Sean McDowell

“Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis—the same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable human being—regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life. Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for this young woman was his mother.”
― Sean McDowell, ETHIX: Being Bold in a Whatever World

“We must learn to debate the ideas and the implications  of those ideas without affirming that everyone’s view is equally valid on the one hand or demonizing those with whom we disagree on the other—this is what is truly dangerous for society. Persuasion rather than coercion is the only reasonable way forward.”
― Sean McDowell, Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists