Dr. George Tiller
June 4, 2009 at 8:35 pm 1 comment
The recent killing of Dr. George Tiller is not merely an isolated act by a deranged individual. It is the natural extension of a philosophy that preaches hate, intolerance and vigilantism. Pro-life groups have been quick to condemn the act for fear that it may paint them with the same brush. What they fail to see is that they deserve to be painted by the same brush. If you participate in vilifying a man so much that he is perceived by many as the devil incarnate, you can hardly blame a believing Christian for taking the obvious and final step of killing him.
This is something that many religious people fail to recognize. When you are part of a group that believes itself to be just and chosen and persecuted and that it is your job to save and die for your God, then the men and women who kill in the name of Christ are the brave ones. The rational ones. They are the ones who can add up 1 and 1 and get two. So many religious believers will go to the edge only to stop short of leaping. They cannot take that next step because something deep inside them knows it is wrong. But, knowing that it is wrong never leads them to re-trace the steps that led them to that cliff in the first place. To question some of the fundamentals that have led them to an obvious and terrifying conclusion.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be in the army of God and be a pacifist. You can’t believe there is only one true church and love your neighbour. You cannot hate atheists or abortionists and be belssed as a peacemaker. So many things in religion are mutually exclusive and so many religious believers intentionally blind themselves to this. To what they have signed up for.
And now, the same people who yelled from the rooftops that George Tiller was a murderer and who also advocate capital punishment are surprised that somebody killed him?
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: abortion, faith, George Tiller, religion.
1.
Nicholas | June 11, 2009 at 9:58 am
I will have to agree with you that many in the pro-life movement are as guilty as the people they’re fighting. People who are are true to the goals of pro-life movement not only should be against abortion, but also the death penalty, euthanasia and all the many ways our culture diminishes the value of life. Murder would have to be included.
You will find people inside the pro-life movement who are concerned about all life (not just the unborn), but abortion politics makes for good media coverage and advertising dollars. And there is nothing wrong for people to hold a viewpoint as such – it doesn’t have to be a religious thing to declare “I believe that life is special and needs to be protected.” I am sure there are those inside the pro-life movement who were disappointed in the news of the murder, and some who were joyed by it.
To prejudge everyone inside the pro-life movement as a radical religious right-winger would make one just as guilty as those inside the movement who play God and judge doctors and clinic administrators as “unfit.”
Can an individual be in an organization such as the Army of God and say they’re a pacifist? Of course they can, so long as they don’t take militant action. Would I describe the Army of God as a pacifist organization? Definitely not, but I need to make the distinction between the individual inside an organization and the goals of an organization itself. (I would also be suspicious of anyone in such an organization who claims to be a pacifist, but in the end all these things are simply labels …) It’d be wrong of me, for example, to assume every Catholic believes and follows the doctrine of the Church, simply because they go to church?
We, as human beings, like to attach labels to things: atheist, Christian, abortionist, murder, bigot, hypocrite, open-minded, enlightened, etc. It’s just a way for our egos to better separate ourself from something else and claim individual identity. We also like to join groups because it’s a way to “buy” or become quickly associated with an identity. At the end of the day though it is not really who we are, at most they’re simply roles we might play.
The whole “abortion” debate is very emotionally charged and much more complex than can be given time to discuss in a single blog post. It highlights how humanity is fundamentally flawed (on both sides), imho. You make some good points here about the duplicity of many in the pro-life movement, but you also make attacks based on assumptions that I’m not entirely sure are true.