Leatherneck: Regarding abortion, I feel handicapped in discussion because it isn’t an issue as close to my heart as it is to yours. Jewish law was developed at a time when infant mortality was an everyday event. Read pained and consoling American children’s poetry written by housewives and mothers all over the country for pin-money during the nineteenth century and you will see that high infant mortality was normal until recently.
In Jewish law an infant does not achieve full legal status before thirty days of life. In civil cases settling accidental injury, just compensation is redeemable for the killing of the unborn infant of a pregnant woman. But otherwise an infant isn’t real until it has survived a month.
(A disclaimer: I’m not a rabbi and hardly learned and shouldn’t be taken for an authority. I’m merely recalling the little Talmudic law I yawned through in adolescence. There are Jews who would violently disagree with me.)
This is not to say I don’t have huge sympathy for your case, Jarhead. In an increasingly populated and mechanized world, when human life is weighed in mass numbers and socialist political fashion prevails, setting up trip lines to snuffing life by legislative and medical fiat is urgent. Reports of female fetus abortion in response to government population engineering in China are chilling. Halting the development of human life should be a last resort.
The position of the Catholic Church and the Christian Evangelicals on abortion is laudable. But it is a modern position and I’m inclined to a more traditional, less draconian take. I am also the father of three very well educated and capable daughters and I will not have their lives dictated by religious councils overwhelmingly male.
Of Lucifer I know nothing. This entity is extra Biblical and I never learned or read about it. Nephilim translates to fallen in Hebrew and the Bible mentions giants. But that these references are to fallen “angels” and King Kong or even Hulk size monsters I’m less than certain. Suffice it that Christianity parts company with Judaism in its insistence on an evil opposite divinity to the good Lord.
Penance , of course, is core Jewish practice and was, long before it took its place in the Church as Lent or in the Mosque as Ramadan. We sincerely and soberly repent our sins during the Yomei Noraim, the Terrible Days, preceeding Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Try to remember, buddy, that Christianity is based on Judaism, not the other way round. But thanks for the heads-up.
Lynn S: I apologize but I’ll have to reread the Hagar narrative to properly answer your question. As for Isaac, seems to me he gets led around quite a bit, first by his father then by his wife and son. All without protest. Makes him a dummy a my book.
