Oh gosh. Leaving church... My parents had been attending a large, well-known church in our city, the pastor of which is (inter?)nationally famous. My dad was on church leadership (can't remember at the moment whether he was an elder or a deacon), my mom had typed some of said pastor's books for him when she was in college. They'd been there for fifteen years, invested so much life in that place, when a massive scandal hit. As often happens, it wasn't so much the scandal that led to a big split in the church, but the way it was handled, with condemnation and anger and malice... My parents, and many of their closest friends, were absolutely heartbroken. So much of our family's existence was woven into that church. It was a long, slow, gutwrenching tearing-away.

I was not quite five years old when this happened, but I remember it. I remember my last few times at Sunday School, I remember my parents being anxious and high-strung and miserable and angry, I remember my mom soaking an entire pack of tissues with her tears during worship at the first service we attended in another church. I remember a year of searching for churches, feeling adrift at sea, and finally settling in one that had a thriving kids' program for me and my sister. They weren't happy or growing there, but they were just too tired to keep looking.

My older sister made good friends there, so we stayed, but as soon as she got her drivers' license and was able to transport herself to services and youth group activities, we switched to the big nondenominational place that I still call home. (My parents left there as well for a smaller, closer-to-home place when I went to college.) That church is a suburban megachurch, but the whole body has, collectively, an active and curious mind, a soft and sensitive heart, and willing hands and feet. I love it there and it's one of the reasons I plan on returning to my hometown after college.

All that to say--we've found our places in the institution now, but leaving that church was an absolutely definitive process in my childhood, that affected my parents and my siblings and me in profound ways still in evidence today.

I've been frustrated more and more lately with the mentality of shame, guilt and fear that pervades much of the church today, and I totally agree with you that sex is one of the areas in which that mentality is strongest. It's so negative and so exclusive of people who need healing from past sexual sin--their own or others'.

I totally agree with this. Sex was created as a good thing and it's not going to lose all its goodness when used in the wrong way: physical pleasure is still pleasurable; emotionally intimate relationships are still intimate; both these things will make people happy, because they're mimicking marriage with what God designed them to do. Young people don't really have the wisdom to see the long-term consequences of dabbling in that before they're ready, how much they can get hurt and hurt other people.

But just because they don't have the wisdom to understand what's wrong with this on their own, doesn't mean that they can never understand. Let's teach them "yes, sex and relationships are exciting and great and can be a really wonderful part of your life and a significant way to glorify God... but you're not going to get all that when you are young and immature. It's worth it to be patient, wait for the best God has in store, learn more about who He is and who you yourself are before you start working on this complicated process of romance and marriage and sex." When we lose the nuance and just say "Sex outside of marriage is bad! Sex is bad! Stay away until the ring is on your finger and then everything will be fine!" they know that something's missing from that. Of course they know something's missing; their bodies and emotions are telling them exactly what it is. Let's not lose the nuance here.

Perhaps we should stop obsessing about sin and yelling at teenagers about every single thing that they might possibly mess up, and focus instead on showing them, in positive ways, how to seek the heart of God and live free, joyful lives that glorify Him?

Just a thought.

No, it's not anti-woman. I apologize if it came off that way, although I'd hoped the paragraph where I emphasized that one of the major problems is how anti-woman our culture is would have shown you that that's not what I meant.

I didn't state or imply that having a child always and completely ruins a woman's life. What I said was that our culture makes it so that being unexpectedly impregnated and carrying and birthing the baby *can sometimes* ruin a woman's life, and is, to some degree, likely to ruin a woman's life. In some cases, it only *seems* that it will ruin a woman's life, but it means nothing for a woman to have alternatives if the world she lives in, and the people who impact her ability to carry and raise a child, make her incapable of seeing or taking advantage of those alternatives.

