1. May I interrupt this line on abortion to refer back to the original article?

All questions on torture need to appeal to a moral foundation. Does God use torture? Or are "trials" the appropriate word only because the motive is benign for the same allowed/inflicted suffering? Then is torture considered sadistic, or humane depending on who you are trying to save (back to motives)? Or is torture merely a definition of certain acts... regardless of motive.

Happy Veterans Day, everyone...for those willing to risk torture and death for everyone else who won't.

Arlyn,

I'll join you in your on-topic commenting by saying how much I liked this well-timed article by Pr. Coffin.

Water boarding is indeed torture. Our use of torture is as much an indictment of our own morality as torturers as it is a reflection on the barbarity of the actions committed or to-be committed by those we torture.

Waterboarding is physical and mental torture. Nevertheless, for the sake of fairnes, it must be contrasted with the murders, maiming, and beheading of innocent individuals by the terrorists.

The aim of waterboarding is to save the life of our soldiers and our allies. The aim of the murderous acts perpetrated by the terrorists is the indiscriminate killing and maiming of human being for the sake of the advancement of their political and religious agenda.

Nic,

Wow. That really amazes me.

Looking at your comments on this tread I can't resist asking if you feel that, for the sake of fairness as you put it, the murder of abortion providers should be contrasted with the holocaust of abortion (as I've heard you call it).

Or, how consistent are your comments?

Since Nic insisted I bring this from the other thread:

"Children to not feel they are harmed when older man get physically intimate with them, unless they are trained to avoid physical contact with adults. The trauma usually blossoms when they get older.

Many older men sexually abuse small children and feel there is no harm. They feel there is a fair mutually accepted fair exchange. They satisfy their sexual deviant cravings, and the children get what they like: atencion, candies or a trinket."

First, there isn't a single culture that considers child rape okay. Yes, in India it is not okay to rape children. An old man may marry a child but she must reach an admissible age before they engage in intercourse. Just read Phoolan Devi's autobiography.

Perhaps Nic had best do some more studying. I work with abuse victims. While it is true that it often takes some time for trauma to manifest I can name many "third world" children who passed out when being raped.

Nic, you used very subtle language but you seem to disregard the seriousness of child rape. A child's vagina and anus is very small. When a child--male or female, Western or Eastern--is raped, they quite often pass out because there is ripping and blood. I'm disturbed at your candy coating of child rape. (Let's not use euphemisms like pedophilia and molestation or physically intimate here. It is a disgrace to utilise the word intimate in stead of the word rape. There is nothing intimate about rape. It's violent and abhorrent and intrinsically harmful.) Your use of language signifies you think that there was consent or wish on the child's part. Subtle? Yes. But it is there. And I'm appalled.

Torture unfortunately is a necessary tool for fighting the war on terror. The reason for them being so ambiguous is to shield us from the harsh reality of what really is being to done to protect us. Thank you president Bush for making our Christian nation a safe one.

Ian,

I was unaware that our country had a national religion. How do you come by the description of "Christian nation?"

Johnny:

Yes, I am willing to contrast what Hitler did with what we are doing. Hitler decided to exterminate the unproductive members of society and the WWI amputees under duress. His country was at war, and he felt there was a need to save food for the soldiers on the front lines who were dying like flies in Russia and elsewhere.

We on the other hand decided to exterminate the innocent in the richest land on the earth where food is so abundant we don't know what to do with it.

Hitler exterminated his six million. We have exterminated almost ten times as much so far. Hitler killed in times of war. We kill in times of peace. He killed so that the his soldiers could survive. We kill without provocation. He killed those he considered to be his enemies. We kill our own children, our own flesh and blood.

On judgment day our crime will be dealt with more severity than Hitler's crimes, I believe. "From those who were given more, more will be required."

You avoided my question. You say that torture of terrorists is to "save the life". You contrast that with the aims of terrorists which you describe as murderous.

