Over the course of the 19-year program, more than 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers, many of whom were trained medics, contributed to the Whitecoat experiments by allowing themselves to be infected with numerous different kinds of bacteria that were considered likely choices for a biological attack. While some volunteered immediately after basic training, for conscientious objectors at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas (before they began their medic training), the near certainty of being assigned as a combat medic in Vietnam helped some medics choose instead to remain in the United States with the Whitecoat program. The goal of the program was to determine dose response for these agents.
"""
I attended an SDA high school and was a member of the church for a couple years in college (I dated an SDA woman). It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism. They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday. Conversely, this generally included a desire for religion not to get too involved in government, which I respected quite a lot.
I never really believed, and left the church after breaking up, but I really miss the sense of community. Every Saturday I'd go to a service with a boring sermon but some _fantastic_ singing (the entire congregation could, and did, sing, and those walls rang with "Down By The River To Pray" in 4 part harmony), then have a vegetarian (albeit cheesy) potluck after, and then just chill at the beach with friends. Society would do well to adopt the sabbath as a cultural practice. The minister where I was seemed pretty chill with marriage equality - I remember he gave a sermon about marriage while people protested California's prop 8 outside and he pointed out how badly LGBT couple wanted marriage at the same time others took it for granted.
> California Adventists have higher life expectancies at the age of 30 years than other white Californians by 7.28 years (95% confidence interval, 6.59-7.97 years) in men and by 4.42 years (95% confidence interval, 3.96-4.88 years) in women, giving them perhaps the highest life expectancy of any formally described population. [0]
SDA live a lot longer.
The SDA vegetarian diet was also the driving force behind the Kellogg's Cereal company [1]
Vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and smoking, and maybe most of all pretty strong (albeit also quite insular) communities. They seemed to be pretty well-off too, for the most part.
What I wasn't taught as a youth, is that 90% of the value of college is in friends and acquaintances you make while there. Guess what really helps with that: drinking, smoking, promiscuity. Conversely, do you know what actively hinders that? Yes - avoiding parties and socializing in general, because you don't want to engage in drinking, smoking and promiscuity.
Looking back, I really wish I wasn't so "conserving" about my "youth energy" back then.
If a person has a problem with your attending a party sober, then they're the one with the problem, my friend, and you're probably not going to be creating a healthy relationship as a result of that interaction, anyway.
The relationships I should have focused on in my college career were my professors, at least a couple of them; I literally had zero understanding of graduate school, even as I was in college. But if I wasn't partying every Fri and Sat night I would have been able to better take advantage of the incredible opportunity I had at the time. Unfortunately, I was ill-prepared to make the most of it, though I was lucky that my passion for programming drove me to become a skilled practitioner. It was crucial that I got a mainframe help desk job where I manned a phone that never rang, and I got to teach myself C and superscalar programming (vector-based on an IBM 3090) and early internet protocols and stuff, using brand-new RS/6000s and Sparcstations and the like. Writing an Asteroids clone for X-Windows (using XLib) and a couple of vi clones was pure fun but foundational in a way.
I say all this without regret, or blame for the people around me. I'm just a product of my society, and I find great wisdom in Tolkien's notion that Hobbits don't come of age until 33. Knowing that the frontal cortex doesn't mature until 25 should have been a guiding force for this 17yo idiot matriculating too early and with no guard rails. Especially with regards to binge drinking, but it is difficult to escape one's culture alone at such a young, inexperienced age. Luckily, I basically stopped drinking only a few years later, and having never drank daily, but I lived the life of a fool, sans mentor, for those college years.
My kids have the benefit of my experience, however, because I am very typically not American in many cultural ways, thank God. Life has been gracious to me to get to experience many different world cultures, not being so enamoured with my own, though I love many of my fellow Americans when they are kind and accepting of others, though they grow more rare by the day.
Peace be with you, friend. Thanks for helping me vent a bit this morning. I am at your service.
My wife's son is a recently-minted top-of-his-class doctor who said that he would not be a patient of 80-90% of his med school graduating class.
I chalk it up to their primary skill is to be a memorizer. As a problem solver, myself, I have more respect for people that can think through a problem, analyze it, and come up with creative solutions. I have never seen that in a doctor, but that's really because they're just a product of the system that produces them, and I've only known a few. My guess is that most of them are pursuing that career because it's lucrative and socially beneficial, not because they can make a difference in people's lives.
