If God ordered you to kill your child, would you do it?

truth
If I heard the voice of God, I might ask myself (as Terry asks) "How do I know this is the voice of God?" Would he or she be offended is I asked for I.D.? I would he/she carry identification? Oh Hell, just believe. Be good.

Cool. I'm all from drawing on the world's literature as a source of wisdom and cause for reflection. Makes me want to see if I can dig up those "Ant and Bee" books from my childhood.

Throughout the Bible, God speaks through prophecies, dreams, and visions. God still speaks today, You should test it by considering that the it never be in contradiction to the the words of Christ or the NT, not the OT.

when Abraham went to kill Isaac, his son, as God ordered him, He stopped him the moment he was going to kill his son.

God was just testing Abraham's faith.

That wacky God. What about Job's family?

In the Abraham story, god was just being a dickhead, as in the Job story. You see, there isn't much to do in heaven that's fun, so god and the angels occasionally indulge in a bet or two, and use mortals for their fun. I hear the stakes on the Job thing went through the roof.

Funny, this is frequently brought up by folks who challenge religion: if you're god loves you and is all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world?

But didn't religion come about, in part, as a means of explaining why there was so much misery in the world? Norse mythology is little but, and it's acknowledged that the world will end in darkness. The Hindu and Greek pantheons are -- well, they're not always very nice. The God of the OT is capricious, vengeful -- lots of people suffer when he gets a wild hair. Hell, along the Niger river, it's imperative that you appease the spirits or they'll screw up your entire life. Otherwise, why the need for so much prayer and gratitude? Even Buddha pretty much said that the universe is indifferent to your suffering.

The Buddha was correct, but he also added that not worrying about it constantly would allow you to lead a healthy, normal life. Smart Buddha....

Pardon?

Was thinking about the Buddha-under-the-bo-tree and chacras in conjunction with animal development/evolution the other day.

Chacras: in yoga -- I'm flying sort of blind here, from what I patched together from various pseudo-gurus over the years -- the focus is first on the lowest chacra, which is associated with the very base of the spine and the genitals. Aside from noting the handy coincidence that the sexual response is primarily mediated by nerves that go to from the sex organs to the base of the spinal cord and back again, it also tickled me to think that the body is founded on a continuous line of totipotent germ cells (meaning they can, by necessity, form any other type of cell), and that these can probably be traced back to simple sexual cells -- similar, perhaps, to yeast.

You move up to the spine and you get to the more recently evolved structures -- first gut, which evolved to feed the germ cells; travelling upward through the notochord/spine, which protected them and gave them the ability to move around with greater purpose; and so forth up to the brain, which -- as handy as it is -- is best used when everything else is put in order first.

So then I thought of Buddha under the bo tree. The fatness of Buddha (as he is generally portrayed) heavily emphasizes the gut. I picture Buddha in my gut, seated as perfectly aligned as he is, with his genital and ass where mine are, his belly radiating happily like mine, feeding his well being, projecting him outward through space and time (like my gut is there to feed my germ cells). At his back is the bo tree, which is my spine, rooted firstly in the earth and ascending upward toward the heavens. Everything centered at the base of our spines, the roots of the tree, in the earth, belly projecting outward, encompassing the world, and spine/trunk ascending up away from the earth, but always grounded in it.



Just tangential thoughts. Please don't think that I make some cosmic significance of it; I'm just pleased with the metaphor. (And it's a useful one, when you're trying to stretch out your own spine and reduce the static noise of the brain by being mindful of the body. Dude.)

Buddha is traditionally reperesented in both thin and fat varieties. The large belly of the fat Buddha apparently reperesents a very strong 'chi', the source of life energy that is stored in the tan tien, in the belly area. I am most certain that Asherman can fill in the details, especially regarding the thin Buddha, who I always thought was a reperesentation of the reluctant warrior, but I could be completely off base there.

Sure, go ahead, undermine my speculation with factual observations. (I used to know a bit about this stuff, but it's all been muddied by misinformation and bad wiring in the noggin.)

that would be 'fat'ual and 'thin'ual; lets stay on top of it now...........

What are you inthinuating about by infatuation?

If you haven't been through this experience, don't judge
Much like a civilian trying to tell a combat soldier what he or she would do or would have done in the heat of battle, the only people properly qualified to answer this question is someone who has had no choice but to take the life of his or her precious baby due to circumstances beyond their control. After consulting with experts at three leading hospitals, we had no realistic choice but to take the life of our unborn triplets at 20 weeks into a pregnancy for the health of the mother. Two of the babies were severely deformed and had no chance and would die soon. The third was perfectly formed and normal, yet there was no way known on this earth to save her due to the condition of her unborn sisters. The choice was and is devastating for us yet we had no choice but to take the life of our sweet babies. Anyone who has not been in a similar situation has no right to say that they would never take the life of their own children. They do not understand how difficult it is for people with our history to look at billboards that condemn abortions and listen to people who say it is wrong. Ministers who preach against abortions under any circumstances should make the time to talk to doctors and view pictures of ultrasounds that show babies conjoined in unGodly ways, to see babies with out a head, with multiple hearts, etc., and realize there might actually be someone in their church who continues to battle with the reality they have to live with every hour of every day, especially when they view others with perfectly healthy children. Although it is not a direct commandment, sometimes God does not give you a realistic choice other than to take a life, however painful that may be for the parents to cope with for the rest of their physical life on this earth.

My sympathies to you and your family.
But this is not the same question, really.
In your case, doctors gave you options, not God.
God may have let you carry those babies to term and lose them all, for all we know, right? Or maybe you'd be raising a couple of severely disabled children right now, courtesy of God. Who knows?
You made the decision that was right for you, and for the health of the mother, but God did not order you to kill your child.
I wouldn't call what you did killing, by the way.
You had a horrible choice and made what was probably the only rational decision to be made.
I'm sorry you had to go through that.

truth
Pardon my presumption but it's obvious that you had no choice, and, as such, you and your wife did not IN ANY RESPECT kill the fetuses. I hope you see this so that guilt and remorse can be discarded as inappropriate emotions.