Jesus...

When I was a Christian I don't think I loved Jesus all that much. Generally, I prayed to God the Father, not Jesus. It was God I called to when I was frightened, not Jesus. When I felt God inside me or spoke in tongues, it was the Holy Spirit at work.

Jesus frightened me. He frightened me because I had two very different ideas of him in my head and I didn't know which to trust.

"Let the little children come to me."

The Jesus in this picture was the Jesus I wanted to believe in and love and trust the same way the Christians around me did. He was God, but he was material: If I had lived in Bible times I could have seen and touched him! And he loved little children and blessed the downtrodden. When I was abandoned or hungry or sad, I knew Jesus had felt those things right along with the rest of mortal humanity.

But the image of Jesus that was most firmly embedded in my mind, in those dark hours when I was most honest with myself, was this one:

"Depart from me, I never knew you."

A distant, judging, shadowy lord. It was beyond my powers to please him.

Matthew 25:14-30

New International Version (NIV)

The Parable of the Bags of Gold

¹⁴ “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. ¹⁵ To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag,^[a] each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. ¹⁶ The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. ¹⁷ So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. ¹⁸ But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.
¹⁹ “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. ²⁰ The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’
²¹ “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’
²² “The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’
²³ “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’
²⁴ “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. ²⁵ So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’
²⁶ “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? ²⁷ Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.
²⁸ “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. ²⁹ For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. ³⁰ And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

This passage, and a similar parable performed here emotionally by Keith Green, scared me more than just about anything else in the Bible. I didn't feed the poor. I didn't clothe anyone. I didn't visit people in jails. According to the words of Jesus, I was going to be cast into hell.

As a youngster, I made parcels of money here and there from family members, which I used to buy myself toys and clothes and things that I liked. I could have helped feed poor people with that money, but I was just a short-sighted kid and I didn't think of that when I had a crisp $10 bill burning a hole in my pocket. Oftentimes the rush of dopamine I got when I purchased new things staved off my suicidal depression; in retrospect these small happinesses may have helped save my life. But that would not have mattered in eternity. When I thought about Jesus and Judgment Day, I had a deep feeling in the pit of my stomach that "Well done, good and faithful servant" would not be what I would hear when I faced him.

I rationalized to myself that since I wasn't quite in a position to take care of homeless people, or to talk to prisoners, maybe Jesus would accept some other form of servitude. I prayed to find out what God's will for me was. The answers I got back were often bizarre and pointlessly punitive: an ultimatum to stop "lusting", orders to give my treasured possessions to my family members, a command to delete one of the stories I was most proud of. While I endured these messages from God, I thought maybe my natural talents and interests could be taken as a hint as to what Jesus ultimately wanted from me. I liked fantasy and writing and drawing, so when I discovered the philosophies of the Inklings, I began to think that if I made art about God and Christian themes, that would make me accepted in Jesus's eyes. (Even if I was just going to be commanded to delete my stories later....) This viewpoint carried me into adulthood with an image of Jesus that I could tolerate. I will always be grateful to this flavor of Christianity (also reinforced at Cornerstone Music Festival) for encouraging me to be creative and for liberating me from the terrifying Bible-based Jesus that Keith Green preached.

The thing is, I still did not quite love Jesus. I believed in Jesus and the virgin birth and everything, and I wanted to please him, but I could not feel affection for him on a deep level. I'm still somewhat confused when Bible-believing Christians talk about how much they love Jesus because I can't understand how you can really love someone who will throw you in hell if you displease him. Love that has coercion wrapping its tendrils around one of the participants isn't free. It's wrong.

I continued to cling to Christianity for some time because I did truly like many of Jesus's teachings. The defense of the condemned adulteress, the beatitudes, and others made for lovely, worthy sentiments. But once I realized that the factual basis for Christianity was non-existent, I let go of Jesus. My heart was not broken. I did not love him.

Control Sex, Control Abortion: Some Speculation

I'm Pro-Choice. I see the ending of the life of an embryo or fetus which has no sense of self or ability to think, as a far lesser evil than forcing a woman to endure an unwanted, painful, perhaps emotionally torturous, potentially life-ruining or life-threatening parasitic relationship with said fetus. As such, I don't really care how successful the Pro-Life movement is in achieving their goals of ending human abortion. I am on board with reducing abortions in the sense that abortion carries some (generally minor, and less so than full-term pregnancy) inconveniences and health risks to the pregnant woman (contraceptives are less risky and therefore preferable: Plan A, so to speak). Also, there may be some value to a fetus as it develops into a thinking human being, therefore if the circumstances that cause women to see abortion as their best option (financial concerns, for instance) can be mitigated so that she doesn't feel the need to have an abortion, so much the better for all involved. These are not particularly connected to my Pro-Choice position so much as my general inclination towards harm reduction, but in a loose sense, abortion reduction is a shared goal I have with Pro-Lifers.