> I think doing well in college is probably more about factors like time management skills and social support network than about vices.
I agree, but the vices can certainly interfere with the rest of it, especially for us poors who don't have upper middle class parents to fall back upon, as you suggest. I think a lot of why we're not rich in the first place is that our parents didn't have the mentorship to succeed either.
But I'm not crying about it, not while I have breath and love and fighting spirit.
Yeah, it's difficult to find the middle path between too much and too little. Those little mental gremlins always try to push us too far in the opposite direction. It's the nature of our internal enemy, the enemy of both our inner peace and happiness and our outer peace and happiness with other people.
> It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism.
Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of. It's hilariously bad "science" at the very best, and outright farce at the worst. But for some reason simply acknowledging evolution is, seemingly as of the last 20 years or so, utterly untenable, and so they perform.
> They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday.
I mean that just sounds like garden variety Christian persecution complex to me. I don't think a certain segment of the Christian population can properly reckon with reality if they don't feel they are being somehow oppressed despite running... basically everything.
Well, they view Genesis as a literal account. I agree with you, though.
As far as the latter point - it was mostly that, at least where I was, a desire to keep government out of religion paired with a desire for religion not to be too involved in government. Among other things they knew that other denominations were more powerful than them and would have far more influence in government.
I'm not an SDA booster (I'm not a member and haven't attended any church for 20 years, and found the insularity of the community stifling) but I still think it's a really interesting denomination.
> Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of.
this is uninformed and prejudiced on its face. In Theology graduate class, the first week of lecture included the division between "literalist" Biblical traditions, and others. It is well known among anyone who has studied comparative religion in any way that Christians are not at all unified in the interpretation of Genesis, despite outward appearances.
I don’t usually expect nuanced theological discussions here. It’s usually the equivalent of bumper sticker comments.
The “appetite” for Young Earth Creationism amongst my Christian group is very low if nonexistent. In fact we often spend more times groaning at the antics this crowd gets into.
What other antics and policies do “we” groan about and then nevertheless elect politicians to govern the rest of us? Policies attacking female reproductive freedom? Attacks on LGBT? Attacks on freedom of religion? Attacks on separation of church and state?
I feel like you are trivializing the dogged, uncompromising, and ceaseless war organized religion wages against intellectualism, progress, and tolerance.
I suppose this will surprise you, but I'm strictly against religion and government mixing. When Jesus said, "My Kingdom is not of this world," I take that very seriously. It's why I've never associated with the Republican party, which has increasingly high-jacked the evangelical vote.
I'm not sure why you're accusing me of trivializing anything. I'm simply commenting on the religious discussions on HN and how I usually find them sorely lacking. But I wouldn't expect any different, considering most "hackers" tend to be secular in my experience, which is fine.
Out of curiosity, would you support things like removing "in God we trust" from currency and abandoning the motto, removing the words "under God" from the pledge of allegiance, banning religious requirements to hold public office, removing tax exemptions for churches, the removal of "blue laws" that ban or restrict certain things (like sales of cars or alcohol) on Sundays, and the banning of the 10 commandments or nativity scenes from public schools, court houses, and other government buildings?
I've known a few Christians to support some of those things, but I haven't met one so far who would have religion removed across the board.
In general, I prefer not to impose my views on people via the government. If the majority of people feel having "in God we trust" on the currency is beneficial, then so be it. If they don't, I won't stand in their way.
The only place I will push back is removing tax exemptions from churches, as this breaks the fundamental separation of church and state the other way. It gives states power over churches via taxation.
Being treated from tax perspective the same way as every other legal entity without extraordinary privilege is “breaking separation of church and state”?
You might be interested in reading Walz vs New York [1] for some background on this subject. As with most things, it's nuanced, but you essentially have two choices here: tax the churches or don't. Most have agreed that the former has a much greater risk of violating separation of church vs state (excessive government entanglement) than the latter. You're free to disagree, of course.
As a Sufi, I agree with the overall truth of your analysis, but it is absolutely not true for we Sufis, who believe in love above all.
