• CM400@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    118
    ·
    1 month ago

    Just guessing here, but I’d assume it’s because the unborn have potential and the bad guys had their chance. I don’t agree, but that’s what I assume being around some people like that…

  • vzq@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    77
    ·
    1 month ago

    As someone recently told me, they don’t worry about saving lives, they worry about saving souls.

    You need to abide by the quaint rules of the magical sky daddy for that, even if they don’t make sense.

    • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      1 month ago

      Except clearly any aborted fetus would immediately go to heaven based on what’s written in the bible. In fact, heaven should be absolutely completely full of dead babies based on miscarriages, stillbirths, etc. if you believe that they get a soul at the moment of conception.

      So that logic doesn’t really make sense either. Which is par for the course.

        • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          24
          ·
          1 month ago

          That depends on which flavor of Christianity you’re looking at, but even the Catholics don’t think they go to Limbo, the pope had an entire study done on it, and the result was “we hope they go to heaven but we don’t know”

          A lot of the other denominations don’t subscribe to the original sin shtick, and therefore babies would go to heaven even without being baptized.

          • mrcleanup@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            14
            ·
            1 month ago

            I always loved the “do uncontacted remote tribes that haven’t heard of God or Jesus go to heaven?” question. So far everyone has answered yes. And then you realize that Christians could save everyone, everywhere, forever, just by destroying all their literature, not teaching religion, and letting it die with them. One sacrificial generation and everyone is saved forever.

            But they won’t do it because of greed and pride, the core aspects of their belief system.

      • slickgoat@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 month ago

        Actually, nobody goes to heaven when they die (according to the bible). Everyone must wait until judgement day when all the graves, etc, open and we all face judgement at that point. This surprised me when I first learned it because it goes against all the Christian culture I’ve ever been taught and experienced.

        So grandma isn’t currently in heaven no matter how good she was.

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 month ago

          That’s a huge relief that perhaps my grandparents haven’t seen my embarrassing moments after all.

        • Blaster M@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          and judgement is not “brought back to life just to be sent back immediately”… no, it will be a good span of time to live without evil on the earth…

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        I was juuuuuuust about to explain how making sense isn’t a requirement to them, until I saw your last sentence. Then I knew you already get it.

    • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      I dont think it really has anything to do with that. A state recently sued due to abortion and teen pregnancy reduction efforts leading to decreased teenage pregnancy rates arguing something along the lines of our populations are going down and it will cost us in population, political representation, and federal resources.

      This is about cheap/free labor, disenfranchising women, and maintaining a permanent disabled and poverty-stricken underclasses that keep everyone on up in line with the hierarchy

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      But the Skyfather himself has given us directions to induce a miscarriage with a tabernacle dust smoothie.

  • Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    1 month ago

    Arguably, an unborn baby cannot be guilty of anything. But an adult sentenced to death is often guilty of some horrible crime. So if you accept killing as a punishment, there is no contradiction.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 month ago

      Until you realize that our court system is FULL of false arrests, and the courts have some stupid high number like 98% conviction rate.

      They say “take the deal, or the court will fuck you”.

      2 years vs 30 years.

      And then later they run a second trial for something else that has a death penalty as the outcome. The jury is shown this guy, already in prison, for a semi-related charge. Already convicted of the other charge. So his ability to appear innocent is already swayed. And now suddenly there’s no deal. The court goes full hammer. The jury is made to believe he did it 100%.

      And he can’t say he didn’t do it, and wasn’t even there, because he ALREADY pleaded guilty to the other charge which would place him there.

      So now you got a populace, who wasn’t in either court session, not seeing how this escalated, and not willing to believe our court system may be flawed. Just kill the criminal and move on, right?

      • bluGill@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 month ago

        You are overstating it. all evidence I can find is only a small percentage are not guilty. Of course that small possibility is enough for me to be against the death pentalty. If we had a way to be 100% sure of guilt I’d favor death but since we don’t I can’t go that far.

  • EatATaco@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    1 month ago

    It only sounds like a contradiction if you take “pro-life” literally. In fact, I find this hard to understand at all if you simply just listen to pro-lifers.

    Let me be clear, I’m about as firm a supporter of a woman’s right to choose as they come. I’m also adamantly against the death penalty. Do you find this position to be contradictory?

    However, the general position of “pro lifers” does not contradict this at all, pretty obviously. They think that a fetus is a child that hasn’t been born yet, and because it hasn’t been born, it’s completely innocent. So you have no right to take it’s life. However, if some person in life has done something in life that removes that innocence, they believe sometimes that rises to such a heinous level that they must be permanently and irrevocably removed from society.

    There are other glaring contradictions in their position, like not wanting to provide support to that innocent baby once it has come into the world, but this is clearly not one of them.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      I’m pro choice but also anti-death penalty, but only because if someone is horrible enough to deserve it then they don’t deserve death, because death is the easy way out of suffering. They deserve to live long, miserable lives in a 3-meter cell.

  • angrystego@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I think they just see it as very simple: killing innocent babies - no, killing evil criminals - yes. It sounds perfectly alright if you don’t think about it too much.

  • C126@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    1 month ago

    My understanding is that they consider it ok to kill someone who committed a heinous crime but not ok to kill someone who is completely innocent.

    • atx_aquarian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 month ago

      This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.

      And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.

      *I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.

      • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        1 month ago

        But should we even punish?

        I don’t mean to troll, so let me explain. Why do we punish? I think it’s two fold, we punish to deter crimes and we punish to exact revenge. But the fear of punishment doesn’t deter crime https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence and that leaves revenge as the only both intended and actual outcome of punishment.

