Abortion Doctor George Tiller Murdered - Page 2

No, when they start saying Christofascist like they say Islamofascist.

Fuck Christianity. Seriously. What a disaster it's been for the last two millenia.

I would think that regular Christians would want to renounce extremist murderers in the same way that regular Muslims want to renounce the extremist murderers that kill innocents in terrorist acts. In both cases, murder twists something beautiful into something profane and evil.

Yeah, it sucks to be lumped in with murderers, but that doesn't mean you should deny that religious extremists do evil in the name of their alleged religion. It happens, and it's evil. By jumping to the defense of religious extremists, you lump yourself in with people who use your religion to justify evil acts.

This kind of murderous extremism is part and parcel of the toxicity that has to be constantly recognized and guarded against from within in any organized religion.

This thread is fucking hilarious. Pre-emptive righteous indignation in the face of a person murdered for religious reasons. Brilliant.

Twas a joke. But thanks for showing up all pissy and offended.

It did give us Stryper. And they were pretty bad ass.

Yeah, those talking heads are just harmless blowhards, right?

O'Reilly's campaign against murdered doctor

"Almost invariably, Tiller is described as "Tiller the Baby Killer."

Tiller, O'Reilly likes to say, "destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000." He's guilty of "Nazi stuff," said O'Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. "This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union," said O'Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

O'Reilly has also frequently linked Tiller to his longtime obsession, child molestation and rape. Because a young teenager who received an abortion from Tiller could, by definition, have been a victim of statutory rape, O'Reilly frequently suggested that the clinic was covering up for child rapists (rather than teenage boyfriends) by refusing to release records on the abortions performed."

O'Reilly's a dickhead, but what can we (meaning, society at large) do about it? Fortunately or unfortunately, his speech is protected.

Yeah, I know. It's just maddening.

Guaranteed O'Reilly will paint this as the tragic but inevitable result of a well-meaning public dissatisfied with abortion laws, etc., and though he personally finds the murder reprehensible it just goes to show what lengths some people (wink wink) will go to to defend blastocysts.

Wow.

Right? But let's not lose sight of the real issue here, which is offending non-doctor-murdering christians.

For the cheap seats...

It's not bigotry to decry people for their religious beliefs. Bigotry and prejudice are about hating people for things they CANNOT CHANGE, such as race, or orientation. People make conscious decisions to practice or not to practice religion. If you make a conscious decision to do something I don't agree with, I reserve the full right and privilege to mock you and dislike you. That doesn't necessarily mean I intend to do those things, but I can without being considered prejudiced.

Although I fully support your right to hate people for what they do, bigotry does indeed extend to intolerance of religion or other personal opinions...according to MW at least. Just sayin.

Aside from that I agree with you...there's nothing wrong with not liking people based on choices they make.

Right-wing websites are imploding over this. They want to play the liberal media victim while still painting the guy as an extremist loon, but without alienating their batshit base.

And how this isn't framed from beginning to end as a terrorist attack is beyond me.

Because this was for the right god?

It's hilariously inconsistent to rail on the killer's apparent Christian-ness and to simultaneously ignore the apparent Christian-ness of the doctor, who was serving as an usher at his church.

It's not like one is "more Christian" than the other; as Greg pointed out, if you call yourself a Christian, you're a Christian. It just so happens that one believes in reproductive freedom and the other is a wack-job who killed him. If it's Christian-on-Christian crime, why get hung up on Christianity as the X factor? Surely, the doctor's idea of Christianity didn't entail him getting murdered for performing abortions.

I don't deny that religious extremists do evil at all. All I was getting at is that not all religious people are extremists. Of course murder is evil, when anyone does it whether they be religious or not. And in no place did I see anyone jump to the defense of religious extremists, unless you were aiming that comment at O'reilly.

So we can calmly dismiss one christian's beliefs as a wack-job, while the other is an acceptable hunky-dory God-fearer?

Terrorist attack or hate crime or assassination. Either way, fucked up.

I am less inclined to blame Christianity here, although obviously a form of Christianity is at the root of much of the pro-life movement, I believe that it is likely Dr Tiller's faith helped him to stay strong in the face of constant threats to himself and his staff at the clinic.

Dr Tiller had been shot at before, and injured in both arms, and his clinic has also been bombed. I am not saying that an atheist, agnostic or a person of another faith would not have acted in the same way but I'm sure that his beliefs were of great comfort to him and helped him to deal with the pressure. I am an atheist but I can respect that belief, and if it enabled him to continue helping women and, in many cases, saving lives, then I am glad that he had it.

The problem here is not religion, which can be used for good or evil. The problem is the pro-life movement (to which only some Christians belong), which is harmful in its very nature. If you believe that abortion should be banned or restricted then you have no respect for women or any life outside the womb.

