AP: “China’s officially atheistic government prohibits proselytizing and is worried that if the spread of religion goes unchecked, believers might ultimately challenge the Communist Party’s authority.”
That may be true, it may be false. But where’s the AP’s rationale for saying it? Can you imagine the uproar if it said
“The US government panders to Christian fundamentalism because its leaders crave their votes.”
which is clearly at least as true.

Did this Christian group really think they were going to get 315 Bibles through the customs folks in China and then the Chinese were going to return them? They obviously had no idea how serious the Chinese were. Now they know. Guess Christ’s teaching will have to wait until another day in China. Oh well.

“Christ’s teachings” or what someone chooses to claim he meant.
Can you imagine how much more trouble the world would be in now if the RCC’s policy on having as many children as possible had been in place in China for several decades instead of their one child policy? The world needs us all to adopt a policy like that; too many people is the ultimate reason we are using more energy than we can safely produce, we are fouling our air and oceans and many of us don’t have clean water to drink.

The world needs us all to adopt a policy like that—nnmns
Yeah, forced abortion and sterilization is a great policy. I hardly think killing more babies will clean up smog and give us prestine drinking water. If you think the tyrants in Beijing are doing it for environmental reasons, you’re sorely mistaken. Your incorrect interpretation of Catholic teaching is a liiiitle bit off base.

They are probably doing it to keep a governable country. In so doing they’ve made it a lot better world than it would have been. And the Chinese are a lot better off, too.
If you think the number of people in the world has nothing to do with making more smog and screwing up our water you just don’t understand how the world works at all. And with us running low on cheap petroleum and the world running low on drinkable water (knowledgeable people say Darfur is ultimately about access to water, and watch the Middle East closely just for example) it’s about population size. And the diseases coming out of Africa are because people are being pushed by more and more people into closer contact with our close relatives in the bush who carry those diseases.
But the worst problem is what we are putting into our atmosphere that’s warming the planet, very possibly so much our offspring won’t be able to live well, maybe not at all. And again, the more people (especially well off people like we are and China and India are becoming) the faster that stuff goes into the air. Granted leadership makes a difference and the US has had seven years of some of the worst leadership in the history of the nation.
Read the news. These things are happening.

Wow, this discussion is quite disturbing.

And I’m wondering whatever happened to supposedly respecting the right of a woman to do what she wants with her own body. A one-child policy hardly seems to fit the pro-choice agenda.
I guess nnmns is a woman-hater.

They are probably doing it to keep a governable country. In so doing they’ve made it a lot better world than it would have been. And the Chinese are a lot better off, too.—nnmns
They’re doing it to control their people and maintain power. Its the same reason they don’t allow unsanctioned religious practice, political pluralism or freedom of speech. Read the news, these things are happening, as you would say.

Nate W., I don’t think China is worried about a pro-choice agenda for their women. Nor are they worried about the holy words of the Christian Bible. Christian Bible pushers don’t seem to realize that China is deadly serious about NOT having religious (except government sanctioned ones)propaganda distributed. Guess that ticks off the Bible pushers. Right or wrong this is the current situation in China. The 1 child policy has made it possible to continue to “feed” the population. Do I approve of the way it is enforced? No. I do think a woman should always have the right to have an abortion if she needs to. Do I think it should be forced on a woman? No.
Does the Chinese government care what we think of their policies? No.
nnmns: Yes, if the RCC had their way, this world would be even more populated.

Pagansister,
I think most “Bible pushers” fully realize how serious China is. I mean, that’s why so many Christian/missionary publications you pick up constantly remind readers of how utterly evil the Chinese government is.
And you might not be a woman-hater, but nnmns clearly is. He doesn’t want women to be able to choose how to manage their own reproductive system, which is something he’s never hesitated to denounce any time it entails restricting access to abortion. But I guess if it means forcing abortions upon women, he’s got no probelem with it. Go figure.
And by the way, if the RCC had its way, there may or may not be a much higher world population. Keep in mind that the RCC also promotes celibates, and celibates don’t have children.

nnmns,
you said: “”The US government panders to Christian fundamentalism because its leaders crave their votes.
which is clearly at least as true.”
boy, is that statement true. Just because a religious group wants to go into another country to proselytize, doesn’t mean they can.
I suppose they think their religious rights and beliefs trump the other governments. guess they found otherwise. actually, their blessed for not having their butts thrown in jail. then, they’d have reason to whine.