I will state it clearly that we believe in always loving our fellow human beings, regardless of their ethnicity, form of religion (including none at all), sexual preference, or gender identity. The only time we have a problem with someone is if they're abusing others, irrespective of reason; in that case, we must love the oppressed differently than we love the oppressors, and prevent the abuse.
I am a lifelong reader and appreciator of science, scientists, and engineers, and have some level of understanding of the evolution's beauty on this Earth over the past 4B years. That's how God manifested this wonderful creation, perhaps two trillion galaxies with maybe hundreds of billions of stars in each, and this lovely oasis, Earth, with so much water and life, over the last ~14Gy since the CMBR's Big Bang origin.
Remember, you can't blame science if a person says they're a scientist then claims that the Earth is flat. Most religious tradition is just as off-base. If it ain't about love, it's not from God, for God only wants us to be happy, no matter what the belligerent hypocrites, liars, and cruel oppressors of this world do in God's name. To love someone means to want them to be happy, on their terms, so long as they're not hurting others in the process (which wouldn't create happiness, only cruel pleasure).
God freely gave us our free will to do with as we please, for good or ill. But It also made this universe such that it keeps a karmic tab on all our actions towards others, and we will reap what we so, each of us, in calculus-like precision in this universe of integrated information systems.
Life is the realest, most deadly-serious game you can ever imagine. And your happiness is at stake, so choose well how you evolve your heart and treat your fellow human beings.
Thank you for thoughtful post. I know near nothing about Sufi religion. Sounds enlightened and good for them/you! My words were very influenced by frustration rooted in my experiences in US, especially as of late.
You can peruse my religious-oriented posts from today to get a pretty complete picture of our Sufi perspective.
To be Sufi is to be the small part of all forms of religion that truly try to manifest compassion, kindness, generosity, and all the virtues, to ALL our fellow human beings, by self-evolving ourselves from vice-ridden to virtue-manifesting. The spiritual process is a purifying of ourselves, not of others. They must do it themself, and only our lovingkindness can help them.
Peace be with you. Thank you for caring about true compassion.
I feel like you are trivializing the dogged, uncompromising and ceaseless war liberals wage against common sense and decency.
I'm sorry but when the other side of the war wants me to pay fines, go to jail or be expelled because I subjectively hurt someones feelings I gotta go with the church whatever their faults
Can you name an example of this actually happening, or is this just yet another echo of the utter nothing-burger that was Peterson's complaints back when he transitioned from being an educator to a professional grievance monger that, and I can't stress this enough, has never, once, ever, one time, produced an actual complaint that has resulted in actual penalties?
I don't need to name examples. There was a proposal for a draconian law, it got brought up to light, it was fought and it didn't pass. All that because of people like Peterson.
This was in 2016. In 2023 I went to a climbing gym in Bucharest, got friendly with a foreign (EU) guy that was visiting, asked him what was he doing in Bucharest. Apparently he was representing a leftist party that sounded very good on the surface policy wise and goal wise but then I asked him..
"What do you think about punishing people through the law for misgendering someone?". He started avoiding answering directly, said we shouldn't be assholes etc but it was clear by simply refusing to give a direct answer what his position was.
If he didn't think it is a good law he would've said so, he avoided answering and the conversation died out after that because it was clear we couldn't move past that.
Purposely misgendering someone is indeed being an asshole but that's not the issue at hand. If someone calls me stupid or swears at me that makes me uncomfortable but I wouldn't expect he be reprimanded by the law by stripping away his freedoms.
> There was a proposal for a draconian law, it got brought up to light, it was fought and it didn't pass.
I'm finding it difficult to take your opinion seriously when you're getting basic facts wrong. Bill C-16 did pass, it's been the law in Canada since 2017. And as I said, it has not once been actually utilized in the way Peterson and I'm guessing, you, were so concerned about.
> "What do you think about punishing people through the law for misgendering someone?"
I think it would depend what you mean by "punishing people through the law." I don't think it should carry a prison sentence, if that's what you mean. However as a legally recognized act of discrimination, I think it's an important data point. For example, if a trans-person was fired from a job for "performance reasons" but was able to demonstrate proof of constant misgendering by their supervisor, I think that can be valuable to that person for a wrongful termination suit. Or, simple inter-workplace bullying. Like that's ultimately what that is, it's just being a bully, and I wouldn't suggest bullies be brought up on charges, but there also should be legally enforceable consequences for ongoing harassment.
