#rebuttals

The mainstream dogma sparked a wave of dogmatic revisionism, and this revisionist mainstream dogmatism has now given way to a more rematic mainvisionist dogstream.

Rebuttals [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

June was Queer Pride Month, July is Disability Pride Month, and that means it's the prime time of year for certain people to remind us that "pride is a sin, didn't you know?"

So for episode 75 of the Blessed Are the Binary Breakers podcast, I called up my dear friend Laura, a fellow disabled trans Christian, to discuss how the kind of pride that marginalized communities use as an antidote to shame is not sinful, but indeed essential in our pursuit of justice and abundant life for all!

Listen as Laura and I — interspersed with excerpts from Eli Clare's 1999 text Exile and Pride — contrast marginalized pride with nationalist, supremacist pride; explain why "awareness" and "acceptance" aren't enough; and emphasize the need to join pride with witness.

Click here for places to listen + the episode transcript.

Hear more from Laura on their podcast, the Autistic Liberation Theology Podcast. Click here for their website of essays and biblical Playmobil art.

Look under the readmore for more excerpts + image descriptions.

[cont.] 2) is it okay to sell an infant for sex, compared to killing a fetus for money? Well, the reasoning for performing an abortion isn't for money as much as any other medically necessary procedure can be 'for money'. And I wouldn't consider it 'killing' in the sense of murder, it's 'killing' in the sense of killing part of a living being, or killing an unconscious organism, because it isn't conscious or independent of the mother. To sell a living, conscious person for sex would be evil, but again, fetuses are not conscious or people. 3) a fetus is actively in the process of becoming a person. Is a fetus the same person as she will be as an adult? You could say the same about sperm and eggs. Both have the function of potentially becoming a person, but aren't. You could take the exact sperm and egg, unfertilised, that would become you, which, left to its own devices, would fertilise, but that would not be a person. What's so special specifically about fertilisation that makes it 'you'? What you share is DNA, the same as any other cell in your body, billions of which die all the time. Also, you could say that the fetus itsself is not 'actively' becoming a person, because the growth and development are reliant on the mother. 4) it is extremely unlikely that any scientific evidence would come forward to make a fetus fit the definition for 'human being', in a way that killing a fetus would be murder. 5) The violence we use on fetuses is used on living beings all the time, to amputate or remove parts of the body. It's also used on living unconscious organisms such as plants, fungi, and animals when it is done for good reason, eg. removing a parasite. 6) the arguments and 'belief' that a fetus is not a person is solid enough to be considered fact, just as anything else non-person is not a person. A person is defined as a 'human being regarded as individual', and a fetus is not 'individual', being directly connected to and reliant on the mother, and also not a 'human being', the definition being a man, woman or child.

For context, this is a response to my comic post "Six Illustrated Responses to “A Fetus Isn’t a Person”", which has also been published as an article on Secular Pro-Life's blog.

@poofem I see you took a good-faith whack at a fetal non-personhood argument and you deserve a fair response.

1) Well, if consciousness is a red herring, then it doesn't matter if fetuses experience a "self" or not (although I would say they do, you can read my take on the theory of enselfment.) Human organisms are definitely alive in a very different way than ALL human cells are alive; not every cell is an organism. Human cells do not follow an integrated body plan as human organisms do; they do NOT develop, which is one of the 7 characteristics of life according to NASA.

A clump of human cells forming a tissue is alive but is not a life form. Human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses (ZEFs) ARE life forms. They have organic unity and are whole organisms, while cells are only parts of organisms. ZEFs are not missing any parts; they have all the parts and abilities appropriate for their development. Defining them as non-people because of their age and ability is ageist and ableist.

As I read through “Speaking For the Unborn” by Steven A. Christie, M.D., J.D., I want to share the useful information included in the book. You can buy the book for yourself here. It’s quick rebuttals to pro-choice arguments. 

Companion Video Tutorial: Vid 1, Vid 2, Vid 3, Vid 4.

Why Bother?

Strategy

A Few Basic Definitions

“Why I am Pro-Life” (in 30 Seconds)

1. It’s not “alive” or “human” or a “person”: Argument 1-2. Arguments 3-6. Arguments 7-11.

2. A woman’s autonomy

3. One should never impose their personal beliefs on others

4. Women shouldn’t have to bear the burden and personal hardship of an unwanted pregnancy

5. You are just anti-woman, a misogynist: Arguments 31-37. Arguments 38-42.

6. Abortion empowers women

7. Abortion is best for society and best for unwanted babies

8. Miscellaneous arguments: Arguments 54-59. Arguments 60-65.

cw homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia, unaffirming Christians

Hello anon! Ach ugh, I am bombarded with that accusation of "shaping God in my own image" all the dang time and it drives me up a wall.