Unwanted pregnancies can bring financial ruin, emotional trauma, family and relationship breakdowns and physical illness. In some cases an unwanted pregnancy can kill a woman, either because of complications or because a woman who has a child forced on her against her will may become suicidal.

Some women continue with unwanted pregnancies and everything turns out ok, that is what being pro-choice is about - giving women the options to decide what to do in a difficult situation.

Late term abortions are not something that anyone goes into lightly. You do not wake up six, seven or eight months into a pregnancy and think "fuck it, I want to fit into my skinny jeans today, I'll get an abortion." Women who have abortions at that stage of pregnancy are doing it for their own health or because the quality of life for the child would be terrible due to an abnormality. Sometimes it may be for a woman who was prevented from getting an abortion within the time limit by controlling family, or a woman who conceived in traumatic circumstances and had gone into denial.

The pro-life organisations that are condemning the killer of Dr George Tiller are hypocrites. This one violent death they claim to disapprove of, yet they would happily allow thousands of women to die or have their quality of life destroyed by a forced birth. Dr Tiller was a hero and I hope, that although his loss is terrible for his family, co-workers and patients, that this will inspire people to continue his work and to support the pro-choice movement.

They're both Christians, as I said. But since both victim and assailant are Christian, doesn't that mean that something else is the driving force here? The particular brand of Christanity being practiced, for instance, if not another factor entirely? And if it's a particular brand of Christianity, why aren't we naming it? I'd think the murdered doctor, a practicing Christian, would be quite annoyed to find that his killer's motivation was being ascribed to the same religion that he practiced and apparently found compatible with his views on abortion.

Dave, Dave, Dave. Since when has rationality and fair-mindedness been a trait of these boards?

I'm of the opinion that if you're an church-going American Christian, there's no way you can have divisive thoughts in some fashion. I'm not saying every Christian has a inner killer inside them, but I do believe that many Christians harbor thoughts of being better than a non-believer in some fashion.

There was a Bill Maher episode from awhile back that hit the point dead on. There was a guest who was a Christian who tried to explain why she was a Christian and Maher asked her if she thought she was better than him. She said no, but proceeded to prove his point instead by saying that "he was in a place that she was once at", implying he hadn't found the truth yet. He felt that she was being condescending, which was a definite.

There's constant discrimination by Christians toward non-believers (especially agnostics and atheists). I hate to generalize, but can anyone tell me one American Christian sect that doesn't project these feelings of divisiveness?

The feelings of divisiveness to a crazy person might cause them to kill someone for being an abortion doctor.

I'm of the opinion that Christianity works if you strip away all the dogma and jargon and focus on the beliefs and teachings of Jesus Christ. A lot of what he says in the Bible is some great stuff to live by. The problem is that the religious officials over the past 2000 years have abused, perversed, and essentially de-legitimized his teachings with their actions. The same can be said today with Christian movements to abolish abortion, gay marriage, and stem-cell research.

Not that I'd ever voluntarily enter into an antogonistic debate with DaveB, but sometimes his defense of religion and faith are honestly baffling to me.

The fact that people like O'Reilly egg on these monsters is worthy of discussion, in my humble, and the lazy culpabililty of general American christianity should be taken to task as well.

File under "I wish I'd said this".

Yeah, we're pretty rabid 'round these parts.

I can agree with most of this statement, but this is a movie board. Hyperbole is almost a requirement in order to post here. Although I don't remember too many rational, intelligent responses in the 2008 Election thread (maybe 50/50).

I would've said passionate.

All of this. While religion obviously has a part in the pro-life movement, I've known non-religious pro-lifers who believed what they did because they really liked babies. It doesn't make them any less misguided, condescending, and irritating, of course.

Sure, in an endlessly repetitive and one-sided kinda way.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/c...into_question/

Interesting read about this incident and the "common ground" conundrum.

Fuck it, I'll kill babies just for fun. Wheeeeee!!

Ah, how can you have a reasonable debate when those on the other side of it consider you "anti-life"? You can't...and then they kill you. Ah well.

And the reverse isn't true from an "intellectual" standpoint? Please. Do you read these boards? Ever? "Moral goodness" and "personal insight" for Christians is like "intelligence" for atheists. These are all concepts arrogantly held over the other side's heads as a means to stifle alternative views.

At least he wasn't a veterinarian who performed animal abortions, ammirite dreary?

It seems obvious to me. A religion is an ideology, and its followers have certain ideas particular to that religion; that's what makes them followers. A skin colour, on the other hand, is not an ideology.

Nah, I totally agree with you, but that's not under the frame of the discussion. I think you missed my point. The odds are that this guy did not kill the doctor because he was much smarter than the average person or whatever. The argument was framed against Christianity and I simply stated that I could definitely see how American Christianity could warp this guy's mind into killing Dr. Tiller.

Do intellectuals shun laymen? Of course they do. But, is there any evidence that a lot of intellectuals just go out and execute people because they are laymen? Not really.

