In this lecture Dr Wyman dismisses "human personhood" as a non-event and further tries to make that assumption "rational, scientific and religiously reasonable." Dr Wyman begins the lecture by setting up an easy straw man, using a quote from, columnist George Will, "It is a biological fact not a theological postulate, that such life is a continuum from conception to death." Then he quotes a pro-life letter to the editor of the New York Times, "It is a scientific fact, as any basic biology text will confirm that life does begin at conception. The fetus is a live human being, distinct from, while dependent upon its mother. it deserves the full protection of its rights."
Taking both statements out of context, Dr Wyman acts as if the writers were NOT speaking of "individual human personhood." He takes the word "life" as if the writers meant "biological life in general." What follows is simply ignorant and irrelevant, or calculated, arrogant and malicious. It does appear that he is taking advantage of the abysmal ignorance of the young students before him; this has to be, since some of the statements he makes are so transparently false it would take pure ignorance not the challenge him.
Wyman claims that the statements by Will and the Pro-Lifer are what is "generally believed by the population" "I've heard this from prolife people and prochoice people, almost indistinguishably." He is right about the observation and nothing he said in the lecture changes the truth of that view.
So then the lecture sets about to prove that "life does not begin" that it is a cycle - whatever that means. At the end of this series I will explain the true cycles of life. The cycles of life are real, but Dr Wyman is clueless and blind to them. So let us try to understand what he is trying to express. "life is a cycle . . Fertilization is one of the events going around the cycle."
Will It Go Round In Circles - the late Billy Preston - please excuse the humor but if you are interested in this lecture you are going to need the humor and the joy of Billy's celebration because what follows is simply Satanic -Luciferianism- parading as Ivy League Education. Enjoy Billy, then watch Dr Wyman's Lecture ready with the mouse to stop it as you read my commentary. Warning, if you continue, this experience will change you. I've had tears in my eyes for two days.
Will it go round in circles? Well Dr Wyman answers that question for us as he takes us on an odyssey of circuitous logic and circular mental gymnastics like no lecture I've ever experience heretofore. This is truly amazing!
So even though his subject is "human abortion" he quickly goes into plant and animal reproduction, next thing he is talking about reproduction in fungi and algae! "So the basic idea is, not that there's a beginning but that it is a cycle." What? Really. Conception caused by the fertilization of a female human egg by a male sperm does not signal the beginning of a completely unique human individual? Sorry, this is utter Scientistic slight of hands.
What would happen if a Zygote of an alien species - a fertilized egg of an unknown species were carried to earth from outer-space and discovered, it would suddenly become the most valuable life on the planet and every scientistic practitioner would bow in its presence and wax poetic about its unique value. There would be no doubt that that "life" was individual and unique, even though it were a merely a Zygote and they would know very little about it. Just the fossils of cell forms in a supposed meteor caused a sensation a couple of years ago. And it was quite magic that they instantly held the full knowledge of this "rock", what planet it was thrown from, how long it had been in space and when it struck earth, etc. But that is a digression. So here is a fertilized human female egg, having conceived an individual, identifiable strain of D.N.A. and to the Post-Humanist - it is not human and not valuable. It is merely a biological process of a biological cycle - whatever that means.
Then our dear professor goes into asexual reproduction, more about yeast and other bacteria, some plants, strawberries and pricker bushes. So the whole boring point is, "So, the idea that life begins at conception, that life has any start point is really not what textbooks are saying. It's saying life is a cycle, it's repeated, organism use different versions of the cycle, and many organisms reproduce asexually with no version of . . of that."
What a piece of mind numbing obfuscation. George Will and the other pro-life writers were not writing about when the species of human life began, or when plant and animal life began in general, but rather when the life of an individual "human being" begins. This idiotic answer to that, in the mind of this post human makes perfect sense, I suppose - - since in the scientistic paradigm that the "individual human" is of very little importance and the only thing that matters is the grand idea of "the species as a whole" and the species' "evolutionary destiny." As far as the Scientistic practitioner is concerned, humanity is in a constant cycle of reproducing itself. It desperately needs to prune the malformed and less attractive, so no single abortion interrupts that "cycle." In fact as Dr Wyman made perfectly clear two lectures ago, not even a BILLION ABORTIONS are a negative thing, merely part of the pruning necessary. For him the cycle as a whole is all that has meaning. One cannot draw any other conclusion and not need to place a net over this fellow and put him away for his own protection. What he demonstrates clearly is the premise I have ascribe to those of his mindset, and ascribed to Secular Humanist/Scientism in every instance. The sacrifice of any number of individuals is okay for the abstraction the humanist believe is their "goal." They believe that murder amounts to "a good for the species." Only in this context do Dr Wyman's words HAVE context and make sense, albeit warped and inhuman, post-human sense. There can be no more thought about that aborted individual human than there is for a plant that is crushed under foot, or a whelp that is still born . . . after all there are three other pups in the litter.
When you have accepted the Mark of the Beast and are willing to be seen as "beast only" then your individual child has no worth, no meaning. When he/she is aborted it does not even register on the scale of "interrupting the cycle of human life" because human life goes "cycling on." His presentation sounds so calm and disarming, yet it is a horror on parade and what is sad is that so many of his listeners have accepted "The Mark of the Beast" that most find his reasoning, sane.
Next Dr Wyman talks about the abnormality called parthenogenetic production of a "non-viable" fetus, compares that to natural conception and claims that the self-cloned non-viable fetus and the naturally conceived fetus are "equal."
Well . . . . except that one inconvenient truth - that one is viable and the other not viable. The point being to devalue the "biological matter" that is a fetus. In his own words about this comparison, "Again, it loosens up your whole mind about what biology is actually saying about life and it's not saying that it has a beginning and it's certainly not saying the beginning is at fertilization."
Again, this is total obfuscation and would be the silliest of debate tactics if it were not for the purposeful demeaning of the individual human, which is "cooked into" the primordial paganism that is the new religion of Evolutionary Scientism. If we can say this of the beginning, make it a non-entity, then by extension we can say it of the end of life - that this has no meaning as well, merely a process in the cycle. We must remember that Dr Wyman like all evolutionary biologist believes that life had a beginning - in fact that it "spontaneously generated" - he actually believes this with the same sophistication that the 16th century men of "science" believed it. The only difference between the modern evolutionists and the ignorant 17th and 18th century scientists is where they place the "spontaneous generation" on the linear time scale.
Dr Wyman goes to great lengths to make the case that "fertilization" is not the "important thing about reproduction." Why? Because, "The whole phrasing of this debate in terms of when does life begin is a cultural holdover from the many centuries when there was no scientific understanding of reproduction." So man was without moral knowledge, until the advent of Scientism. This is really what he would like you to believe. IF you would believe it, the Genocidal job of the Eugenicists - the Bio-demographers, the population planners would be so much easier.
There you have it. Anyone, who is concerned about the future and safety of a fetus is "unscientific" and their respect for the fetus and wish to see it prosper is a "hold over," an ignorance of pre-scientific perspective. To get it right, despite our moral understanding and traditional teachings, we have to bow to the superior knowledge of the "priests of the new religion of Scientism." His next sentence is purely insane. Where he makes the assertion that George Will or any pro-lifer for that matter believes that fetuses are "conceived from non-living matter." And that that is what they mean by the argument that "life begins at conceptions." In every case they understand that reproductions of human life is LIFE from LIFE. (There is a scriptural reason for this belief that LIFE is from LIFE which we will get to later.) But the life of the first life, does not diminish the value of the LIFE produced. One Apple Tree is not superior to its offspring. Truthfully, I'm having a hard time believing the inane argumentation to which Wyman has devolved on this subject. He is actually suggesting that humans in their history believed that pregnancy was "spontaneous generation." This is ludicrous!
Please show me in the history of human literature where it was not known that male lying with female could and should produce a child? What does the language of the oldest know texts read, "And this one 'knew' that one and they produced a son" etc. When and where was it otherwise? The ridiculousness of his argument about "spontaneous generation" is that it was a late theory, alive in the time of Darwin, an ignorance upon which Darwinism is based. After all the "Origin of Species" depends upon "spontaneous generation" from primordial ooze. Yes it comes to us through some mythology, like the mythology of the Phoenix rising from the ashes. However, NO civilization of humans to my knowledge has lacked the understanding that "mating" produces off springs. No civilization has believed that human children were "spontaneously generated" in the womb. Yet, this is exactly what Wyman is suggesting is the basis of George Will's suggestion that life begins at conception. Again, this is ludicrous!
Wyman finally admits that this mythology of spontaneous generation comes from the sixteen and seventeen hundreds A.D. This is another anachronistic slight of hand on his part. We caught him doing this in an earlier lecture, if you recall. This whole set-up is to point out that in "pre-scientific" times some believed that the fetus was formed from menstrual blood "which is also dead and as a sort of coagulation kind of process." Really? Okay, but show me in all of human literature where it was a spontaneous generation and didn't need "fertilization from a male", and PLEASE show me in history where humans associated blood with a "dead thing."
Gen_9:4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
Lev_17:11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood:
Lev_17:14 For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof:
Deu_12:23 Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.
Wyman makes the statement, "So, in everything from an insect to a human, spontaneous generation was the most obvious interpretation of what you could observe from many hundreds of years, until the experimental techniques really took over and people started showing that was not true." Do you believe this complete rewrite of the history of human understanding of animal and human reproduction? All this skewing of history and reason to try to make false what pro-lifers say, that "human life begins at conception." Again, this is ludicrous!