 In a much-discussed post, blogger Libby Anne describes how she began to understand that the purported goal of the Pro-Life movement, saving unborn lives from the moment of conception, does not appear to be their actual goal. One of the problems with the movement is that it is married to a religiously-motivated sexual ethic that has more to do with ensuring that people have sex their god approves of (and no other kind) than it does in valuing human life.

I recall the prescription for an abortion-free society offered by Pro-Life groups as something like this: 1. Do not have sex until you're married. 2. Once you're married, all sex should be procreative because if you have any other kind of sex it means you're rejecting God's gift for life, which is a birth-control mindset. You should always want children. 3. If you're someone who wants to prevent babies (not an option in some Christian worldviews), you should use birth control methods that don't cause abortions, and if you accidentally get pregnant anyway, then you must either raise the baby or give it up for adoption.

Practical Problems

 

I suppose, in the theocratic mind-control utopia that the Religious Right imagines to be possible, this would indeed be a recipe for basically eliminating abortions. Even taking into account the fuzzy cases (pregnancy that poses an immediate threat to the life of the mother, for instance), abortions would still be quite drastically reduced if everyone obeyed the abstinence code as outlined above. The problem is that this recipe is never, ever, ever, ever going to catch on in a free society. It is not working. People want to have sex. People want to have sex with people they aren't married to. People, both married and not, want to have sex that won't result in babies. Pro-Life organizations have been doing the scare tactics and the guilt-tripping about sex for as long as I can remember, but abortion is still happening. I'm convinced that attempting to push the abstinence model as the one and only solution to abortion guarantees that the Pro-Life movement will fail.

So while the hysterical, sinister virgins* in charge of the Catholic church, and the Evangelicals who increasingly lap up their every word as they help helm the Pro-Life movement, push this useless agenda, fetuses die. On the other hand, researchers who actually care about what works are showing how to slash abortion rates through widely available contraceptives. Pro-Lifers who are sincere in their belief that abortion is a tragic killing should be red-faced at their organizations' willful indifference to the ongoing deaths of fetuses as they try to turn the cause into a culture-wars battle that is doomed to fail. Even if you feel that abstinence until marriage, and unlimited baby-making thereafter, is the only moral model for sexual behavior, is this more important than the deaths of fetuses that are going to continue to happen until your worldview catches on, if it ever does? If freely available contraception can reduce abortion rates by more than 50%, is it still worth opposing because, to you, it represents sexual immorality?

Look also at the way this sex-control ideology has managed to spin birth control and Plan B access into an abortion issue despite a lack of evidence that hormonal birth control pills actually prevent zygote implantation. Plan B works by inhibiting ovulation, and that's a win for Pro-Lifers, since a last-minute stab at contraception should be seen as better than the abortion that otherwise would happen. Yet Pro-Lifers will continue to rage against Plan B's existence because they either don't understand that it doesn't cause abortions, or they don't care and they're just angry that women are escaping the unwanted consequences of Non-God-Approved-Sex.

Especially revealing is when masturbation, gay sex, and straight non-PIV sex get shafted in the Pro-Life worldview, despite the fact that these have nothing to do with potential harm to embryos or fetuses. Opposition to these kinds of sex were a given in the materials I used to read; these acts were portrayed as being somehow connected to the vaguely-defined "culture of death" we supposedly live in. Pro-Lifers may say that promoting abstinence reduces unwanted pregnancy, which reduces abortion, but what the hell is the justification for opposing these sex acts where pregnancy isn't a risk? Oh, hey, it's religious and it has nothing to do with protecting life. Shocking.

*as Christopher Hitchens so tactfully described them

The Anti-Birth-Control Mindset

 

Although my family wasn't part of the Quiverfull movement exactly, there was a definite opposition to birth control (I'm one of 6 siblings) and many of the Pro-Life and "Christian living" materials I used to read asserted the theological wrongness of non-procreative sex. The viewpoint was something like this: "God controls life. If he wants a [human] life to exist, it is not the place of any person to interfere with the existence of that life either by preventing it or killing it, and the act of having sex is tantamount to giving God permission to work his life-giving powers. Birth control is trying to tell God 'No, we don't want the blessing of life' and since it's putting your own wisdom above God's, it's sinful." Due to the Biblical literalism that made it mandatory to trust God to take care of you no matter what, there was also a notion that no matter how many children you had, God would intervene so that you would not go hungry or homeless.

