You seem to have some kind of blockage against accepting the fact that a fetus isn't a person.
In order to protect that fetus from its mother's action, you have to override the mother's will and violate her personal boundaries.
You have NO RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING WHATSOEVER TO A FETUS THAT IS STILL INSIDE ITS MOTHER'S WOMB. But _she_ has the unalienable right to do with it whatever she chooses to do, because it's her tissue. Every single molecule of that thing got to it by way of Mom's mouth (and nose).
Once it escapes, it's free game, because it's identifiable as a separate being, and then all of your laws apply to it, except for the unconstitutional ones.
There's a difference between "one pregnant person" and "two people".
Hell, even the religions call it "the Miracle of childbirth".
So, what's the secular purpose of forcing pregnant girls to carry it to full term and assume the responsibility for its upkeep for the next
20 years or so?
Is that their punishment for getting caught sinning? Doesn't sound very secular to me. Especially since they usually wind up on the dole, and you're making the taxpayers pay for their upkeep.
And what's the secular purpose of forbidding people to donate their own cells for research?
I made no such logical mistake. Richard said that the US shouldn't be allowed to legislate something because that something was "religious faith." The proscription against "bearing false witness" is also a Commandment, but that doesn't keep it from being basic to common law.
I suppose his real position is that a viable fetus is just a piece of meat, and that only religious fundamentalists would ever consider it to be anything else. My position is that even atheists can have ethics and can feel responsibilities beyond the needs of their own hedonism.
All concepts of basic rights are superstition, in that there's no proof they have a basis in fact. And if you don't believe in anything, you don't have a lot of basis to complain that other people do.
The mystical part comes from the nature of the complex stuff that you claim is happening, at the stage that it has to happen, such as invoking a mechanism for evaluating "quality" within the genome, when the genome can't tell what any specific gene does, nor how it does it.
You want the geneome to have the processing power of a brain - without any visible form or short or medium term memeory - and some way of relating to the outside world.
Find a mechanism that can work in the context of the early embryo and you may start talking scientific hypotheses, but at the moment your story is all thin smoke and unconvincing mirrors.
When I hold up my hand in front of my face and wiggle my fingers I've got eyes to see the fingers, a brain to recognise the visual pattern as fingers and a complicated signalling system (that took a couple of years to come to fruition while I was still an infant) to allow the brain to relate to the fingers and wiggle them.
None of this bulky and expensive hardware is available to the genome, which basically represents a program that describes how to build this hardware. You are confusing the program with the the computer.
Agreed! I have no problem with others seeking an abortion, but it would trouble me deeply if it were in my family.
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I don't think they should be forced to be "baby makers." (Honestly, this is a bunch of men sitting here arguing about what really isn't about our own bodies.)
My take is a practical one, though. We have a population here with about 1/3rd of it either fundamentalist or darned close to that. Something Europeans can't begin to fathom well, I sometimes think. But it is real and the rest of us need to deal with it. Somehow, we must find a way to get along. I don't know where a negotiated line should be drawn and where all the exceptions might be placed, but I really don't want to find myself preparing to shoot my neighbor before they get around to shooting me. The US civil war was over strongly held beliefs and profit (which the evangelical Christian orgs are all about, near the top, as far as I'm concerned.) And I'm not wanting to see our political system mired forever in this debate. I want to get past it, somehow.
Exactly how, I don't know. But I think we should engage in a serious debate about it with an eye to a compromise that can keep us from getting together on other important issues or worse, blowing folks up as has already been happening.
Nope. I hope you are addressing yourself to someone else. I don't recognize the concept of sin.
I do think, as I said earlier, that women need to have enough time to make rational, informed decisions about their own lives in a timely way. Period. And this is about their life. No one has the right to order them to stay pregnant. That decision _must_ remain an option that the woman has control over.
However, practicality dictates that the damaging presence of so many fundamentalists here in the US must still be dealt with. I suspect that a line can be placed that is far enough out in time that a woman retains absolute control over her body. She can inform herself and make a rational choice. But after making a choice and waiting long enough, or by not exercising her ability to make a choice earlier, I could imagine coming to some accomodation with fundamentalists and Catholics on some point in time where she loses the option.
I wouldn't like it that much as I support increasing options to women and mothers, rather than reducing them. But we've got a problematic group in the US. And they are powerful. So when they scream for attention, folks have to react like it or not.
Well, what you are going on about is beyond me. It's not about what I wrote, I don't think.
Agreed. But that's not the big problem I see. What I really care about is the children, themselves. I want them to have good homes and a decent chance at life. I'm not nearly as concerned about the comfort of adults, who can largely fend for themselves. So I probably take your position, but with different priorities in mind.
Modern Republican policy makes no sense to me. You'd have to ask those folks. My guess is that they are catering to a group they despise for the votes and that about sums it up. But they can speak for themselves, I suppose.
Frankly, I don't know why you brought in the point you did. Rich's point was about legislating religious belief. To counter it, you made your statement which still reads (even after your disagreement with me about the logic) exactly the same to me. In other words, you appear to me to be arguing by saying that:
since "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a religious thing, we shouldn't be allowed to make any murder a crime. Or stealing, for that matter.