Can Wyman argue that Genesis in written form, which reflects a much older oral tradition didn't state that child birth was by mating? Genesis 3:16 a literal translation - To the woman he said, Increase! I will increase your pains and your conceivings, with pains you shall breed sons, for your man your longing and he, he shall rule you.
It doesn't take a genius to know that is saying that child birth will be painful, yet she will desire what causes conceptions, she will long for man and endure pregnancies despite the pain of conceptions and the pain of child birth. Find in that the mythology of "spontaneous generation." Or in the pages of genealogies contained in scripture. Genesis 5:3 - Adam live 130 years and bred in his likeness, after his image. He called his name Seth, The days of Adam after he bred Seth were 800 years, He bred sons and daughters . .
Seth bred Enosh . . .Enosh bred Kenan. . . " on and on pages of "generations." Please show me where the mythology of spontaneous generation applies.
It is terribly sad to see the level of biblical ignorance and thus ignorance of history, sitting in this lecture hall at Yale University, a University whose founders were all "congregational clergymen." I'm sure they could not have imagined that the school they founded to train clergy and government leaders could have devolved to the lunacy of this lecture and young adult students would be, could be so ignorant of history and sacred literature that none were able to challenge this ludicrous misrepresentation of history by a professor turned propagandist.
Having falsely pasted the mythology of spontaneous generation over all of "pre-scientific history" he tells the history of dispelling this mythology of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. So his premise is that even though ALL ancient literature debunks his premise, that is the premise that humans believed that human reproduction was by spontaneous generation, that indeed man was totally ignorant that mating caused pregnancy until mercifully those primitive scientists began studying in the 1600s.
"The first real break in this was Francesco Redi in about 1668, who studied butterflies and he did it very carefully. They hadn't really used scalpels before, and so if you pull apart a cocoon without a really nice sharp knife, you get more mush - you get mush at all stages. He used a scalpel, cut it apart, and he could see that early on, that actually inside the caterpillar you could see the rudiments of the adult moth happening, and then you could watch the development inside the caterpillar. That was stunning to the world when he started talking about this to scientific societies: that a moth did not come from the rotting caterpillar but came from the cells - - they didn't have the idea of cells back then but came from the body of the caterpillar itself."
Interesting but irrelevant.
"Then Spallanzani when I went to high school, Spalanzani was the hero - - I don't know why instead of Redi, and he did the next step of it, and that was the next century. He worked around the 1750s, and finally Louis Pasteur showed that it was true also for microorganisms. That was what Pasteur put the final nail in the coffin, not only animals, plants, insects which are animals, but finally microorganisms. So by the later 1800s is when this idea of spontaneous generation for everything alive disappeared. And the phrase, which was - originated much earlier but not proven, was omnia ex ova, everything comes from an egg."
Again, interesting but irrelevant.
Wyman's conclusion: "So we've known for about 250 years that there is no spontaneous generation, that life is a cycle, and in the cycle you can't point to a beginning, so it's very hard, you know - - it's a sign of - - there's just the persistence of cultural ideas that the culture somehow hasn't caught onto that."
Again irrelevant and ludicrous vis a vis the beginning of an individual human life.
"Now more educated people, when discussing this is more detail, understand that it's a cycle but they decide that fertilization is the final genetic - - sets the final genetic constitution of the fetus and therefore we can legitimately say - - point to that as the origin point. But of course, that's not true. Even now we know in great detail. And I don't want to run a course in reproductive biology but ah, somewhere I've got - - what's go'n on here - - uh oh not good - - not good - - why has this stopped work'n? Something is going slow here. Alright it doesn't matter - - So actually at the time of fertilization the nucleus of the egg is still diploid. It's only after fertilization and sometime later, that the female nucleus goes through its final division and that's random which chromosomes are going to be included in the embryo and which chromosomes are not. So the final - - part of the step - - one of the steps of the final genetic constitution happens after fertilization, if you again define fertilization as the entry of sperm."
Notice another straw man. Notice that he has not mentioned the word embryo or the more proper term for the early cellular stage as the D.N.A. is being adopted - Zygote. He has only spoken of egg and fetus. Why? An embryo is called a fetus at a more advanced stage of development and up until birth or hatching. In humans, this is from the eighth week of gestation.
Human prenatal development is divided into an embryonic period and a fetal period. The embryonic period begins with fertilization and ends eight weeks later. The staging of human embryos was introduced in 1914 by Franklin P. Mall at the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Mall's successor, George L. Streeter, later refined the classification of human embryos into 23 stages, or "developmental horizons".
It is important to note that each of the 23 Carnegie stages represents an arbitrary point along the time-line of development, akin to a "freeze-frame" in a movie. The stages are based on a variety of morphological features and are independent of chronological age or size. As implied by the original term, "horizon", the stages are not definitive steps, that when combined lead to a fully formed human fetus, but rather they are a series of events that must be completed during development. As the description of each stage is based on the features seen in an "average" embryo individual embryos may not fit exactly into a particular stage. There may also be considerable variation within a stage and overlap between stages.
But here is the important fact which you will not hear Dr Wyman state in his lecture. At the very earliest stage of conception, the collective cells and D.N.A. strains and chromosomes the embryo will adopt are called a Zygote and a Zygote is biologically alive. It fulfills the four criteria needed to establish biological life: (1) Metabolism, (2) growth, (3) reaction to stimuli, and (4) reproduction." It can reproduce itself through "twinning" at any time up to about 14 days after conception; this is how identical twins are caused.
It matters not that primitive man didn't know the secrets of D.N.A., we know that he understood the term ילד = yâlad, Meaning, to "begat" to "breed". Man from the most primitive times understood that mating was the act of "breeding children", that what a woman carried in her womb wasn't a biological mass, but a "person". And the concept of person isn't something you are going to hear from the post human "priests of Scientism."
Dr Wyman states, "The number of genetic things that happen after fertilization is quite significant." - Again interesting but irrelevant. The fact that the "creature" is biologically alive, that is "ensouled" and is at fertilization immediately at work forming itself, at work on a 24 + 7 + Nine month quest to form itself for breath - tells the story. It is forming "itself" using the genetic information it has, even choosing particular Chromosomes. It isn't producing a part of its host mother, it is producing itself. And even though it is not conscious vis a vis our understanding of human cognition, it is "ensouled" that is it is alive acting on the intelligence ensouled in its "being."
"Even moderately sophisticated things that educated people believe about development and when it begins are just plain wrong."
Do you believe that hubris! Here is a creature ALIVE in the host mother, busily forming itself into the mature creature it is to become. Again, by the four criteria of biological life it is ALIVE. And for the Orthodox Christian that means that it is ensouled, that beyond the supposed randomness of Chromosome choices Dr Wyman mentioned is a spiritual intelligence functioning according to its "life source and force" its soul. However, for the post human, who has accepted the narrow confines of radical materialism and believes that all biological processes are "random" when the vast evidence says to the contrary, it is impossible to view the Zygote with any respect as to its humanity. For the post human, it is merely another post-human who need not be born.
"So the only scientific response to the question of when life begins is, when does one say? Well four billion years ago, when the first cell in some slime of some sea somewhere or something, ah . . life began and since then cells have replicated cells. So in a sense, since every cell in your body is the result of a split of some prior cell, in a sense every cell in your body has been alive for four billion years." Sorry, but that it idiocy on parade.
"There's never been anything dead in the past of that." The blind ignorance under the guise of "wisdom" is painful to see and hear. He just described the mythology of life spontaneously generating from inert matter, that is from something dead, which is the mythology of self-generation and self-development, the gnostic roots of modern gnostic materialism and then he proceeds to state, "There's never been anything dead in the past of that" . . . well except the dead matter he claims "spawned life." He speaks as if the procession of "living cells" over billions of years answers the question of life, merely by distance of time. Inert matter, to living matter is spontaneous generation whether it was offered by a stupid intellectual in the Renaissance or a stupid Yale professor in the 21st century. Please explain to me the qualitative difference. While you are at it, show me the single instance where this magic process of spontaneous generation of a single living cell from inert matter is replicated, repeated and observably proved, as rigorous and REAL science requires. Dr Wyman can't because he knows it is an impossibility now and was an impossibility then.
"There's really very more interesting things about development if I can get this to work. Okay, so development is a very, very chancy operation there, so this is the germ cells. This is in a female but everything I'm saying about it happens in a male. And what happens is from conception this is the number of germ cells that they can count and they get up to seven million germ cells. And then, again, before birth, they start dying. So for instance, in a woman, most of the class is female, you're born with this number of this potential eggs - - I'm sorry you've developed this many eggs, then most of them die right away, and then as gestation continues more of them die at birth, then they keep dying and by the time you are sexually mature there's only a very few left. We used to believe and maybe still believe, that that's all the eggs you're ever going to have and a similar sort of thing happens with sperms, not quite the same. There's now recent research that seems to show that there are some stem cells, the kind of cells that originally produced all those oocytes, that there are some stem cells that hang around. And then, in fact, after this period you can make, females can make more eggs. For the artificial fertilization, artificial reproduction clinics, this is now a really hot area of research. Can we find those stem cells? For infertile women can we get them to now make egg cells, later? So, that's one set of a real decrease in the potential. So you start with seven million potential eggs but you'll ovulate like 400 eggs during a woman's life. And this is what ovulation looks like. This is an ovary cyst, a proper thing, and this is the egg that's coming out of this guy is - - this doctor I guess is trying to extract the egg for someone, either experimental or in vitro fertilization kind of procedure where they can take the egg and inject it, fertilize it externally, inject it back into the female, and all kinds of wonderful things can happen."