The most obvious pitfall of this kind of thinking is that people do go hungry. And they do become homeless. Even Christians. Even Christians with a lot of children. Circumstances are everything and faith is irrelevant. Ignoring your best judgment in family planning because of a blind-faith insistence that nothing could possibly go wrong if you have 12 kids is nothing short of stupid. Using your religious and political clout to try to deny people access to birth control is nothing short of evil.

The other thing that strikes me as weird about this theological setup is the veneration of a perfectly material and mundane biological function, conception, as a literal, miraculous act of God. The idea of interfering with procreation raises hackles in ways that other types of "tampering with nature" do not (who objects to using an umbrella even though God supposedly controls the weather?). I can only look at it as body worship, a deification of the reproductive organs. It's assuming that just because a sperm and an egg are doing their job, they're doing God's job. Procreation is seen as mystically powerful, as if blocking conception could trigger an avalanche of disastrous butterfly effects that will ruin God's plan forever. There is no free will here, only submission to your bodily functions. That's the way God wants it.

What the Pro-Life Movement Could Be

 

 What if the Pro-Life movement, as a whole, decided to try to figure out what can actually stop abortion (hint: Laws are not the only factor, and may not even be the most important factor in some regions)? What if they dropped the hand-wringing about what sex God doesn't like? What if they helped make birth control accessible? What if they stepped beyond the Crisis Pregnancy Center and actually went into the hellholes of poverty that the anti-birth-control worldview may have helped create? What if they stopped lying about sex, lying about STDs, lying about pregnancy and motherhood and what a fetus thinks and just dealt with the issues honestly?

I think I could respect them then. I might actually believe that human lives were their #1 priority.

Post-Pro-Life Reflections

Let me live
Let me walk into the sunshine
Let me live
Feel my mother's arms around me
Feel my father's love surround me
Be a part of God's creation
Let me live
 -Pat Boone, "Let Me Live"

Pro-Life propaganda is pretty effective on a little kid. Songs like the above, books such as Tilly, a plethora of miscellaneous bumper-sticker slogans, Last Days Newsletter articles, and Pro-Life magazines, combined with the traumatizing Pro-Life trump card of dismembered-fetus pictures, had me convinced that abortion was the number-one atrocity facing America. Perhaps it was even the worst atrocity of all time. These materials were peppered with blame: Feminists, Democrats, and money-hungry abortion "doctors" (always in quotes) were frequent targets. Interestingly, the most blame was assigned to Christians who didn't care enough: you had better vote Pro-Life, picket, lay down in front of abortion clinics. If you don't, abortion is your fault.

What was a child to do, now convinced that babies were being ripped apart, in agonizing pain, and that she was to blame? I wasn't entirely sure. I went out of my comfort zone a time or two for picketing, or candlelight vigils in sub-zero January. I made myself look at the aborted fetus pictures on a regular basis, and when I wasn't doing that, I would lose myself in nightmarish daydreams in which bloody aborted fetus parts would be dumped over my body as punishment for my inaction. Mostly I just cried.

It was only this past year that I realized, really realized, that the hullabaloo was all for nothing. At long last it has sunk in for me that a fetus doesn't care if it's being aborted. And for someone who had been taught that fetuses writhe in agony and make silent screams when they're aborted, that changes everything.

Abortion is not really cruel

Although there is scientific uncertainty as to when a fetus starts to feel pain response, the ages in dispute are between 20 and 35 weeks gestational age. Additionally, it's worth considering that a fetus's brain is awash in chemicals that basically keep it in a state of sleepiness/drowsiness. It's "knocked out," so to speak. Meanwhile, in the U.S., only 1.5 percent of all abortions performed are in this 21+ week range when a fetus's pain response starts to develop in a significant way. Generally, third-trimester abortions are only performed in cases of medical necessity such as when the life of the mother is threatened or the fetus has a severe deformity. You know, the reasons Pro-Lifers are most likely to make exceptions for?

Therefore, in the vast majority of, if not all, cases, abortion cannot be considered "cruel" no matter what method is used to end the fetus's life.