        Is the current costs of running a complicated criminal justice system really worth it, if all we get from it is revenge? Does revenge make society better? I don’t think so.

        I’m not advocating for anarchy either. There should be consequences for criminals. I’m just not sure what the consequences should be, but punishment is ineffective. I get that we have personal responsibility, and free will. And I’m not trying to excuse criminals, I’m just saying that punishment doesn’t work.

        • whaleross@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 month ago

          One aspect of punishment is retribution for the victims when there is nothing else and another is to keep people that are harmful away in order to keep other people safe.

          Here in Sweden we have a current massive problem with organized crime that are now systematically abusing our criminal justice system that is built on humanitarian ideals for rehab and protecting suspects and criminals rights to the absurd. So yes, in those cases I think punishment will do. Cynically abusing protection measures of society deserves punishment. It may not change those individuals for the life they have chosen for themselves but it will keep them out of making even more damage to society and violent crime against individuals and I honestly see no problem in harsh consequences for their own decisions.

        • ripripripriprip@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 month ago

          I’m all about scientific research, especially when it goes against the grain, but the idea of getting caught being a bigger deterrent than the punishment is just, weird?

          If there is no punishment, why would you be afraid to be caught?

          • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 month ago

            If there is no punishment, why would you be afraid to be caught?

            I think the idea is that the thing that stops you in the moment is “I likely won’t get away with it” more than “if they catch me there’ll be hell to pay … but only if”.

            I mean you’re (as in the informal general usage of “you”, not as the second person pronoun) not going to pull out your phone while driving, if you’re next to a cop. But if there’s no one around that even looks like an undercover traffic cop?

            Human brains are bad at thinking in long term consequences, but immediate consequences? Those we understand.

            • ripripripriprip@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 month ago

              I see what you’re saying and understand that criminals have poor judgment, especially long term.

              I still think that there is a natural idea of consequences, even if latent. If no consequences, the only thing about getting caught is having to do whatever thing you’re doing again, ie losing time.

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 month ago

          Lots of people never reach more advanced stages of moral reasoning. They don’t do bad things to avoid being punished, or maybe because they have a simple understanding of “it’s against the rules”

          The current justice and prison system is abhorrent, but something needs to happen if someone tries to murder someone else. Most people are alright but there are a lot of anti social people out there, too. And a lot of people who would be alright if they were in more stable circumstances

  • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    1 month ago

    Because people receiving the death penalty theoretically did something wrong, and fetuses did not. I’m neither against abortion nor pro death penalty, and I don’t really see a contradiction there.

    • OccamsRazer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      That wasn’t so hard, was it? People tripping over themselves to find a gotcha and forgetting to use a little common sense.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      Former Christian here.

      This is it. Criminals have (theoretically) been proven guilty. Some crimes are worthy of death.

      A fetus (ahem unborn baby) has cast no sin and does not deserve death.

      Christians would also say that they would never get out to death because they would never do anything wrong but when you bring up the fact that Jesus himself said you should be willing to suffer even to the point of suffering on a cross, they start changing the subject.

    • bamfic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      An unwanted unplanned baby is punishment for having sex outside of marriage.

      Death penalty is punishment for being convicted of murder.

      It’s perfectly consistent when you look at it all about punishment.

      The cruelty is indeed the point

    • umt@lemmynsfw.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      It’s a pastime of liberal pundits to point out that the pro-life governor of some flyover state also supports the death penalty and so on and so forth. We get incredulous and infuriated at their blatant hypocrisy. We call them stupid, which really sets them off […] They don’t think of themselves as self-serving hypocrites or idiots who can’t keep their facts straight long enough to form a cogent argument in continuity with the rest of their ideology. We try to describe this as “cognitive dissonance” or other give other armchair diagnosis that doesn’t fully capture what’s going on. I’d like to give them more credit than that. They clearly believe in something, and in that context their words and actions would make sense, but it’s not what they’re self-advertising when you ask what they believe in.

      From still the best description of american conservative thought I’ve read: an essay by u/kin7es: https://wiki.dlma.com/belief-system-of-republicans

      • kautau@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 month ago

        Everyone has a spot on the big food pyramid of the socio-political hierarchy. Good, smart, and hardworking people of merit make their way to the top. Bad, dumb, and lazy people go to the bottom. For convenience sake, this hierarchy is color-coded. In a zero-sum world, everyone who gets to the top has to knock someone down a rung to make room.

        I would argue this is how republican voters think. That they’re in the right because they are voting for the right of the individual. But on the other hand I think Republican policy makers give zero shits about a person’s self worth and actualization but rather they know that they need to feed the machine and we need the poor babies born to do so, and on the other hand they can demonstrate some form of moral high ground by deciding life and death.

        There’s no death penalty for defrauding elections, molding the healthcare (or really any corporate) system to work for harm and profit, avoiding taxation through infinite shell companies and offshore bank accounts. Those things are celebrated as “beating the system”

        Still to this day everyone that claims “Plandemic” is chasing some invisible elite power structure that somehow only includes democrats, without ever getting mad at the corporations that profited immensely off developing covid vaccines and charging market price for them as a portion of the world was dying.

  • ragepaw@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    1 month ago

    Because it’s never been about anything other than control. The right to choose anything is abhorrent to them. The only rights they want you to have are the right to be dictated to and the right to be like them.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 month ago

      Roman Catholic doctrine opposes both, but the bishops don’t go around threatening to withhold religious services for politicians who allow the death penalty like they do with pro-choice politicians…

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

    (I’m not picking a side in the “Are fetuses people?” debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 month ago

    contradiction

    You’ve discovered conservative politics. Party of freedom that wants to restrict women’s access to healthcare, books in schools, reproductive rights, healthcare for children, etc.