Wonderful things? Sorry, but for a post human, what can happen but the birth of another post-human - which is an unimportant event, even an unwanted event.
"Now, after fertilization, this winnowing of - - continues very largely. So there's a lot of genetic death. So, now you have your fertilization, the early events of really setting the genetic constitution have taken place, and often they don't work. And it turns out that from fertilization, in the next few weeks something like 80% of conceptuses die. It's a quite striking phenomenon. It's called pregnancy wastage and humans have it more than other animals and we don't understand why. All mammals have the same process but it's really extreme in humans and there's nothing but theories about why this happens."
On the face of it that is a chilling statement. So he just proved what I've said from the first hour of his lectures. We struggle for life, and from the first moment of conception, the destroyer is aware and at work. After all, that is Satan's role, he is the destroyer of Life.
"And it's mostly genetic death, so I told you that you start with a diploid cell, the germ cell that's crawling out of the sac, and it has two copies of each chromosome. And the chromosome unfolded is a huge thing, and it has to fold itself up, it has to pair, they have to all the - - 26 pairs have to pair and then they have to split nicely. Well that is a very complicated process that frequently does not work. And what you end up with is, instead of one copy going each way; you get two copies in this say egg or this sperm and no copy in the other one. Then as events go on, if you have two copies here, and it gets fertilized by a sperm then you have three copies and that's lethal for almost every chromosome, and if you have no copies and it gets fertilized by a sperm you get one copy and that's lethal for almost every chromosome. So the only chromosome for which there isn't lethality is the Downs syndrome chromosome where you can - - I think it's 23. You can survive with three copies of that and that's Downs syndrome. You know the frequency of Downs syndrome, one in however many a thousand it is. For every Triplo, that's called triplo because you have three copies of that chromosome, there's a nullo, you get no copy. Or you get just the one from the sperm. Where if it's the sperm that has this problem, you get the one from the egg. So and that dies and every other chromosome dies. There's one other chromosome where there's some viability. So you take the frequency of Downs syndrome, you double it for that chromosome for the null. Then you multiply it by the 46 chromosomes - - 23 pairs of chromosomes that there are and you get a number that just from this process, which is called non-disjunction, what the death rate of the oocyte - of the fertilized eggs is. Then there's all kinds of other genetic problems which I won't go into. But the experimental observed, the empirically observed thing is that the actual number is 78%. I said 80% but if you read the paper its 78% of fertilized conceptuses then die very rapidly of genetic death. The mother doesn't even know that she is pregnant because there's - - she doesn't know anything in the first couple of weeks. Her period may be a little delayed but may not be delayed at all."
So at "fertilization" of all the eggs fertilized by natural means only twenty-two percent become fetuses. This is interesting but irrelevant. At this point unable to trust that anything the fellow says is "true" even though he went to great lengths to tell us that this story of "genetic death" prefacing it saying, "the experimental observed, the empirically observed thing is that the actual number is 78%". Then he says that most women experiencing the "genetic death" of a fetus never know it and never miss a period. So before I could believe his percentages I would have to study the nature of "the experimental observed, the empirically observed thing", but this fellow rarely sites a source. He practically worships Darwin and Maltus, without telling us of the warped and racist man Malthus was, and his whole paradigm is wrapped about the mythology of Darwin and he never quotes the real title of "On the Origin of the Species." We listened and commented on the hours of lectures by Father Thomas Hopko trying to paint Darwin in a sympathetic light and as a sympathetic character. He told us that the title was, not On the Origin of Species, but rather on "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection." Well neither man quotes the real title or bothers to explain the rampant racism that was a driver to Darwin, Malthus, Huxley, et al's logic. The real title is "On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." This is the second reason I titled this critique, "The Struggle For Life."
"You get really interesting legal and religious complications, if . . . if and well . . there's some theology here which you can ask me about later if you want to know but standard Christians are supposed to believe that resurrection is in the flesh. So that you come back in pretty much the same state that you died in."
This is a total fabrication, either abysmal ignorance or a malicious motive to deceive.
"And, uh if 80% - - if you believe that then - - if you add to that that life begins at conception that means at the fertilized egg, then that means that 80% of the embryos - - of the resurrected bodies in heaven are going to be in a test tube . . they're, they're, they're just a few cells big. So, it gets into very serious kinds of religious complications." Absolute lie.
We know the fertilized eggs the Zygotes which cannot manage to string together the proper data for growth into a fetus and are "spontaneously aborted" at the few cell "genetic level" before a fetus may be formed do not demonstrate four criteria needed to establish biological life: (1) Metabolism, (2) growth, (3) reaction to stimuli, and (4) reproduction. In fact the Zygotes, spontaneously aborted on the cellular-genetic level are not ensouled with the intelligence needed to complete even "self-formation." The post human, unable to accept the idea that "biological mass" and "human being" are not synonymous, they are unable to make this distinction as well. So once again we see Dr Wyman build up a straw man - the 78% percent of "fertilizations" that end in "genetic death" and then knock the straw man down in a way that is reasonable to him but which in fact is irrelevant and even spurious . . . and in this case not even interesting, except for the exposure of his abysmal ignorance of the Christian Eschaton. Well there is that other thing, and that is that Dr Wyman does not seem to know the difference between the "fertilization of a female egg" a biological event, and the conception of a "human being" which is the production of a "viable fetus" that exhibits the four criteria needed to establish biological life.
"It also gets into legal complications; see I'm just a little out of place here, but ah, ah I can't remember what state it is . . ah . . A woman got pulled over so this state - - she was on a highway and in an HOV lane, a high occupancy vehicle lane, where you're supposed to have at least two people in the car. She was pulled over by the cop because it was just her, and the cop started writing her a ticket . . and she says, 'No, no I'm pregnant and so there's two of us in this car,' and it became a serious kind of court case. And so, if, legally, one decides that an embryo or fetus is a person from the moment of conception, then every time a woman doesn't have a baby or she drives, the police are going to have to carry around pregnancy tests and . . and . . examine this." Well, well, apparently this is the straw man lecture of the century. "It's - the conclusion, not the conclusion but - - Another point about this - - Anybody know roughly how long it take to get pregnant if you're trying? Five months. Does that tie up with anything I just said? If 80% of conceptuses die, that's 4 out of 5 and if it takes five months to get pregnant, in what month did the other four happen? Well those are the four months that you on average did not get pregnant. And that . . . though this is not proven, but the numbers work out that there's really no other reasonable interpretation, that when a woman is having regular sex without protection, trying or not trying to get pregnant, she gets pregnant every month, but four out of the five months the fetus - - the conceptus, dies early - - the fetus dies early and she doesn't even really necessarily know about it. So then in the fifth month on average, out come a fetus."
Excuse me? Well here you have it yet another Straw man. So even though the window in which a woman can become pregnant is just a few days every month, and every instance of intercourse even in that period does not necessarily fertilize an egg, this is the "the experimental observed, the empirically observed thing" so this is the "thing" upon which he is basing his theory? Wait, that cannot be since he said here, "this is not proven, but the numbers work." In what universe do the numbers work? The numbers work IF you ascribe to the reason for non-pregnancy in the four months only one cause, when in reality there are many causes.
Now to the previous straw man - the pregnant woman driving in the HOV lane. It is a silly story meant to blur the line between the presence of one or two human beings in the persons of a pregnant woman and a fetus. As a retired prison chaplain I know this well. When there is serious crime most states take a stand for the personhood of the fetus, where the murderer of a pregnant female is charged with TWO counts of homicide. This is the major inconsistency in modern abortion law, that the mother is exempted from the charge of homicide when she chooses to kill a fetus, but another person can go to prison for life for the same action. The confusion rests not in the identity of the fetus as a human person, but in the insanity of the present abortion laws.
More foolishness:
"So then again, legally and religiously, that if one - - has the - - ah - - decides for themselves that life begins at conception and your - and a woman is having sex, that means every month a human being has died. There has to be a death certificate. There may have to be an inquest, why did this fetus die, did the mother drink alcohol or smoke or do something that might have caused that to die? Is she causing the death of this full human being? And religiously you would have to have a burial, a memorial mass; you would have to do all the religious things that attend to death. So the fact, that's not widely appreciated, that 80% of conceptuses die genetically sits uneasily with an idea that life begins at conception." Again the same Straw man, created by the post human not being able to make a distinction between a non-viable biological mass and viable human fetus and the blurring of the concepts of "fertilization of a female egg" and "conception of a human fetus."
"So . . so we are talking about the chanciness of the reproduction. We saw, that out of all these eggs that are started, so many die before you're born, and then even those that get fertilized, not many of them get fertilized because most people aren't having sex all the time. You don't have 400 - - So, there are 400 eggs that you ovulate and only a small fraction of those will get fertilized no matter what your sex life is like, so there's a big death there." Again, the same Straw Man - what he describes of eggs that are not fertilized IS biological matter, NOT a human being. "And of them that do get fertilized, 80% of them die . . . " Same Straw Man. "And then of course as you're well aware from this course, that once a child is born up until very modern times of medicine, something like a third of the kids died as infants or children, so it's a very, very chancy procedure and there's elimination at all kinds of . . . of stages."
"so there's a big death there." How can one speak of death, when speaking of something that has yet to meet the criterion of "biological life"? Now do you see the point and the entire lunacy of this lecture. The entire ridiculous, really idiotic skewing of reality has occurred to make a frame work so that he may say, abortion is merely an elimination at a stage, part of the common chanciness of procreation, and unimportant. It certainly isn't the murder of a human being.
