John Calvin Quotes
If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house, then in a field,...it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.
Calvin, John. Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony. Translated by Charles William Bingham, vol. 3, Calvin Translation Society, 1854, p. 42.
One of the extreme religious fundamentalists in the Congress, Brownback was referring to Federally funded medical research which uses embryonic stem cells. The cells are generated from in vitro fertilization procedures and potentially if implanted in the womb of a woman could produce a child. Several cells are produced by the fertilization process but typically only one or two is needed. So some religious extremists believe that just because the cell has the potential for human life, it is human life. This is the same logic which opposes birth control on the grounds that sperm and egg cells are incipient life forms. It was as late as 1973 that bans on birth control devices were declared unconstitutional be the Supreme Court.
In most parts of the country, if the legislators did not carve out the exceptions for rape incest and danger to the life of the mother, they would lose the majority of their support as most Americans who oppose the freedom of abortion that existed after Roe v. Wade, but really do not view abortion in the early trimester as murder. They just think that the regulation should be greater than it is.
This was a variation of the famous Henry Clay quotation.
Churches are political organizations too and are subject to the forces of their membership. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 they passed resolutions to assure the right of a woman to have an abortion to protect her health. The position on abortion changed steadily thereafter to even pass Constitutional amendments to ban abortions except to save the life of the mother. See {614356},54122, {614358}, {614359}, {614360}, {614361} for the dynamic history of the change.
Barnabus, like most Christians at the time, was also Jewish and was reflecting the Jewish view on abortion and infanticide in that part of the world. However, the Christians tended to be more forgiving than traditional Judaism was and made much greater provision for repentance and forgiveness. See {620149} .
John Calvin was a French theologian, pastor and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, aspects of which include the doctrines of predestination and of the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation of the human soul from death and eternal damnation, in which doctrines Calvin was influenced by and elaborated upon the Augustinian and other Christian traditions. Various Congregational, Reformed and Presbyterian churches, which look to Calvin as the chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world.