Hey! In fact, you did just argue that way. Still reads just the same as before. I don't see your point, except as arguing as I suggested.
So let me put it another way. A law against murder is quite secular. It does not invoke the Constitutional prohibition just because it also happens to be found in some organized superstitions, as well. The fact that it occurs in some religious circles doesn't make it religious. It's primary role is a legitimate and secular function. If it happens to accidentally also serve a religious purpose, fine. But the main thing is that it's prima facie purpose is secular.
See US Supreme Court decisions in Lemon v. Kurtzman and Larkin v. Grendel's Den for a couple of good treatises on the subject. By the way, any relation?
Atheists aren't any different than anyone else in terms of "responsibilities beyond the needs of their own hedonism."
I meant organized superstition. Sorry about not clarifying that.
The problem comes, as I've said repeatedly, I do not assign external _Truth Value_ to my internally held beliefs -- those that are immune to evidence or where I have not yet comprehensively weighed the evidence that exists. I expect the same from those who would impose laws upon me, too. In that sense, I'm very libertarian of mind.
This sums me up, too. My youngest child wasn't expected and my wife and I could have made the decision for an abortion. But it also troubled us deeply and we were in a position to choose to keep him. I cannot express in words how glad we are for that decision. Suffice it that he's beyond wonderful to just be around.
But I also cannot tell others how to live their lives in this regard. They must make their own informed choices. If I were to insist on them making birth choices "my way," then I'd also be responsible for forcing my will upon them and thus responsible for all of the attendant consequences. And if I am to fairly insist that they are responsible for their own choices, then they must actually be making those choices.
DNA is the tape in the Turing machine. The cellular RNA and the enzymes in the cell are the computer that builds the output that is eventually you or me.
A Turing machine really can do anything that any other computer can do
- not necessarily all that quickly - but it can't invent it own input.
In order for the genome to be processed in any kind of clever way, the Turing machine would have to be getting input on what the various genes do, how they do it, and how this works in the real world. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this kind of information ever gets written into the junk DNA in the genome - it would lead to Lamarlian rather than Darwinian evolution, and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which doesn't seem to happen.
How can you presume to know that? I have no argument against enzymes, except to note that DNA directs the synthesis of them too, and some of those enzymes modify DNA itself. It's a system.
What you're saying is that DNA is not allowed to execute mechanisms which are too complex for you to understand, or to imagine.
...the US isn't supposed to be allowed to legislate it. "Congress shall make no law establishing religion..."
To which you responded:
...since "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a religious thing, we shouldn't be allowed to make any murder a crime. Or stealing, for that matter...
I assume that you took Rich on face value. He has been pretty honest about his own position, you know. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to parse his words.
I'm going to keep this in front of you, when you respond, until you can make sense of it.
I don't think there is anyone here confused about Rich's comment. However, you seem to insist on refraining from explaining your point. Why not try a straight forward, honest statement from the heart, for grins. Might do a wonder of good.
How does your reply "demonstrate" the "silliness" of what Rich wrote and I just quoted, above?
Rich said that since prohibiting the destruction of a fetus was a religious position, Congress was therefore prohibited by the constitution from enacting such a provision into law. Isn't that what he said?
I pointed out that if that were so, a number of other "religious" things, like prohibitions against theft and prejury, couldn't be enacted into law, either.
If that's not what he meant, maybe he can explain exactly whet he did mean. He also used the "born in the USA" right to citizenship as an indicator that fetuses have no protection under law, and he did that in a manner that looks plainly wrong to me.
I think what he really meant is that, if a religious person believes something, he's opposed to it. Lots of people here obviously agree with him on that.
Any decision that involves life and death *should* be difficult and is worth agonizing over. What disturbs me is people who have easy, absolutist answers for questions about when life begins, or when it should be ended.
I see how you read it -- in a kind of absolutist way.
Although I cannot speak for Rich, I can speak more broadly about the arguments here in the US. In the US, the arguments for a _complete_ prohibition of willful abortion are essentially religious. I have managed to miss hearing arguments that weren't, anyway. I took Rich to be discussing those arguments.
So I gather you believe that Rich was arguing that _any_ prohibition at all is a religious position. I concede he may have meant that. I don't know, though. I just failed to read his words that way. Could be my fault.
My own position (since I'm trying to encourage you to state your position honestly and without obfuscation, in what may only be a demonstration of futility) is that insisting on the ability to abort right up to the moment that a birth takes place with the intent to keep the child alive probably has moral complications, as I'm sure you'd generously point out. Beyond that, it seems wrong to proceed that far, then to just kill the child because of a sudden change of heart. There is hardly a difference between killing a child still in the womb minutes before and killing the child minutes later, once breathing on its own. So if we objectively decide that one is wrong, one must seriously question saying that the other is still okay.
We need to seek an honest stance in this, though.
And that is where you departed, I think.