So life is a cycle. Are all cycles of life equal?
Here is the complex life cycle of Malaria - I wonder what esoteric message this High Priest of Scientism sees in it? The life of the individual apple tree does begin when the seed germinates and takes root, and so the life of the individual human begins when the fertilized eggs become a viable fetus. That this happens inside a larger cycle of life, does NOTHING to diminish the importance of the individual event. And quite obviously to any who have not loss all common sense, nature exists in a fallen state, struggling with death for survival, and not all "cycles of cellular life" are equal. The Malaria Oocyst is not the Apple seed, is not the human fetus, though all exist as a "species" in a cycle of reproduction.
I began this series with an open mind, and hoped that Dr Wyman's expression of the value of human life as witnessed in the first hour of the lecture series wasn't cynical. The initial respect I have held for this priest of Scientism, was completely gone midway through the series as I realized the cynical propaganda tool this Yale College Course truly is and its anti-life foundations. I thought still that maybe I was just prejudiced until I witness the cynical lecture two lectures back where the recalling of the historical event from 1982 to 2002 of 800 million to a billion abortions in that twenty year period was celebrated as a good thing and even trivial as a "back up to contraception." Knowing that these abortions were mostly brown and black people, seeing that it was nothing but Darwin's on racist prejudice at work on a United Nations-Planned Parenthood mass scale, since then all I have experience is anger and grief. Grief that there are none to challenge the killing cabal of Eugenicists, and anger watching especially this cynical lecture where Dr Wyman knows there isn't a brain in the class who isn't rocked into hypnotic acceptance of his shoddy scholarship and irrational reasoning. It is a pagan priest speaking to new pagan initiates. It is both anger and grief that THIS is the state of academic education at the second most prestigious university in our culture. It is a grief and anger engendering hellish reality.
What did Darwin say in "The Descent of Man" the book where he thoroughly embraced Malthus' hate filled Eugenics and racial prejudice?
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At that same time the anthropomorphic apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even that the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." Do you comprehend what Darwin was saying? That he wanted the Caucasian race separated from the other primates by the distance of Caucasian to baboon, instead of Caucasian to negro, or Australian Aborigines, or great ape.
Let us not pretend what we are dealing with here. We are dealing with nothing short of the Doctor Josef Mengele-Joseph Goebbels-like planners and practitioners of mass death. Where the NAZIS managed a few million, Planned Parenthood, the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S. Government and other national governments cooperating with the U.N. have managed what has to be by this year 2012, ONE AND A HALF BILLION abortions since 1982 ! The hellish, anti-life, culture of death, post-human dimensions of this boggles the mind. Truthfully we cannot comprehend it. These people are truly post-human, have themselves become beasts and instead of murder by brutal fang and massive bloodshed, murder by disease, starvation, privation, and abortion, wearing the white lab coats, and the casual clothes of the Priests of Scientism.
Next, Dr Wyman thinking he has established his premise I previously stated, "abortion is merely an elimination at a stage, part of the common chanciness of procreation, and unimportant. It certainly isn't the murder of a human being" comes in for the kill. "When does a cycle begin? You know can you even say something like that?" Well can we? Absolutely WE CAN. When we want to interrupt the cycle of the protozoa parasite that is Malaria, we can do so by killing the mosquito at the larva stage in the stagnant ponds. We have interrupted the cycle of that protozoa before the mosquito was every itself infected with it. - This premise of when does a cycle begin is simply idiocy. "Well sometimes it's necessary to arbitrarily put a beginning to the cycle. So one of the most common cycles is the seasons, is the year. The year is a cycle, it gets warm and then it gets cold," (except where it doesn't) "and different cultures choose different times to start the year, so in our culture it's January first, and why is it January first? It's close to the winter solstice, the lowest point of the sun, then the sun starts coming up after that, which is December 22. " What could be the purpose of this analogy except to point out that when one chooses to interrupt a cycle is arbitrary and of NO MORAL significance. Try comparing this to "Thou shalt not do murder." "Well the calendars weren't very good and they didn't get it quite right, Christmas and New Years, and December 22 -- or 21st are supposed to all be the same day, but the calendars were not good enough to do that." Again another anachronism - it is according to what calendar you are referencing. Some calendars in ancient times were very, very accurate. "The Romans put it at the Ides of March, you remember Julius Caesar getting killed then, and I just read the history of that . . they changed their calendar many times but during most of period it was the Ides of March, which is March 15th. Ah, Chinese put their New Year in February; they have a lunar calendar so it rolls around a little bit. Jewish New Year is in September and then that's a lunar calendar so that rolls around a little bit and . . and . . every culture decides how it wants to set the beginning of the year. It's conventional, it's not a scientific statement, and it's whatever any of the cultures decides."
Well, the Celtic yearly cycle WAS scientific, a solar calendar set upon the summer and winter solstice and the autumnal and vernal equinox. But THINK! What association does the cultural understanding of when the yearly cycle begins have with when the individual human life begins. The answer is no association whatsoever, unless . . . unless you are a post human high priest of the extreme material Gnosticism that is the new Religion of Scientism, and you need to string together a mythology to confirm your anti-life teaching.
"And similarly, with when does life begin, different cultures have decided different start points for this cycle of life. One of the common ones is that life only begins after the worst period of infant mortality. There are many emotional economic legal reasons that you really don't want to consider someone a human until they've - - you're somewhat sure that the infant is going to stay alive. So among the Fulani of West Africa, Nigeria, an infant becomes a person and it's given a name seven days after birth because that's the most extreme period. The Navajo, in America don't consider the child is alive, again for this period of infant death, and after delivery it is kept in cradle board as a kind of an extension of pregnancy."
Don't we do the same with premature infants in an incubator? Just because we nurse the infant by extraordinary means, do we deny it is a person? Do we deny it is a human being? Do we deny it is unique and worthy of life?
"It come out, it's put in a cradleboard and that's considered the mother is still pregnant with the baby, this is very nice."
Is this different than what we all do, as the infant Jesus was kept, "wrapped in swaddling clothes."
"When the child laughs for the first time then it's considered to be a human being and to be alive, and then they have a big ceremony to mark this child's birth."
Again, interesting but irrelevant.
"In some cases, that you've read about, birth happens at puberty and in some of the New Guinea tribes, the infant stays with woman until puberty, and even boys are considered to women, they're just female boys and girls are not differentiated. And at puberty, the males steal the boy away and they have a birth ceremony. You remember reading about this in New Guinea."
Now if you had a doubt when I say that "evolutionary dogma" is actually a "devolution" a regression back into the mindset of the perennial paganism, you can't doubt it at this point.
"Or upon become a mother even because it's so - - in traditional China, which means up until the Communist revolution if not later, a woman has sort of two lives. You may remember from one of your readings, that often a woman, a girl child is not even given a name; number one girl, number two girl, number three girl, they don't even get a name, they have sort of a quasi-existence. And in this - - these parts of Chinese culture, a mother is considered to start her life all over again at the birth of her first son, not her daughter but the birth of her fist son. The mother takes a new name at this time and she has a - - she'll, by that time have a family name, but the son is never allowed to learn what the name of her prior - - previous life was. For all intents and purposes her life begins at the birth of her first son. You read the article about the Egyptian woman; remember what her name was? OM GAD, and that means? Mother of Gad, so again, she takes the name which - - she has a whole life that's starting anew, that in a sense, when she has the first son, mother of Gad."
Again, very interesting but irrelevant. As an Orthodox Christian convert, I have a name given at birth, a name given at baptism, a name given at ordination to the diaconate, a name given at ordination to the priesthood. Were my wife to die and I to become a monk, I could at that point upon the Bishop's discretion be given yet another name. And the symbolism of this is all the same that at each point in my life, as I'm entering that cycles of my life, and in effect have become a new person in some concrete way, those names remind me of that, yet, these cycles exist like a wheel within a wheel, the tiny axle, the hub, the wheel, the tire as an analogy, never denying the reality of the tiny axle, or the hub, or the wheel, or the tire.
"So the idea is that different cultures have very different - - have very different takes on when life begins. Since it's a cycle and it's arbitrary, cultures have a perfect right to choose whatever point they want for the beginning of this cycle." We have stepped through the pagan looking glass.
It is interesting and informative to note that the book of Genesis, rather than being yet another mythology, though not being literal in the creation story, the creation story contains the wisdom that "demythologizes" that is, topples and nullifies ALL of these primitive pagan "mythologies." I would refer you to:
Defanging the Atheist Tiger Volume Seven for a romp through the Bible, and Father Hopko's later lectures on Genesis - in three lectures if memory serves - available in the same series "Defanging the Atheist Tiger, Volumes Eight, Nine and Ten.
http://therockheritage.blogspot.com/2012/05/defanging-atheist-tiger-volume-seven.html
"Even within a culture and I'm talking about the culture of my friends, who are largely medical people, they all have very strong ideas about when life begins. Um . . and . . the obstetricians and gynecologists, uh . . because the vast majority of fertilizations do not result in a fetus . . . . "
What? Go back and listen closely again and again as he lectured about "genetic deaths" how many times he used the words, conceptus and fetus interchangeably! Now, he admits what I pointed out to you, that fertilization and conception are not the same thing. He adopted the name, "conceptus" to blur this point, and NEVER used the proper name Zygote for the "non-conceived unconnected and non-viable or viable" fertilized female egg.
