the question of whether we have the patience any longer to give ourselves up to the hours of real solitude, as opposed to virtual conversation, that it takes to read real literature. She writes:

As a matter of fact, after several failed attempts, two of which may have occurred before the advent of the Internet — which was, therefore not to blame, I have finally read, in full, George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch. To be sure, it required extraordinary measures, including turning off my computer on weekends, sitting in computer-free places indoors and out, foregoing nightly TV talk fests for a while, and neglecting facebook entirely. To be honest, it also helped that I persuaded my book club to make it the September book — giving us much of the summer, and creating both peer pressure and a deadline. That I missed nothing important, and actually recreated the formerly familiar, almost-zen state of submerging oneself in an author's created world for hours at a time, has made it hard to go back to newish bad habits.

What I gained was substantial. I am prepared to conclude, in the company of a long line of readers, that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel ever written. (Of course, that matters little if our culture is giving up serious literature entirely.) The author's insights into human psychology are stunning, even 140 years later, when we are all presumably much more sophisticated about motives and thought processes. Furthermore, I forgive my younger self for not sticking with it. It is no book for a 20-year-old — or even a busy 30-year-old. Even if I had read it back then, rereading it at mid-life would yeild far greater insight. Life experience makes a real difference. I recall being too upset to by Dorothea's headstrong act of self-immolation in marrying Causabon in a state of total misapprehension of who and what he was the first time I tried. Now it seems clear enough that we all walk blind into many of our choices in life — and some of them don't work out.

Literature teaches wisdom. Reading teaches patience. Those are two very important skills to have. They are in fact the virtues that define being a mature person.

Tips for going off to college, and not ruining your life.

From Fallible Blogma.

Worth bookmarking this now since Boff is off to college in two years.

It seems that I kept most of the fourteen tips, and it worked out alright for me.

Particularly, the one about having classes in the morning.

A plan for study

From the Maverick Philosopher.

Sometimes it's the SSPX and sometimes it's Foxnews

Pope Benedict XVI observes:

Sometimes one has the impression that our society needs at least one group for which there need not be any tolerance; which one can unperturbedly set upon with hatred. And who dared to touch them - in this case the Pope - lost himself the right to tolerance and was allowed without fear and restraint to be treated with hatred, too.