I find it interesting that some people can claim to be pro-life, yet are also pro-gun and advocate the use of deadly force for self-defence.
How can one say that an unborn, speculative life is more valuable than one of a living person? Is one person’s life more valuable than another's? Is the possibility that you could harm or kill an innnocent bystander outweigh your own life?
Additionally, this position puts the value of property higher than that of a human life. Is $40 dollars (or whatever you have in your pocket) worth more than a human life?
If you believe in life, shouldn't non-lethal options be your first choice, rather than your
last.
In most religions there is something called the rule of reciprocity, which is also called the Golden Rule in Christianity. The Golden Rule is arguably the most essential basis for the modern concept of human rights, in which each individual has a right to just treatment, and a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others. The main point of the Golden Rule is that a person attempting to live by this rule treats all people with the same consideration as he would expect to receive, not just members of his or her in-group. The “golden rule” is exemplified in many Christian stories, in particular the Parable of the Good Samaritan. One point that gets missed is that the Samaritans is that the Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along, yet the Samaritan was the only person who helped the traveler.
The rule of reciprocity is tied into the concept of the Sanctity of Life. You are to treat others as you would have them treat you.
Additionally, the sanctity of life is a concept that one believes in. It is, in other words, a moral conviction.
It is a moral conviction about how human beings are to be perceived and treated. Belief in the sanctity of life prescribes a certain way of looking at the world, in particular its human inhabitants (with implications for its non-human inhabitants—a subject for another article). This perception then leads to behavioral implications related to how human beings are to be treated. Moral conviction leads to perception and flows into behavior. Notice that in constructing my understanding of the sanctity of life in this way I am emphasizing worldview dimensions first (convictions), character qualities next (perceptions), and behavioral prescriptions last. I think this is actually how the moral life works.
Another thing to note about this definition is its universality. Rightly understood, the sanctity of life is among the broadest and most inclusive understandings possible of our moral obligations to other human beings.
All human beings are included (each and every human being), at all stages of existence, with every quality of experience, reflecting every type of human diversity, and encompassing every possible quality of relationship to the person who does the perceiving. What all are included in is a vision of their immeasurable worth and inviolable dignity. This means that each of these human beings has a value that transcends all human capacity to count or measure, which confers upon them an elevated status that must not be dishonored or degraded.
This breathtaking and exalted vision of the worth and dignity of human beings is what we mean, or ought to mean, when we speak of the sanctity of life. It is a moral conviction that continually challenges our efforts to weaken it. Yet weaken it we do, whether purposefully or unintentionally. Most often we weaken it when we chafe against the implications of its universality—its vision of the weak, the enemy, the disabled, the stranger, the unborn, the sinner, the poor, the ex-friend, the racial other, or whoever else we find it difficult to include within the community of the truly human.
Every effort to point out someone else’s violations of life’s sanctity implicitly requires us to examine our own fidelity to this exalted and demanding moral norm. This may be why the language of life’s sanctity has perhaps faded from public debate to some extent. Anti-abortion advocates who argued for the sanctity of (unborn) human life were met by anti-poverty advocates who argued for the sanctity of (born but poor) human life. Thoughtful moral theorists recognized that this was precisely right, and that a true understanding of life’s sanctity required a both/and rather than an either/or approach. But this hardly fits the culture wars paradigm. The sanctity of life is not so helpful as a political cudgel after all, which may mean its real value is as a bracing statement of human moral obligation.
Thus one has to admit that being pro-gun with its emphasis on deadly force and shooting first asking questions later is a violation of another's right to life. Work should be made to address the causes of crime rather than to punish or kill someone. Remember the exhortation to love the sinner, but hate the sin.
How can you say choose life, when you would kill another for $40?
See also:
Christianity, The Golden Rule, and Social Justice
Laci the Dog Topics: Right to Life
Isaiah 58
Versions of the Golden Rule in 21 world religions
Am I My Brother's Keeper? | Daily Devotion from Genesis 4:9-16 | RayStedman.org
The Bible on the Poor or, Why God is a liberal
God Calls Us To Show Mercy and Compassion to Our Fellow Man
How Greed Destroys America
Brown, Richard Maxwell No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society, ISBN: 978-0195045109