"and the mother doesn't show any signs of it, the mother doesn't know, there's no change in her body, you can't test anything about the body, they consider implantation, where the early embryo sits into the uterine wall and at that point hormonal signals going - - bouncing back and forth between the fetus and the maternal one. At that point the mother's body starts changing and so they consider that the begin point. And when they say, 'you're pregnant', they're not talking about fertilization they're talking about implantation. And this has caused lots of debate. Depending on where you define this some - - like birth control pills and various devices are supposed to work after fertilization but before implantation. If you ask someone who's talking about beginning of life at fertilization they say that's abortion. If you're talking with someone about the beginning of life is at implantation that's not abortion. This is almost never put out when people are arguing fiercely about these things, that they're just using different definitions of when things begin."
How about this definition. There is no such thing as "spontaneous abortion" there is only mis-carriage. And for a healthy fetus there is only violent and malicious abortion equalling murder or carriage to full term. That seem to clarify a lot of the muck Wyman is suggesting is a cogent and reasonable way - but I'm sure not to his satisfaction.
"Another very standard one, very important in Western history is the ability to move."
How about rather the definition of biological life, for which a fetus that cannot yet move qualifies?
"So back then, start back from Aristotle, the difference between dead and alive was whether something had the power of motion and that was called animation. When you move you're animated, like a cartoon, a cartoon is a fixed image in a comic book or something, then you have animated cartoons, and that's where they move around. So the motion . . . "
Well actually a cartoon is the outline suggestion in a drawing. Animation is the movement of cartoon or fully developed drawing.
"You've probably heard 'The Quick and the Dead'? Quick referring to movable as a famous book, The Quick and Dead, and it's a very common expression. You're either dead or you have the power to move. And so ah . . Saint Thomas Aquinas tied together, it actually comes from Aristotle and we'll go back to that in a minute, tied in Catholic theology, the ability to move with animation being alive and that happens at - - we now call it quickening, when the mother can feel the fetus start to kick. And so, that's another way so you can have - - when the embryo implants, when the embryo starts to move. The neonatologists are very interested in fetal viability. Can the fetus stay alive outside the mother? They argue that this is a sign that it's an independent being, because it can live outside the mother."
Think through this for a moment. What is the qualitative difference between a fetus in the womb, dependent upon the mother for survival, and the fetus living on the outside of the mother totally dependent upon the actions of others to do everything for it, what form of "independent life is this?" This is another straw man. The mixing of the concepts of "individual" and "independent." Once you grasp that it isn't a matter of "independence" but rather the fact that the fetus is an "individual life" that is important.
"And so that turns out to be the most delicate thing is, when the lungs can function."
But then that's not quite true, since lung function can be only partial in a viable pre-mature baby, many thousands have lived on respirator for weeks some for months until the lungs fully form.
"A fetus or a baby can live outside the mother as long as there is enough lung function, so for the neonatologists, life begins when there's enough lung function so that it can live outside the uterus."
Again, a straw man. If this were so, no one would speak of the premature baby, "dying." If it is not yet "alive" it cannot die, yet we know premature babies without enough lung capacity to survive, die. Life has to begin before something may die.
"Now neurologists, I'm a neurobiologist, so neurologists are closest to my - - I don't know to my heart, but they're close to me, they always define the beginning of life as when is someone human, as referring to some mental capacity that they can do. It might be motor response, it might align with the ability to move, that they're looking for motor responses, it might be brainwaves, it might be ability to sense something. One variant of the neurologist's point of view has gotten, to some extent embedded in the public debate. And this is when the fetus can feel pain and that's the point at life begins for legal purposes, as they perceive it."
I remind you: (1) Metabolism, (2) growth, (3) reaction to stimuli, and (4) reproduction and this applies to the earliest form of the fetus.
"And there's some research on this question, no an awful lot, it's very hard to tell. What you can determine experimentally is, we know there's pain receptors on the surface like if you electric shock something or burn it or something, there's pain receptors, we can identify those, we can stimulate those, and we know the pathways by which it goes up to the cortex. And so by the seventh month, at the beginning of the seventh month those neural pathways are mature enough so that at least the information that there's some pain has gone into the cortex."
Again, interesting by irrelevant since the fetus will react to stimuli at a very early stage.
"We still have no information on what, if anything, the cortex does with that information at this stage. It may not be ready to have any kind of response to it. So, ah, I go on about all these different ways of defining the beginning of a cycle, beginning of the cycle of life, and it's up to your cultural or scientific, or academic predilections. you can do it whatever you want. All of those designations are equally legitimate and equally illegitimate. And none of them are a scientific question. Science will describe to you all the stages of the cycle, ah, but it won't say anything about where you should say the beginning of the cycle is. It's a chicken and the egg problem, just very simply."
So all that just to say that the interruption of the cycle at any point is "equally legitimate and equally illegitimate." Wow. The trick of the Secular Humanist has always been to tear down the walls of traditional morality, to make morality malleable so that the sociologists, the high priests of the Sceintistist Religion may influence the culture based upon experimental morality and use culture like a lab rat, to see what may be produced and how it may be produced. The many decades promotion of the homosexual "life style" and now the attempt to seal it with "marriage", which is an impossibility, is such a sociological experiment. It required a few things besides constantly romanticizing the homosexual life style, and always painting homosexuals in the media as (a) trusted friends, (b) victim (c) people who have an extra degree of empathy for others - this is the constant story line vis a vis gays in all the media. But for this to work it required an all out attack on marriage, (1) removing the sacredness from marriage, (2) making it merely a hedonistic pleasure seeking relationship where the sacred bonds of marriage are meaningless, (3) the constant picturing of fathers as either (a) dangerous or (b) stupid (4) wives had to be viewed as victims, (5) the family had to be viewed as dysfunctional and the home a dangerous place. Unless, the household accepted the new morality, then as the man bumbled onward, under the watchful eye of his all wise wife and her friends, which usually included a homosexual confidant, then all was merely friendly comedy and happy paradise.
Many have addressed this social manipulation and its effect to fray the fabric of both society and morals. I'll recommend just one book.
The Manipulated Society - by a twenty-five year writer for the New York Times, hardly a right-wing-nut.
http://www.beardbooks.com/beardbooks/the_manipulated_society.html
"Okay, so now you have this thing that is not a scientific question. There's tremendous cultural diversity on it.
Dr Wyman in releasing the subject from 'science' also wishes to release it from "morals." And it is masterful manipulation. If science can't say and cultures decided differently and all are equally legitimate and equally illegitimate as Wyman opines he has set the perfect stage or better the most fertile ground for the social manipulators. Now the decision can be made on the subject according to other pressing needs of the Scientistic Religion, like elimination a massive chunk of humans from the face of the earth.
There's tremendous diversity within the public of one culture like ours about it. So, but, the law has to define murder because you can't go and murder a T.A. because they gave me a bad grade. So the law has to define some - - has to accept one of these points. And . . . There's law has had a variety of things. The law - - what the law likes is what they call a bright white line. And it's clear to everybody when you've crossed this line. And since the development of the fetus in the uterus is continuous, there's no particular point in time that you can say; you know this stage is different than the day before. So, no point during gestation would be a bright white line that everyone agrees that it either happened or didn't happen. So what they - - the bright white line today is birth; everybody knows when someone has given birth. I'll tell you in a moment that in Jewish Rabbinic law it's even more specific. It's when half the head sticks out - - that's when birth happens, that's when the fetus becomes a baby.
And pretty much the courts have stuck, so far in America, with this conclusion that birth is the bright white line, everybody can agree on that."
This is masterful manipulation! Telling the students that "in America . . birth is the bright line, everybody can agree on that." When in fact this is not the case, but if the student THINKS it is the case, when he or she runs in to the vast majority of the states whose laws are of a different opinion they will think that is a aberration, a throwback to a previous era, NOT in line with good old American settled opinion. The idea os settled opinion you see crop up again and again in the debates when the post-humanists have an agenda and they always have an agenda. Here are the facts: At least 38 states have fetal homicide laws. The states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. At least 23 states have fetal homicide laws that apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy, described variously as "any state of gestation," "conception," "fertilization" or "post-fertilization."
Realize that that is saying and compare it to Wyman BIG LIE - the Saul Alinsky propagandism at work. 76% of all states have fetal homicide laws. 46% of states have very strict fetal homicide laws that apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy, described variously as "any state of gestation," "conception," "fertilization" or "post-fertilization." As you see this Saul Alinsky Big Lie Wyman told, cannot be ignorance on his part. These areas are his expertise, he is not ignorant of the fact, but he is a master manipulator intent on creating a certain result in the minds and more importantly in the "emotions" of his students.
These methods are not new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Wright_Mills
"There is also a fair amount of religious opinion that and everything that quickening, that's another - - at least to the mother - - identifiable event."
This is news to me. What 'religions'? In Christianity from the beginning, as represented by the Apostolic Churches, that is the Oriental & Eastern Orthodox Catholic Churches and the Roman Catholic Church, the opinion on abortion has been the same. This represents 1.5 Billion of the 2 billion Christians on the planet. It is only in the 500 million protestants where there is any doctrinal confusion on the issue, and at least 300 million of these are strongly opposed to abortion. The confusion vis a vis doctrinal stance on abortion by the dwindling "Main Line Protestant Denominations" is accurately recorded here:
Protestant confusion on abortion.
http://www.nrlc.org/news/1999/NRL199/sween.html
Those who try to claim that a few statements by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas represent the mindset of the Apostolic Faith and thus the mindset and teaching of the Church are grasping at straws, but more about this later.