China has 1 1/4 billion people. They had to do something radical years ago or the effects would have been catastrophic.
Do people really think the world’s population can keep on increasing without planet-wide catastrophe?

I remember reading an article on belifenet that said China said Americans could bring their own personal Bible into the country, but not distribute or proselytize with Bibles and literature, that it would be confiscated. I had no intention of going to the Olympics, and I read this in a couple of places. When you are guests of a country you should be respectful of their rules, and if you don’t obey them you’re going to pay in some way. They lost 315 Bibles printed in Chinese, and the money and time it took to cart them over there. Stupid.

Nate W.:
“And you might not be a woman hater, ….”
Nate, I “MIGHT not be a woman hater???” I AM a woman…so why would I be a woman hater? My gender is unique and I’m proud to be a member of a unique group.
And the RCC might promote being celebate for those “unmarried” folks and the priests and nuns and other “religious”, however when those who marry have in their vows to “accept all children God gives them”, that certainly doesn’t promote small families.

Nate I’m not a woman-hater and it disturbs me that you’d say I am.
I can see the seeming disconnect of this with my right to choose principles when the right to an abortion is threatened, which I presume you’re referring to. I think a small family is the best choice for most people and for the world so I’m definitely in favor of peoples’ rights and ability to achieve that. As for choosing a big family, I know there’s no chance a forced policy like China’s would be passed in the US but I’d love to see our government encourage fewer children and I hope most people see the bad economics of a large family.

I’ve been posting a long time along side of nnmns, and he’s not a woman hater. He makes sense about the worlds population problem. Family planning is a must for every country, so a quota for children will never have to be given to people. More people, more hunger, disease, poverty, pollution, etc. Good sense has to prevail or a mess is the result of anything.

The woman-hater remark was meant to point out the irony that nnmns, who has many times in my time here wondered how anyone who loves women could want to deny them the right to manage their own wombs by voting pro-life, could turn right around and praise a policy that actually removes more power from women’s hands than most pro-life policy would. Those who love women either support a woman’s right to choose, or they don’t, but you can’t have it both ways. If loving women means not meddling in their reproductive choices, it means that in all instances, not just some of them.

No Nate, it’s one thing to be allowed to have a child or two but not the third, fourth or fifth. It’s quite another thing to be forced to have a child you don’t want that results from rape or failed contraception.
Thank you Henrietta.

It’s only “quite another thing” if you don’t follow through with your pro-choice rhetoric. No one who is truly, fully pro-choice could advocate the things you’ve been advocating.
You’re willing to qualify your pro-choice stance for what you believe to be a more pressing moral issue, I understand that. You’re willing to say, “I believe women should control their own sexuality, but I believe that unchecked reproduction will destroy the earth, so there should be limits to choice.” Fair enough. Just learn to have a little more respect for those of us who believe in placing limits on that choice in other places, like to protect the lives of developing human beings we believe deserving of basic rights. But if you go on questioning the motives and the integrity of pro-life advocates like you have here in the past, your moral position is going to appear so utterly confused and hypocritical as to make your opinions hardly worth taking seriously.

Don’t expect me to cave in to your arbitrary decision “life” begins at conception. Even the RCC has gone back and forth on that over the centuries and it’s decided by old men who don’t know any more about biology than you or I; probably less.