My question was if this permissive view justifying torture of terrorists could be translated to the abortion discussion.

If you see violence aimed at stopping abortion doctors from practicing as morally justified. Be it harassment, torture or murder.

If terrorism offends you to the point where you'd say torture is morally justified, and abortion is in your opinion one of the most morally offensive acts our society engages in, does it follow that you believe killing abortion doctors is a morally just act?

Dear Anonymous:

I agree with you entirely about the awfullness of child abuse. I have no idea where you find reason to disagree with me. I merely explained a fact of life in some undeveloped countries where innocent children fall an easy prey for predators.

What I stated about some children who have tolerated sexual abuse in exchange for candies and trinkets is based on factual anecdotes I received from credible sources. I was talking about boys between seven and ten. In the cases I am referring there were no reports of extreme pain or physical trauma. I wish I could exagerate for the sake of my cause against child abuse, but my morals prevent me from fabricating.

Evidently you are privy to other cases with different results. This information is very valuable, but I am not in possession of such. Will you fault me for being factual instead of attempting to twist the facts?

Let's wok together for the eradication of these predaotry practices, instead of trying to destroy the credibility of those who should work in harmony.

By the way, I wonder why you prefer to remain anonymous!

One of the hopes that I have for this blog and for our church is that we avoid personal attacks and simple-minded binaries. Thirty years of the abortion wars hasn't cut the unfortunate number of unwanted pregnancies or the poverty rate.

Nic, the Spectrum community is full of serious, ethical medical professionals who have saved a lot of lives. If you're going to accuse, you'd better back it up with facts. And maybe conversations with those involved in those decisions.

One of the marks of people who really care about human life is that they go out of their way to understand the motives of those who make different choices.

And often there is grace to be found and shared in those back stories.

Johnny:

Thanks for clarifying your question. First I must make it clear that when I contrasted waterboarding with abortion, I did not approve the morality of the waterboarding type of torture. I merely contrasted the degree of moral evil between those two types of torture.

When Jesus stated that the inhabitants of Sodom would condemn his generation, he did not justify the actions of the Sodomites.

Regarding killing the providers of abortion, the Bible states that the sword was given to the government, and not to individual citizens. When Peter drew his sword, Jesus scolded him for doing so.

The day abortion becomes illegal, then the government will be able to go after those engaged in the devilish busniness of killing the most innocent members of society for profit.

Dear Alexander:

I agree! The SDA Church and Loma Linda University have done and are doing a lot of good deeds on behalf of humanity.

At the same time the church has made the big mistake of justifying abortion, and at one time five of our hospitals were offering elective abortions according to an official survey.

You asked for facts. These facts are documented in my doctoral dissertation and a couple of slide presentations I have prepared so far. The Internet links are:

http://www.sdaforum.com/page13.html

http://www.sdaforum.com/page14.html

Please, identify which facts I have made reference to in this blog you want me to document, and I'll be glad to do this.

By the way, most of the documentation I used in my doctoral dissertation came from credible sources. The main source was our official "Ministry" magazine.

I would suggest that perhaps our government is not like Rome- it is not imposed. We in this representative democratic republic elect our leaders and their actions are validated or repudiated in the voting booth. For us the governments sword is wielded in our name- we collectively share moral responsibilities for the policies our elected officials enact on our behalf.

But moreover, am I to understand that you are against abortion but in favor of the death penalty?

Nic

Best your cotten pick'n heart. I thank God daily that you have just as good a standing before God that I do but none better.

Just keep in mind your arguments are neither moral, logical, nor pertinent to the thread.
Neither torture nor abortion are a solution to man's problems. In medical ethics, one must make the best choice out of a bad situation. No arm chair theologian has the right to an opinion outside of the immediate environment. Read all the books you like, Pray all the prays you wish. When it comes to the moment to decide. It is the one with the power to heal who must make the choice. My prayers are forever with him/her. To prejudge is arrogance beyond belief. Tom

Nic,

Children who are abused are NOT at fault, whether it's you or me NONE OF US are at fault. Little boys don't ask to be raped. They don't have the mental and emotional facilities to understand the meaning of "sexual intimacy." It makes me weep to think of what our patriarchal culture is doing to little boys who are being hurt so terribly.

