Ok, a father cannot force a woman to deliver. I agree with that.

But what with the other way around? Woman wants the baby, the father doesn't. He shouldn't b e forced to raise the baby too (imho), so if he specifically said he doesn't want that baby, and the woman decided to keep it, father should not be forced to raise it and support the mother with money.

Men should have some rights too! Gender equality!!! :P Because if we take away all the choices from the father, it means fathers have no rights for planning a family, and woman has them all. Not cool :P

Just like she knew it. But yet, she can decide to "get rid of it" and be free of all responsibility, and the man can't?

There are two people having sex, and saying that one side has to take responsibility for "sticking it in" and the other one is not responsible for "opening the gates to hell" and ameks all the calls is discriminating, imho.

I agree with you there that men should have more rights when if comes to reproduction (where is my pill, pharmaceuticals?) and a single father can be just as good a parent as a single mother but they are in the minority when if comes to raising a family. Requiring a woman to have an abortion if you (male) is probably not going to be viewed favourably by any western court but it would be more equal if the man has more say. However, we're talking about rape in this thread and the man should have no say in the outcome of non-consensual sex.

No, I am not talking about forcing to give birth or forcing to terminate. I agree that only a woman can decide that. But I don't agree with the fact the father has to take all the consequences, even if he doesn't want the baby.

Mother made a choice. She chose responsibility and starting the family. She can't choose it for him, imho.

You are misapplying some Bible here, with missing some cultural queues.

Deut 23:2 (bastard child) (by the way, these are not moral laws, these are civil codes for the Jews, not Christians)

In Israel, there was a necessity to maintain a distinct "differentness" to show their neighbors that their God was the one true God. One way to do this was to maintain their cultural identity in a world with neighbors very different than their own. So young women (who married often around their 1st period or even earlier) who ran off or were raped or kidnapped or whatever reasons, their children would essentially be outcasts.

Although it's quite brutal, it maintains protection among the community. If neighbors cannot "breed out" the Jews b/c their children will just be kicked out of the community, then they won't try to breed them out.

BTW, "even until the tenth generation" doesn't mean that after 10 generation you're cool. It's saying that no generation is allowed back in.

Moreover, it has nothing to do with Heaven and Hell. It has everything to do with keeping rotten foreigners from doing horrible things to the community.

Girls in those days were very careful to marry those their parents told/sold them to. If one were to run away to be with another culture, then there they would likely stay (though not always).


Deut 22:23-24 is about honor -- especially family honor. And lineage, I'd imagine. The idea of this is that if an engaged woman has sex with a man and people are within screaming-distance, then it can be assumed that the engaged woman and the man were in cahoots. They are both to be stoned b/c both are guilty.

I should also note that this is a civil code. Did it mean both would be stoned? Not necessarily. But it could mean it. Sometimes grace was applied. Sometimes not.

When cheating like this, it's an attack against not just honor and lineage, but also generational property. If a woman has another man's baby boy, then that other man would end up inheriting most of the husband's property. I hope you start to see the gravity of the crime.

In those days in that culture, we didn't have people entering puberty at 11, getting married at 30 and everyone sleeping with everyone else until their wedding day (much like some folks live their lives today). And people didn't have wills. Everything went to the sons. Period. If the culture was like it is today, then this law wouldn't protect anyone from anything.


Deut 22:28 (this is also a civil code for the Jews at the time) If a man rapes a woman, he has to marry her (if she is a virgin and she isn't married). Without this law, if a man raped a woman, then the woman would remain in the care of her parents until the parents died. And then she would be without income or home or anything else. She would be homeless, probably prostitute herself out, and eventually die horribly.

Since this is a civil code, the parents could always deny the 50 shekels of silver and keep their daughter and find another way for her to live. But if they cannot take care of their daughter (who is an economic sink in this culture at this time), and the rapists isn't that bad of a guy (he'll take care of her), then they'd take the money (the reverse-dowry) and sell their daughter.

You can imagine that most parents wouldn't do this if the rapist was a nut-case. But they might do it if their daughter doesn't like sex, the man is in mostly good standing and seems an alright chap (except for the whole rape thing), and will take care of their daughter.