"Now an outside person can't necessarily tell this, but the mother does not know whether she's pregnant until quickening, until she feels the baby kick."
This would be news to nearly every woman who has ever related the experience of pregnancy to me. So called "quickening" generally happens at the beginning of the third trimester or around six months. What woman was two months, three months, four months pregnant and didn't know it? Most are pretty adamant that they were aware pretty early, most within the first few weeks.
"She can miss a period but there's a quite few reasons for missing a period other than pregnancy. So some of the earlier laws and continuing into some of the abortion laws refer to quickening as bright a line as you can get. But there, the mother knows it before everyone else. Eventually you can put your ear or your hand to a pregnant woman's stomach and feel the kicks but the mother knows early. But since that happens over - - in different pregnancies over quite a wide range of time, over actually a month to month and a half before the kicks become sensible, it's not a very good kind of a line. Okay, so we so far have the idea of the beginning of life is not a scientific idea, it's very variable in cultures, and so we still haven't really answered the question of why this idea that life begins at conception is such a prevalent idea in the West. Again, other cultures have different kinds of ideas."
And remember our post-human has assured us that the misuse of Chinese girls he witnessed in his youth, sold as slaves and abused by their masters, most dead at a young age from T.B., is "equally legitimate and equally illegitimate" with the high value Christians place on all children.
"One thing of course that pops up to mind is, is it biblical, because so much of our culture comes from biblical ideas. And well, you know what - - what is life - - what does the Bible say about when life begins? Anybody know? Nobody - there's all this fundamentalism in America and nobody here. Well what is the cycle of life described in the Bible? This is common in literature; any literature major should know it. 'Dust to dust.' You've - - how many of you have heard dust to dust? Yeah, or sometimes translated as earth to earth, it's Genesis 2:7, "God formed man of dust from the ground until he returned to the ground, for out of it you are taken, you are dust and to dust you shall return.' That's the cycle of life. And if there's a beginning cycle, at what age did God create Adam? There's something moderately explicit about that. Created Adam in his own image, well the image of God is not - it's not a fertilized egg, right? Whatever you perceive the image of God, it's more or less an adult person. And of course, right away Adam was able to receive commandments to not eat the fruit and so forth, and suddenly Eve was born out of his ribs, certainly not a two cell cycle. So um, again in the Old Testament there's just no support whatsoever for the idea that as a biblical idea, that life begins at conception."
Another straw man. After the fall, "The groundling knew his woman Eve. She conceived and bred Cain. She said, 'I have acquired a man with YHWH' (showing that pregnancy from the very first pregnancy was a gift of the creator) Once more she bred, his brother Able." Genesis 4:1ff. "Adam knew his woman again, She bred a son She called his name Seth . . . Adam lived 130 years and bred in his likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth." Genesis 4:25 and 5:3 - Eve, הרה = hârâh =haw-raw' ="conceived" and ילד =yâlad =yaw-lad' = "brought forth" - that is bore, bred Cain. So contrary to our dear post-human doctor's theology - there most certainly is a concept of "life beginning at conception AND being a gift from God" in the Old Testament, and in the very first verses of the Old Testament. Eve conceived and bore Cain, and Abel, and Seth. And NOT in the image of the creator as Wyman described, that is as Adam the adult's creation was in the "image of God." But Adam's sons conceive by intercourse, bred in the likeness of Adam. So much for the biblical knowledge and theology of this neuro-biologist. Nothing is more desperate than Satan when he stoops to teaching theology to those he fears will slip from his grasp. What does the Torah say about the murder of the unborn? If men fight and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely . . . if any lasting harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. - Exodus 21: 22,23. What does that say about the value of the unborn? It says rather that the unborn in the womb is of equal value to the adult male. - So much for Dr Wyman ignorance.
"There is no - - in the New Testament the issue just doesn't come up at all. There's no statement about when life begins. We'll come to some statement which are very loosely interpreted in that way in a minute."
Well, there is nothing loose about the angel's proclamation to Mary, "And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS." Luke 1:31. Try as you will, you will not be able to come to the conclusion that Jesus' life, his "incarnation" began at any point OTHER THAN conception. You will συλλαμβάνω = sullambanō = sool-lam-ban'-o - a compound word meaning, you will "take to you" in your womb and τίκτω = tiktō = tik'-to, meaning bring forth - produce, a son. You will take to you and bring for a son.
Now I have answered Dr Wyman as if we are treating Sacred Scripture like it is a magic book like the Koran, where the only meaning it may have is in the dead letter itself, removed from the people who wrote it and grasped it. The entire Sacred Scripture isn't singular, it isn't a book, it is many books produced over many centuries with history and context. And yes the Jews of the Old Testament WERE opposed to abortion, and valued the child in the womb as a "child" in the womb.
Jdg_13:5 For, lo, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.
Jdg_13:7 But he said unto me, Behold, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and now drink no wine nor strong drink, neither eat any unclean thing: for the child shall be a Nazarite to God from the womb to the day of his death.
Ecc_11:5 As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.
The Jewish world and the Pagan world in which Christians first appeared was very familiar with abortion. The fact that the Jews of Jesus' day opposed abortion was silliness to the Roman rulers and those of Roman culture, just as it is silliness to the post-human pagans of today. Roman law allowed for the abandonment of the new born according to the father's wishes. We have extant letter from Roman soldiers instructing their wives to "expose infants." Which means abandoning the infant to the elements to die of exposure and dehydration. Such children could be rescued by tender hearted people, or by slavers, the former were good people like the philosopher Epictetus who found the practice of child abandonment cruel and inhuman. And as in other cultures, female infants were the most frequent victims of exposure.
Children, male and female were important in the Judeo/Christian tradition. The New Testament speaks of John the Baptist leaping in the womb of his mother Elizabeth when found in the presence of Jesus in his Mother's womb. Since other Christian writers, not included in the New Testament, but writing contemporaneously in New Testament time, whose works are valued as part of the heritage of "The Early Church Fathers" spoke clearly about the evil of abortion and infanticide, and in language unmistakable.
Saint Paul in his letter to the Galatians making a list of evils in which Christian should not participate used the word "φαρμακεία = pharmakeia =
far-mak-i'-ah" which has been translated in the scriptures as "sorcery" and "witchcraft" - is used in some of the contemporary "mystery religions" as "magic potions" and "poison" it is where we get our English word for "drugs" = pharmaceuticals. In the noun form it means, "one who manipulates another by drugs." As we know this is the sock and trade of witchcraft and sorcery, it is also the practice of abortionist of the period. Paul was making this list of evil "works of the flesh" so we know we are talking about something concrete, that is we are talking about actions and not abstractions:
"Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, pharmakeia, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God."
One doesn't have to look very far into the contemporary Church Tradition to understand what Saint Paul and the Church understood about that word, Pharmakeia. The Didache is one of the earliest Christian works, contemporary with some of the New Testament writings; an apostolic instruction on the proper praxis of the church composed around the year 100 A.D. condemns what it also calls pharmakeia and goes on to say, "You shall not slay the child by abortion. You shall not kill what is generated." This is a specific reference to abortifacients. An abortifacient is a substance, a pharmakeia, that induces abortion. It is also a reference to drug use in ritual, which was common with the Mystery cults and some pagan worship. Further the Apostle Barnabas specifically mentions a proscription against abortion. "You shall not kill the child by obtaining an abortion. Nor, again, shall you destroy him after he is born. The Epistle of Barnabas (circa 70-130 and Eastern Saint and Apostle) The only reason this book was not included in the New Testament was because Barnabas was not a personal witness of Jesus Christ in the flesh. The New Testament only includes those who witnessed Jesus Christ both in the flesh and in his resurrected body. Barnabas was the companion of Saint Paul on one of his missionary journeys and recognized as an "apostle." A contemporary writer said of the Christians, "They bear children, but they do not destroy their offspring." - Letter To Diognetus.
So we will know that my interpretation of Saint Paul's proscription against abortifacients is part of the Church's tradition from the beginning, we have the Eastern Father, Athenagoras writing around 175 AD stating it clearly, "We say those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder and we also say they will have to give an account to God for the abortion. So on what basis could we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being and therefore an object of god's care_ - yet, when he has passed into life, to kill him. We also teach that it is wrong to expose an infant. For those who expose them are guilty of child murder. (Ante-Nicene Fathers vol 2 pg 147.)
Clement of Alexandria though not recognized as a "teacher of the Church" was a churchman who wrote a lot of true things and some not so true. But he witnesses clearly the Church's stance on abortion. I won't add the quotes here, but if you are interested you can find them in the Volumes called "The Ante-Nicene Fathers - vol 2 pgs, 276, 279, 368.
Also the noted Christian apologist Tertullian confirms this teaching. His writings are found in the same volumes, vol 3, pgs, 25, 26, 123, - If you doubt their knowledge and abhorrence of the practice of abortion, read Tertullian's personal witness: "Among surgeons' tools there is a certain instrument that is formed with a nicely adjusted flexible frame for first of all opening the uterus and then keeping it open. It also has a circular blade, by means of which the limbs within the womb are dissected with careful, but unflinching care. Its last appendage is a blunted or covered hook, by which the entire fetus is extracted by a violent delivery. There is also a copper needle or spike, by which the actual death is brought about in this treacherous robbery of life. From its infanticide function, they give it the name, 'killer of the infant' - - which infant, of course, had once been alive. - Tertullian circa 210 A.D. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol 3 pg, 206. "Indeed, the Law of Moses punishes with appropriate penalties the person who causes abortion. For there already exists the beginning stages of a human being. And even at this stage (the fetus) is already acknowledge with having the condition of life and death, since he is already susceptible to both." Tertullian ANF Vol 3, pg 218. Of course Tertullian was reading the oldest known text of the Old Testament, the Septuagint Greek version, accepted as the Canon of the Old Testament by the Eastern Orthodox Church and highly valued by all other Apostolic Churches. Only a few Protestant fundamentalists object to it.