Homosexuality and child rape are not the same thing, child rape has to do with sexual compulsion and manifests in largely the same way as does an addiction to drugs, with interestingly, about the same rehabilitation rate. If a little boy were to feel a sexual response to an abuser's attack, that is normal bodily function. It definitely does not mean that he is homosexual or that the abuser is homosexual when it comes to adult partners.

I hope all adult survivors on this board will go to professional counseling. There are many excellent male or female Adventist psychotherapists. One of the best things survivors can do is learn, as you noted Nic.

I remain anonymous for personal reasons. I hope you understand.

To Everyone,

I do apologize for changing the subject to what I did. There were reasons and I found it pertinent regarding the underlying hierarchical issues in bringing up abortion (which is in many ways a gender and sexual issue) but certainly Bush's stance on torture deserves its own thread. I'm removing myself from this thread and watching with interest.

Thanks for the links, Nic.

Am I right in reading that you received your PhD from an online school called Andrew Jackson U?

I can't find any PhD programs offered in Religion and the faculty mostly appear to not have PhDs themselves. Am I missing something?

And am I right it reading your endnotes correctly that you researched and wrote this in about a year? In fact, you accessed almost all the Ministry articles on the same day?

I also noticed that your research is almost wholly without primary documentation. In fact, your entire chapter three comes from one book on Desmond Doss.

In fact, the almost the entire document seems to be a compilation of previously published articles and letters by others and some of your previously unpublished works.

One thing that really doesn't do the issue justice is your reliance on hearsay and secondary observations. I'd be interested to see the credentials of your diss. committee.

While plenty of your observations certainly are true -- laity don't have an equal say in the church -- it doesn't follow that by guessing the position of Adventists by extracting quotes from their writing and totaling those up, one gets an accurate sense of the Adventist stance on abortion.

For instance, this guess:

"Shawn Boonstra seemed to be in agreement with the lawyer he interviewed that human life starts at 'the time of conception. . .' These statements seem to support the idea that Shawn Boonstra believes in the pro-life agenda."

That's a lot of subjunctives.

In chapter XI, I found your story of frustration compelling. But it appears that most of the chapter is a reprint of articles you've previously written, including a letter to a politician. Sometimes it's not the viewpoints but the scholarship that keeps some stances from seeing the light of day.

Dividing writers into the pro-life or pro-choice camp is extremely subjective, especially when the evidence is just a paragraph from Ministry.

You may wonder why all those articles have not been published. You might consider that your scholarship is getting in the way of the moral question.

Now let's get back to the topic of this post: torture.

Given the time o' trouble narrative in Adventism, I'd be surprised to find an Adventist who takes our theology seriously willing to justify torture through a "rooting our subversives" or defending a "Christian nation" argument.

Nic said: Nevertheless, for the sake of fairnes, it must be contrasted with the murders, maiming, and beheading of innocent individuals by the terrorists.

Does the result really justify the method? While there can be no justification for 9/11, should we not also take into consideration America's past actions of self-interest that may have
provoked it?

Johnny:

In answer to your question I will quote what I stated earlier to David about my position regarding the death penalty:

"I do not support the death penalty for another reason: The penalty is final, and there is no recourse if later on a DNA shows that the executed man was in fact innocent.

Nevertheless, in the event we could be 100 percent sure that the murderer did commit the crime, then if society were to execute him, there would still be a night and day contrast between his exedution and the execution of a totally innocent victim."

Tom:

I agree! I will emphasize one great statement you made:

"It is the one with the power to heal who must make the choice." This represents a mandate and a limitation!

