In a phone interview with writer and director David Altrogge of 3801 Lancaster: American Tragedy, infamous Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell talked about reading the entire Bible in prison. Rather than share a repentant conversion story that one might expect from such an experience, Gosnell surprised Altrogge with quite the opposite sentiment.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATsiRDDNhko]
“My youngest son asked me, ‘Dad, did you do these horrible things that are in the newspaper?’ and I said, ‘Alex, I don’t want to lie to you. I really have to do a lot of reading to feel comfortable that I in fact was on solid ground in my thoughts and my approaches.’ And until I really completed my first Genesis through Revelation reading of the Bible which I did since I was incarcerated, I really didn’t feel as comfortable as I am.
Genesis begins almost – I think it’s Genesis 2:7 expresses the breath of life as the beginning of life. That God breathed breath, breathed life into Adam. The Bible to me is very clear that life does not happen until breath.
I very strongly believe in my innocence, and there are many people who believe that. There are many people who come to me who say that, ‘How could you be this terrible person and people are coming to you for 40 years?’ The story just doesn’t make sense.”
But Gosnell doesn’t think it was wrong to snip the necks of those babies who drew their first breaths after failed abortions?
“If breath is the biblical measure for life, then anyone on a ventilator is biblically dead,” Dan Arsenault, creator of the television show Church for Skeptics, remarks to Live Action News. He continues:
Presumably the life that God breathed into Adam is not the same as Adam breathing it back, nor is there any indication that God breathes equally on every person born. Life in the womb does not require breathing. Life outside the womb does. Since when is the function of lungs the measure of life? Why not a functioning heart, or kidneys? I’m guessing that neither of those were functioning in Adam before God put life into the clay He had molded, either.
Genesis 2:7 says, “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (NASB). The Hebrew word used for “breathed” is naphach, which in Strong’s Concordance means:
a prim. root; to puff, in various applications (lit., to inflate, blow hard, scatter, kindle, expire; fig., to disesteem): – blow, breath, give up, cause to lose [life], seething, snuff.
Furthermore, the word translated as “breath” in that passage is neshamah, among the definitions of which is “divine inspiration, intellect, soul, spirit.”
These obviously indicate that something different from natural inhaling was happening. Yahweh expired some of His very own divine nature into the first human being, and that nature has been imparted to all of Adam’s descendants in our DNA. In Psalm 139, David famously describes personhood in the womb.
Some have mistaken Exodus 21:22 for not equivocating abortion with murder. A closer look at the original wording, however, indicates that the topic in that part of the law is premature birth, not miscarriage.
But if there is any remaining doubt concerning where Scripture stands on the personhood and beginning of human life, the first chapter of Luke removes it. Elizabeth, six months pregnant with John the Baptist, felt him leap within her womb in response to the voice of Mary, who had just conceived Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.
Gosnell’s use of the Bible to defend the murder of the most defenseless among us is truly stunning. Distorting Scripture in order to validate a bloody agenda is nothing new in human history, but it still is a shock to the ear when lives of innocent babies are at stake.