If, as some would point out, the point of the Pro-Life movement is to oppose abortion because of an ethic of preserving human life for the sake of it, irrelevant of cruelty issues, what was the point of brainwashing me into thinking that abortion is barbaric?

I'll tell you why.

The first reason, I suppose, must be simple misunderstanding. A pro-lifer reads "Embryonic brain development begins at 3 weeks" and hears "At 3 weeks, an embryo can think." A Pro-Lifer looks at a dismembered embryo or fetus and thinks "That looks like a miniature infant. It must be able to hurt like an infant can." This kind of skewed thinking borders on dishonesty when Pro-Lifers distribute fetus models that make an embryo look a lot more like an infant than it actually does, or when they attribute the characteristics of infants, or even toddlers or teenagers to a fetus (more on that later).

Second, I believe that for some Pro-Lifers, aborted fetus pictures are a type of torture porn. It was for me in some ways. While traumatizing, looking at pictures of dismembered fetuses also came with a kind of visceral thrill and fascination, much the same way a child might enjoy dissecting a dead squirrel. Christians, who helm the Pro-Life movement, have long had an affinity for the grisly; why do you think Foxe's Book of Martyrs was so popular, or why The Passion of the Christ was such a hit? Certainly not for the spiritual enrichment. The Pro-Life articles I read often seemed to take a certain relish in describing how atrociously horrible abortion is. I don't think this reveals an unusually twisted psyche in the Pro-Lifers, it's just human psychology.

Third, it stokes ordinary Pro-Life self-righteousness into a frenzy. The more you play up how evil you think the position of Pro-Choice people is, the better you get to feel about yourself. It inoculates you against considering other positions. They're evil baby killers who like to cruelly rip apart little ones. We're the ones who want to protect babies.

The fetus as a tool

The lines at the top of this post are from a song called "Let Me Live" by Pat Boone, a Christian singer who is surely aware that fetuses are incapable of communicating with their mothers, but apparently found the notion compelling enough to write a song about. This song is the perfect emblem of a manipulative tactic in the Pro-Life arsenal: giving a voice to the fetus.

Putting aside the fact that there's no way a fetus can have anything resembling an actual thought until the cerebral cortex is developed (about 20 weeks), it's interesting that Pro-Lifers feel comfortable putting their opinions into the mouth of an embryo. It's not surprising, though; for the often-religious Pro-Lifers, God is a sockpuppet, so why not add fetuses to the show?

The typical fetus narrative goes something like this: "Mommy, let me live. I want to be part of the world and run and play on a swingset. I have fingernails and bones and all I want is the chance to live."
But why not a different viewpoint?
"Wow, Mom, my existence seems to be causing you a predicament. If you had me, you'd have trouble paying rent and taking care of my brother and sister. It's really unfair of me to demand that you go through the miseries of pregnancy and childbirth to have me; you are not my slave. Since I won't be able to feel it anyway, you can go ahead and abort me."
If you're going to anthropomorphize a fetus into an adult, why not a selfless one who cares more about its mother's well-being than its own eventual life? Pro-Lifers assume fetuses are theirs to speak for, when they can't even be assed to accurately understand or portray the cognitive capacity of the thing they're trying to defend. And they peddle a simplistic view of motherhood, too.

This sympathy with the fetus comes up a lot in the mind games and supposedly unanswerable questions Pro-lifers come up with, like that old chestnut, What if you had been aborted? The simple answer to that is that I wouldn't be "me." I would have no concept of self. I wouldn't care. If my mom had rolled over and gone to sleep instead of having sex with my dad, I also wouldn't be around, but I don't consider it some kind of moral threat for people not to have sex. My being aborted would be no different from non-existence, except that my developing presence would have been a slight inconvenience to my mother in the former case. What happened to me before I had the ability to think is of no concern to me.

An embryo or fetus does not care if it's aborted because it's physically unable to "care" about anything.

If you want to have some personal ethic of the sanctity of life, fine. Be my guest. You can be a vegetarian if you wish. You can oppose killing shrimp, or cutting down trees. You can be a Jain and avoid eating root vegetables, and carry a little broom to sweep away bugs from your path so you don't step on them. I don't care. Just quit trying to guilt-trip children, quit worshiping fetuses to puff up your own sense of self-righteousness, and stop trying to legislate protections for something that is less sentient than a fish. Doing those things, at the expense of women's liberty and the truth, causes more harm than a fetus has ever cared about. I'm so glad to be rid of your bullshit.