Dear Runner,

It would not cross my mind to kill a cow in order to prevent myself or anyone else from starving, just like it would not cross your mind to kill your mother for food, but if someone else did it, then who am I to judge them?

This whole "untouchable" thing was a distortion of scripture, it was a social phenomena rather than a religious issue, it was shameful and anyway, it was fortunately cancelled by Mahatma Gandhi. While one should indeed keep away from bad company, one needs to be very stupid to deem another as "bad company" only because they happened to be born to particular parents or clan.

Yes, the child might have to reincarnate regardless where s/he was going to be born, so what has India's admittedly-serious social problems to do with it?

Now to your main and very intelligent question:

«I wonder where you draw the line in murdering the child for 'its own good'.»

Well, I have already drawn the first line - the Golden Rule: If you, imagining you were in that child's place, would have hated to be killed there and then, then you should not do it. Period. It's not about theorising and intellectualising: even when scripture says that killing the child would be for their own good, if your own gut feeling is otherwise then you should not kill.

There is also a second line: you must be very honest with yourself and if you sense the slightest selfish motivation in you to abort a child, then don't do it.

So as you can see, in today's society there are very few cases where killing babies is the correct thing to do. However, there was a famous exception: Ganga drowned her first seven sons as soon as they were born. This was done for their own good and without a hint of selfishness. Ganga was aware that her eight sons are incarnations of the eight Vasus (a class of angels) who sinned and were punished to be born as humans on earth. Drowning them shortened their sentence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClRyHq2309c

runner,

No, I didn’t think there was anything you knew much about. It comes through in your posts.

<<maybe not AJ but very easy to detect a fraud like you.>>

People like you often become or remain both religious and/or conservative due to an intolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and a heightened fear of perceived threats.

Feel free to demonstrate my alleged fraudulence, by the way. I suspect you have about as much evidence for that as you’ve had in the past for my supposed misrepresentation of the Bible.

Squat.

--

Yuyutsu,

Your analogy is false. Killing a cow is not the same a killing a fellow human being.

<<It would not cross my mind to kill a cow in order to prevent myself or anyone else from starving, just like it would not cross your mind to kill your mother for food, but if someone else did it, then who am I to judge them?>>

A human being who themselves doesn’t want to be eaten just because someone else is starving, and so condemns those who would do such a thing. That’s who.

But thank you for demonstrating how religion can skew one’s moral compass. Especially with that story about how a woman suffering from severe mental illness and delusions drowned her eight sons. It reminds me of a guy in the Bible who nearly killed his son because a voice in his head told him to.

' It reminds me of a guy in the Bible who nearly killed his son because a voice in his head told him to.'

it actually reminds me of the putried doctrine of secularist who insist its a womans right to have thier babies murdered. This is far more common than another one of AJ's fantasies made up by distorting the biblical account of Abraham/Isaac.

Dear runner,

Exactly how did AJ distort the account of the Biblical Abraham? Abraham according to the account was a superstitious nut who heard a voice telling him to kill his son and was willing to do so. When I was a child I heard that story and got scared. I asked my father what he would do if he heard a voice from God telling him to kill me. He said he would see a psychiatrist. That probably was the beginning of my awareness on just how rotten, stupid and wrong a lot of the Bible is. My faith in my father increased, but any faith in the Bible started to go.

A few years ago two Mormon missionaries showed up at my door. I asked one of them if he would kill his son if he heard a voice from God telling him to do it. He said, "Of course." Another superstitious nut.

Two JW teenage girls came up to my door. I told them my feelings about the Abraham/Isaac story. The cute one said that it was a test of faith. I asked her what she would do if a boy asked her to go to bed with him to prove her love for him. That would be a test of faith. She blinked, swallowed, gulped and said, "I'll have to think about that."

Apparently that hit home. She was able to question what was obviously nonsense. I can hope for you also. You really don't have to swallow nonsense and defend it.

Please state exactly how AJ distorted anything. You call him a fraud, but you never specify any way in which he is fraudulent. It is easy to call people names, but that does not constitute a reasonable argument.

Posted by AJ Philips, "It reminds me of a guy in the Bible who nearly killed his son because a voice in his head told him to".

A dishonest representation of the events of Abraham's conversion. Abraham was raised by Terah his father to worship many gods, It was the practise in Ur to sacrifice their firstborn to the fertility gods. Initially Abraham was following the religion of his father and ancestors. However he had conviction during this event that this was morally wrong, a young ram was grazing nearby in the thicket which he sacrificed as prescribed under the Adamic covenant. There are two religions here in conflict the plural gods of Elohim [polytheism] and the God of monotheism. Abraham converted at that time to Monotheism from the religion of his parents, and was part of the reason he left the area.

Dear Josephus,

The change from polytheism to monotheism is the replacement of several imaginary gods by one imaginary god. One can do without any of that superstition.