And I can't think of why anyone would disagree with a position like that, unless the notion of bullying transpeople is just really important for them to be able to do, in which case I would suggest you find a new hobby?
I just realized "reproductive freedom" sounds like an emotive conjunction. It isn't about the freedom to reproduce, it's literally the freedom to not reproduce.
I have a very reasoned and nuanced view on this topic that I probably will never share online. I don't know why I didn't notice this weird phrasing before.
It struck me as an euphemism as well. But thats the whole abortion debate. After all, pushing the timeline up from conception to a convenient point where abortion "feels" like it isn't murder yet is a pretty deliberate move as well. All in the name of personal freedom. The freedom to not have to care.
> After all, pushing the timeline up from conception to a convenient point where abortion "feels" like it isn't murder yet is a pretty deliberate move as well. All in the name of personal freedom. The freedom to not have to care.
It has nothing to do with whether it "feels like murder." It's about a woman's bodily autonomy.
Even if you ascribe the descriptor of "baby" to a fetus, which is entirely your prerogative to do, that baby is and will remain a parasite upon the mother's body until it is born and can subsist for itself (bodily anyway). And because of how bodily autonomy works (and should work) you are not required to keep other people alive by way of your own body. If you are at a car crash scene, and have caused another person dire harm via that crash, and they can ONLY be saved for some reason by way of a blood transfusion from you: you are not required to give it. There may be other civil or criminal consequences of that, depending how the crash investigation goes, but no reasonable person would say that you are nor should be tried as a murderer simply because you would not give up even something as trivial as blood to save this person.
Ergo, abortion is not murder. Abortion is a medical procedure by which a fetus is severed from the mother that is carrying it, and I must emphasize, the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, the fetus at the time this is done is literally a few million cells. You genuinely kill more living tissue than an abortion when you have a routine surgery. And in those handful of times when it is a nearly-ready fetus, there are almost every time, extenuating circumstances. The fetus is non-viable, for example, or it's outright dead and rotting inside the mother. And while they do exist, the weaponization of these traumatizing events by the pro-life movement is absolutely ethically indefensible.
These are not situations where women get kicks killing babies. These are women who wanted the baby. They're women who did their best for however many months to get them to that point. They may have named it. They've almost certainly got a home full of baby things that are about to become useless. Women come apart from this psychologically. Marriages fall apart. It's horrible, and again, co-opting such events to push a narrative of women who enjoy abortion is just, I cannot stress enough, ethically horrifying.
I mean sure, I wouldn’t disagree. But also a blood transfusion is utterly trivial in terms of effects on your body compared to a pregnancy. I don’t know that I know any women who’ve had kids who don’t have like, parts of their bodies that are just numb 24/7 now, or mystery pains, hormone regulation problems, etc etc. Pregnancy is AWFUL on your body.
That's an interesting point. I haven't interviewed an extensive number of post-abortive mothers, so my view is, of course, not representative of the whole, but in those few cases I have (via my community work), this was universally true. In every case, there were external factors pressuring the mother to abort the baby despite her motherly instincts pushing back on it at every level. Sometimes, it was a controlling boyfriend, parents, or some other peer pressure. In each case, though, the mother was left scarred for life.
However, in that particular case, her freedom trumps the "freedom" of the child, because for some reason, the child isn't allowed to make their own decisions growing up.
The origin the dispute is not so much arguing that Genesis must be literal but that acknowledging evolution diminishes the special uniqueness of the human soul
It's funny; unethical human experimentation during that period is often excused as "it was common practice at the time" (to "forget" to consult patients before enrolling them into experiments), and here we have people of the same period making sure to follow proper ethical procedures...
(The same way that even at the time slavery was common - be it XIXth century or Antique Greece - there were already quite a lot of people revulsed by it...)
For what it's worth, enrolling patients without consent in unnecessary procedures still happens today. There's even a whole Wiki article about one category of those (which was banned in France in 2016, and US in 2024, but probably remains legal and pervasive in a lot of other countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelvic_examinations_under_anes...
