@YJ

Is your profile ASCII supposed to be a chick's ass?

No, it is a beautiful flower, ready to bloom.

To each his own, I suppose.

If you see something else then that just reflects on your dirty mind :P

oh, and above, in the 1st paragraph, I meant pro-lifers, obviously

@abge - It sounds we are actually in agreement. You agree there is a point where abortion is untenable and it is probably somewhere aroud the later part of the 1st or early part of the 2nd trimester.

@dexter - If a heartbeat doesn't get it's signals from the grey matter in the head, then why doe sit stop beatign within moments of the head being cut off? *Something* from up there tells the heart to beat and the lungs to inhale and exhale or our bodies would live on until they bled to death if decaptitated.

@all - In regards to why I gave that specific example... I wasn't using Martha as being representative of all or even a large part of the populace. I was just showing that havign an abortion can be just as emotional and distressing as giving a child up for adoption. The argument abgemacht made was that adoption was a very stressful and emotional option. Abortion is also a very stressful and emotional option. So don't try to trump adoption with abortion on the emotion issue because they both weigh heavily on the woman in the situation.

@ Dexter--The Bible is very clear about 1) God knew you from the moment of conception, which implies that you are a person at that point, and 2) There is an age at which children become morally responsible, which is some years after being born. Implications: 1) Abortion is killing a person. 2) Aborted babies go to heaven, just as children who die young. But just because they aren't mature, aren't morally responsible, doesn't mean they aren't people. Severely retarded people are people, people in comas are people. There's a huge difference between withholding extraordinary measures to artificially sustain a life and actively taking a life.

But if you deny the truth that God exists, if you deny the truths in the Bible, then I conclude that there's very little chance that you will accept other truths either, including the definition of a person.

@ Largeham--God created mankind in his own image, male and female. This means having freedom of choice (free will), with all the terrible consequences of making wrong choices. But my three-pound brain can't come near to completely comprehending the purposes of the God of the universe, so I just have to trust that from all I know of his character, he's doing amazing things that will turn out great in the end.

@ Dexter--Logic is only one of the bases we use to make decisions. Morality is another. And Emotion is the third. Aristotle codified this information as Logos, Ethos, and Pathos over 2,300 years ago.

"Aristotle codified this information as Logos, Ethos, and Pathos over 2,300 years ago."

So, something carriers more weight because an ancient Greek philosopher said it a long time ago? You know what Greek philosophers also said? A fetus isn't considered a child until 40 and 80 days for a boy and girl, respectively.

Old books and philosophers are not at all pertinent to this discussion.

@Mujus - You don't win arguments of real life issues by bringing up religion. Only another believer will accept your argument as being valid. Non-believers just write your argument off as laughable because you are using circular logic ("the Bible is God's word so I believe it", "but how do you know that God exists", "because the Bible says he does"... see how circular that argument is?) and demanding a belief in God in order to make your point reverts back to the circular logic of God's existence to non-believers.

So argue it from a purely logical standpoint. When is the growth inside the womb a life and, without espousing a religious view, why do you feel that way?

@Draugnar, you said: "If a heartbeat doesn't get it's signals from the grey matter in the head, then why doe sit stop beatign within moments of the head being cut off?"

The heart is controlled by the brainstem and spinal cord as part of the autonomic system. This is similar to digestive function and reflexes. I misspoke when I said no gray matter... as there is some small amounts of gray matter in those locations too... but, it is only to control these bodily functions (not unlike a CPU - pretty basic control). No conscious thought occurs outside of the cerebrum. And... I'm sure you've heard of chickens running around with their heads cut off... indeed there was a case of a chicken surviving for 18 months after decapitation - thanks to the brainstem being somewhat intact. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

@Mujus

Like, fulamish, please don't cite things that don't back up your claim and just assume we're too stupid to realize you're pulling a fast one on us. It's very insulting.

Let's look at the *full* quote you referenced from the bible. Jeremiah 1:5

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

God was talking to *one* person: Jeremiah! This in no way supports a pro-life stance. Are we all prophets? No. He was chosen by God specifically. There is no support here to suggest God considers every fetus a living person. FFS, if you're going to cite a fantasy book for support of your cause, you could at least pick parts that actually support you.

No offense meant to religious people who have been very reasonable during this discussion, but I'm sure you can understand how infuriating this whole twisting of bible verses to prove a cause is.

Lots of offense meant to religious people who are incapable of being reasonable in any discussion, because I doubt you could ever understand how ridiculous even attempting to cite a bible verse to prove a cause is.

@YJ - Didn't I just say that, albeit more politely?

@Mujus, what abgemacht and Draugnar said so well.
Aristotle himself, by the way, was *proven* wrong in a number of areas... he is by no means an authority - and, unfortunately got his ideas from only thinking on them rather than experiment (actual collection of evidence) - not unlike most in his day - and not unlike theologians, for that matter. Galileo, for example, with his famous Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, proved once and for all that Aristotle was wrong when he posited that heavier objects fall faster. They don't. (Also shown dramatically on the moon when an astronaut dropped a bird feather and a hammer and both dropped at the same rate... thanks to the absence of air resistance).

Link to astronaut - hammer v. feather experiment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5_dOEyAfk

Thanks for that link. Even as an engineer, that's still so weird to see.

