STEMMING THE TIDE

Saddened, I don't know if you're going to come back to read this or not, but if comics turning political upsets you, I suggest you not read Doonsbury, Bloom County collections or archives, Mallard Filmore (or is it okay for them to be political if it's from a conservative PoV?), etc.

On the matter of the unborn, you should know that there are more Bible verses that imply that the unborn are not full persons than do. The only passages where God says anything about the status of the unborn as a matter of Law or commandment, it's opposed to the concept of the unborn as persons.

Some examples: Exodus 21:22-25 talks of men causing a pregnant woman to lose her child prematurely. Remember, there were no neonatal care units nor incubators nor hyeline membrane treatment drugs back then. This was when Israel was wandering in the desert for a generation after the Exodus. They didn't even have access to the level of neonatal care available to settled communities way back then! Premature birth was virtually always fatal for the baby, so there'd be no point in mentioning what to do if the child was unharmed. The passage says that if no harm results (and, given this and also some aspects of the Hebrew langauge, it means harm to the *mother*), then it's a mere fining offense (paid to the father, whose potential heir the child was considered to be, and thus the Law held him to be the injured party unless the mother were also harmed).

This, mind you, in the same chapter and only a few verses after a verse (#14, if I remember right) that says that merely cussing out either of one's parents is a capital offense!

Also, the Mosaic Law prescribes a test for marital fidelity, if a husband suspects his wife of cheating on him. The test would very likely cause miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy (it involves drinking a brew made from toxic dust), and the symptoms described if the woman was indeed unfaithful sound very much like miscarriage. In other words, the Law here is commanding induced abortion!

While not referring to the unborn, there is the passage in Deuteronomy that says that parents are to have their son stoned to death for merely being *stubborn*. That's post-birth abortion, commanded by God Himself!

The only passages I know of that imply that the unborn may be persons are not God speaking as Law or commandment, but (A) God talking to Jeremiah about Jeremiah's pre-birth life (which may well have been talking about a pre-mortality spirit existence, especially given the "*before* I formed thee in the belly part") in Jeremiah 1:5, and the incident told in Luke where the fetal John the Baptist leaps for joy in his mother Elizabeth's womb at the approach of Mary, who was pregnant with Jesus at the time.

I won't go into all of the incidents where God commanded or even performed Himself the slaughter of children (including sending two she-bears to rip 42 "little children" [exact words in the KJV] to shreds for calling a bald man [Elisha] "bald-head").

Before you use your religious beliefs to complain about a comic strip's politics, you should know what the scriptures you believe in actually say on the matter.

Religion should stay out of politics, and vice-versa. Do you know Who invented Separation of Church and State? Not Thomas Jefferson: it predates him by nearly two millennia! It's Someone Whom you claim to think rather highly of. This Someone had four official biographers, and no less than three of those four found this statement of His important enough to quote Him on it:

"Render therefore unto Caesar [the embodiment of the State of the time] the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."

And there you have it: Separation of Church and State, as stated very plainly by one whom you believe to be no less than Almighty God Himself.

So, if you continue to have a problem with the concept of Separation of Church and State, my advice is that you take it up with Him.

Finally, Jesus was a liberal (unless you think He told the rich young ruler, "Go, and sell all that thou hast, and give it unto the CEOs of the international megacorporations, that it might `trickle down' unto the poor"), and His Apostles (pre-Paul) were downright practicing Marxist-style Communists -- yes, over a millennium and a half before Karl Marx was even born! Just as Jesus invented Separation of Church and State over a dozen and a half centuries before the First Amendment, so too did His Apostles invent Marxism centuries before Karl Marx! See Acts 2:41-47 and 4:31-37 (both are complete paragraphs in the Koine Greek and thus not taken out of context), and compare them with Marx's own summarization of Communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The latter passage continues into the first eleven verses of Acts 5, which shows Almighty God Himself divinely (and fatally) enforcing honest participation in this Marxist Communist economic system!