It's mindblowing for us today, but when you're working on fewer resources and men are only going to marry a virgin, it may be the only course left to some folks to make sure their daughter is taken care of.

Is it optimal? Absolutely not. And that's why most women hang out around women and didn't go places alone where other men might be. But it happened. And sometimes it was just the only way to take care of someone else.



I hope I was able to give some helpful insight on some of the civil codes of a 3000 year old culture. You should note that these are not civil codes for the world, just the Jews at the time. The Jews don't use these civil codes now. Some they probably adhere to, but not the majority. Our cultures have moved toward better places than they were that long ago as far as women rights go and taking care of widows and others who can't take care of themselves.

As for Christians, we tend to work on the principles of grace as established by Jesus but also shown in the Old Testament in times like when David hid in a temple and broke some dietary laws to stay alive. God was okay with it in the Bible. So we realize that God's not a totalitarian. He's just trying to make the world we busted up work for us as best we can.

That goes both ways:

You can't espouse the virtues of freedom when it comes to topics like the choice to end a pregnancy well after conception, and then try to take that freedom away when it concerns a topic that you don't agree with (like gun ownership). The party that says a woman should be able to kill a defenseless unborn in all circumstances (including partial-birth abortion) is the party that wants to (and has, over and over again) restrict one's 2nd Amendment rights. How about we do the same with abortion: put in place some sensible restrictions, like ending third-trimester abortions except in those rare cases where the mother would suffer permanent harm or death. Is this so unreasonable?

With regards to comparing abortion with the death penalty and protecting life, they don't really relate. It goes back to what Tallima said, protection of the unborn who can't defend themselves. Death-penalty crimes, by-and-large, are committed by functional adults with a mind of their own, and a capacity to decide for themselves (there are exceptions for mental issues, and future legislation needs to address those problems). Yes, the death penalty statutes need a whooooole lot of work, but it's apples and orangutans.

But if one wishes to stick with that point - abortion versus death penalty - it should be noted that estimates place abortions in the US at somewhere between 800,000 and 1,200,000 annually. In the last decade, there have been less than 100 executions per year. ~10 million defenseless unborn, versus less than 1,000 cognizant decision-making criminals who killed at least one person. It's a comparison that does not favor pro-choice.

Misunderstanding exactly what the Bible says? Perhaps you can point out a verse where god says he values the life of a child from rape? Since Christians are apparently New Testament take one from there, I pointed out a verse which specifically states rape children are worthless and I can point out more 100, some from the NT, where god takes a big dump on women or kills an entire village because of the actions of one person. Just reach the same level of specificity.

Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with the news lately but there are many of cases where this exact thing does happen all around the world, mostly in Muslim countries where Sharia Law, partly taken from Deuteronomy, is prevalent. Women are killed, young girls are forced to marry, sexual crimes are punishable by death or dismemberment, how can you say this is 3000 years old when it is being lived today? You can say Muslim countries are backward but in Israel there are groups of Orthodox Jews that attack school girls because they believed the exact book which I quoted verbatim forbids them from getting an education.

And Jesus/god never said Deuteronomy didn't applied to Christians, this was done at the Council of Jerusalem 20 years after the death of Jesus and made it into the book of Acts. It was then included in the vulgate Bible at the Council of Nicaea where they decided to cut out some of the crazier books. It then made the cut again when the English Protestants under King James made there version and cut out several books from the Catholic Bible. That's right, early Christians and Christians from 400 years ago didn't think killing rape victims was crazy enough to be taken out of the Bible.

You can claim cultural misunderstanding but there are people who actually want to impose some of this onto modern society and certain parts of it already have been, almost half the US believes what the Bible says about the creation of Earth is true! What this post is about is some asshole misunderstanding the Bible and placing his modern cultural perceptions onto a deity.

My argument was against proof-texting out-of-context verses.

As for what the senatorial candidate said, he said something that would probably not be taken well. When we talk about what God allows or what God "makes" happen, it can often be misunderstood depending upon one's view of God.

If God is the great manipulator, then he's moving us like action figures. Every rape is his rape.

If God made us and let us make our own choices, God isn't raping anyone. But if he doesn't intervene, perhaps he's callous or lacks power.

