Are unborn babies “saved”?

Are unborn babies “saved”? Let’s examine two conflicting issues:

Problem 1 (Original Sin) – We have inherited corruptness and impropriety simply due to being born. Therefore, we are sinners, guilty of inherited transgressions. Were this idiotic idea applied to civil justice, I could be put in prison for some crime that my grandfather committed. “That’s ridiculous!” you say, but that’s exactly what the concept of Original Sin is. Ultimately, the endpoint of this argument can only be “predestination,” which is a bit of a “Problem 1(b)” (God’s Grace) – We can be “saved” only by God’s grace. To receive God’s grace, we must be worthy. Since all members of humanity are all sinners (due to Problem 1, inheriting the sins of Adam and Eve), none of us is worthy, and therefore, none of us is saved (due to Problem 2, since we do not have the ability to choose to make ourselves and our lives right with the Lord). We’re all going to hell – “saved” or not.

Problem 2 (Free Will) – God implanted in us the choice to live our lives properly, to take care of others and do good works, and to glorify him…..with the promise of getting the cookie (i.e., eternal life) at the end of our earthly lives. The endpoint is that if we have inherited corruptness and impropriety simply due to being born, then we have not had a choice in the matter. We have not had Free Will to realize what is inside us, or to decide how to behave. Therefore, Free Will must necessarily be an illusion. If Free Will is accurate, then whatever Adam and Eve did does not apply to us, and we do not have the burden of Original Sin. If we were created in the image of God, and God gave all of us – Adam and Eve included – Free Will to choose, then by blaming us for Adam and Eve’s sin, that Free Will was effectively revoked.

Original Sin and Free Will cannot be reconciled. They cannot exist together.

(Side Note: God is supposedly omnipotent, meaning He could “design” it any way He wanted; and He is supposedly omniscient, meaning that He would have had to know what his “design” would result in. So what the hell kind of a god would knowingly design a flawed Creation, and then punish that same Creation for being flawed, when it’s actually His fault to begin with? That is not the mark of a good and loving god. That is the mark of pure evil.)

But, moving on……let’s blindly and stupidly pretend that both Original Sin and Free Will exist completely, despite their obvious irreconcilable contradiction.

For the most part, the different iterations of the Christian faith have determined that infants and unborn babies are somehow “exempt” from the guilt of original sin. Catholicism has implemented a kind of limbo state in which – essentially – babies are not worthy of Heaven, since they are unable to glorify God or accept Jesus as their savior; but they’re not worthy of Hell either, since they do not have the “free will” to live or act in such a way as to glorify God. Indeed, these babies are not aware of the concept of choice at all. (Even if their reason for non-salvation means that they’re ultimately in limbo – neither Heaven nor Hell – they still must have a kind of “spiritual status,” so to speak. Something has to be done with their souls.)

Other denominations portend (or pretend?) that these babies are indeed saved automatically, since they do not have a choice, but have also not yet had any significant time on Earth in order to be corrupted by the world. (On the flip side, I have heard examples of Southern Baptists saying that unless one can “accept Jesus as [their] Lord and Savior,” they’re going to Hell, and yes, this includes those babies.)

So, depending on your personal fantasy, babies may or may not be saved. If they are, they go straight to Heaven. If not, they go straight to Hell. If they’re Catholic, they’re stuck.

But let’s assume, for kindness’ sake, that they are indeed “saved.”

Now, let’s look at the human reproductive system (the way this retarded omniscient and omnipotent God supposedly designed it) and try to understand a scenario that would impact the spiritual status of a baby during a potential Rapture event, one like Harold Camping has predicted. There are several stages of the reproductive process. I’m not going to touch on the most enjoyable preface to those biological functions, but will begin with the deposit of semen into the vagina.