@dexter - I'm a computer geek and never even took a biology class, so thank you for that little bit of previously unknown info (to me at least). And I mean that. I never really thought much about which part of the nervous system truly supplied the signals. But tht also explains how such extreme head trauma as to render a person braindead can still allow their heart to beat.

So allowing for that, where do *you* place the start of life at (rough time frame in the womb) and why?

If God ever writes a book addressed to humans I would like to think he would include more useful and relevant information - such as a nice proof for p!=np or if the Higgs boson exists or not, instead of silly generalizations about behavior.

@Draug

You should read the Wikipedia article on the brain; it's probably the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. But, it really creeps me out when I think about it too much.

"such as a nice proof for p!=np or if the Higgs boson exists or not"

Where would the fun in that be? It'd like having the solution guide to the Universe. Lame.

^Point

I just want him to answer if 42 is the answer and, if so, what the question really is, because we know there was a malfunction so that even the answer "What is 6 times 9?" isn't correct.

@Draug,

I don't really want to jump in here very fully, because I'm very busy this week, and I've already been through this in another thread (not the last one, but about a month ago with orathaic, Marti the Bruce, Mafialligator, et al. I don't recall the thread title off hand, sadly). Anyway, though, the problem I think is that if you're a Christian, your opinions ARE going to be based on the Bible. So if you pretend otherwise, at that point you're just being disingenuous. And honestly, if you don't have some source like that, you just have another one, equally arbitrary -- all these discussions boil down to discussions of why there is morality, and when it attaches to an organism. "Well, I think it's consciousness that's important." "No, it's self-awareness." "No, it's cognitive ability." "No, it's just life if it's the same species." How is one _supposed_ to distinguish between these? Unbelievers rarely have a well-developed foundation for their ethics in the first place, and if they do, they're as arbitrary as the above. So, I do understand what you're saying, but understand that when I have a discussion with an unbeliever and he appeals to "when consciousness begins" or something, that is every bit as arbitrary to me as my quoting Scripture would seem to him. I don't accept his choice of what undergirds morality and he doesn't accept mine.

As I argued in the other thread, I think that is what the problem is in trying to have these discussions.

_That said_, I do think that, even though people don't believe the Scriptures, they do have moral intuitions that, at their purest, do reflect correct morality, and this is why it's worth having such discussions at all -- to obliquely address your questions, dexter. Thus, for example, talking about all the various things a fetus can or does do can help somebody realize that it's human and that, according to their own moral mirror, it is wrong to kill it. I don't do that because I think that cognitive ability or a unique genome or whatever is the actual right basis for not killing it, I do it because it may call to a person's moral intuitions. Sceptics would of course all this appealing to emotions, but I don't agree -- it is appealing to moral intuitions. In a similar vein, American slavery was just wrong, but sometimes the most successful appeals were those which made slaves seem human. ("Am I not a man and a brother?").

None of this worldview dependence is avoidable. The fact -- well known since Hume at least -- is that there is NO argument from a fact, like "a fetus is conscious at X weeks," to a moral conclusion, such as "It is wrong to kill the fetus" that does _not_ have an additional moral hypothesis, such as "It is wrong to kill conscious entitites." So it is going to be necessary to go to the foundations whence people draw their moral rules, and on this, I typically have profound disagreements with pro-choicers. Not surprising, perhaps.

Among those "heuristic" arguments that I _would_ offer most, dexter, is the fact that the fetus is a potential person -- not one, like an egg, that needs to be fertilized to develop, but one that will naturally become a conscious person if not actively killed. I personally find this quite a powerful argument, though I don't find that others do. Tastes differ I guess. But the line-drawing between a fetus and, say, a sleeping adult, or on another hand, between a fetus and a month-old infant, just seem to be terribly hard once you're going to go down a path where a line needs to be drawn at all. You abhor the doctrines of Peter Singer, but as far as I can tell, all that separates you is drawing the line at a different arbitrary point on a continuum and then just denouncing his based on.... what? On moral intuitions whose consistency you don't seem to want to overprotect.

Well, that is all, sorry it turned into a bit of a ramble. I hope it was relevant to your questions. I'm now off for the rest of the day, so.... enjoy tearing me to shreds. : P

@santosh, actually, the existence of the Higgs is not that useful. Or at least, nobody has designed any technology from it yet. That's just curiosity. How to treat each other is a good bit more practical.

Or perhaps you were joking.

"Unbelievers rarely have a well-developed foundation for their ethics in the first place, and if they do, they're as arbitrary as the above."

Excuse me?

@abgemacht,
"Even as an engineer, that's still so weird to see."
Indeed. Me too (as a scientist). I don't get tired of it for that very reason. I think things like the moon experiment serve as very helpful reminders that the world in no way has to conform to our sense of "common sense". Common sense, of course, is formed trial and error through evolution as well as personal experience and is by nature highly tuned to our surroundings... and basic survival - and thus will ignore things that are not important to our survival - such as how things work in a vacuum or in a black hole or at a subatomic scale or whatever. Richard Dawkins has a marvelous speech on the topic called: "Queerer than we can suppose - The strangeness of science" Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw
He talks of us existing in "a middle world" - where our perceptions are tuned only to that... and have a profoundly difficult time getting our minds around things that are outside our immediate experience.