Along the same lines...

Just to ramble a little more along the same lines as my last post:

The anti-choice crowd quotes one particular Bible verse almost more than any other when they want to "prove" that God is anti-abortion. It's Jeremiah 1:5 and it goes like this:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.

I posted the whole verse, but italicized the part that the anti-choice groups really use (I've never heard them actually use the entire verse).

Now, I see where they're coming from so don't try and explain it to me, but it still doesn't make any sense, and their argument doesn't hold any water. Supposedly, according to them, this verse gives proof that God knows all humans before they are born and ascribes personhood and souls to said humans before they are born (even though the verse says nothing about that, just that God "knows" a person).

BUT...

Christians believe that God is all-knowing, right? (Yes, they do.) So if God knows everything and is aware of everything, then this verse doesn't really mean all that much. I mean, God knew 10,000 years ago that in the year 3000 A.D. a crippled cricket will be born in New Mexico in the rain at 2:37 p.m. (Just an example... I, for one, am not omniscient.) He knows everything that there is to know, from the most mundane thing, like a deformed leaf falling from a tree at exactly 5:33 a.m. on May 19th in the year 1933, to the most intricate things, like human beings.

And this doesn't even go into the fact that God was speaking to a specific person during a specific event in this verse. That's a whole 'nother issue there.

So the big lynchpin of the anti-choice Biblical argument holds little to no water. They'll have to do a lot better, and unless they find some long lost books of the Bible that have new verses dealing specifically with abortion, they won't be able to do better.