The clue here is "power to heal." God has given physicians the power, the talent, and the authority to heal. Likewise, for two thousand years society held physicians responsible for said power to heal and they were accountable to the Hippocratic Oath which prevented them from encroaching onto the "power to kill."

The "power to kill" granted to physicians by nine unelected Justices of the Supreme Court was a new phenomenon and society has been experimenting with this new power. A power which eventually will go, I believe, the way of the "power to enslave," which was done away following the Civil War when blacks began to be treated as members of the human race.

One day, and I hope it would be tomorrow, the unborn will again be considered members of the human family, and will again be protected from ujust execution.

This day is fast approaching, and there are signs that it may soon become a reality: A good example is the case of Scott Peterson, who was convicted of two murders, the murder of his wife, Lacy, and of his unborn son.

The power to execute a human being should be retained by the government and never granted to individual women, which has created an artificial double standard: If the baby is wanted, it is a human being, and anybody who kills the unborn is guilty of murder; but if the baby is not wanted, then killing the same baby is merely akin to rhe removal of an appendix. This is insane, in my book, and a perversion of justice.

Dear Anonimous:

You said it quite well: "Little boys don't ask to be raped." I will only add that they may enjoy the taste of candy, but not the sexual act." I can't imagine they would or could!

Alexander:

Thanks for your comments and your questions. They are quite lenghty. I will try to answer all of them, one by one. I may even do it in more than one step, since otherwise my response may turn out to be extremely long.

1. Yes, my doctoral dissertation was done by distant learning, and the institution was Andrew Jackson University. It was the only way I could have done this, since I needed to take care of my family and of my business.

It took me ten years of part time effort. I would get up at five A.M., study till 8:00 A.M., then engage in my daily real estate business activities, and then resume my Ph.D. study in the evening and work till nine or ten P.M.

2. You can't find a Ph.D. program for the simple reason that it was phased out. Nevertheless, you can verify with the university that such program was in existence!

When I signed up for the program, I was advised that the Ph.D. program was under review, and that A.J.U. could not guarantee that the program would be eventually accredited.

When I discussed this with Dr. Gerald Winslow, I explained to him that I could care less whether A.J.U. would succeed in their accreditation efforts. What I wanted was an opportunity to learn.

3. The faculty I had the privilege to deal with all had their Ph.D. I have no idea what the current situation is now. When the doctoral program in religion was discontinued, the people I knew were let off. If this is important for the question we are dealing with, I can find out. Please let me know!

4. You are reading the endnotes correctly. [Actually they were footnotes in the original.] But you are interpreting that information incorrectly.

I started work on the dissertation several years prior to graduation; but, before submitting my dissertation material for review, I double checked my sources to make sure those links were still live.

I performed that taks about the same date. This is why it gave you the impression that I had done the research in one day! Wow! I wish I could have performed such feat!

You can ask my wife, and she will testify that I struggled with my dissertation for ages. Those Internet links bear the same or similar date for said reason.

I did not want to submit material which my dissertation committee could not double check and verify because the sources had evaporated, which is quite common in cyberspace

I will continue answering your many questions and comments in my next posting. I need to tale a break and I don't want what I have already typed to be lost in cyberspace!

Alexander:

I will try to answer a few additional questions you posted for me:

5. Yes the material I relied on was what you call "secondary." I do not label said information as secondary or "hearsay." It includes articles written by recognized authors and also the opinions of many individuals who had written to the publishers expressing their personal opinions about abortion.

There is a reason why I chose to rely on this type of materrial. My objective, which I stated in my dissertation proposal, was limited to finding out whether the Adventist claim was a valid one or not. The Adventist Church had claimed to be pro-life. This was a shocker to me, and I wanted to find out whether our official Guidelines of Abortion accurately represented what the majority of those who had written about the morality of abortion between 1970 and 2006 were thinking about the issue.

If you read the conclusions I reached, you will discover that my instinct had led me right. The official Guidelines of Abortion did not represent the thinking of the majority of those who had stated their opinions in black and white in the SDA literature I examined.