3.3 people per thousand is pretty common for something that isn't meant to exist at all.
I could meet 1000 people and, due to the ostensibly advanced & cultured world we live in, I would be confident none of them should be slaves.
Being so inflexible with the definition is not the same as being honest. Astrophysicists and statisticians often use the word 'common' to refer to vanishingly small numbers, and us uneducated laypeople are usually just fine with that.
Being so inflexible with the definition is not the same as being honest.
If I said "AB negative blood is common" or "Australians are common", most people wouldn't say I was being 'inflexible' if I said "only 1/3 of 1% isn't that common" and uneducated laypeople (and Australians) are usually just fine with that, too. But it's a hot button topic and the OP want's to derail the thread to it's pet peeve, and there's always someone who wants to pipe up with "I don't like your facts so I'll attack your intent".
A million dollars is a lot of money. A million hours is a long time.
This is, after all, the same hackernews that says "80 billion in fraud and waste is only N% of the budget for that" where N sounds smaller than 80 billion.
It is in our constitution, and some people are big enough assholes that I almost don't mind; but I know what a railroad is and it isn't hard to imagine a series of events where I am one of those million people.
Also it's 5 million people in prison, not 1 million. 5 million is more than 1/3rd of 1%. There's a bit of waffle, is it half a percent? Is it more? Do you not count people who have left prison as having been slaves?
I probably have never seen a million unique people in my life, including on TV and movies, nevermind 5 million.
But I guess it isn't common. Because I don't understand "large numbers". I have seen a pile of 1,000,000 soda pop can pull tabs on a 30' tarp, so I have a rough idea of how large 1,000,000 is.
Ask the GP. I was just clarifying the misunderstanding. However, an extremely cursory search turns up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#View... where it is mentioned that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcidamas is one such person. Though it seems that slavery in ancient Greece was normalized and deeply intertwined within their society. I am sure there were critics but like everything unpopular, may have been discarded or suppressed.
This is a fascinating paper with a lot of interesting context, the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.
I grew up in the Adventist church and it's been wild seeing it drift so far from its original distinguishing stances.
When I was a kid, I primarily went to Adventist schools. However, one year after my family moved there wasn't an Adventist school available. I went to a local evangelical school instead. It was a real eye-opener.
The evangelical school had a program of outright child brain-washing about abortion that I'd never heard as an Adventist. As a fifth grader I was getting daily updates about the Supreme Court nomination battle over (disgaced Nixon lackey) Robert Bork, because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement. There was daily news about abortion protests they were running. When I went home and asked my parents about it, they told me as Adventists we had the bible's stance on abortion: the bible says nothing about abortion. Adventists hospitals even allowed abortions to be performed on prem since they had no doctrinal problem with it.
Fast forward to now, a lot of Adventist members are loudly anti-choice, anti-vaccine (the church leadership had to post a very delicately worded statement about vaccines because they operate respectable medical schools, and had to please both the many facebook-addled cranks in their pews as well as the sane professionals in their medical school staff), generally indistinguishable from generic right-wing evangelicals. The Adventist core membership of today I have no doubt would've been mostly pro-slavery and definitely would have no qualms about shooting people in war.
The paper talks about the church's effort to go from 'sect' (firm moral stances putting them at odds with the majority) to 'denomination' (compromising their morals to fit in), and the church of today I'd say has run as far away as they could from being a sect.
I recall an organization that was proud of Desmond Doss (one of only 3 conscientious objectors to get the medal of honor) and pre-political Ben Carson (I never was able to square the person I saw campaigning with the extremely well-regarded neurosurgeon). I wonder what happened.
Ok, but please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're invariably less interesting (because more repetitive, and more indignant) than the specific point they tangent off from.
> The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.
People say this all the time and it's facile. Yes ideology is everywhere and you cannot be completely free from it. But the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
Nah, you can't really. Before you question the textbook you have to wonder if it is worth it. Since the successfully indoctrinated believers won't let you get away with it it is not worth it. So much so that they never get to hear other versions of anything.
> Nah, you can't really. Before you question the textbook you have to wonder if it is worth it.
This is some weird goalpost moving - I didn't say it's easy I said it's possible. Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology - it's literally against the rules.
