Zombie Epicurus to Mourdock: use your braaaains

By now, you’ve probably thrown up a little in your mouth over the latest Republican to say something horrifyingly contemptuous about rape in defense of forced pregnancy legislation.

This week’s gray-faced man in a two-dollar haircut is some dingleberry Indiana senate candidate named Richard Mourdock. His view is that the federal government exists as some corporeal arm of divine will, albeit an arm that’s extremely limited when it comes to non-uterus-related functions, such as biblical banking regulations, because FREEDOM!

Explicating this view, a heavily-jowled Mourdock spewed the following:

“I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

A metric gigaton of sane people immediately pointed out that such an belief entails that God intended that particular (and presumably illegitimate) rape itself to happen.

Epicurus pointed out the problem Mourdock is trying to weasel out of quite awhile back.

Is this God able to prevent rape, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

If God can intend and actively intercedes on behalf of embryos, and is otherwise omnipotent and intentional in his intercessions, then presumably he can prevent rape. He is able, but not willing.

Preserving omnipotence requires a god that is completely indifferent to whether a woman is raped, yet waits in the wings/fallopian tubes of the raped woman, gently coaxing the individual sperms along until the one that’s going to cure cancer burrows safely into the egg. God personally cross-stitches it into the endometrium.

Then God politely bows out again, helpless to stop a woman from getting minor outpatient surgery and thwarting his divine will, except by inspiring gray-faced men to take up the mantle of controlling women on God’s behalf.

Is God willing to prevent rape, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Mourdock has since clarified: “”God creates life, and that was my point,” Mourdock said in a statement. “God does not want rape, and by no means was I suggesting that He does. Rape is a horrible thing, and for anyone to twist my words otherwise is absurd and sick.”

So he is willing, but not able, to prevent rape.

He can’t be both able and willing to prevent rape, otherwise there would not be rape. And if he’s neither able nor willing, then he’s not much of a god.

Pick one of the two, Mourdock.

Can we ever solve the dilemma of a weak or malevolent biblical God?

Yes! You can read the friggin’ book yourself.

As it turns out, the god of the bible is on record as not only intending rape, but actively employing it as a humiliating punishment! Examples of God directly involved in choreographing rapes litter the bible, but perhaps the most explicit is in 2nd Samuel 12:11-14, where God, all in a snit over the whole Bathsheba incident, decides the best way to punish David is to give his wives (who were essentially his sex slaves) to his neighbor to rape in broad daylight.

11 Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.

12 For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.

13 And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.

14 Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die.

Nice stuff, eh?

Then for good measure, God murdered David and Bathsheba’s son. “Absurd and sick,” indeed, Mr. Mourdock, but I’m not the one who worships it.