While I acknowledge that we all have a tendency to want to find our own assumptions confirmed in scripture, I'm not the one conforming to the world's stereotypes and bigotry by casting God as a wrathful, abusive, anti-queer, white supremacist patriarch! I've been compelled to investigate and challenge my own beliefs time and time again — why don't my accusers take even a single moment to do the same with their assumptions and beliefs?

Anyway, to start with the question of rejecting tradition:

Christian tradition is so much richer and broader and more colorful than those in power want you to know!

Christians over the centuries have organized themselves into communities and relationships that many contemporary Christians would despise, as they break with heteronormative norms of the "nuclear family." Kittredge Cherry of QSpirit writes about much of this history in her articles on various Christian historical figures.

And Saints have experienced God in many-gendered ways from the start — and have experienced themselves that way too!

As Elizabeth Geitz explains,

"It is important to stress that throughout the Christian tradition, even the incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, was consistently imaged as both male and female. It is for this reason that Anglican theologian Mary Tanner stated at the Lambeth Conference of 1988 that the church needs to ‘recapture certain neglected strands of the tradition, especially from the mystics of the church, that help to point our way into the future.’

Recapturing and recovering lost tradition is what I am suggesting here, not inventing something out of whole cloth to answer only a twentieth-century concern. As committed Christians isn’t it appropriate that we teach all of the tradition of our church rather than just part of it?"

On to the next facet of your question —

Are we fashioning God in our own image / according to our own beliefs or desires?

I am told time and again that in order to believe that God affirms LGBTQA+ persons and relationships, I must "go against scripture." To the contrary, I find the God of scripture to be radically inclusive.

It’s only if you insist on a narrow reading of the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God (and especially if you resist examining biases & failures translation) that those tiny handful of “clobber verses” require you to accept as “clear as day” that God isn’t LGBT affirming.

For my own framework of reading scripture that takes the Bible seriously but not literally, visit my webpage here. One problem I explore there is the one that Rachel Held Evans lays out in this quote:

“The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks. For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We’re all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible in our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it."

On that webpage, the last section responds to that accusation that “you’re just reading into the Bible what you want to believe!”

On a similar note, I’ve got an old post that explores 1. How to “know” we’re not just “justifying our sin” when we interpret God as affirming us; and 2. “If being gay is as natural and God-affirmed as being straight, why do we need to work so hard to prove it?” I direct you there for responses to those questions!

Finally, as you continue to grapple with arguments commonly made against us, I invite you to explore my rebuttals tag, where I compile responses to those common arguments. Some of the stuff in there that’s tangentially related to your questions:

I once wrote a sermon on the idea that when we give in to the idea that being LGBT is a sin, that’s “conforming to the world,” while embracing LGBT people as they are is living into God’s Kin(g)dom.

“How do you know God is okay with LGBT+ people?” Answer

Everything I thought I knew about God has changed now that I have accepted God affirms LGBT people – what do I do? / I don’t know the Bible or God like I thought I did – what do I do? Answer

This beautiful statement by Rabbi Shai Held about God’s love in the face of human rejection 

And of course, even more vital than tearing down others’ hate is to build up joy and love — so check out my #affirmation tag too, where among other things you’ll find examples of how various parts of scripture support the full affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQA+ persons.

Happy 4th of July!

Americans celebrate their independence on the day the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. On an earlier July 4, we posted about our copy of one of the earliest printings of the Declaration, a document that outlines the reasons the thirteen American colonies were no longer subject to the British monarch, King George III, and were now united, free, and independent states. 

This July 4, we present a British rebuttal to the Declaration, John Lind’s An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress printed in London for Thomas Cadell, John Walter (founder of The Times of London), and T. Sewell in 1776. The work presents a detailed response to the Declaration of Independence, quoting in full each of the twenty-eight objections to the policies of the British Crown, followed by highly critical comments, with a separate section at the end discussing the famous opening lines.

Prime Minister Frederick North commissioned Lind to produce an anonymous pamphlet that would exculpate the King. Lind completed An Answer in the fall of 1776, taking up each of the Declaration's accusations point by point. The pamphlet ostensibly ran through several editions before the end of the year to meet a growing demand. Ours is the fifth and last edition of that year, printed by William Strahan. In actuality, starting with the second edition, Strahan printed 8,000 copies, and as they were issued they were successively labeled second to fifth editions to give the impression of widespread popularity. Unfortunately for North and Lind (and ultimately the King), Lind lacked the force, articulation, and reputation of someone like Thomas Paine.