Hummm…are we into the “when does life begin” discussion again? That is like trying to decide which came first..the chicken or the egg? Anyone have the answer for that one? NO. I have my ideas on the life start question..(not at conception) and others figure the minute that egg and sperm meet…boom you have a kid.
Somehow the “life starts when?” question has nothing to do with the Bible pushers getting their propaganda AKA Bibles taken away forever at the airport. Now if there were more Chinese…no child restrictions, then there would be a call for more Chinese language Bibles to be printed so they too could be taken away at the airport in China.

The thing is, nnmns, that any designation of when “life” begins is going to be arbitrary. What attribute determines who merits basic rights and who doesn’t? Who gets to decide what that attribute is? This isn’t about who knows more about biology, because all biology tells us is whether or not some biological entity possesses a certain attribute. It doesn’t tell us which attributes we should even be looking for when it comes to deciding who is a person and who bears dignity as a person; that, my friend, is a question that has always been open to profound disagreement. Your answer to the question is, in the end, no less arbitrary than mine. You just find it convenient to call mine arbitrary because that would mean that you win and I lose, with no real discussion needed (I’ve noticed that you’re a huge fan of trying to beat down your opponents by stopping the discussion before it can even begin).
I personally have no idea what the magical attribute is that makes a human worthy of any kind of dignity, and given the fact that the search for that attribute has resulted in grave errors throughout history (women, children, slaves, blacks, Native Americans, Jews, and many other groups in history have been perceived to lack whatever person-making attribute was currently in vogue, and they suffered dearly because of that), I want to err on the side of caution. When I speak about standing up for the dignity of the least in our society, I want to err on the side of inclusivity if I must err at all, because because when millions of lives are potentially at stake, I think a little caution is in order.
You, however, have no interest in understanding or sympathizing with the motives of those who disagree with you, just as always. So I have nothing to learn from you. You absolutely refuse to take me and my moral concerns seriously and charitably, so I have no reason to take you seriously either.

Nate if you really want to be as inclusive as possible you have to include semen and eggs. If you are just trying to establish a debating point I guess you don’t.

I’m aiming to be as inclusive as possible within reason. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would mean to say that semen and eggs are human beings, or what it would mean to give them dignity. A developing child in the womb is another story, considering that people treat the thing in a pregnant woman’s belly as being a child all the time.
But of course, you’re simply avoiding the point, which is that your entire debate tactic is to try to paint anyone with the slightest pro-life viewpoint as just trying to force some arbitrary value onto everyone else, effectively sealing off the possibility of real discussion, while you refuse to consider that your values might end up no more grounded than ours. I’m not surprised, because this is a common tactic. What’s disturbing is that you fail to realize it and try to correct it when someone points it out to you.
What you basically communicate is that you don’t respect other people enough to even give their ideas a fair hearing or to have any sympathy for their deepest moral and humanitarian concerns. You’re no better when you do it to us as people on our side are when they do it to you.

I agree semen and eggs aren’t human beings and it’s silly to think they are. But they are precursors of human beings as are blastocysts, zygotes, embryos and fetuses. And it’s just as silly to think of blastocysts, zygotes and embryos as humans (do you really think something the size of a period on your screen is a human?). But they are slowly turning into humans and fetuses continue that process. And due to miscarriages, many undetected by the pregnant woman, they often don’t become humans. So they share the property with semen and eggs of being precursors of humans, many of which don’t become humans.
I choose to think of it as a gradual process where the bzef becomes more nearly human, finishing when it’s born. You choose to think it’s an all or nothing process and you claim to be as inclusive as possible (I guess that’s easy for your theorizing but it can be hard for people who have to live with it) but in reality you are not as inclusive as possible.
I do respect you as being consistent and having a basis for your beliefs but that basis and your reasoning has led to beliefs which are more likely to impact women than you and sometimes impact them very hard. And I hope you’ll re-think your position on this, particularly if you may counsel people on such issues.