If you don't think that many women live in circumstances where having a child is going to cause them major problems--financially, relationally, career-wise, physically, emotionally, psychologically--I think you're probably not looking closely enough at the world around you. For many women, bearing and raising a child is not something they want to do or even something they're capable of doing well. One of the major reasons for this is that our culture makes it so expensive--in terms of money, time, energy and sacrifices made to so many other important parts of life like friendships, marriages and career--to have kids that women *panic* when faced with the prospect of an unexpected child.

I am, and I hope you are, in a position that would make it not all that ruinous to have and raise a child. If, God forbid, I were raped and impregnated on my way home from the convenience store tonight, it would be traumatic and there'd be some terrible consequences for my well-being. But I have the personal, social, psychological, spiritual and economic resources to deal with that situation, heal and resume my life. It would look pretty different, but I could still be healthy and happy. That is a massive blessing and privilege to have.

Many women don't have it. Many women don't have the access to healthcare, education, social support and therapy. Some women live in a different world from me--they *are* victims. They are victims of an oppressive culture, of abusive or unsympathetic partners, of unfair and irrational expectations about their personal lives and careers. Denying that women can be victims is not pro-woman. Creating a society where both women and men are free to choose whether or not they want to have children, where women have the resources to deal with an unexpected pregnancy safely, happily and healthily, where men never rape women or force them to carry and raise children in order to exert power over them--that's pro-woman, pro-child, pro-person. That's what I want.

I support the fact that murder and manslaughter are punishable crimes because I believe the fear of legal punishment is one of the most successful and effective incentives against killing someone. For example, I support laws against drunk driving not because driving while impaired is inherently immoral but because it is a particularly deadly form of negligence, but one that most people would risk because they don't truly register the consequences for themselves or for others, unless society threatens an immediate, personal punishment for that negligence itself and an even higher punishment for injuries and deaths that result from it. I support the government's punishment of murder because for many sane people, the threat of massive fines and large amounts of jail time is enough to stop them from acting on really intense anger or hatred that would otherwise temporarily override their morality or their fear of personal social repercussions in the future.

However, the fears that a pregnant woman faces when she chooses an abortion are very, very real and very, very powerful. Women who are in a desperate situation--which always feels desperate to them: whether it looks like it to an outsider or not, a woman who's afraid having a baby will ruin her career can psychologically feel like that's just as desperate as a woman who's afraid her partner will kill her if he finds out she's pregnant--are not likely to consider legal punishment sufficient to dissuade them from terminating the pregnancy. Abortion is much, much easier to conceal from authorities than murder. It's not that difficult to run a black-market practice and hide it from the government--used to be done all the time. It's even easier to look up the procedure on the Internet and have a friend perform it with whatever tools are on hand. Women in a desperate and vulnerable position are going to take the option that gives them a *chance* of having the life they want--if the options are "have the baby which will ruin my life" and "have an abortion which will only ruin my life if someone finds out about it and presses charges", a woman is probably going to choose the latter.

I'm convinced that murder rates are lower because murder is illegal. I'm really not convinced that abortion rates would be meaningfully lower at all if abortion were illegal. I don't think I ever *will* be convinced that making abortion illegal will do *anything* noticeable to solve the serious problems that our society has with how we treat women, children and all marginalized persons, how we deal with the myriad socioeconomic dangers that make abortion seem like the only option for vulnerable desperate women. It would not be helpful or practical at all.

I adamantly *do* care what the Bible says. I care what the Bible says about murder, and that's why I'm never going to kill anyone, with the help of the Holy Spirit to transform my heart away from anger and hatred. Personally, I think the personhood of a fertilized egg, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is a murkier issue than you have stated you think. I wouldn't have an abortion myself, because I want to err on the side of life and God, and I know that a) the supreme blessings of being saved by the grace of God and walking with Him and relying on His strength, and b) the great blessings of my worldly privileges of race, class and family situation, would make it not prohibitively difficult in any way for me to have a child.

