Christians and Abortion - Ignorance, apathy and shame

Christianity and Slavery

It shouldn't be a particular surprise to anyone that most Christians ethical views are influenced and informed far more by the media and the cultural zeitgeist than by a Christian world-view. What this means is that most Christians tend to be ignorant about a number of things that are shaping the minds and practices of people here in the UK. One example I will focus on specifically is that of abortion. I don't think it would be an overstatement to claim that abortion is the twenty first centuries ethical equivalent of the chattel slavery so prevalent in the nineteenth century. If anything it is far worse, and like slavery it has serious cultural consequences with respect to how we view certain groups of people within our society. In Wilberforce and Clarksons day the big question was whether or not it was wrong to treat black people as inferior to whites and therefore justifiably use them as a means for their desired profitable ends as slaves. The answer to this questions would affect how you would view and therefore treat them, because if they weren't a human 'person' with moral value then there really was little problem with chattel slavery.

Is Christianity Evil?

The late Christopher Hitchens in his rhetorical master-piece that is God is Not Great argues that religion as a whole is a terrible evil, Dawkins claimed that God is a sort of mental illness and the rest of the four horsemen, Dennett and Harris offer just variations on those themes.

If you are of the sceptical variety and only read other Atheist writings, that is to say that you only learn about Science, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, History and the like from other Atheists [This is not to say that this is the case for all Atheists, but certainly a growing minority] it’s no surprise that many have come to believe that Christians do and have done very little good in the world. I’ve encountered many Atheists unfortunately of this type who are just as indoctrinated as the people they claim they are against, sadly the irony is lost on many of them.

However I don’t want to appear overly negative, in fact many of the people I would rather spend time with happen to be thoughtful and pleasant Atheists. Sadly many although not all Christians are not interested in intellectual matters and I admit I have to return to a select group of non-theists for interesting intellectual discussion.

Steven Weinberg once said: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” [1]

Even those people who don’t adhere to a particularly sceptical view of the world will have had their view of Christianity shaped by the often negative depiction through the media. EastEnders for example had a Christian Pastor murdering someone and then kidnapping his girlfriend in 2010, for my American friends EastEnders is one of the most viewed soaps on British TV. From the media you tend to get the picture that Christians in America are allegedly all like George Bush and Christians here in the UK are known more for what they are against rather than what they are for, as we all allegedly hate homosexuals, people who have abortions and Jerry Springer the musical.


Needless to say we may not agree with those things but we don’t hate anyone and in fact Jesus warned his followers many times to practice love over hatred and Christians are made aware of the seriousness of hatred in several places [2].