You're again hitting the nail exactly on the head as to the difference: the Lutheran reformation gave way to Lutheranism, it did not actually reform the Catholic Church (cf the counter reformation). So again you see an instance where questioning foundational ideology from within is not possible.
You seem to be saying that religions are open to having their dogmas questioned and then growing from that, something that they are famously not open to (kind of the whole idea of a dogma).
Obviously 'Not all religions,' etc. However the Catholic church is notoriously dogmatic. Usually the more you press a dogmatic group to change, the more they dig their heels in about it. It's only when the organization is wounded by a schism or massive loss of membership do they suddenly start getting word from heaven that God has changed his mind.
> But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?
This is wildly underselling the consequences of challenging the church: two centuries of unrest and war that would eventually result in millions dead, amounting to a significant fraction of Europe's population.
If you are part of a community, be it a religion or [say] a sciencentific discipline, you have to do the ritual dance around the campfire. Not because it makes sense but because that is the way we do things around here. That one community will kill you and the other won't talk to you anymore doesn't matter for the result.
There are lots of different bible worshippers but there is only one academia. There might be small differences of opinion they all preach the same "proverbial" creation myth.
What textbook taught in the United States has anything with an ideological stance that isn't at the very least revisionist towards making the US look better?
Most history taught in the states already waters down the historical facts to make us look better.
> the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.
Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.
In religious schools, even the best of them, I learned nothing about any ideology but the “true” one, everything else was people being deluded by the devil.
Our state school played the pledge of allegiance every morning, had police with drug dogs doing sweep to great praise of the administration, and military recruiters begging us to come kill enemies of the state. The sanctioning of these activities for all to witness was part of the indoctrination -- praise for god was just replaced for worship of the government. Meanwhile basic civil stuff like how to invoke your rights a traffic stop was never even mentioned.
This is why even as a hardline atheist I have sent at times my kid to private religious education, and I hope I can continue to afford it. Neither system is great but worshipping someone who exists only as an ideal entity in your mind seems marginally better than worshipping the world's largest incarceration machine and military aggressor.
> Our state school played the pledge of allegiance every morning
I had the opposite experience, I never did the pledge in public school (or in the Adventist schools), at least not regularly enough for me to recall, but in the evangelical school it was the entire school doing it together in a big room every damn morning, first thing. I'd argue religious schools are more likely to drill it into you than public schools on account of the "under God" part that they've retconned in.
I also never saw military recruiters in public school, neither in military-dense Hawaii nor in deep red central Oregon.
If you didn't notice the military recruiters in your US public school, I have to imagine you weren't paying attention. They posted up during lunch with tables and stuff where I was. Maybe they were just capitalizing on the 2008 recession.
There was never an assembly dedicated to them; it was always just a kiosk-type thing students could walk up to.
>Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.
Did you hear a "devil's advocate" argument for the burning of Tulsa, Oklahoma by white supremacists?
Both-Sides-Ism isn't a real way to account for ideological coercion in education. It's just painting a picture that includes your enemies. What your enemies look like in the picture is LADEN with ideology.
Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder, what with science informing us that human life begins at conception and our consciences, and God's moral law recorded in good book that murder i wrong.
I notice you use the word choice and classify the pro-life position s "anti-choice" which makes it seem like a bad thing. However the "choice we are talking about here is directly and intentionlly causing death to an innocent human being. I think it is very important to understnd that.
To borrow an atheist trope, you and I agree that murder is evil and immoral in most cases. I just think it's wrong in one more case, when the victims are yet unborn too (I reckon murder is intrinsically evil and immoral)
> what with science informing us that human life begins at conception
No. Science can't say when life begins any more then it can say how much sand is needed to make a heap. Because it's a question of how we choose to define things, not a question of objective fact.
(And fyi... since what makes humans special is our rather absurd level of ability to think and learn things, human life begins with the ability to form long-term memories. Which is well past the end of infancy. This may seen counterintuitive, but there's a sound scientific basis for it.)
> Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder
Which christians are you referring to? Plenty of christians disagree with you and will tell you it's a complicated issue with no black and white answer. There isn't even a completely agreed-upon definition of what a christian is[1].
> I am surprised that Adventist Church, or the one you went to, said that the Bible does not say anything about abortion. The sixth commandment explicitly say that: "You shall not murder."