1.) Copulation (mating) occurs, where semen leaves the male urethra and enters the female vagina.
2.) Sperm cells “swim” toward the fallopian tubes, reaching their destination within about 15 minutes of mating.
3.) Sperm cell(s) attach to the egg.
4.) Some chemically magical stuff called fertilization happens. Within moments, enzymes released from the egg cytosol act on the zona (outer layer) making it impermeable to the other sperm that arrive.
5.) In about five days to one week, the resulting zygote (not a “life” form yet) implants into the uterus.
6.) Once the zygote is implanted, and the organism starts taking in fuel (food) via the umbilical cord is it now “life.” In other words, cell division (replication) alone does not constitute “life.” The organism must also take in fuel and expel waste, and be able to regulate its own biological systems. Before this time, it is nothing more than regulated chemical reactions, and technically a parasite. (Hey, embryos secrete substances that prevent the mother’s immune system from expelling the embryo, ya know.)
7.) At about Week 6, the heart begins to beat and the brain and other neurological components begin to develop. By Week 9, the brain and central nervous system are nearly completely developed – fetally, that is. (It is at this point that a fetus is likely to have both proto-cognition and some sort of primitive survival instinct (which requires – among other things – the ability to analyze and react to the sensation of pain).

Therefore, a newly developing “person” cannot be a human being until at least Week 6, but more likely Week 9. Before that time, it is nothing more than a parasite. Obviously, none of this happens instantaneously. It takes some time for this process to occur. In effect, there is at least a six-week period between copulation and an actual “baby.” However, for the sake of this experiment in reasoning, we can actually abandon everything past step 4. We’ll assume a standard benchmark of fifteen minutes, and apply that fifteen minutes to Harold Camping’s prediction of Judgment Day occurring on May 21, 2011 at 6:00 p.m. (Technically speaking, time zones really don’t matter here to Camping, because I could find no reference to a time zone in which the Rapture will begin in. To me, this would be a rather IMPORTANT DETAIL, but it apparently slipped Harold “I’m a complete fucktard” Camping’s mind.)

So let’s list the criteria we must use:

1.) All those who are incapable of recognizing and glorifying God due to circumstances outside their control are exempt from the guilt of original sin.
2.) There is a delay of fifteen minutes between copulation and fertilization.
3.) Judgment Day is Saturday, May 21, beginning at 6:00 p.m.
4.) Judgment Day is a one-shot-deal. According to Camping, there is no “Plan B.” Once Judgment Day happens, that’s it. No more lifts to Heaven will take place, so either you will be sucked into the sky or you will absolutely, positively go to Hell within five months (153 days from the Rapture).

The short sequence of events on Judgment Day is as follows:

At sundown, there will be worldwide earthquakes. This is to shuffle all the buried bodies up to the surface, because according to Scripture, the dead and pious will be taken first. (Why this is necessary I don’t know, since God is like, really magical and shit like that, and has no need to create earthquakes to vacuum rotting skeletons from the ground. I mean, come on, he can snap his omnipotent God-fingers, right?) After all of those corpses zoom up into the Sky Fairy’s starry domain, it’s time to claim the living and pious (probably only conservatives, because all of the rest of us are idiotic trashy sinners, you know).

So if a man and woman who are NOT saved complete the act of copulation at 5:51 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, the sperm cell still has about another fifteen minutes before it can fertilize the egg cell. So the “creation” of a new life happens at 6:06 p.m.; which, of course, is after any possible chance of the benefit of “exemption.” The new baby has missed the window of opportunity and will not be drawn into Heaven, even with the implied exemption. The baby, through no fault of its own, is now doomed to Hell. Yes, this baby’s spiritual “life” was completely dependent on what some naked dipshit in Paradise did with a woman and an apple.

This omnipotent and omniscient God certainly did an excellent planning job, didn’t He?

Shalom, bitches.

