Reply #76: Her purported 'moral guidance system' had little to do with what she did. [View All]

[Philostopher]

It took me a while to figure out where you were going with it, Walt, but I think I did finally catch on -- please feel free to tell me if I missed your point, here, but I think I get it.

Saying that whatever adopted moral guidance system she claimed to follow was the cause of her committing this gruesome act is parallel to blaming Islam for terrorism or atheism for totalitarianism just because some terrorists call themselves Muslims or some totalitarian dictators have called themselves atheists.

Individual acts of oppression and murder usually come from individual oppressors or murderers; societal or cultural acts of cruelty may come from the manipulation of large gullible groups, but they're usually still started by an individual or group of individuals -- they don't come out of the individual's belief system, but out of psychological, social or cultural short-circuits in the individuals themselves.

Which is to say this woman may well have been a Christian, but it wasn't why she murdered a pregnant woman and performed an impromptu C-section on the corpse to steal what became, when it left its mother's body, a baby she very much wanted.

And Stalin may well have been an atheist, but it wasn't atheism that caused him to corrupt the communist political philosophy into a totalitarian regime.

It would seem only sensible, but it's awfully easy to whip people into a frenzy over such things -- it wouldn't be fair to blame Christianity for her behavior any more than it is to blame Islam for terrorists or atheism for Stalin.