There’s one major difference between semen and eggs, on the one hand, and a zygote or a fetus on the other. The first are NOT in the process of becoming a mature human being, while the latter are.
I have no firm belief in an “all or nothing” approach to life, but there has to be some kind of “all or nothing” element to it, because some particular organism either has a right to life or it doesn’t. Even if you’re pro-choice, you believe in a point at which the child begins to possess a right to life and before which he or she doesn’t. I’m not interested in insisting that a zygote has exact moral equivalence with the woman in whom it exists, but I have to pick some point at which there is a new human being come into existence, and I choose to err on the side of caution.
I have to insist that your position is no less arbitrary than my own (I admit that all our positions are somewhat arbitrary). What’s so special about birth as to make something a human person who an hour before was not? And what of the fac that children are not all born at the same level of development; why is a prematurely born child somehow more human than a more developed fetus that hasn’t yet been born? I suppose you could consider the very fact of the child’s existing independently of the mother’s body as somehow relevant to its status as a human persn now deserving of a right to life, but that assumption could be made only on top of a whole set of questionable, arbitrary assumptions about what it means to be a human person in the first place (as a philosopher/theologian I can assure you that the definition of the human person has never been settled in all of intellectual history, and it would be extremely arrogant for you to suppose that your definition somehow has the power to settle the dispute once and for all and end the conversation).
My point is, you yell and scream about my attempts to base my moral actions on supposedly arbitrary definitions of human personhood, but anyone could turn around and make the same accusation against you. To someone Peter Singer, a world-renowned ethicist and proponent of infanticide, pro-choicers who want to make birth the moment of the reception of the right to life are guilty of just as much arbitrariness as you accuse me of. But my guess is that you’re going to want to err on the side of caution and reject the infanticide option. That’s all my pro-life position is–erring on the side of caution–but I’m just a bit more cautious that you.
Sure, the pro-life stance affects women, but no less than your advocacy of population control does. Some women deeply desire a large family, and meddling in her decision to have one is no less intrusive than placing restrictions on the decision to abort. You might imagine a difference between them, but that’s only because you’re a liberal probably have liberal women in mind. Go to find a culturally conservative woman (or man) who values the freedom to have a full table above all else, and what you’ll find is that your attempt to meddle in their affairs violates their sense of freedom far more than restrictions on abortion would.
Basically, you’re being morally inconsistent as long as you bear the “pro-choice” label. You’re not pro-choice, you’re liberal who wants all women to choose liberal values. That’s fine, but be honest about your position. No one who praises population control policies can ever honestly call themselves “pro-choice.”

China may have cleaned up for the Olympics but it s showing its power hungry ways here. pagan is right about China being deadly serious about controlling or eliminating Christianity. Christians every day find themselves either persecuted or murdered in China for practicing their religion. I am humbled by those Americans who reach out to such a persecuted yet devoted minority. I expected to see my boss in that group.

You seem to have misunderstood my position on when human life begins. There’s no moment when it begins. It develops over nine months, becoming closer and closer to human. That’s why I like Roe v Wade; it recognizes this and allows states to grant the bzef more and more protection over those nine months.
There does need to be a time definite when it’s defined to be a human and receives all the protections granted to humans where it is. Birth is the natural moment for that to happen. As you would appreciate, it’s traditional for people to start being counted at birth (check census forms) and to get social security numbers as early as birth, no earlier.
There are other, psychological events which affect how serious the death of a thing is. Will it make others sad? Will it suffer fear or pain? How many people depend on it? While you may and likely will make arguments those things don’t start at birth, in fact they do to a great extent. After birth the baby is visible, not imagined; it becomes a member of the family not just to the mother. At birth it begins experiencing the world and surely development of its ability to fear pain accelerates. Members of its family and their friends depend on its being there to care for it and to love it and for it to entertain them.
So to emphasize what you apparently missed in all our arguments I don’t think the bzef becomes human at any one instant, I think it ramps up to being human over nine months. But I do think it should gain every right to life a human has at its birth.

And if they are indeed born in China, there had better not be a Bible thrust into their hands the minute they pop out. It will be confiscated.