"Very simple Johno. Thou shalt not kill." - Er, not so simple.

I was having another abortion debate on facebook, as happens far too often, mainly with a Catholic adversary. The thread was started with this meme:

One of the side threads went like this:

Him: Oh for the days when nuns wore habits and believed the ten commandments.

Me: wow. Just wondering where in the ten commandments it mentioned abortion. I mean, you do realise Jewish belief t the time - you know, Old Testament belief - was that life started at birth, not conception?

I then preceded to cite the Talmud, The Old Testament and a bunch of other stuff to show that contemporaneous Jewish belief was that life started at birth.

Him: The Talmud is the oral tradition of the Jews compiled by Jews post Christ. It is not the Bible. It contains many errors and it also contains blasphemies against Christ and His Blessed Mother. It is not a guide for the true Word of God found in the Old Testament and the New Testament. At the time of Jesus, just as today, there were many varied Jewish sects and beliefs. These were pertaining to different aspects of the law. Christ indeed, criticised the Jews for creating useless laws through their tradition (found in the Talmud) while neglecting the commandments of God on divorce, love of neighbour etc. So citing the Talmud will have no impact on this debate since it is not the word of God but mere human tradition.

Me: And where were the rules on abortion? Also, reference to Exodus.

Him: Very simple Johno. Thou shalt not kill.

BOOM! He had me there.

Except, there's a whole heap of problems with that claim.

First of all, the Ten Commandments are absolutist. This causes problems. Since Christians hate consequentialism as it does not require a god, there can be problems in making sense of their ethical proclamations. I will list some simple potential issues with a deontological claim that "thou shalt not kill".

1) Good intentions, but with unforeseen collateral? In other words, what if you killed someone whilst intending to do good (and perhaps otherwise realising good).

How about if you knew there was to be some death in order to enact something overwhelmingly good? Here's something topical in the UK: you allow a beach to remain open to the public so that they can enjoy it and nature, but know that within the next ten years, someone will almost certainly die in its dangerous surf. Or you are an anaesthetist and administer anaesthetic on a daily basis, but know that 3-9% of the serious reactions (1 in 10,000 cases) end in death. You know that what you are doing will eventually kill someone...

2) Just war (as set out by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas!) and just war theory - you advocate or enact war, that will kill perhaps millions, because you believe in its justification. This surely directly contravenes the above decree.

3) All the deaths enacted in the Bible by and for God - millions of dead hypocritically carried out directly by, or ordered by, God.

4) If any deaths can be showed to be a result of cutting back on universal healthcare, for example:

Massachusetts has shown this to be the case, then anyone fighting "Obamacare" (i.e. most pro-lifers, people like my friend above) are actually condemning people to death - in effect killing them.

Policy decisions involving health and welfare can be calculated, to some degree, in body counts.

5) Death penalty - a common issue for pro-lifers who are very often Republican authoritarians who believe in the efficacy of the death penalty. Rather anti-life.

6) Not spending more money on, say, overseas aid, tackling malaria, poverty and any other issue that would thusly allow the death of many - all this inaction, and lack of funding, kills people.

7) What about Jesus? Was he not killed to achieve an end?

8) Self-defense - if someone is in a position where their own life is in danger, and there is no option but killing someone who is assaulting them, then how does this sit with the bsolute command?

etc etc.

You get the picture. What does "kill" mean here, in this soundbite of a divine order? Such simplistic "comebacks" in argument are thoroughly naive.