Religious Zealotry and Fight Against Choice

The Dilettante is feeling rather activist today.

One of the largest lies that religious people claim is that our laws and ethics come from religion. This is not the case. In fact, of the Ten Commandments, only 25 percent of them are illegal. You cannot kill, you cannot steal and you cannot lie publicly. We can still lie privately, commit adultery, not follow our parents, covet, create graven images, curse, work on Sunday and worship any god we please. Additionally, of the 2.5 commandments that are illegal, they are only illegal because society functions better with them illegal and not because we fear the wrath of God.

That said, law and policy should exists so society runs smoothly and not for religious reasons. Homosexuality is legal because society runs just as smoothly with men fucking men as it does without. Pedophilia is illegal because society would run worse with people molesting children and screwing them up for life. Should any of these results change (say men fucking men starts hurting the ozone layer), then maybe the laws would change.

Now, Bush and the rest of the fundies are clearly trying to create a Christian Fundamentalist state and a major step towards that is the banning of abortion. We know that society runs more smoothly with safe and legalized abortion than without, yet the fundies want it gone. Chipping away at legal abortion and anthropomorphizing masses of cells is their path. Why was the Scott Peterson case so big? Because his wife was pregnant. The fundies in the media wanted to make it look like a double murder. It wasn’t. Masses of cells are not people and do not have rights

I’d like to emphasize that there is no logical reason to be against abortion. Religion, which is based on faith and not logic, is the only reason to be against it, but you can be religious and pro-choice. It all really boils down to whether or not you believe a “soul” exists in the mass of cells in a woman’s uterus. If you do because your religion tells you to, you will be against abortion. If you do not believe in souls or think that souls are bestowed at or after birth, you will be pro-choice.

The connection between religion and the anti-abortion movement is all around. “Abortion is murder” is famous slogan. Of course, murder is unlawful killing. Under American law, abortion is legal so what law are they talking about? God’s law.
“Abortion stops a beating heart” is another one. Now a heart is just a muscle, but the phrase attempts to project a mystical feeling associated with the heart (derived from religion) onto the mass of cells. This mystical projection is nothing more than the projection of a “soul”. The same goes for talk about late-term abortion. They will mention brains, which people also associate with a soul.

All of these arguments and slogans that talk about body parts defining a “person” are ridiculous. After all, cows, chickens and bugs all have hearts and brains as well. Most people, besides animal rights activists, would say that killing these animals is fine for the benefit of mankind. What’s the difference between a person and an animal? Well, the religious person would say “soul”.

The fundies that are anti-choice with abortion are also anti-choice with everything else. They do not want religious freedom to worship anything. They want everyone to worship their religion. They do not want economic choice to work whenever, they want everyone to not work on Sunday.

Sympathizing with the fundamentalist point of view only gives them legitimacy. They are illogical and oppressive and should be treated as illogical and oppressive. They want to impose their religious views on our free American society, which will, in the end, weaken and destabilize it. So, I say boycott Chick-fil-A, Seventh Heaven and anti-abortionists! They are a plague.