Category Archives: religion

About turning the other cheek

Posted on by
9

There’s an important issue related to the previous article, where I talked about separating your inputs from your outputs, so that you don’t become a reactionary automaton. It’s the issue of “turning the other cheek”, as Jesus would put it. If we look into it more deeply, we find two underlying issues: self-defense and justice.

The issue of self-defense is essentially the issue of standing your ground, both spiritually and materially. Spiritually, it means defending what you believe in and what you stand for. Materially, it means protecting your life and property, as well as persons and things entrusted to you.

The problem with standing your ground is that everybody and their dog assume they are on the “right side of the Force”. Everybody assumes they are worth defending. But are you, really? Is defense of your person really the defense of God in this world? Is it the defense of what is true, righteous and good? Or are you merely a dog barking at the people on the street just because you’re on the “right” side of the fence, and you’re simply defending your territory like any other animal? Those are important questions, because if you ask people, they will all tell you they are trying to do the right thing, and they are trying to do good. The result of all that is the sum of all evils in the world. All evil people think they are perfectly justified in all their actions. If you find a person who is full of self-doubt and thinks of himself as inherently evil, you’re probably dealing with a saint. Evil not only assumes the right to defend itself, it assumes the right to assert itself. So, although the issue of self-defense initially seemed straightforward and clear, it is everything but. When someone slaps you in the face, the instinctive reaction is to assume you’re right, to assume the right to defend yourself. But what if you are in the wrong? What if that other person has the right to slap you in the face? What if the right and proper response is to feel shame and remorse, to accept rebuke and to repent? So, the solution would be to be situationally aware. You need to know your place in the wider world. You need to know where it is proper to stand your ground and defend your position, and when to re-examine your stance, retreat, perhaps even change sides. One possible lesson of “turn the other cheek”, therefore, might be that you should not assume your righteousness with full certainty. Maybe you got slapped because you’re an asshole. To turn the other cheek might be to accept blame and rebuke, and to offer apology. If so, that is a valid lesson.

Implicit in this is the judgment of right and wrong. If you are wrong, retreat, accept punishment and offer apology. Attempt to redress the wrongs. Repent. However, if you are right, and you are attacked, what then? Turn the other cheek no matter what? This is the place where people instinctively disagree with Jesus, they rebel against his teaching, and I’m not really sure it’s justified, because as we could see above, there are other legitimate interpretations of his statement – don’t assume you’re right and automatically reflect the input. We don’t know if he had a moderate or an extremist attitude towards this. I, however, can tell you what I think. I think you need to defend what you know to be true, and what you know to be just. You need to stand your ground. You don’t necessarily retaliate in kind, but you make your position known, you declare yourself and you work toward the greatest good. Sometime this means to attenuate a volatile situation. Sometimes you will remove yourself from the situation. Sometimes, however, you will respond with deadly force. There are legitimate situations where I would do so, and I wouldn’t bat an eyelash about it. If you had an active shooter scenario where some Muslim yelled “Allahu Akbar” while shooting people, and I was armed, I would shoot him twice in the chest and once in the head to make sure he’s dead. I think the response with deadly force would be so automatic I wouldn’t have time to even think about it, it’s like catching a glass you dropped, a reflex. So yeah, I wouldn’t turn the other cheek, I wouldn’t try to talk, or dismantle the situation. Every second of fucking around can mean another innocent person dead. You need to act, and you need to apply violence. You need to do it quickly, and effectively. Yes, those who live by the sword can die by the sword, but the trick is, you don’t even have to know what a sword is, to die by it. But that’s not the only possible scenario. It’s not always “allow someone to bitch slap you” or “shoot to kill”. Sometimes, you negotiate the exchange of five hostages for yourself, knowing you’ll be killed. You make the assessment, and if you see it’s worth it, you save their lives by offering yours. That, too, is a way to stand your ground – “if you need to kill someone, kill me”. So, as you can see, it’s a complicated matter, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s all an application of Augustine’s principle of just war, or, in a generalized case, just application of violence. Today people think violence is evil and there can be no excuse or no tolerance for it, but that’s a wrong approach. The right approach is, how can we minimize violence? How can we fight evil, how can we act in order to reduce evil? If you have a situation where 50 people die if you do nothing, and 1 person dies if you shoot the armed terrorist, how is refusing to kill a terrorist a good thing? And how is killing him bad, even though it is violence? You need to have your priorities straight. The Hindus have an excellent system for this; they have a list of priorities. First priority is moksa, liberation. Second priority is dharma, righteousness. Third priority is artha, usefulness. Fourth priority is kama, sensual pleasure. Basically, you see if something is conducive to liberation or not. Of things that are conducive to liberation, favor those that are righteous and just. Of things that are righteous and just, prefer to do those that are useful to you and others. Of things that are useful to you and others, choose to do those that are pleasurable.

