Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
Thank you for spelling this out, 'this once'.
You're welcome, of course.
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In which case, though, he's still on thin ice.
Here's the trick.
If I have a remote detonated charge of 15 grams of RDX in Alice's maxillary sinus, I can flip a switch and she's dead. I'm in control of her survival. So let's say Alice is about to kill Bob. If I flip the switch, she will not kill Bob, she'll just go all pinkmisty instead. But, if I were a pacifist, that is, of the mind that I should never proactively end a life prematurely, then I would not flip the switch. I would still be in control, but I would be exercising that control in line with that supposed personal moral principle. Not flipping the switch neither implies I condone Alice killing Bob, nor makes me guilty of killing Bob.
If God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, this does not imply that he lacks principles, or that we share the notion of what it means to be benevolent (indeed, part of the reason I reject omnibenevolence in any meaningful sense is that its semantic content is the opposite of what one might assume; it states "good is that which is akin to the values exhibited by God", not "God is what we consider to be good at any given time"). If, as is posited by most mainstream Christian doctrines, on the subject of Free Will, that the human element holds, that God does not impose a mental straitjacket on people that constrains their choices to conform to his preferences, then we have quite simply a case of Alice killing Bob while God says "damn, I wish he wouldn't do that!" because he considers it worse to intervene than to let it happen.
And, let's face it, some of the horrible things about rape lie with helplessness, disparity of power, etc., when one's bodily integrity is taken away forcibly by a greater power. Now imagine that we can go one layer deeper, take away your mental integrity, forcibly, by some greater power. Imagine the depth of that violation. Then scale that greater power up to a mainstream Christian concept of God. There is no greater disparity of power than that between a human and someone that is both omnipotent and omniscient. Denying you Free Will is raping your soul. I don't know about you, but I would consider that a worse act than bodily rape. Which invokes porportionality. God, in essence, by his omnibenevolence (if there's anything to that, one would imagine it includes "well, I don't mindrape folk"), doesn't control what Alice does, because his control over her actions would be worse than anything it is within Alice's power to do.
You may complain about the lack of mindrape, of course, but the doctrine of Free Will states that God isn't into that. No contradiction. It's just like the hypothetical of me not killing Alice, despite the cost to Bob. Which is solidly founded in modern secular ethics (e.g. medical ethics), to boot. In older ethics, it would go to character, as older ethics considered people (or entities) to be good or bad; actions, not so much. Does God want to be the ultimate tyrant, or does he sit there and cry because humans choose to fuck each other up with him having no other recourse to intercede than to choose the role of ultimate tyrant?
As Herbert nicely put it, a paragon would rather die than transform into his polar opposite.
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So, assume that it's his view that it's neither Satan nor God that is behind rape, but just human volition. If that's the case, though, we're just left with a human choice, rape, against abortion versus carrying-to-term resulting from that rape, which is not a choice (in his book).
Correct. The life itself is sacred, no matter its origins (now there's an egalitarian notion).
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Now, you will remember not to become impatient with me, at pain of incurring my wrath and being cast out from my flock, won't you? 
You've already said elsewhere I'm a pretty patient guy, yanno. 
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Actually 'Free will' has various meanings, depending on the context.
Agreement in this paragraph, generally.
From the earlier, it should be clear that I'm thinking about the "having a mind not enslaved by God".
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And such enslavement seems to be against God's will. As Lincoln used to argue, we're all made in the image of God, we're all equal in the eyes of Him, and so forth. It's evil and immoral to enslave a person, or so I thought Americans of any political or religious hue accepted.
Quite. However, I don't see how this affects, or has a direct bearing on, interpreting what Mourdock said.
But let's not get bogged down in minuitiae here; the surface meaning of his statement is clear, and you're arguing its implications.
Simply put, Mourdock's position when fully resolved in its implications, or even when grasped in toto without reference to the statement made, seems to be that, regardless of its origins, life has an absolute value that is matched only by another life, that all other concerns must be rescinded in the face of the concern for life, that a transgression against this sanctity of life is unconscienable, regardless of circumstance, save to preserve another life. This is not an uncommon position, nor is it one that requires an appeal to religion. Several secular worldviews posit the ultimate sanctity of life. Most get caught up in a debate about what the exceptions are. It is an interesting core question there what life even is, and when it begins, one that is more honest than a debate about "exceptions" (fraught with the perils of pragmatism on the best of days), but one that is often addressed with the notion that the absolute value of life makes it a non-starter to risk erring on the wrong side.
Now, if you want to pick apart his position, here's where to start: Mourdock supports the death penalty.
We know for a fact that the death penalty entails occasionally ending a viable, innocent life.
And so his entire position is null and void, but for a different reason altogether.
Let's by all means hang him, but with incontrovertible substance, please, not idle speculation about something he neither said nor meant to say, whose deeper implications are debatable but ultimately come down to a theological argument that stands unsupported and mostly unrelated and has been undercut in a different spot than the one we're concerning ourselves with here to begin with. His statement, seen in isolation, is not correctly represented by the title of this thread. The implications of his statement, confined to one aspect of his position, is also not correctly represented, as elucidated in this post. But his overall position is compromised elsewhere, in a manner as damning as the misrepresentation in the title of this thread. That much, I don't think we can dispute.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
PS: Are you familiar with the Hierarchy of Disagreement?
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Now God intended rape to happen. - 
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