Legitimate Gifts from a Loving God

My fellow SINners have already weighed in on this story a bit (here and here) but I wanted to get my 2¢ in anyhow. Does anyone really find it surprising that some theists believe God intends pregnancies from rape? Shouldn’t they all believe that?

First off, consider the problem from the perspective of intelligent design. God could have created men such that they can only ever be sexually aroused in the presence of an enthusiastically willing partner, failing that, he could have created women with built-in biological protections against pregnancy in the event of rape, as Todd Akin would have us believe. Surely an unfathomably intelligent and undoubtedly beneficent designer could have come up with some clever way to prevent pregnancies from rape. Instead, according to Bible believers, the Lord God Almighty came up with this ingenious solution to the problem.

Alternatively, we could look at this problem from the perspective of an theistic apologist inclined to theodicy. If an all-powerful and all-good being stands by and allows a rape to happen (as opposed to intervening in any number of possible ways, subtle or overt) we must assume that He has good reasons for doing so which somehow outweigh the emotional trauma. From this perspective, it’s not a huge leap to assuming that a child thus conceived should be seen as a blessing rather than curse.

Finally, we could take the view of a typical American “pro-life” activist: zygotes are people, my friend. As such, they are a blessing from God, axiomatically, full-stop, from the moment the spermatozoön wiggles its way into an ovum. They seem to think that this is somehow grounded in the Bible, to boot, in a poem wherein the Psalmist waxes poetic about his mother’s womb.

Combining these three concepts we get something like the following: God designed all life to work as marvelously just as it does, including pregnancies from rape; God is in total control of everything, at all times, to the greater good; and God mysteriously implants human ‘souls’ in single-celled zygotes. Given the popularity of this cockamamie worldview, it should come as no surprise at all that some Christians actively campaign to help rapists pass on their genes. Such nonsense invariably flows from the gift of faith.