So, it’s not always a choice between righteousness and a painful death. It sometimes is, if it can’t be avoided, but sometimes it’s a subtle choice, between polite silence and polite expression of your attitude. Sometimes to testify for God means to have an orgasm with the right person. Sometimes to testify for God is to offer your life in exchange for another person’s. Sometimes it’s to kill someone, quickly and efficiently, so that he wouldn’t kill the innocent. It’s a subtle thing, and it annoys me when people oversimplify things to the point of making nonviolence or kindness an absolute. Yes, kindness is good, but only if it’s helpful and useful. Sometimes kicking someone’s ass is better than kindness, and produces a greater good. It is wrong to justify evil actions with this, but nevertheless, it is my opinion that violence solved more problems than any other approach. The Nazis in the second world war weren’t defeated by lovingkindness, they were defeated by brutal violence. Sometimes you need to blow someone’s brains out in order to do good, and there’s no other way around it. If you’re facing an army of murderers, the right thing to do is take up arms and oppose them with deadly force. Sometimes, the only truly consistent choice for the greater good is to reject the concept of absolute nonviolence, and instead treat evil as a problem, and moderate violence as a possible solution. But it functions like this: if one uses words to do evil, you oppose him with words to spread truth and reason, and do good. If one uses a gun to kill good people, you take a gun and put a bullet in his brain. It’s that simple. Respond moderately, adopt a moderate, almost passive approach, but be ready for decisive and very violent action if it’s the right thing to do. Oppose evil by doing good, oppose lies by spreading the truth, but oppose an armed terrorist with a 9mm, two in the chest and one in the head if he still moves. Then turn the other cheek to check how the victims are doing and how you can help them.

Eat bitter, taste sweet

Posted on by
3

Some 18 years ago I had an altercation with a Dzogchen Buddhist who recommended a technique of meditation that basically went this way: you inhale impurity, and exhale purity. You inhale anger and exhale bliss. Eat bitter, taste sweet, essentially.

My objection was that what you “inhale”, basically your spiritual input, will determine the content of your consciousness, and expecting to transform it within the span of one breath is incredibly naive; you will fail, and instead of transforming discord into harmony you will accumulate discord and disturbance within you, and you will exhale hypocrisy, the pretense of peace and harmony.

However, I recently witnessed disturbing trends within society, as well as some individual examples, that made me reconsider my position.

What I realized is that I might be defining the problem from one position, that might not be the only possible and valid one, due to certain unsaid implications. For instance, if one implies a steady spiritual foundation of one’s consciousness, basically what I would call a vertical connection, and if one learns how to maintain this amidst all kinds of superficial experiences and mental states, this would invalidate my objection. “Inhaling” would then not refer to appropriating a spiritual state, but to suffering an experience with one’s deeper spiritual state unperturbed, and, furthermore, it would imply suffering a blow without automatically generating a reaction of the same energy-type, but instead the implication would be that one separates the quality of one’s experiences from the quality of one’s actions. Essentially, it means you can take any input, suffer its blow, absorb it and transform it, and act not as a reaction to the immediate energetic quality of your input, but from the deeper position that determines the correctness of actions.

The social phenomenon that initiated this line of thinking can be described as “pussification”. A pussified person assumes it’s his right to be happy and to feel good, to live without any stress, responsibility or danger. When experiencing something other than perfect bliss and approval, a pussy whines, complains, hides from the unpleasantness and is basically useless. It is here that I realized that the Dzogchen practitioner, to whose meditational practice I took exception, might have been on to something, because my recommendation, too, would be to “eat bitter, taste sweet”. Buddhism isn’t about “woe is me, all is suffering, let’s wallow in misery and whine”, it’s about “shit happens, suck it up, get over it, get over yourself and manifest harmony, goodness, clarity and wisdom”. Buddhism has a very manly approach to things, very Roman in its stoic balance. One is to take the blows of life, remain unperturbed, and manifest dignity, justice, beauty, kindness and harmony.