But I don't want the laws of my country to follow the spiritual and moral laws of the Bible or any other religious text. I want the laws of my country to make my country safe and free for everyone so that they can pursue happy, healthy lives. Laws against murder help achieve that goal. Laws against abortion don't.

Okay, so some really dense things to unravel here. I'm trying to be straightforward and level-headed, but I think it's really unfair to say that the only reasonable argument is that the baby isn't a person. I think you mean that the only argument you've ever heard or thought of as a reasonable response to your questions is that the baby isn't a person. That doesn't mean that I don't have arguments that are perfectly reasonable and valid to me and a lot of other people. It's just that my arguments come from an essentially different approach to the legal system.

I believe that abortion should remain legal because I believe that fundamentally, laws should exist in order to protect people and their rights, *not to stop people from acting immorally*. This is a crucial difference. I want laws to maximize the safety and freedom of citizens, giving them as equal an opportunity as humanly possible to pursue health and happiness.

Thus, I want murder to be illegal and abortion to be legal. This is because the reasons for terminating a pregnancy are a whole lot different from the reasons for murder, *and that results in very different outcomes when each act is legalized*. A woman or girl terminates a pregnancy because she is not ready--financially, physically, emotionally, psychologically, what have you--to give birth to and raise a child. She terminates a pregnancy because she sees it as the only option she has that will not ruin her life.

A person kills another person out of anger or hatred or greed. Murder is for the most part committed as a crime of passion, or for material gain. A person kills because the victim has angered the killer, or because the victim owes the killer something, or because the victim is trying to blackmail the killer, or because the killer hates everyone of the victim's race and is taking it out on one particular victim, etc. Manslaughter is a crime of negligence.

(tbc)

I replied to a comment by jbenezra on the second page--you'll have to expand the replies, then look for two *really* long comments in a row. I explained a little bit of my political philosophy and a lot of my thinking on abortion there, if you feel like getting into it. :) I went from thinking like you to being a pretty intense liberal, while maintaining my faith in Jesus as the only Savior and the Bible as the ultimate perfect truth. So it's not totally impossible.

Some of us choose it for its leftward slant specifically--not because we only want to listen to things we agree with, but a) because much other media is so conservative that we need a break sometimes, and b) because they tend to cover a lot of material that isn't so completely exclusively US-centric, and c) actually in terms of the global political climate NPR is usually a wee bit right of center.

All of these things are intrinsically valuable; all of these things are steps toward a society that really, truly values each individual life and *behaves that way*. All of them together are *much* better ways to reduce the number of abortions that happen in this country. I don't see Republicans making meaningful progress toward any of these projects.

I don't think the Church should support abortion. I don't think the Church or any one church should align with a political party. The Church should be spreading the Gospel and guiding Christians toward more Biblical, Godly lives. The Church should be supporting and lifting up its members so that they can make God-honoring choices. Of *course* the Church should be working harder than any individual or government to care for the hurt and sick and poor and lonely and lost, not just in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.

Government does not exist to make people follow God. Government cannot save people's souls or cause them to repent or show them the life-changing love, grace and truth of Jesus. Only the Church can do that. But while the Church seeks to completely transform human beings and free them from human nature, government exists to help human beings continue to function because not everybody's being transformed yet. Good governments allow the best of human nature to reign, and curb the worst of human nature, thereby protecting individuals from oppression and giving everyone a chance to live happy and healthy lives.

Your beliefs about abortion are different, sure, and you and all my Christian friends who vote conservative have every right to pursue your beliefs by supporting the candidates with whom you agree. Political freedom is a great thing. But you're being hurtful and unfair and arrogant when you guarantee how Jesus would vote. Right now, though the Democrats have a mess of issues as well, I vote Democrat because that's what fits the way I think and the way my faith in Jesus inspires me. Jesus didn't live His human historical life in America in the 21st century. Maybe Jesus wouldn't vote at all; that's something I've followed at certain times in my life. But St. Augustine said "God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed." We don't get to put words in God's mouth.