(June 30, 2022 at 5:53 pm)John 6IX Breez Wrote: I guarantee you'll win over more pro-life supporters with this analogy than by attempting to dehumanize a human fetus, etc.
They believe that an individual human being is a hybrid, part physical, part spiritual; the spiritual part comes into existence at the moment of conception, supposedly, the result of a divine act.
Of course, in the history of Western Christianity, the Catholic Church, after the regional Council of Carthage, taught that all infants, born or unborn, who died without sacramental Baptism were consigned to Hell proper, to suffer some torments for all time and eternity, the punishment of original sin. Later on this view was mitigated by Peter Abelard, who said that such infants were only deprived of the Beatific Vision, Heaven, a view that was taken up by Thomas Aquinas and entered into the realm of scholasticism.
The Church tolerated such a viewpoint, which became the basis of centuries long practice of excommunication for having an abortion, but, not for infanticide. In any case, very few of the so-called pro-life people believe in the damnation of unbaptized infants. Their belief system, as always, continues to be a work-in-progress.