I think our civilization lost this Roman aspect and, as a result, I lost my respect for it. Our civilization is more about worshiping victims, about whining, finding all kinds of “repressed minorities” to “help”, and not about manifesting great things and having faith that justice and harmony will result from the general upward attitude of our spiritual vector. I think the victim-worship and the oppression Olympics are the direct result of this general social pussification, of the expectation that everybody should have only sweetness and joy as their input, as their experience of life. But that’s not how life works. Life is basically a torrential stream of suffering, pain, disappointments, losses and humiliations. If you think there are privileged ones who are excepted from this, you are simply stupid. Buddha wasn’t stupid, he got it. Suffering is the determinant of life. You can’t eliminate it, the only constructive approach is to deal with it in such a way that you don’t drown in it due to faulty expectations of pleasure and approval. Whatever you do, shit will happen. It’s what you are when shit happens, what you manifest, that separates the men from the boys. The metaphorical boys expect to eat sweet, and whine when it’s bitter, or even when the sweetness is not absolutely perfect. The metaphorical men eat bitter, and smile, because they know that what you manifest determines who you are, not what you experience. That’s what Jesus meant when he said “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.” “But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts – murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” (Mt 15)

What you do, what you manifest, is what either defiles or sanctifies you. Not what you experience. To experience difficulties, hardships, oppression, discrimination, prejudice, sickness, hunger, old age and death, is normal. To manifest things that are worse than what you took in is particularly evil, and causes spiritual downfall and degradation. To simply reflect the pressure is ordinary, and causes perpetuation of suffering. To shine under pressure and manifest God in this world is exceptional and glorious, and causes liberation. So take in the difficulties of this world, stay unperturbed because your consciousness has deep foundations in God, and manifest greatness of all kinds. Inhale suffering, hatred, pain, loss, agony and humiliation, and exhale clarity, beauty, justice, kindness, wisdom and greatness.

Eat bitter, taste sweet.

Why are there lightning rods on churches?

Posted on by
9

There’s a phrase that never fails to piss me off and trigger an episode of violent facepalming.

“If God exists, why are there lightning rods on churches?”

Because this world is not ruled by God, but by Satan (Matthew 4:8; John 12:31, 14:40, 15:11), because belonging to the church that celebrates the true God puts you under all kinds of hazards due to Satan’s vitriolic hatred of him (John 15:20, 16:2; Matthew 10:16-25) and his Church (1 Peter 5:8), and because Jesus himself made moves to protect his students against Satan’s wrath (John 17:15), so following his general advice is very wise, because the prince of this world would like nothing better than to have the Church carelessly tempting God (Matthew 4:5-7).

Christians don’t believe that believing in the true God is a “get out of jail free” ticket, something that can allow you to break the natural laws because you have divine protection. They actually believe that being faithful to Christ is closer to a death sentence than a protective shield in this world, but without accepting the possibility of martyrdom they are not really following Jesus. However, they are also advised not to tempt fate carelessly by doing things against natural laws that are likely to result in harm, and are especially advised against thinking that they are protected by God because they are his chosen people, because, as John the Baptist said, God can take a piece of rock and turn it into his chosen people if he so wishes (Matthew 3:9). If God allowed Jesus to be slandered, ridiculed, spat on, flogged and crucified, and his disciples and apostles persecuted, tortured and murdered, why would he prevent lightning from hitting a church building? God’s existence doesn’t preclude the existence of evil in this world, because this world is ruled by God’s sworn enemy. If God could use his power to vanquish evil this world wouldn’t even exist, and how it was allowed to exist in the first place and fall under the domain of Satan is a mystery. Instead, God can only provide an alternative to this world, and he can point to it, show the way. Salvation of the soul does not mean immunity to physical harm; in fact, it usually invites physical harm.

So yeah, I’m not a Christian and I know all this. And atheists pride themselves with being smart? My-oh-my.

False dichotomies: religion

Posted on by
7

You know those atheists who assume that anyone who disagrees with them is a Christian? The guys who automatically respond to any legitimate criticism of their ideas with some stupid bullshit that makes no sense whatsoever unless it is aimed at someone who believes in Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark, and they don’t actually bother to make sure that the person they are talking to even belongs to that group, nor do they change their rhetoric when they find out that it’s not the case?

Yeah. It’s as if their brain has a “case” statement with only two options and unhandled exceptions. If you agree with him, he assumes you’re an atheist. If you disagree with him, he assumes you’re a Christian. If you tell him you’re not, his brain crashes due to an unhandled exception, but he never stops talking, it’s just that nothing that comes out of his mouth makes any sense whatsoever.

So, those people assume some kind of a dichotomy between science and Christianity, where you need to choose one and are not allowed to even touch the other. I see it differently.

