I was watching a video from one of the more prominent YouTube Athiests the other day. A lot of these goes are pretty obnoxious, although a couple of them make some worthwhile points. As I've said before, a truly religious person should probably agree with an atheist about 99% of the time since having faith in a single religion precludes the possibility of other religions being correct. (For some reason, athiests don't always seem to get this subtle point.)
Anyhow, the athiest in question was Pat Condell, and he was condemning a recent UN motion to make defamation of religion a globally recognized hate crime. The motion in question seems to be led by Muslim countries, making the whole thing seem very suspicious...especially since Islam isn't known for its tolerance towards other religions (consider my previous point about where the faithful and the faithless seem to agree).
On this point, I agree with Condell. As much as I love the Church, it seems a very dangerous thing to outlaw defamation of it. We see how well history has treated the burning of heretics and blasphemers.
In our post-Enlightenment age, we have to hope that the Truth of the Church to shine on its own rather than rely on punitive laws to silence oppositional views.
So what does this have to to with Aragorn?
In the course of his video, Condell takes a pot shot at the Church's position regarding abortion and how it relates to the recent story of a 9-year old Brazilian girl who was the victim of rape. According to news outlets, the local archbishop excommunicated the girls mother and doctor when they pursued an abortion.
Now the anti-religion gang is using this to argue a flaw in Church logic. How can they publicly excommunicate a mother and doctor who are trying to save a nine year old's life by preventing an obviously dangerous pregnancy, and yet not publicly excommunicate the rapist.
It's another sign of how excommunication is little understand in popular culture, just as when the media had a freakout over the pope attempting to lift the excommunication on a heretic who happened to also be a Holocaust denier.
It is as if people think the Church is more okay with rape but not abortion...when it should be painfully obvious that this is not true.
Early in the Two Towers, Aragorn faces a dilemma. All of the hobbits have gone missing. Two have fled on their own with the Ring. Two have been abducted by orcs. Searching for one party necessitates the abandonment of the other. Aragorn can't make a choice with betraying his pledge to one of the two groups.
Sometimes, the world leaves us with only evil choices. Such is the case with frozen embryos. Implanting them is gravely immoral. Letting them die is gravely immoral. There is no good action.
Such is the case with this nine year old girl. It is mortal sin to kill the baby within her; but it also seems gravely sinful to knowingly allow a nine-year old to undergo a pregnancy that very well may kill her. Yet, if the Church recommends abortion in this case, then it would create a scandal...a confusion that could lead to even more death. The public excommunication makes clear the Church's position. It is to preserve the consistency of Church teaching that leads the Church to excommunicate. It is not as if those who are excommunicated cannot ever be reunited with the Church so long as they renounce their now public views regarding abortion.
This, then, hopefully explains why the Church hasn't felt the need to publicly excommunicate the rapist. Assumably, this scumbag, who was the girl's stepfather, hasn't made a public declaration that rape is morally acceptable. If Catholics were, by the millions, voting to legalize rape and making public expressions defending rape, the Church would surely step in and start dishing out excommunications.
It is unfortunate that the archbishop is quoted as saying the father would not be expelled from the Church. I can only assume he means formally expelled, since, as any Catholic should know, rape divorces him from any relationship with God until he receives absolution.
The other hitch that seems to stand in the way of critics of the Church is the archbishop's defense that the abortion is a graver sin than the rape since it is the taking of life.
This statement does not lend itself well to this attention-deficient age of soundbites and YouTube clips. It sounds cold and dismissive of the barbarity of rape. Still, it is philosophically true. It is also Augustine's argument against Lucretia's suicide after her rape -- that her violator, Tarquin, did a heinous thing in assaulting her, but that her own murder of an innocent woman (herself) is even worse. (It is worth noting, however, that the archbishop spoke against the mother and the doctor, not the nine-year old girl herself.)
The fact of the matter is, however, that there was no good or right choice to be made in the case of this girl. It is one of the consequences of the horrible sin of rape that it creates such scenarios where only evil could be done. Should the Archbishop spoken in support of the abortion, he would have created global scandal and perpetuated the sin...encouraging in others. If he had remained completely silent, he would have bred confusion and seemed to have supported this abortion as a precedent. If he speaks out against it, he seems to be cruelly honest.
In the end, Aragorn goes in search of the hobbits that had no say in their fate, leaving Frodo and Sam to fend for themselves as they clearly chose to break from the Fellowship on their own. Merry and Pippin are the more defenseless, the more helpless...and it was the most helpless victims that the archbishop sought out
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