Yesterday I heard a couple of stories in the media about the Christian owned businesses and schools that are suing the government over our right not to fund abortions. The arguments against the lawsuit seemed to be that corporations aren’t people so they don’t have the freedom of religion and the slippery slope argument of what will the religious people object to next, vaccinations?
Neither of these arguments seem weighty enough to ask someone to violate their conscience and pay for the destruction of human life. And Christians have always thought so. I was reading again Rodney Stark’s superb The Rise of Christianity this morning and found this timely paragraph that Athenagoras wrote to the emperor Marcus Aurelius (p. 125):
“We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion…[for we] regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care…and [we do not] expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child murder” (Plea, chapter 35).
Their website problems may have been a surprise, but anyone who was paying attention to the last 2,000 years would have known that our lawsuits were coming.
Mike Wittmer 
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