I'm not a theologian, but I know the Adventists took a much harder stance against killing real, live people in war than they did about in the abstract in utero, and that makes rational sense to me. Everyone has a different take on scripture so I expect for other religions it will say what they want to it say.
> Reading all these verses – and many others – and combining them, I don't think it is correct to state that: "the bible says nothing about abortion".
Great, don't get one. In any case, that's not how the Adventists have historically seen it, and I'm not an Adventist now in any case.
The Bible says a lot more directly about holding slaves and that being acceptable than anything you could argue regarding abortion as a divine directive. Even the New Testament is pro slavery in some respects. The citations noted, regarding abortion, are really stretching things.
Remember this is the same book that says “Oops we can’t let the Benjaminites die out because the prophecies won’t come true unless there are 12 tribes so because we won’t intermarry with them as punishment they can kidnap and keep women from a nearby people as wives so they survive.”
If one considers life to begin at conception, abortion unambiguously violates the commandment not to kill. I grew up Adventist, and contrary to OP, I didn’t know anyone pro-abortion. Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion. The Bible doesn’t command Christians to own slaves and keeping other commandments literally would conflict with chattel slavery, but it does command not killing (murder).
> Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion.
The largest organized religious group in the United States is an evangelical community founded specifically in support of slavery, and against a movement within its former parent community to oppose slavery.
Evangelicals, did not, as a while, oppose chattel slavery, whether for literalist or other reasons.
I grew up in the Adventist church. I am still a Christian (although no longer Adventist). While I don’t agree with it at all, it is actually true that there are some weird pockets within the denomination that either overtly or tacitly approve abortion. It’s very bizarre.
Not just tacitly approved, the church has run hospitals that have performed a lot of them[1].
> Early Adventism published positions in harmony with the Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion, though it was not active in that movement. The church produced its first set of abortion guidelines in 1970, when American attitudes toward abortion had changed and some of the church's hospitals were experiencing in creasing pressure from their communities to provide abortion services.
> Less than a year after the first set of abortion guidelines was developed, the church revised and expanded it. The resulting liberalized guidelines have allowed Adventist hospitals a great deal of freedom in their abortion practices, a freedom that has resulted in a large number of abortions being performed. Although the church has been hesitant to let it be known, at the present it is clearly not, in either policy or practice, limiting its medical institutions to therapeutic abortions.
^ From 1991.
I think the church, historically, has been so conservative that they are unwilling to contort the scripture to get it to support their political ambitions to the same extent other churches are (although lately that's not so true). This is similar to how the Southern Baptists initially supported and ran an op-ed praising the Roe v Wade ruling[2].
It’s important to bear in mind the distinction between slavery and indentured servitude. While both are terrible, projecting modern day morales onto scripture on this subject isn’t appropriate. It’s not like people could file for bankruptcy as we know it 2,000 years ago. You had to work it off.
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Over the course of the 19-year program, more than 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers, many of whom were trained medics, contributed to the Whitecoat experiments by allowing themselves to be infected with numerous different kinds of bacteria that were considered likely choices for a biological attack. While some volunteered immediately after basic training, for conscientious objectors at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas (before they began their medic training), the near certainty of being assigned as a combat medic in Vietnam helped some medics choose instead to remain in the United States with the Whitecoat program. The goal of the program was to determine dose response for these agents.
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I attended an SDA high school and was a member of the church for a couple years in college (I dated an SDA woman). It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism. They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday. Conversely, this generally included a desire for religion not to get too involved in government, which I respected quite a lot.
I never really believed, and left the church after breaking up, but I really miss the sense of community. Every Saturday I'd go to a service with a boring sermon but some _fantastic_ singing (the entire congregation could, and did, sing, and those walls rang with "Down By The River To Pray" in 4 part harmony), then have a vegetarian (albeit cheesy) potluck after, and then just chill at the beach with friends. Society would do well to adopt the sabbath as a cultural practice. The minister where I was seemed pretty chill with marriage equality - I remember he gave a sermon about marriage while people protested California's prop 8 outside and he pointed out how badly LGBT couple wanted marriage at the same time others took it for granted.
I wonder if it's still like that.