God Is Prolife?by Farrell Till
Alongside Interstate 55 at Sikeston, Missouri, is a billboard that proclaims GOD IS PROLIFE, FIGHT ABORTION. Almost a year has gone by since I noticed this sign on a trip to visit my mother, but I have not been able to put the absurdity of its message out of my mind. I don't intend to discuss any moral issues involved in the abortion controversy, but I do feel compelled to comment on the appalling audacity of the organization that posted this message. The "God" referred to in the message was, of course, meant to be the God of the Bible, and this is where absurdity enters the picture, because whatever adjectives one may appropriately use to describe the God of the Bible, prolife is certainly not one of them. All through the Old Testament, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, was depicted as everything but "prolife." When the wickedness of man became great in the earth (Gen. 6 : 5), the God of the aforementioned prolife billboard responded by sending a great flood that destroyed "every living thing that was upon the face of the ground" (Gen. 7: 23). This hardly sounds like the conduct of a god who is "prolife." Biblicists, of course, will argue that "God" did this because "all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth" (Gen. 6:12) and therefore deserved destruction. Such a position, however, ignores the reality of what had to have happened if this great flood occurred exactly as it is described in the Bible. Even if we concede a limited human population at the time, there still would have been thousands of innocent children and babies who drowned in the floodwaters rained down upon them by an allegedly "prolife" god. Undoubtedly, there would have also been thousands of expectant mothers whose pregnancies were terminated when they died in the rising waters. By what stretch of imagination could such widespread destruction of the unborn as necessarily happened in this story be considered "prolife"? If we are to believe the Bible, the destruction of human life by divine decree was a commonplace occurrence. When the pharaoh of Egypt refused Moses' plea to release the Israelites from bondage, this god of the prolife movement sent terrible plagues upon the land that caused untold human suffering and misery. That "God" would do such a thing to an entire nation is enough to cast serious doubt on his prolife image that the billboard message asked us to believe in, but the finale of this story is enough for rational people to change mere doubt to total disbelief. When Pharaoh persisted in his refusal to release the Israelites, God sent his last plague, the death of the firstborn that struck every Egyptian family from "Pharaoh that sat on his throne" to "the captive that was in the dungeon" (Ex. 12:29). In all Egypt, "there was not a house where there was not one dead" (v: 30). Imagine, if you will, the extent of the devastation. Every person in Egypt who had been the firstborn in his family (according to the story) was struck dead in a single night. Imagine too the appalling injustice of it. "The captive in the dungeon," as well as every other common person in Egypt, had no power to make political decisions. Pharaoh was the one who had refused to release the Israelites, yet God (if we are to believe the story) killed thousands of ordinary Egyptians whose only offense was that, by pure chance, they happened to have been the firstborn in their families. We have to understand too that there would have been many Egyptian fetuses who did not survive that night because they had the misfortune to be in the wombs of women who had been the firstborn of their parents. If conduct such as this makes God "prolife," then what would he have had to do for abortion opponents not to consider him prolife? When the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, they executed a take-no-prisoners military policy that had been commanded by their god Yahweh: "When Yahweh your God has led you into the land you are entering to make your own, many nations will fall before you: Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than yourselves. Yahweh your God will deliver them over to you and you will conquer them. You must lay them under ban (utterly destroy them, ASV). You must show them no pity.... Instead deal with them like this: tear down their altars, smash their standing stones, cut down their sacred poles and set fire to their idols. For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh your God; it is you that Yahweh our God has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples on the earth" (Dt. 7:1-6, Jerusalem Bible, see also Dt. 9:3-7). This perception that they were the "chosen people of God" led the Israelites to put a low premium on non-Hebraic life. Time and time again, the book of Joshua claims that the Israelites executed Yahweh's command to the point of destroying "all that breathed" (10:40-43) and leaving alive "none that breathed" (11:6-15). Each time, the texts emphasized that this mass destruction of human life had been done in order to obey what Yahweh, "the God of Israel," had commanded (Josh. 10:40; 11:15). To put the massacres of the Canaanite people in proper perspective to the claim that God is "prolife," we must again consider the implication of what had to have happened if these events occurred as recorded in the Bible. If entire civilian populations were massacred to the point of leaving alive "none that breathed," then by necessity thousands of women and children would have been among those who were killed. Furthermore, as was true in the worldwide flood and the death of all Egyptian firstborn, there would have been many unborn lives terminated, in this case by Israelite swords and spears that pierced the wombs of pregnant Canaanite women. Indeed! there is even one passage in the Bible that tells of the Israelite conquest of a city in which "all the women that were with child" were "ripped up" (2 Kings 15:16). To argue that this atrocity was committed by Menahem, an "evil" Israelite king, who had no commandment from God to do this deed, will by no means prove that Yahweh was above this type of barbarity, because the prophet Hosea, who claimed that he was preaching "the word of Yahweh" (1:1; 4:1), once pronounced this curse: "Samaria shall bear her guilt; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up" (13:16). This hardly sounds like a message from a "prolife" God. By implication, then, the Bible teaches that at least in Old Testament times God had no concern for unborn life, but in addition to the implications, there are direct claims that God personally commanded the massacre of women and children. TWO particularly bloody atrocities against women and children, allegedly ordered by Yahweh, were the massacres of the Midianites and the Amalekites. In the case of the Midianites, Yahweh (according to the Bible) ordered Moses to "(a)venge the Israelites of the Midianites" (Num. 31:1). In obedience to the command, Moses sent an expedition of 12,000 soldiers against the Midianites. In its assault, his army "killed every [adult] male" (v:7) but spared the women and children and brought them back as captives (v:9). Upon hearing that his men were returning with prisoners, Moses went out to meet them and angrily commanded his officers to "kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him" (v:17) but generously allowed his men to keep the virgin girls alive "for yourselves" (v:18). This Midianite massacre was ordered presumably to "avenge the Israelites" of wrongs they had suffered "in the matter of Peor" (Num. 31:16) , an orgy involving Midianite women that had occurred a short while before the military assault on Midian (Num. 25). The Amalekite massacre, however, resulted from a grudge that Yahweh had borne for 450 years. On their journey to Canaan, the Israelites were attacked when they entered Amalekite territory (Ex. 17:8-16), and this had resulted in a vow from Yahweh to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven" (Ex. 17:14; Dt. 25:17-19). Approximately 450 years later, when the Israelites had established their own nation in the land of Canaan, Yahweh remembered his grudge and ordered king Saul to exterminate the entire Amalekite nation: "Thus saith Yahweh of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" (1 Sam. 15:2-3). The rest of the chapter reports how that Saul partly carried out these instructions but was severely reprimanded by Yahweh for having spared the life of the Amalekite king and kept as booty the best of the Amalekite livestock (vv:17- 33). The important point, however, is that the story claims that all of the women and children, by direct orders of Yahweh, were killed. If so, then common sense tells us that many unborn lives were terminated when the Israelite soldiers killed the Amalekite women who were pregnant at the time, probably by ripping them open as vividly described in the passages cited above. The history of "God" as told in the Old Testament is a history that drips with the blood of women and children. When we read such appalling stories as these, as Thomas Paine said in The Age of Reason, we should be ashamed to call them the "word of God." However, to be aware that these stories are in the Bible and yet proclaim that "God is prolife" is to insult human intelligence. Whatever evidence the prolife movement may have to support its position, one thing it should be embarrassed to do is claim that God is on its side. Table of Contents | 1993 Issues | Subscribe Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996 |