The anti-abortion movement focuses on one thing, the sanctity of human life. And if they are right, that each new life deserves a chance to be born, then that is not affected AT ALL by whether or not the mother was raped.

And if you bring up the standard "rape exception" point about the mother's mental state, then that's still tricky as hell. If she doesn't want to raise the child, can't she just put it up for adoption the same way that anti-abortion advocates think that EVERY OTHER abortion seeker should put their kids up for adoption?

And if abortion is "murder", and rape victims are allowed to "murder" their "children" in order to spare the mother from the emotional trauma of carrying her rapist's child for nine months, then once again we're back to square one. The woman's "feelings" are justification for "murdering" a "person". In which case, we're STILL left with the situation in which it's okay to murder babies as long as the mom has a reason for not wanting it. And if we're going that route, then we're right back to abortions for every woman who wants one.

Well, my personal reason for believing in a God is basically rooted in speculation about the origins of the Big Bang. Scientists currently believe that some fourteen-odd billion years ago, the universe was an infinitely small singularity that then expanded, with space expanding along with the matter within it. One of the fundamental laws in the world is the conservation of energy, stating that the amount of energy in a closed system must be constant. Since Einstein showed that energy is fundamentally interchangable with mass (which was proven to be true through the atomic bombs), this also means that the total mass (and energy) in a closed system must be constant - that is, mass cannot come from nothing and it cannot go into nothing; it can only be converted into energy (and theoretically back again, although I believe that has never happened).

Thus, it can reasonably be concluded that the universe did not create itself, so we can only make one of two conclusions:

1. The universe must have always existed; or

2. The universe must not be a closed system (i.e., something external to it could have added what exists from outside).

We know that since the Big Bang happened in the first place that the singularity must not have been stable, which thus rules out the possibility of that singularity existing as a singularity forever prior to the Big Bang. Therefore, the only other option for #1 to be true is for the universe to be an endless oscillation of Big Bangs and Big Crunches. However, current scientific knowledge is that the universe's expansion is not slowing down, but rather is speeding up, which makes it likely that the universe will only become more and more filled with empty space rather than coming back together.

If the universe has not always existed, which seems likely to me given current scientific knowledge, then the only other conclusion is that the universe is not a closed system, in which case all bets are off.