First of all, opposition to atheism isn’t Christianity. Opposition to atheism is any form of transcendentalist thought. Atheism is a fringe belief, espoused by fanatics who arbitrarily reject any evidence they don’t like, in a way quite similar to that of the “Moon landing hoax” or “flat Earth” believers. I know that to be true, because I once was an atheist, but unlike them, I was honest enough not to reject the evidence I couldn’t shoehorn into my favorite model. Instead, I was tortured by the evidence I couldn’t explain and this drove my thinking further. I didn’t choose the easy way of cherry-picking evidence so that my pet theories look great. I had to deal with the stuff that broke my models. This hurts, but it’s a healthy kind of pain. The fact that I chose to suffer the pain of knowing that my theory doesn’t explain the real world well makes me despise people who opt to stone themselves into oblivion by simply dismissing everything they don’t like, choosing the euphoria of imagined omniscience and omnipotence in the face of all intellectual competition, obtained merely by dismissing every piece of evidence that brings them out of their euphoric state.

The false dichotomies we have here are creationism vs. evolution, science vs. transcendentalism, chaos and chance vs. the will of God.

Honestly, if the atheists who kidnap science and hold it hostage weren’t the crazy cult that they are, those issues would never arise. I don’t actually see the reason why those viewpoints would even be contrasted in the first place. It would be normal for science to be aware of the limitations of its scope and not to extend its conclusions beyond that, and it would also be normal for religion to listen to what science has to report on the world, this being a form of insight into both their scripture and their understanding of reality. For instance, the fact that we now know that there were ice ages not that long ago, and that this ice melted away for the most part, should be taken as a confirmation of the general concept of the story about Noah. Mankind was almost swept away by the meltwater, but managed to survive, albeit with losses, and rebuild its civilizations. Of course the story itself is a myth; it was probably told, retold, changed and adapted for thousands of years and throughout dozens of successive civilizations, until only traces of the actual story remained, but something remained, and it’s our only semi-historic recollection of the onset of the current glacial minimum. It’s probably the oldest memory of mankind. And why is it a false dichotomy, because “science” for the most part argued against the story by pointing out that it would be unlikely for the situation on Earth to change radically and it’s more likely to assume that things just were this way forever. Also, the scientists pointed out that it would be impossible for all that water just to appear “out of nowhere”. Really? Are you fucking kidding me? But yes, the science up until recently didn’t know shit about the ice ages and the Bible was actually the better version of history, for all its flaws. At least it remembered there being a big flood. That’s what I meant by saying that religion should listen carefully at what science has to say and how it casts new light onto their scripture, because science can tell them what that flood was: the ice age ended and the ice melted. It happened suddenly and violently, according to newest findings, and if we use our imagination to visualize what must have happened to the humans who lived at that time, it becomes obvious that it was a memorable event for the survivors, and a mystery that required some explanation. People tried to make sense of it – oh, God got angry at humans because they grew wicked and corrupt, and he regretted ever creating them and decided to drown them all in water, save few who for some reason were more acceptable to him. Will that happen again? No, God decided not to repeat that. So, no fear.

So, obviously, I can appreciate that the Bible got the main concept right, but that science is the way of gradually getting the more complete version of the story. Why is that so difficult for some people to accept? The atheists hate the Bible so much they refuse to accept that it could have a better version of the story than the early science, and the religious Christians refuse to interpret their scripture as anything but the literal truth. From my perspective, that marginalizes both groups and makes them unfit to accept the truth.

The next issue is the age of the Universe. Science dates the Earth to some 4.5 BY, and the Universe to around 14 BY. The fundamentalist Christians who derive their ideas from the Bible put those numbers between 6 and 10 KY.

The thing is, science can’t actually tell us jack shit about the actual age of the Universe, because it simply assumes that the Universe is real (as I would say, reality level 0), and that by observing the physical phenomena such as the Doppler effect on the increasingly distant cosmic objects and the radioactive decay of isotopes, we can find out how long it took for the rocks on Earth to reach their current isotope composition, how long it took for the stars of high metallicity to form and evolve, and basically we can turn the mental clock backwards and calculate a point in time where all the matter in the Universe must have originated from one point. The problem with this logic is that if this entire Universe is a simulation, similar in kind but more sophisticated in implementation than our best videogames, we can’t really know for how long the thing existed before we plugged in. For all we know, it could have really been turned on a few kiloyears ago when the first souls accepted Satan’s offer and entered the simulation. The simulation could have appeared exactly like a Universe that was 13 BY old, with population 1 stars, isotope composition typical for a 4.5 BY old planet, and with fossil remnants of extinct plants and animals, but we have that in modern video games. In fact, I recently finished playing Witcher 3, and in the game I actually traveled between several parallel worlds with different histories and lifeforms. Tell me, how old are those worlds? They appear to have at least thousands of years of history embedded in them, ancient ruins, all kinds of life that appears to have naturally evolved, artifacts of erosion, some life that plane-shifted during the conjunction of the spheres, but really, how old is the world in Witcher 3? Thousands of years, millions or billions of years? Or did it just come into existence in 2015 and it’s a completely “young Earth”?