This more than shoots a hold in Dr Wyman's false representation of Jewish and Christian beliefs - as if our beliefs are "fundamentalist" and not of the whole and complete Tradition of both Judaism and Christianity.
Other references in the first four centuries of the Church against abortion and infanticide may be seen in the same volumes of the Ante-Nicene Fathers
Tertullian vol 4 pg 78
Mark Minucius Felix vol 4 pg 192
Saint Hippolytus vol 5 pg 131
Saint Cyprian vol 5 pg 326
Lactantius vol 7 pgs 35, 144, 145 187
And finally in the later "compiled" (390 AD) - Apostolic Constitutions (which core document is as old as the New Testament) Vol 7 pg 466.
NOTHING Wyman has said, speaking of the Christian and Jewish beliefs as if we were followers of "A Magic Book" like the Koran is true. Vis a vis our grasp of our history tradition and teaching he is an ignorant man.
"So very interesting. Ah, there's two great Catholic and then Christian because, Christians have inherited most of the theologians - Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, you've heard of them. Saint Augustine came first in 300 and something . . . "
This ignorant man does not know that Augustine is not a universal Saint of the Catholic Church and is not one of the "early church fathers." Augustine's writings although he wrote at the turn of the 4th century were appeared late in the first thousand years of the Church's history after the Latin speaker had taken control of the Roman Church. He was a Latin writer and did not grasp Greek and all the early church fathers wrote in Greek. "and, in his Confessions he's interested in this question and he says, 'Tell me God, tell me whether there was some period of my life which preceded my infancy. Is this period that I spent in my mother's womb, was I anywhere or any sort of a person? I have no one able to tell me that, neither my father nor my mother, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory.' So here's one of the greatest Catholic saints and theologians, who's of course read the Bible, knows it backwards and forwards and he is very well aware that there isn't information in that to tell him that answer."
What blithering ignorance! Augustine was a convert from the Gnostic religion of Manichæism. Manichaeism is a religion founded by the Persian Mani in the latter half of the third century. It purported to be the true synthesis of all the religious systems then known, and actually consisted of Zoroastrian Dualism, Babylonian folklore, Buddhist ethics, and some small and superficial, additions of Christian elements. As the theory of two eternal principles, good and evil, is predominant in this fusion of ideas and gives color to the whole, Manichæism is classified as a form of religious Dualism. Oddly Augustine's Manichaeism and Dr Wyman's Scientism are kindred gnostic religions. Augustine himself tells us that he was enticed by the promises of a free philosophy unbridled by faith; by the boasts of the Manichæans, who claimed to have discovered contradictions in Holy Scripture; and, above all, by the hope of finding in their doctrine a scientific explanation of nature and its most mysterious phenomena. What you see stated above in Augustine's Confession is not a reflection of "scriptural knowledge" or even of the Christian Faith, but an expression of his own scientistic passion and an exposure of his ignorance (in those early days) of both Scripture and the Christian Faith. Augustine was no Biblical Scholar. Why was he no biblical scholar? Because he could not have been. Most of the Bible did not exist at that time in Latin and Augustine was literate ONLY in Latin. At the time Latin was a primitive language, a vernacular. All literary works of the Empire and all Christian theology were written in Greek; most of the business contracts in the empire as extant sources show were in Greek. The Catholic Encyclopedia (hardly a source of criticism of Augustine says, "Here arises the curious question propounded by modern critics: Was Augustine a Christian when wrote these 'Dialogues' at Cassisiacum? Until now no one had doubted it; historians, relying upon the "Confessions," had all believed that Augustine's retirement to the villa had for its twofold object the improvement of his health and his preparation for baptism. But certain critics nowadays claim to have discovered a radical opposition between the philosophical "Dialogues" composed in this retirement and the state of soul described in the "Confessions". According to Harnack, in writing the "Confessions" Augustine must have projected upon the recluse of 386 the sentiments of the bishop of 400. Others go farther and maintain that the recluse of the Milanese villa could not have been at heart a Christian, but a Platonist; and that the scene in the garden was a conversion not to Christianity, but to philosophy, the genuinely Christian phase beginning only in 390." The quote Wyman gives from the confessions is a recount of that struggle at Cassisiacum. It was the pagan asking this, not the Christian Augustine.
What is obvious about Augustine is that he was unfamiliar with both the Scriptures and the teaching of the early Fathers. Saint Jerome did not undertake to translate the Scriptures into Latin until 382 and did not complete the task until 405 AD. by that time Augustine was a Bishop but was no biblical scholar. His understanding of The Faith was rudimentary and his Platonism dogged his theology and colored much of what he wrote. Most every Augustine Scholar sees it and admits it. It is recorded that late in life he tried to destroy most of what he had written in life because by that time he held a truly Christian mindset and realized the Platonism that permeated his work. And then most of what writings remained, remained in obscurity until centuries later. Some of his theology was condemned after his death, in the teachings of others - although Augustine was never personally condemned. In fact he was honored as a "defender of the faith" for his writings against the heresies called, Donatism and Pelagianism. But Biblical Scholar? and as Dr Wyman stated, "So here's one of the greatest Catholic saints and theologians, who's of course read the Bible, knows it backwards and forwards and he is very well aware that there isn't information in that to tell him that answer."
Sorry, wrong.
"So the conclusion is, that this isn't a really a biblical, the idea that life begins at conception, is not something that comes from the Bible."
Sorry, this is blathering ignorance, or malicious misleading.
"I'm going to switch a little bit and come back to this - - these kind of thoughts. Em . . a little bit of the history of abortion. Abortion has been known in history as far back as we can trace. The oldest reference is from Egyptian hieroglyphs in tomb paintings, so we're talking about the very early civilization. As soon as people can write they're writing about abortion. By the time of the Roman Empire there were lots of references to abortion in the literature and there are no laws against it. The Romans didn't consider it. And, as I've just mentioned in the New Testament, it's not mentioned at all and there's of course nothing forbidding it. So the New Testament and the Roman Empire are contemporaneous of course and so the conclusion is that, even though abortion was very, very common at the time and used by all classes of people, there was not an issue for the New Testament writers."
Of course this is wrong. The New Testament Writers accepted the Torah as scripture of course and there was the quote in Exodus I previously referenced and then there was the specific proscription against abortion in the "deuterocanonical books" which the New Testament Church also accepted as Scripture. And the confirmation from EVERY historical source that abortion was universally NOT accepted to be practiced by either the Jews or the Christian.
Sorry, this is blathering ignorance, or malicious misleading.
"I'm going to switch a little bit and come back to this - - these kind of thoughts. Em . . a little bit of the history of abortion. Abortion has been known in history as far back as we can trace. The oldest reference is from Egyptian hieroglyphs in tomb paintings, so we're talking about the very early civilization. As soon as people can write they're writing about abortion. By the time of the Roman Empire there were lots of references to abortion in the literature and there are no laws against it. The Romans didn't consider it. And, as I've just mentioned in the New Testament, it's not mentioned at all and there's of course nothing forbidding it. So the New Testament and the Roman Empire are contemporaneous of course and so the conclusion is that, even though abortion was very, very common at the time and used by all classes of people, there was not an issue for the New Testament writers."
Of course this is wrong. The New Testament Writers accepted the Torah as scripture of course and there was the quote in Exodus I previously referenced and then there was the specific proscription against abortion in the "deuterocanonical books" which the New Testament Church also accepted as Scripture. And the confirmation from EVERY historical source that abortion was universally NOT accepted to be practiced by either the Jews or the Christian.
Some modern defenders of abortion argue, wrongly, that Christian opposition to abortion is relatively new. They point out that ancient and medieval Christian writers made distinctions between the "formed" and "unformed" fetus, the time before and after "quickening" when some believed the soul entered the unborn child. Their assumption is that this distinction made early abortion--before "quickening"--acceptable. As I have shown this is not the case.
Although these distinctions can be found in the writings of Sts. Jerome and Augustine, and in the writings of such later Roman Catholic theologians as Thomas Aquinas, they were never understood as offering permission for early abortions. St. Basil explicitly rejected the distinction between the formed and unformed fetus as beside the essential point. St. John Chrysostom attacked married men who encouraged prostitutes and mistresses to abort. "You do not let a harlot remain only a harlot, but make her a murderess as well."
Finally, it is important to realize the profound significance of the fact that we celebrate the feasts of the conception of the Theotokos and the conception of John the Forerunner--in addition to the Annunciation, which is the feast of Jesus' conception.
Now, I cannot help but believe that Wyman will end this sad lecture by regurgitating what I've just written.
"At the end of the Roman - - this classical period, this Judeo-Christian way of thinking about things comes into the mainstream of Western civilization. And there is an explicit passage about abortion in the Old Testament. Don't call it out but anybody know - at least one person ought know what this passage is. One, two, so it's a very, very minor number of people. So, the ten commandments which you all know, - - you all know this passage also which I'll get to - - the ten commandments are in Exodus 20 and the sixth of the commandments as you know, "you shalt not kill". But what does this mean?"
It means thou shalt not do murder. Murder is a legal concept, killing is an action that might be necessary. Murder is unjust killing, usurping the rights of another - the right to LIFE.