Let's say that Rich was arguing, for sake of argument, that all prohibitions (even those only against 3rd trimester, let's say) are religious ones. This might very well have meant only that Rich believes (1) that all such laws are based upon religious arguments. Wrong or right, that is NOT the same thing as saying (2) that all religious dogma is against the law and that therefore so is abortion prohibitions.
The two are different statements, though the effect may at some moment in time seem similar. If Rich is saying (1), then all you need do is show evidence of a single prohibition against abortion that is NOT primarily religious in character. You've made your point, then. If Rich is saying (2), then perhaps your point would apply.
I didn't see it that way then, though, and I still don't. But thanks for the clarification, because I can see from where you were getting things.
Perhaps he will.
I remember. And you countered.
I think that debate should be set aside, unless it is possible to go research letter exchanges and state-by-state ratification debate records by those signing the Constitution to see if they dealt specifically with this and if today we can look back at that to adduce their true intent on this issue when signing. I haven't focused on it, myself, and can't recall anything on it coming to mind. So I don't expect this to be an easy chore. Other than doing that research, we have to accept the issue as moot and leave it there, finding another "hook to hang our hats on."
I cannot imagine Rich arguing that. It would serve to undermine other positions he's taken.
In any case, I don't believe anyone here will argue that anything and everything ever found in any religious organization as an ethic or moral or bit of dogma must, a priori, be always concluded as being primarily religious instead of secular.
I directed you to two US Supreme Court decisions. One of them carries your sirname, in fact. You didn't clarify whether or not that one was any relationship to you. (I'm still interested in your answer to that.) In any case, the two cases illustrate what I believe is an excellent stand to take on religion. Rather than quote them at length (yes, I have them handy and am reading them right now), I'll put my own spin on them and paraphrase (you are free to read them and show me my errors if you like):
In Lemon v. Kurtzman, laws must (1) have a secular legislative purpose; (2) the primary effect of law must be to neither advance nor inhibit religion; and (3) law must avoid "excessive government entanglement with religion." Now keep in mind that Lemon accommodates religious purposes in this sense -- a law's purpose need not be exclusively secular. Only it's primary effect should be secular. But it is perfectly fine to benefit religion _slightly_ and/or just happens to harmonize with the tenets of some religion or another. I think this is an eminently excellent stand to take.
In Engle v. Vitale (1962, and I didn't cite this one), elaborated by saying that one thing that _is_ unconstitutional is "sponsorship or encouragement of prayer by public school authorities." I think this may generally go to the idea that is then continued out more fully in what I did cite to you, namely Larkin v. Grendel's Den, where the US Supreme Court essentially said that what is unconstitutional about Engle v. Vitale (and other situations) is due to the idea of the Establishment Clause forbidding "the mere appearance of a joint exercise of legislative authority by Church and State [which] provides a significant symbolic benefit to religion." The idea here is that religion may not be seen to be "cloaking itself in the respectable garp of government." The reverse is also true, of course.
All of this is a very right and proper view, to my mind. It's an example of brilliant analysis, in fact.
All this comes down to:
If abortion law is simply about caving in to religious dogma and does not possess a legitimate, secular legislative purpose, it's quite simply unconstitutional. So find the secular legislative purpose, make it neither hinder nor advance religion, avoid an excessive entanglement (here, I'm thinking of what happened in Larkin v. Grendel) between government and religion, and don't make it so that religions appear garbed in the respectable cloak of government and government isn't cloaked in the respectable garb of religion.
Except in war, I suppose, where hesitation may mean your own death. And I'm sure there are other exceptions.
But I take your general point here.
I sure don't. To me, the very term "life" cannot be scientifically answered. It's a concept about which we simply do not have the perspective to know. We bandy it about as though we do, just like we bandy about the concept of someone who is "perfectly good" or the idea of an "immovable object meeting an unstoppable one." We can use the words and imagine we know what we are saying. But we have no real idea, and certainly no objective theory about it. But we can come to agreement for a time.
I think it would be interesting to invest in research to study the idea of "life." There is a concept of self-organization in nature that can be made objective, I believe, in the sense that nature itself determines the meaning and not humans arguing with each other. And it may need some other objective concepts pulled into a whole thing that we can then objectively describe as "life." Keep in mind that if we do this, it will no longer be a matter we can simply debate and come to definitions over, but one which we must allow nature to decide itself with us only following what future evidence and science knowledge shows us. In other words, we will no longer be in control of the term. Like the meaning of what an atom is, isn't about our definitions but instead about what nature shows us and what our current scientific theories are about the subject. And those change as theory and result progress. But at least it will be objective.
Until then, the word "life" is only what we decide to make it mean, forced upon the word by edict and fiat.
In this portion, I'm addressing myself to the current term 'life' in common use. And I'm saying that we simply do not have the perspective to decide now some absolute and perfect meaning for the word that will not change because our definition is "true no matter what the future will bring us." We just can't know that much. We are only human, after all.
But we can allow ourselves to discover where nature itself draws lines. It's just that if we do that, we will have to allow that current science theory and experimental result will carry the day, then. I'm not sure people are really ready for that.
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