“Young Earth” is not a stupid theory at all. It’s only stupid if you assume that this world is the reality, and this assumption has less evidence for it than against it, since people who are reanimated from near-death consistently report waking up in a higher-reality world. If that is a higher-reality world, and this is a lower-reality world, there’s another word for “lower reality”. It’s “illusion”. And if it’s an illusion, it’s obvious that it can be as old as the memories of the first observer who joined with it. Before that point, its entire “history” could have been just something that some computer was left to iterate until it came up with a law-set that produces the desired conditions for the simulation, which explains the incredibly tightly fine-tuned fundamental constants. The explanation that someone let the computer run the simulation and tweaked the parameters until it got the desired results is actually the most parsimonic one, because everything else requires such crazy leaps of imagination it all becomes ridiculous. There are some aspects of this Universe and Earth in particular that look so incredibly unlikely, and their absence would result in us not be here to talk about it, the simulation theory actually became my favorite a few years ago, because the probabilities within the alternative explanations are utterly insane. I talked about this a bit in other articles, but mostly in Croatian so I’ll probably go through it again in English at some point, but I digress.

The craziest thing is, science can’t disprove any of it. Science can tell you a great deal about the ratio of isotopes of Potassium and Argon in rocks, but it can’t tell you whether the Universe itself is real or simulated. Paradoxically, the only way to tell is to see if one can plug in and out, and if so, ask them what happened. That’s exactly what happens in case of saints who had mystical experiences of unplugging from the simulation and into reality of higher order, and in case of dead people who were medically resurrected. None of what they tell us makes any sense if we assume that this world is the reality, level zero. However, if we accept the possibility of it all being an artifact that runs on some super-advanced computer, such as we ourselves could conceivably make in a few decades or centuries, it all makes perfect sense. It’s not weird, nor contradictory, nor impossible. In fact, it’s what you would expect to happen. The miracles, too, start making sense, because if it’s a simulation, and someone can get in touch with the higher reality, it’s conceivable that he could tweak the simulation, or ask someone in the higher reality, with the adequate level of access, to tweak the simulation. Pause gameplay. Lookup character Lazarus, timestamp t–6 hours. Delete current state of the character, insert snapshot in its place, re-interface soul with the playable character. Resume gameplay. Voila, raising the dead. Walking on water, even simpler. Detect water surface position, modify substance behavior to allow playable character to walk on it. Voila, miracle, walking on water. And the trick is, Jesus actually said that’s how he did it. He didn’t say he’s doing it, he said he asked God to do it for him.

If we look at it this way, some religions suddenly make much more sense than all the science in the world, because science can explain how the simulation works, and that’s not very useful. It’s much more useful to know the purpose of the simulation, the purpose of our presence within it, and the conditions under which we can leave. And about those things science can’t tell us jack shit. The only way to learn those things is to ask someone who is in the position to know them. And that’s not called science, it’s called revelation.

And yeah, talking snake. Stupid story, eh? But if you combine that with another narrative from the same place and from the similar historical period, that of the Yazidi sect, and it’s very likely that they are both surviving fragments of something, and you realize that the “Peacock angel” who is basically the person in charge of this world, but is a very questionable individual, might very well be the “talking snake” from the garden of Eden. The story then might sound like this: the “garden of Eden” isn’t really in this world, it’s in the world nearly-dead people wake up to when they pass through a “tunnel” between realities, basically unplugging from the simulation. The “snake”, a disreputable dodgy character, tempted the souls and offered them a better way of spiritually evolving, to “be like Gods”, to know the difference between good and evil. There was no “apple”, the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is some kind of a metaphor for some kind of an experience, and let me guess what that might be: plugging into some kind of a virtual reality, very immersive, with very strange rules. This place. And then God saw what happened, and declared that we are oh so fucked now. God didn’t throw us out of Eden – we opted out of it by listening to the “Peacock angel”, the “snake”. And the role of Jesus makes sense from that perspective, too – God figured out a way to redeem those who were trapped here, because the ruleset is such that you apparently can’t live here without breaking some rule or another that puts you more deeply into “Peacock angel’s” power. What Jesus might have done is bought a deep level of privilege on the system with his sacrifice, and this allows him to reset all obligations to the system-owner, of all souls who accept his authority over themselves. Basically, yes, you can say that you accept salvation by the sacrifice of Christ, and the otherwise untouchable infinite loop of obligations to the world and its owner ends.

