Hi there. It’s me, God. You may know me as the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe and everything, or maybe just from my runaway bestseller: The Bible.
I’m inundated with prayers and emails for writing help day and night, and now for the first time, I am opening the gates of heaven to reveal some of my most miraculous and carefully guarded writing secrets.
We’re going to start with some basics: how to make a clear ethical point that won’t be misinterpreted.
This is my bread and butter, and the sales numbers prove I nailed it.
Let’s dive in by looking at my number-one ethical priority: abortion. As every congressional Republican and megachurch pastor knows (they just get me), I oppose abortion in all its forms, and I needed that to hit readers like a ton of bricks every time they opened the Bible.
So how did I do it? Here’s where the divine genius comes in. I made sure to include almost nothing about abortion in the whole Bible.
See what I’m getting at here? You have to make the reader do the work. People may think they want direct, forthright statements, but what they really want is a scant handful of vague and dubiously relevant passages they have to cobble together into some semblance of a coherent argument like patterns in the red string on a conspiracy wall.
I know a lot of people think that abortion was invented like yesterday, but women have been managing their own reproductive lives since I created women and reproductive lives. When it came to abortion: they were doing it, I knew they were doing it, and I needed them to stop doing it. This is why I didn’t tell them to stop doing it. Something like that would have just muddled everything up.
Instead, I just laid out my position on the rights of fetuses as clearly as I could. Naturally, a statement on fetal personhood would have been too bland and uninspiring, so I penned some sweet lyrics about how I knit people together in their mothers’ wombs. Get it? Like tiny embryonic sweaters. The analogy works because babies and sweaters are the same. Once you knit the first loop, a ball of yarn becomes a sweater with all the legal and social rights of a fully knitted sweater. Just like an egg becomes a baby the second it’s fertilized. Exactly. The. Same.
Throw that in the mix with my habit of telling prophets I chose them before they were born, some of my favorites wishing they’d died before they were born, and a pregnant woman feeling her baby kick, and you can see my position on the rights of fetuses clearer than if I’d written FULL PERSONHOOD AND ITS ATTENDANT RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES ARE CONVEYED AT THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION in the sky with ten-cubit-tall letters of blazing angelic flame.
But just in case anyone wasn’t getting it, I made it extra clear in my laws and commandments. Not by making any direct mention of or regulation on abortion itself, of course, but by dancing around the topic with weirdly specific and tangentially related case laws.
Like what if some guys are brawling and accidentally hit a pregnant woman? If that causes a miscarriage, they have to pay a fine. If they injure or kill the woman herself? They pay an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, because I value them exactly the same.
Or what if a guy suspects that his wife’s been stepping out on him with his hot neighbor, and he’s worried that little sweater she’s knitting isn’t for him, if you know what I mean? I help clear that up with a convenient ritual: bring her out in public, make her swear an oath, then give her a bitter potion to drink. If that baby’s not her husband’s, I guarantee the potion will terminate her pregnancy right then and there, in front of me and everybody.
Okay, so maybe that last one sounds like a magical, abortion-inducing paternity test—and maybe, technically, it is a magical, abortion-inducing paternity test—but at least it’s not going to give anyone the wrong idea about women’s autonomy, right?
That’s why it’s such brilliant writing. I made my overall “no abortions ever” argument stronger by including instructions for an actual abortion—I just put it in a context so disturbing and uncomfortable that no one on either side of the debate would ever want to talk about it, ever.
Bottom line: I could think of no more compelling way to communicate how much I, the LORD God Almighty, personally oppose abortion than writing nearly a half million words with like seven oblique references to fetuses and one ritual that helps paranoid cucks misdirect their internalized aggression and self-loathing. Once you look past the literally nine hundred passages that warn against accumulating wealth or oppressing the poor and vulnerable, the many statements that the most important thing is to love each other, and all the stories and genealogies and stuff I put in there as filler, it’s clear that my top ethical priority is condemning abortion. It’s there plain as day in clues that are fewer and farther between than red-state abortion clinics.