Judgment Day

Harold Camping is one of the most idiotic fucktards ever to inhale oxygen. He operates “Family Radio” – a link to that inanity appears on this blog under “Things I Like to Ridicule” – out of Oakland California, a fundamentalist anti-realist organization dedicated to the Christian mythology. More importantly, Camping, a civil engineer by trade, says that he has figured out the math behind when the world will end. I won’t go into the math, but you can read an article about it from SFGate if you search Google for it. The math is creative, but Camping is performing nothing short of a sensationalist sideshow. Camping scoffs at those who would insist that the world will end on December 21, 2012, and says that Judgment Day (the return of Christ) will happen on May 21, 2011 – yeah, this year 🙂 – with the end of the world occuring on October 21, 2011. (Note: The Mayans didn’t forecast the “end of the world.” It was only the end of a calendar cycle.)

So I’ve been doing a little more “research” into Doomsday Prophecies. While this post is not about a specific prophecy, it is related to them in general due to their dependence on the return of Christ.

It’s common knowledge among those who educate themselves in such matters that the mythology of Ye’shua was in a sense “commandeered” from other, older legends and myths. The birth from a virgin (Horus, Dionysius, etc.), a three-day resurrection (Horus; Simon, a Hebrew slave who died in 4 BCE, etc.), and “savior” status (too many examples to list) were all part of the conglomeration of stories that led to the mash-up of Judaism, ancient Egyptian mythology, and Zoroastrianism that we know today as Christianity.

The late, Honorable Thomas Paine, one of my personal heroes, did an extensive disassembly of Jewish and Christian prophecy in his book “Examination of the Prophecies,” and one of the things he points out is that the “prophecy” of the birth of Ye’shua was actually about a child born seven hundred years prior to Ye’shua. But I found something else today – independently of my reading of the works of Mr. Paine – while reading something on the Qur’an that directed me again to the King James Version of the Holy Babble to figure out another one of these stupid Babblical conundrums.

Below is Malachi 4, one of many passages of the Old Testament treated as a source for all end-of-the-world doctrines:

The Great Day of God

1 “For behold, the day is coming,
Burning like an oven,
And all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly will be stubble.
And the day which is coming shall burn them up,”
Says the LORD of hosts,
“ That will leave them neither root nor branch.
2 But to you who fear My name
The Sun of Righteousness shall arise
With healing in His wings;
And you shall go out
And grow fat like stall-fed calves.
3 You shall trample the wicked,
For they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet
On the day that I do this,”
Says the LORD of hosts.
4 “Remember the Law of Moses, My servant,
Which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel,
With the statutes and judgments.
5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD.
6 And he will turn
The hearts of the fathers to the children,
And the hearts of the children to their fathers,
Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”

Now, keep in mind that God is omniscient and omnipotent. Since He’s omnipotent, if He says that he’s going to send Elijah back, He’s going to send Elijah back, period. This ensures that His followers know exactly what to expect. And because He’s omniscient, he knows that this is what mankind would expect. The discipline of apologetics at this point is a disservice to the Word of God, since apologetics second-guesses God – you know, “a day to us may be a thousand years to God” (regarding the six-day Creation).

Where this gets really interesting – and you may know how I feel about the opportunistic side of Ye’shua (if he actually existed at all) – is that in Matthew, when Ye’shua was faced with this question, his answer was that “Elias (Elijah) is come already, and they knew him not,” meaning that Elijah had already returned, but people didn’t recognize him. The Apostles understood this – or perhaps pretended this – to be John the Baptist. However, Ye’shua statement is actually within the realm of apologetics. God said that He’d send ELIJAH, Ye’shua second-guessed God and said John the Baptist. Now, how does that make Ye’shua a trustworthy individual, or more importantly, how does it actually support an end-of-days scenario?

For the record, Ye’shua told Caiaphas face-to-face that Caiaphas would not die before Judgment Day came, yet Caiaphas did die…..and we’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting……and two thousand years later, we’re still waiting for the Judgment Day that hasn’t happened.

Fuck you, Harold Camping.

Shalom, bitches.