The Issue Is... (More Abortion Discussion)

The issue is that no single religious view of when life begins should become law for a country made up of people with differing religious understandings.

I am a religious believer. I should speak up for what I believe. 

However, my country is made up of many people who believe differently than I do. They too should speak up for what they believe.

It's not what I believe or what any one of them believes that determines our laws. Or at least it shouldn't be. It's what the majority believes. 

When our elected officials ignore the voices of those who believe differently than they do and put into effect laws that negatively affect those people, our elected officials are wrong. Our laws should be for the country as a whole, not just a certain subgroup of a country, no matter how vocal that subgroup is.

My religious views shouldn't govern the country unless the rest of the country agrees they should. That's the way democracy should work.

Church history has included many varied understandings of when life begins from the Judeo idea of the moment of birth to the ideas of at conception, progressively throughout the embryonic process, and that God imparts souls to different people at different times (giving them to David and Isaiah within the womb for a special calling, but not necessarily for everyone).

It is the height of hubris and pride for any religious group -- even and especially my own -- to consider itself the only, one true understanding on this highly complex subject.

Most of the opinions we have today stem from the Great Awakening of the 1700s and the Revivalism of the 1900s. That's when a certain flavor of Protestantism began to mingle with the idea of nationality and started to shift the ideas from our founding father's separation of church and state to our modern fiction that the founding fathers were trying to create a nation built on Christianity. When, to be fair, most of them were running away from a kind of Christianity that considered their form of Christianity heretical.

If we want to settle the issue of abortion, we need a clear-cut scientific legal moment in which embryonic cells become life. Then and only then can we use the Constitution to protect life from that point. But it must be a scientific, not a religious, decision. I neither want science telling me what my church should believe in its doctrine or practice within nor want religion telling what to believe about laws for a varied people of multiple viewpoints and religions.