This is not to say that my conclusions are set in cement. Other investigators may reach conclusions that negate the results of my research. I realy hope that others will take the time to do this. If I am wrong, I am the first one interested in finding this out!

For some reason, my connection with your previous posting is not accessible, for which reason I will take another break!

Alexander:

I will resume the task of trying to answer some of the remaining questions you posted for me.

6. I believe that the best way of verifying the credentials of my dissertation committee is by contacting A.J.U. They should have all this documentation in their files.

7. You rightly state that "laity don't have an equal say in the church." This was confirmed by my investigation.

If you check the conclusions I reached at the end of my research, you will discover that I found out that two thirds of the SDA authors of the articles published in the publications and books I relied on belonged to the pro-choice position of abortion, while the opposite is true about those who had their opinions published in the same.

I intrepret this to mean that the intelligentsia of of the SDA is pro-choice, while the rest of Adventists seem to be pro-life. In addition, it should be noted that the American official position on abortion is not shared by Adventists in other Divisions of the world.

In fact, as I have already stated, I received a confirmation of this from Dr. Ronald Noltze who assured me that the hospitals under his supervision in South America, Europe, and Africa did not provide abortion services while he was in charge of those institutions.

This means that the SDA pro-choice/pro-abortion position on abortion is an American phenomenon. The same physician assured me that there exist documents veryfying this in other Divisions. I would be glad to share this with you when it becomes available to me.

8. I agree with you that trying to estimate the thinking of the SDA community by relying of isolated statements is not a sure way of validating a research hypothesis.

Dr. Geral Winslow conducted a survey of Adventist hospitals a few years ago, and he was disappointed with the results, because in a survey, only a fraction of those included in the study take the time to respond.

This led me to believe, that analyzing everything that had been stated in the leading Adventist literature during the three decades since abortion was legalized was probably a more reliable way of estimating the heart and soul of Adventism as it relates to the killing of the unborn.

9. I agree with you that dividing the writers and labelling them as pro-choice and pro-life is rather subjective. The problem is that if I had attempted to rely on a survey, the results would have been even more problematic, I believe.

10. You wondered why my personal articles were never published. I am glad you brought this up. I will answer this in my next posting!

Alexander:

I am ready to try to wrap this up.

10. You wanted to know why the articles I included in chapter XI of my dissertation were never published by Adventist publishers. The reason is very simple. Back in the nineties, the editor of the Loma Linda University Church Newsletter included a critical editorial ridiculing the activities of pro-lifers. I aksed for equal time. This was denied on the excuse that abortion was a controversial issue.

I complained to the Pastor, and argued that the Sabbath has been a controversial issue since the beginning of the Adventist movement, and the same was true about smoking. Nevertheless, this did not prevent us from using a ton of ink on those controversial subjects.

I got nowhere. Later on, both David Larson and Erwin Taylor asked me to write about my favorite subject. I did and submitted it for publication. I am still waiting for them to publish it.

Then it occurred to me to submit to the Adventist Review an article dealing with a non-controversial topic. It was approved, and I received a $50 dollar check for the submission. I am still waiting for them to publish it. I realized that at that rate, I would be six feet under if I continued to wait for Adventists to published anything I were to submit.

One day I leafed through Spectrum and Adventist today, and I noticed that after each author, there was a Ph.D. title printed. I realized then and there that I would probably never be published by Adventists on a controversial subject like abortion.

I decided to enroll in a Ph.D. program for the sole purpose of eventually getting published. I also designed my own web page: http://www.sdaforum.com, which allowed me to publish my own articles in the meantime.

Recently, when Erwin Taylor discovered that I was on the verge of finishing my doctoral dissertation, he came to my office and asked me to submit another article dealing with abortion. This time my submission was published.

11. Regarding your final comments about waterboarding torture. I agree with what you stated.

It's been a pleasure answereing your questions. If there is more, please let me know!