Also, being intelligent does not create a sense of false reality that a crazed religious person would have. You don't see Nobel Prize winners killing retards because they think the retard is somehow damaging society, do you?

As for the issue at hand, here's an interesting take from a former pro-lifer.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-..._b_209747.html

Well, you were talking about Bill Maher and the sense of superiority that some religious people seem to project. On the level of discourse, it works both ways in exactly the way I explained.

As far as the level of violence perpetrated, no, I don't think you will find any extremist atheists shooting religious figures on the simple basis of their atheism. But, then, I find it hard to attribute this guy's motivation strictly to his Christianity. If Christianity condoned the murder of doctors who perform abortions, not only would there be no such doctors left, but the doctors, themselves, could certainly not consider themselves Christian. Yet Tiller did and I suspect many others do, as well.

First off, I think the "intelligent"/"religious" dichotomy is false. The two are not mutually exclusive. My argument is that atheists hold intelligence over the heads of the religious as the religious hold morality over the heads of atheists, and that they're both wrong to do so. Not "wrong" in a moral sense, but wrong in a "you don't even know what you're talking about" sense.

In any case, there have certainly been arguably intelligent and non-religious people who have killed people on the basis of ideology. Seems to me that very specific ideologies are the problem, not massive belief systems like Christianity (which are subject to a myriad of interpretations, most of which are non-violent in nature) or philosophical positions like atheism (which actually say very little about a person, but still allow room for an individual to embrace harmful extremist ideology - Stalinism, for instance).

Interestingly, Schaeffer still seems to define himself (or did until very recently) as a pro-lifer, despite supporting Roe v. Wade.

He actually says in the article he thinks Roe v Wade was "too much, too soon," and implies that late-term abortions should be actively discouraged if not outright illegal. So I should have said former conservative.

Although you were kind of right. He also says in the article that you posted that, despite thinking Roe V. Wade was too much, abortions should be legal.

What he is depends on whether you think that only an individual can determine whether he's "pro-life" or "pro-choice" or if his status as one or the other is based on how he conforms to people's expectations. I'd say he's technically somewhat pro-choice in that he supports legal abortions even if that doesn't include late-term, etc. and even if he considers himself pro-life in terms of whether women should actually have them.

The fact that Christianity in general is not condemning the killing, but instead doing the political equivilant of shuffling their feet and looking around and whistling speaks volumes.

If I'm against late-term abortions ONLY (except, of course, in the case of emergencies), can I still call myself pro-choice?

I mostly agree with you on this. My frustration with the pro-life crowd (and, by association, most people with whom I disagree ideologically) is that I'm consistently trying to pin them down by waiting for a telling statement or stance that would sort of define why they believe what they believe. I end up driving myself crazy by doing that, making it that much easier to just put forth a knee-jerk judgement call about Christianity.

At the same time, there are people who are pro-life who make their reasoning absolutely clear, like the one guy I knew who proudly flaunted his atheism yet was pro-life. I tore myself up trying to find out what this guy's deal was until one day an acquaintance told us about a friend of his who was in an unfortunate situation - the discussion turned to rape/sex while intoxicated, and the guy started popping off comments about how he has no sympathy for women in that situation and usually asks them if they at least got to enjoy it or something similar to that effect...so that made it fairly clear that some part of his pro-life beliefs stemmed from his creepy misogynist streak.

And again, that might have been too easy of a blanket judgment in itself.

There is indeed bias that intelligence = goodness, like it's a moral trait some are born with. This is dumb.

I've wondered that, too. I think you can be pro-choice and still find the idea of abortions to be a tragic necessity that makes you feel squeamish. I am against late-term abortions and even find the concept of mid-term abortion to be a moral quagmire. But I do understand the need and the thinking behind both of them. I would also never dream of telling a woman what to do in any situation in regards to an abortion.

Where are you looking? And what's "Christianity in general"? You want Jesus to make a statement?

Schaeffer's Christian.
I'm guessing that King is religious.
Shit, I just did a google search on "tiller christian" and found plenty of articles and messageboards with Christians denouncing it. Even some big-name pro-lifers are condemning it.

Jacob, if you're still wondering why my position on The Great Ongoing CHUD Religion/Atheism Debate is what it is, look no further. It's the intellectual laziness and dishonesty that exists on both sides of the debate. I have the same problems with believers who construct straw men arguments about atheists, as an old friend of mind did recently online. It's just that you don't happen to see this on CHUD, because the intolerance only tends to occur from one side.

My wife is pro-life and an atheist. For her, life begins at conception. To her life is binary. You're either a living being or you're not. She's not a zealot. She doesn't tell other people what to think about it. And she doesn't say I'm wrong for my pro-choice stance.

She also believes that sex education is one of the keys to stopping the need for abortions. She thinks the government should take a serious role in improving sex ed in schools, in improving the adoption system and also in counseling sexually active teens.