Cranky

Guys, this means we're going to have to man up. If this anti-birth control "comes" about, man up and get more porn! Whack it a bit more! Flog the dolphin,! Paddle the pickle! Choke the chicken! Buff the muffin! Spank the monkey! Battle the purple-headed yogurt slinger!

If you're catholic, damn that's going to be rough and you may go blind if you pull too many violations. But at least the family farms will have more hands to do the work.

Ladies will be resourceful and figure it out. Bzzz Bzzz.

Facebook is the prime source of misinformation, disinformation, and outright evil. I'd delete that account and engage elsewhere. Just my opinion, of course.

being Cranky was essential to transport back in the good ole days. Dayum though, a backfire could break your arm.

What a terrific discussion -- I enjoyed reading it.

My advice is probably not all that helpful. I learned the hard way over the course of the past ten years that there is no way to get through to the vast majority of people who BELIEVE very strongly—about any subject matter. I tried very hard to educate people calmly and gently and with tons of well documented info from reputable sources. I also learned to not take the trolling bait and either keep things factual and impersonal (except when the issue affected the person discussion was being held with) or just drop and move on. In the prior decade I tried to engage my acquaintances and friends with more libertarian/conservative ideology on discussions about how the GQP was morphing into a group collectively working towards destroying rule of law and democracy in a push towards authoritarian fascism. These conversations were always rational and sane in person but became full of whataboutisms, false equivalencies, ad hominems, and the always popular “agree to disagree” BS when these same subjects were discussed online.

This only became more entrenched with the advent of the pandemic and I just finally chose to disengage. I learned these folks, like their party of choice the GQP or their ideology if independent, were not having discussions in good faith. They were there only to defend their indefensible positions and any pushback or questioning just hit their cognitive dissonance and infuriated them (and me because of their lack of good faith in discussing). I have disengaged from social media now except for SAV and totally from trying to convince people to get vaccinated or boosted unless in my small circle of personal contacts and influence. Unfortunately I see the underlying connection to vaccine and public health resistance and the GQP march to fascism using the oandemic as just another wedge issue to confues people and either get them to vote red or disengage altogether and not vote at all. This is now, in my opinion, a bigger existential threat than the pandemic because we have vaccines and masks and effective meds for the virus but we do not have a vaccine for the political bullshit the movement conservatives keep pursuing in their quest to hold and increase their minority power. We only have info and data and hopefully motivated voters to protect against the GQP quest for their agenda.

So, sorry I got off in the tangent but basically I have found the most rabid posters about any issue on SM are the ones merely looking for a fight and who are there to justify their position, not engage in seeking more info or forming a better informed position. Best to leave them alone and seek those who are willing to engage in good faith effort to expand their knowledge or perspective and possibly reshaping their opinions. Tough to do with so damn many trolls out there.

The anti-abortion movement is only recent in Protestant Christianity. If you want, you can start by pointing out why it really came about. It is frequently argued that conservatives just want to control women, but that is only a small piece of the story. For most of American history conservatives didn't give a damn about abortion (there are easier ways to control women than pregnancies if that is your goal).

One saying in the atheist community is "you can't reason someone out of a position they reasoned themselves into." To do that, you have to gently insert topics of conversation which go against their reasoning. There is no magic argument or fact that will necessarily change their minds. They can choose to ignore those, or the bit of information which doesn't fit their preconceptions will work against what they think they know.

Over at Reddit's r/Atheism, though there's a lot of animosity towards religious people of all flavours, there are also personal stories from people who note that one little fact or observation started them down a long path on which they eventually changed their position. The vast majority of people were never reasoned into Christianity, they were inculcated by their parents and community. That is why all around the world there are different religions: It's not about what's true, it's about geography.

Abortion in the United States goes all the way back to colonial days, with regular adverts taken out in newspapers for such things as "restoring the menses." Since the writers of both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were all men, they didn't think much of women's troubles: The only thing at all dealing with anything to do with women was oblique: Only men got the right to vote. If they wanted to outlaw abortion, they would have put it in the Constitution or early laws. They did not.