"What do all these laws mean? So, in the following chapters there's an explanation of how to interpret these laws. There's various violent acts that men do and which ones are accepted. May you beat your slave? May you kill your slave? May you do this, may you do that? And there's a lot of jurisprudence in there. What do these one sentence Ten Commandments, what do they - - how do you interpret them in particular cases. Uh . . In Exodus 21 for instance, what to do in cases of murder. What if one man hits another with a stone or his fist? What if a man kills his servant? What if a man kills a thief? Etc. All of this exegesis; and then in this passage where it's explaining the Ten Commandments, including thou shalt not kill, it describes a crime that is much worse than a modern abortion. In a modern abortion, a woman, for whatever reason, doesn't want to be pregnant. She goes to a doctor and says, 'please doc, I want an abortion, I don't want to be pregnant and here's $150 or $200 or whatever it costs and please do this for me. So it's voluntary on the part of the woman. This passage in the Bible describes a worse situation where a man violently against the woman's will, causes her to miscarry or abort. This is the quote, 'When men have a fight and hurt a pregnant woman so that she suffers a miscarriage,' men is fighting there and rather than . . .so he goes after the wife rather than the husband, "When men fight and hurt a pregnant woman so that she suffers a miscarriage but no further injury, the guilty one shall be fined as much as the woman's husband demands of him and he shall pay in the presence of the judges.' Now that is a standard Hebraic, Old Testament, law for a property crime. You do a crime, everyone knows - - they decide that you really have stolen this and the victim gets to say how much is proper recompense for this. But, the victim can't ask for anything outrageous, so a judge has to basically approve the settlement. If the judge approves - you steal something, well I want that same thing back or ten times as much, or whatever it is, goes before a judge, the judge approves it, if the judge approves it, it's paid, and that settles it. So that's what happens if the fetus comes out, if there's this miscarriage but no further injury, ah . . that's the result. But it continues the passage . . "
Which I previously quoted from a similarly bad translation, an eye for and eye treating the fetus with the same value as an adult man. This is the meaning of the text as we shall see, but not to Dr Wyman. Dr Wyman makes the point asking about the further injury - "Is it talking about the baby or the mother." That is a reasonable question if the source of the text is a Hebrew text that is 600 or more years newer than the ancient text accepted by Orthodox Christians. The Septuagint Text translates - "If two men fight and hurt a woman with child, and her child is born imperfectly formed, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman's husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if the child is perfectly formed, he shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." The text is assuming the death of the infant in both cases. And if the infant is deformed in any way, then it is a civil matter. But if the child was perfectly formed then it is a criminal matter. It has the opposite meaning Wyman gives it.
"That's the most explicit passage in all the Bible about abortion and it is perfectly clear that it is the life of the mother and the life and physical health of mother that's the important thing."
Well, except that conclusion is from a faulty translation of the text.
"And The Jewish Talmudic Law, which is not the Bible but writing about it says, "If a woman is in hard travail, and her life cannot otherwise be saved, one cuts up the child within her womb and extracts it member by member because her life come before that of the child. But, if the greater part of the head was delivered, one may not touch it, for one may not set aside one person's life for the sake of another." Again, a very explicit statement that before birth, before half the heads out the life of the mother is the only critical thing, but once that birth has actually proceeded then they are equal and you can't even save the mother's life in this case. And what kind of procedure is this describing that's become politically very important now? Partial birth abortion. It's ah . . the procedure that the right-to-life people are very much apposed to. But, here it is from biblical scholars taking about it as when a woman is in hard travail and there's nothing to do but that, then you go ahead and do that."
Another straw man. Without making a judgement on the Talmudic scholars conclusion, they are talking about "necessity" and today such "partial birth abortions" are elective and unneeded, and done to keep the mother from enduring the inconvenience of an imperfect child and/or the "scar" of a C-section. The context of partial birth abortion does not fit the suggestion of the Talmudic scholars to save the mother's life in the case of a breach labor. Like I say, another Straw man.
"So of course this emphasis on the mother is exactly what is reflected in the Supreme Court decision. I've given you to read the Roe V. Wade Decision and again, it's the mother that is the central interest."
Another straw man - it is not the LIFE of the mother that is the interest, but rather the convenience of the mother - something quite different, it is the social manipulation of the Religion of Scientism that seeks to reduce the human population on earth by two thirds to three quarters. To do this, abortion is a must in their eyes.
And what about that Roe V Wade decision - how did it effect the mother?
Another straw man - it is not the LIFE of the mother that is the interest, but rather the convenience of the mother - something quite different, it is the social manipulation of the Religion of Scientism that seeks to reduce the human population on earth by two thirds to three quarters. To do this, abortion is a must in their eyes.
And what about that Roe V Wade decision - how did it effect the mother?
So much for the Supreme court decision being "about the mother." What horrible poverty Dr Wyman deals in year after year peddling this anti-life gibberish. May the Good Lord that has touched Norma McCorvey's life and rescued her from the demonic influences that tormented her, find the heart of Doctor Wyman, also.
"But you may remember the Roe v. Wade divides up pregnancy into three trimesters. The first three months, the second three months, and the third three months. And the first three months are completely at the mother's discretion. The second three months the state can put some controls on it and the third three months, after the sixth month, then the state has a lot of say in this. So the Supreme Court Decision is kind of a balance, and why did they decide to break it up by not halves? Why into three months? And that probably again comes - -is uh - - is a biblical thing. So one of the quotes that right to lifers use a lot, and again you probably don't know this, but go talk to a right to lifers; if you're prochoice - whoever - whatever side of this thing - - talk seriously to someone on the other side. There - - it's very - - it's always very informative. Um, so - there's this passage where Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist and then Mary gets pregnant and she goes to see Elizabeth. And John the Baptist inside Elizabeth's womb, jumps for joy. Have any of you heard this passage used in these debates? Again, just a few of you, it's a very, very standard sort of thing."
And something those congregationalist ministers who founded Yale would be grieved beyond belief that only a few even recognized this basic passage of the Gospels. I really didn't start grieving until this hour's lecture and truthfully at this point I'm broken hearted seeing the pagan show parading at Yale.
"and - - and - it goes - - it's in Luke, 'And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb, for behold when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy.' And so, this is taken by right-to-life people that the baby in the womb is already a sentient, a person, a full person. Interestingly, the story gives - - give extra information. Zachariah, that's Elizabeth's husband, they're very religious and they're old and they have no children, but then God rewards their goodness by making Elizabeth pregnant. It's a recast of the Jacob story where his wife wasn't - - couldn't get pregnant."
That sounded like a dismissal. It also hold the same story line of Abraham and Sarah, so what? It is a common theme in the history of God's revelation, God proving that the limitations of fallen nature are not the limitations of glorified nature.
"And after these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she hid herself . . in the sixth month Gabriel was sent to announce to Mary that she would bear Jesus and the angel Gabriel explicitly explains to Mary that Elizabeth is now six months pregnant. 'And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age, has also conceived a son and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren.' And - - it's amazing because the Bible is not - - in no other passage is it explicit about the stages of pregnancy. And this repetition that at six months something special happens is very diagnostic."
Give me a break! What lunacy! Here is what John Wesley said about it "When Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary - The discourse with which she saluted her, giving an account of what the angel had said, the joy of her soul so affected her body, that the very child in her womb was moved in an uncommon manner, as if it leaped for joy."
Here is what the famous protestant expositor Dr Adam Clarke said about it, "Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost - This seems to have been the accomplishment of the promise made by the angel, Luk_1:15, He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb. The mother is filled with the Holy Spirit, and the child in her womb becomes sensible of the Divine influence." Fifteen more protestant commentator say roughly the same thing. All the ancient Holy Fathers are silent on the subject because they find the story so obvious it needs no comment. But to Dr Wyman is it "diagnostic". Why? Because he would love to believe that the carnage of fetuses less than six months old, a slaughter he recommends as "merely a back up to birth control" really means nothing . . this mythology that it does not become "human" till the six month helps him assuage the terror he must sometimes feel in the face of 1.5 Billion abortions in the last 30 years.
"It is almost undoubtedly - they don't explicitly say it - the reason why the Supreme Court said to, instead of in halves, in these thirds. The sixth month, because that, in a sense, is in accordance with one interpretation of these Bible passages. "
Sad, just sad.
"So, it also is scientifically reasonable because it accords with -- ah -- the time when the fetus does respond to external stimuli. By six months, if the mother gets excited or or something, you can detect in the fetal heartbeat and so forth. If there's a physical bang or something you can detect it in fetus. So, at six months there's some sort of responsiveness, neuro-responsiveness going on in the fetus."
Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand of the University of Arkansas Medical Center has provided further research to substantiate their work. He has said he and other specialists in development of unborn children have shown that babies feel pain before birth as early as 20 weeks into the pregnancy. Anand said many medical studies conclude that unborn babies are “very likely” to be “extremely sensitive to pain during the gestation of 20 to 30 weeks.” That would be 4.6 months.
As for Dr Wyman's pretense that abortion laws are "balanced" as if "balanced" has any objective meaning concerning the issue of murder. He hope to convey that it means reasonable and humane. Roe v Wade is neither.
What are the realities of how this law is used? Here is both the cynical "sales" side of "woman's health" (what a cynical euphemism!) and the cost in humanity, the tragic suffering loss and gruesome carnage that is the abortion trade. There is no honor in any of this. This is demonic, hellish, satanic. Welcome to the post-human world.
The culture of death marches on.
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