Of course I don't believe any of those and after a few thousand years of discussion, I think there's been some great material written about "The Problem of Evil." (that's its subject name if you're interested in looking something up)

But what you end up with are a lot of people who get mad. And he's apologized, saying he didn't mean it the way some folks took it. And the honest truth is that sometimes we use words too quickly and whimsically and forget their true power and meaning.

When considering to impose evil legislation, people have to make a stand. If society worked the way it did those thousands of years ago, a woman would be begging to be married to the man who raped her instead of beheaded and left for dead in a field somewhere. But society, by and large, doesn't work that way today. We have grown leaps and bounds beyond that wickedness (and invented some of our own wickedness -- we shouldn't get too prideful).

I've indeed seen the news. It's not good. People don't act with love toward one another. They take from others for their own and their family's security. They stand in fear instead of in liberty. They value currency over honor, freedom, honesty and love. And much like Biblical times, people use the Bible to hurt others when God over-and-over-and-over clearly showed that the single most important thing to do is to love God and your neighbor.

<note: I was going to delete this following part, but I decided to leave it b/c it really speaks true to me right now. Note that I'm not trying to preach at you and I wanted to delete it, but I figured someone might take something good away from it, so I'm going to leave it.>

But who are they anyway? Is it not us?

How can we act with love better? How can we act without fear better? How can we value honor and freedom and honesty and love better?

What we think we see on the news are bunch of evil people doing evil things. But what we're really seeing are a bunch of good people who occasionally do a really evil thing. I for one have done really evil things. I haven't been on the news, but I've known good people who have.

It's not about half as much about changing them as it is about changing us. Because we are them. If you don't think you are, then you haven't really seen yourself.
<end deleted part>

The fact people give a shit what a book written thousands of years ago says about morality will forever be baffling to me.

So you can't come up with a specific example where the Bible says god cares about rape victims or their children (it doesn't)? Instead you're trying to mask the lack of Biblical morality with quasi-philosophical bullshit.
Agreed. This is just plain silly and the fact that it routinely makes it's way into modern politics is equally baffling to me.

It's not that baffling when you realize that a very large number of people actually, truly believe that this ancient book is the word of God, creator of the universe. If you share this belief, it makes perfect sense to accept the Bible as the ultimate guide to morality. (Personally, however, I agree with you that the Bible should be utterly irrelevant to our morality in this day and age.)

I don't think you understand how the Bible works. It's not a magic book with insta-verses to cure what ails you. It's a historical book in a historical context that we can apply to our lives and learn about God (and the history of Israel)

You shouldn't use a 3000 year old Mosaic law passage to teach yourself morality. The moral bits are located elsewhere.

This is the Deut 22 passage you were referencing. This is the passage that talks about the innocence of the woman.

25 “But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. 26 But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, 27 because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.

I can talk about all of this if you want to, but your perception of the Bible is so far off that the discussion doesn't really work. (I hope the tone doesn't sound insulting -- I'm not trying to be. I'm saying that the discussion literally will have no effect except both of us spinning tires (the tire spinning is not literal :D)).

The basic premise of it all, however, is summarized as "Love your God with all your heart. Love your neighbor."

Therefore, of course we should love rape victims. Of course we should love their children. And that is why most Christians defend the unborn.

Most of the laws of the Bible have to do with instruction concerning common events and how the people of Israel should deal with them. The laws are summed up as: "Love your neighbor." Abortion wasn't a hot topic in ancient Israel, so there won't likely be any Scripture that says "Thou shalt not abort thine fetus."

What you will find are a bunch of laws and a whole bunch of exceptions. Why the exceptions? Because the laws are all made to guide a person's ability to love. And love trumps.

(I should note that I'm not talking about love as some do. Love, in short, is the giving of yourself to help others -- being kind, patient, gentle and so forth [as often listed at a wedding -- in America anyway]).

Now, you don't have to use the Bible as your guide. That's the job of a religious person, I suppose. But as a religious person, I didn't want you to misunderstand what you thought you understood about the Bible and what it has to say about rape, their victims and their children.

I hope I'm being clear and not antagonistic.

Look, what did I tell you about being reasonable?

Wait, are you telling me slavery isn't okay?

And a woman isn't worth only 30 shekels compared to a man's 50 shekels?

I got some catching up to do!