So none of it is even remotely stupid if you look at it this way. In fact, looking at it this way science seems kinda silly, like those geeks who study lightsaber combat forms from Star Wars, and can tell you all about the differences between Ataru and Djem-So, or people who can tell you the entire genealogy of Numenorean kings from Ar-Pharazôn to Aragorn II Elessar. Yes, it can all be studied, and scientific methodology can be consistently applied to all of it, but that doesn’t mean any of it is real, in the ultimate meaning of it not existing only in some book, movie, someone’s head or a computer.

False dichotomies: abortion

Posted on by
4

The next false dichotomy is abortion, with “pro-life” and “pro-choice” options, and I will now show why I think it’s deceptive.

The pro-choice argument says that it’s woman’s body, she gets to choose what happens with it, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant and give birth, she can have an abortion.

The pro-life argument says that a fetus is a human being from conception, it has human rights, and you can’t kill a human being legally, so its right to life takes precedence over any other consideration.

So basically the false dichotomy is whether you believe the fetus is a human being or not. If it is, the concept of human rights applies. If it is not, when does it become one? At the time of birth? When is that, considering all the premature births that survive in an incubator? The pro-choice option really has a problem there. The pro-life option has a problem of trying to ban abortion outright, and most people intuitively agree that this might not be the best idea, although it’s difficult for them to argue why exactly without sounding like monsters.

So here’s my take on this. A fetus is a human being since conception. However, humans don’t have any intrinsic rights, whatsoever. There are only duties and privileges. Privileges are derived from contributions; since the mother contributes her body for a parasitic entity to use for its growth and to deform her in the process, and demand her resources and sacrifices for decades to come, any privileges of the fetus, including its privilege of life, are realized at her expense. This gives her the right to simply refuse to donate her body as a host for the fetus. The father, too, has rights, or should I say privileges, considering how he provides for the woman with his resources. Since having a baby is also realized at his expense, and might pose a serious burden on him, he also has a voice in the matter. So, what exactly is the position of the fetus in all this? The fetus is a guest, who was invited into the family by the act of them having sex. It’s a soul that started the process of incarnation based on that invitation. The invitation can be rescinded, but that is done at the soul’s great inconvenience, is very traumatic to all sides and they better have a valid reason for that, because it’s definitely an action that goes against both nature and common decency, because if you tell someone that he’s so unwelcome and such a burden that you’d rather kill him than suffer his presence, that’s a really serious message. So, nobody has rights, but there are other things that are actually much more binding than the concept of rights. One of those things is basic decency and goodness, out of which you simply don’t kill your child unless your life is threatened, or its body is diagnosed to be deformed, in which case you destroy the body in order not to force the soul to endure life in the trap of a deformed body. So yes, in theory the mother has almost unlimited rights to do whatever she wants with the fetus, because all its rights are derived from her personal contributions and sacrifices, and it is her option to decline. The father, too, has rights, because it is expected of him to support the family. The child, in theory, merely consumes resources and is an inconvenience, and has no rights whatsoever. In practice, the child is a guest, who came into the mother’s body by invitation, and if that is so, its protection is a great ethical priority and an obligation. If the child was conceived by carelessness, the mother can rescind invitation, but it always comes at great spiritual cost, because she basically not only made a mistake, she also forced someone completely innocent to suffer for her mistake. If the pregnancy is the result of rape, she is perfectly justified in doing whatever she wants with it. She can have an abortion at no moral or spiritual expense, or she can shrug and decide that she wanted a baby anyway and simply keep it, taking ownership of the situation.

So, in theory I advocate a purely pro-choice position, but in practice, I am almost as extreme in the anti-abortion stance as the most ardent pro-life advocates. That is because I don’t base my moral stance on the concept of human rights or liberties, but on the concept of having God, who is the absolute goodness, as a role model, and not wanting to live my life in a way God would find objectionable. This is the crux of the pro-choice position: you choose not only what to do, but what you will become as you do it, and not all outcomes are equally desirable.