The anti-abortion position of Protestant Christians is actually newer than the McDonald's Happy Meal. Protestants (including Evangelicals) always viewed the issue of abortion as a Catholic problem. The Southern Baptist Convention came out with a statement shortly after Roe v Wade was decided praising the decision as keeping the government out of personal medical decisions. The flagship magazine of the Evangelical movement, Christianity Today, came out with an entire issue with Evangelical apologists and theologians making the case the Catholic Church's position on contraception and abortion was un-Biblical.

What changed was a court case working its way to the Supreme Court which ruled that Christian segregation academies (specifically Bob Jones University but applying to all private Christian schools) saying they could not take Federal tax money if they persisted in racist discrimination, in keeping with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That was codified into law under the Ford Administration.

A conservative operative named Gary North, who's daughter-in-law was RJ Rushdoony's (of Christian Reconstructionism fame) daughter, and who had worked with Richard Nixon to switch racist Democrats to the Republican Party, worked with Rushdoony to galvanise the Evangelical movement around the subject of abortion as a tool for conservatives to gain power. Up until then, Evangelicals were primarily a non-voting group, viewing Earthly governance and God's Kingdom as separate realms, and they were supposed to be part of God's Kingdom.

North was successful at pinning the anti-discrimination case on Jimmy Carter, even though the law was signed in the previous administration, effectively turning the entire Evangelical movement against the Southern Baptist President and delivering a mighty block of voters to Ronald Reagan to win the 1980 election. (Edit: North was interested in White Evangelicals: There's a reason Black Evangelicals overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party—racism against them. The goal was to flip the "Solid South," and by 1980, he did.)

The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal (Slacktivist at Patheos, the history of the sudden switch of Evangelicals against abortion)

Ronald Reagan himself was an open and notorious racist. With his racist advisors, they galvanised the Evangelical movement with the announcement of his opening campaign speech on the site of slain Civil Rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That might not have been enough, but the Iran Hostage Crisis and failed rescue mission, coupled with Iran saying they would release the hostages if Ronald Reagan was elected, coupled with news outlets running daily counters on the crisis, sealed the election for Reagan.

There is no place anywhere in the Bible condemning abortion: The closest you get is the line about God knowing you before you were born. In the Old Testament children weren't considered people until they took their first breath, and even into the XX Century in the USA people often didn't name a baby at all for the first several days since the death rate of children was so high. (Go to an old cemetery sometime and look at all the babies born who are listed with no name on markers.)

In the New Testament, there is no mention of abortion by Jesus or the Apostles at all. Abortion was leveraged solely as a tool for conservatives to gain political power, and it's used as a stalking horse for racism and segregation to this day.

The overwhelming majority of Christians are not aware of their own history on this subject (and a lot of them don't read the Bible).

You are not going to convince someone on one outing. The best you can hope for is sowing seeds of doubt (which is precisely why preachers tell their parishioners they shouldn't associate with atheists or other religions, we're evil, &c). The propaganda is powerful, and the best you can hope for is giving someone who is interested in learning the real reason for their movement will take the time to find out. And when they get there, "well, if they lied to me about this, what else did they lie to me about? Did they lie about Jesus? About sin and forgiveness and repentance? Is it all a lie?"

Most will not change their minds, just like the endless parade of anti-vaxxers here who shitpost on anti-social media right up to the point they are physically unable to. But some will want to learn more, and that leads them both away from the anti-abortion position and Christianity in general.

(Several edits for clarity and spelling)

Feel free to steal this meme to use in response to anyone who claims that their "faith" is more important than anything else.

Why do you feel the need to battle at all? I mean I know that fighting with strangers on the internet is the new favorite pastime, but what purpose does it serve? You are never going to convince anyone they are wrong any more than anyone is ever going to convince you. Letting someone believe whatever idiotic thing that’s want seems to be the best choice for preservation of your own sanity.

If you want to take the pro life mindset to the extreme, wouldn't cancer be considered a living entity? Shouldn't pro lifers be forced to carry their cancers to full term?

Someone put up a meme in the Britain post.

It was about sperm being a baby and Republicans were killing babies, so they needed their testicles crushed.

Copy it and post that. Don't argue/reason with them. I don't want to have to break you out of the lunatic asylum.

Because I will.

Advice that I received many moons ago.

"You can only please some people all of the time"

"You can only please all of the people some of the time"