Killing Beethoven

You've probably gotten the e-mail before or seen the scenarios used in arguments about abortion:

A teenage girl is pregnant. She is not married. Her fiance is not the father of the baby, and he is very upset. Would you recommend an abortion?

If you did, you just killed Jesus!

Gah! First, there's the fact that the scenarios are often total distortions of the truth or outright lies (particularly the Beethoven one), then there is of course the immediate comeback of "Well, wouldn't we be better off if Hitler's mom had gotten an abortion?" (which I think is terribly oversimplistic, but whatever, it works as a retort since the entire thing is a bit oversimplistic).

I understand that the point of these scenarios is to point out that you should think about what your unborn child might turn out like in the future, his or her personality or gifts, and take more into account than just your bad situation, since plenty of awesome people have come out of bad situations. However, these little "gotcha!" scenarios seem to take as implicit that what the world gains or loses is more important than the individual personal lives concerned.

Does the world really have the right to demand a Jesus or Einstein or Beethoven from a pregnant woman who doesn't think she can handle it? It's not like we as the entire world do or should be permitted to vote about who is able to or required to enter the world and join the human race. Is a Beethoven (or a Tim Tebow...) owed to us? Of course not. If people really thought this way, they'd be mixing and matching eggs and sperm all over the place, trying every combination so that the world could have as many great artists, leaders, and scientists as physically possible. (Who are we missing out on? Somewhere out there there is a combination that will beget the person who will cure cancer—hurry up and find it!) Obviously this is madness. (I suspect their actual thought process is that God has a plan, and if you abort someone, you could be stymieing his great design for us all. If so, then God's plan isn't very thorough.) It just seems terribly selfish for the world at large to say, "But hey, I like [that guy]! You don't have the right to keep [that guy] from existing and enriching my life." Shut up, world. What did you do to help [that guy] out on his path to awesomeness, and what did you do to deserve [that guy's] contributions to society?

I guess it all eventually leads to perhaps my biggest pet peeve of all: thinking genes are destiny. I mean, obviously had Beethoven never been born, the Ninth Symphony would never have been written (and then what would we hum when something dramatic and foreboding was happening??), but who is to say that Beethoven's particular package of genes is necessarily the package of genes best suited for taking the musical world by storm? Other great musicians would have still come along; music would still have developed, though perhaps in different ways; other great music would perhaps have come to the fore, being less obscured by Beethoven; we would have developed different cultural tropes with different works of music.

More importantly, I'm pretty sure the world already contains plenty of children with the capacity to become great humanitarians, political leaders, writers, medical breakthrough-ers, philosophers, artists, and so forth; maybe we should concentrate on giving them the opportunities to develop those talents rather than sit around hoping that some genius will fall into our laps fully formed (which isn't even what happened in probably any of those cases anyway). If the kids who could cure cancer or make the next mind-twisting scientific discoveries are stuck in really bad schools full of science teachers who don't really understand what they're teaching and don't do a very good job at it, they're probably not going to go on to study science in college because they'll think they're not sciency people. Let's take care of the genius that's already in the world before we worry inordinately about that which could possibly come into the world if people made other decisions.

The value of a human life is supposedly sacred regardless of who that person turns out to be or what they end up doing. These scenarios (though perhaps deliberately so as they are aimed to make the heathen reading them think again) seem to be almost utilitarian: the world is better off with these people in it, therefore they must be born. You'd think those who are pro-life would balk at seeming to make such ends-based calculations; isn't it inherent in the sanctity of life that you respect people as people and don't use them as the means to some other end? Whatever happened to valuing all life as life?

For some other date (perhaps): the world had Jesus never been born.

Eli Eli Lama sabachthani?

Having now been out of Christendom for five or six years, I periodically realize that my entire way of thinking about God, Jesus, the Bible, and any number of related issues has either worn away or entirely changed without my conscious attention. I feel like it's that my old (largely taught and pretty thoroughly ingrained) ways of thinking about things have finally eroded and I'm seeing the whole Christianity thing with fresher eyes, more as someone encountering the whole story and mindset for the first time as an adult than as someone who grew up seeped in it all. I just suddenly think of something and realize that a mere six or ten (or really even two or three, after the big deconversion but before all the erosion) years ago I would have been looking at that from an entirely different perspective and wouldn't have thought to ask any of the questions I am at that point.

So the big thing (for today) that I don't get: why does everyone make such a big deal about what a great sacrifice (in the sense of personal sacrifice, not atoning sacrifice) it was for Jesus to come to Earth as a human and to die an agonizing death for our sins? It seems to me that as an eternal and all-powerful being, if he had chosen not to spend thirty-three of his infinite years saving humanity from itself when he knew it was within his power, it would be pretty selfish and immoral of him.

Seriously. Presumably he knew at the very least that this would be a temporary gig, limited to the span of one normal human life or less, and that when it was over, he would resume his limitless, incorporeal existence of sitting at the right hand of God and ruling over the angels or whatever it is he did before. Of course there was a lot of pain involved, what with being beaten and crucified and such, but I don't really buy the idea that the Son of God is such a wuss that he couldn't handle it. Lots of people were crucified. I'm sure most of them didn't sign up for it voluntarily, true, but most of them were also pretty sure their existence ended when the crucifixion ended (and actually, martyrs have always kind of signed up for that sort of thing). I mean, if I had the opportunity to put my normal, expected life on hold for some number of years; live some chunk of time in crappy, uncomfortable conditions being mocked and reviled and fighting uphill battles trying to enlighten everyone to my (the right) way of thought; die a tortuous death; and then resume my normal, everyday existence none the worse for the wear, even I would do that if I thought it would significantly benefit the world.

So options for the Christian Jesus:
One, it's only a sacrifice from our perspective and was unpleasant but no biggie from his.
Two, since his god-existence is obviously so far beyond our comprehension, it was a huge ordeal for reasons we can't imagine to limit himself to human capabilities. We are so horribly slow and limited that it drove him crazy to live among us and talk to us and perhaps even limit his own mind to the constraints of ours. (I mean, I'd still turn into a barnacle for thirty-three years if I thought I could still get across my agenda...but I guess first I'd have to learn how to communicate in greatly limited barnacle-speech that doesn't actually hold my ideas very well or something, right?)
Three, he still had all his god-thoughts and god-capabilities and had to actively keep himself in check every second for thirty-three years. I can see how that could be a pain, if you were an intelligent being in a tree's body and had to actively restrain yourself from just picking up and walking around or crying out in desperation, "Guys, this is what I was trying to say with all that leaf-rubbing and branch-tapping! Just do this!"
Four, dying is the most awful thing every in the entire universe, even if you get to un-die later and then live forever; something about the experience itself is just unspeakably horrible. (Those resuscitated patients who talk about lights in tunnels and floating and peace obviously would disagree...of course, maybe they didn't really die in the same way.)
Five, it wasn't really informed consent: God the Father didn't tell him the whole story about what he would do and that it would all be back to normal (but better, because he just gave billions of as-yet-unborn people the ability to skip out on the lake of eternal fire thing) when he was done, so he thought he was signing up for something worse than he actually was, and he should be celebrated for the sacrifice he was prepared to make.
Six, his experience of turning into a human and living for so long in the human world (or the death part, or the shouldering the sins of the world part) contaminated him and he did not in fact go back to his regularly scheduled life afterward.
Seven, nobody ever said it was a big sacrifice and people who do say that are misinterpreting the message due to their own human conceptions.

Anything else? Any biblical support for any of these or any other interpretations?