Delta1212

Ok, now is it still murder when they decide to get an abortion? And for the record, I'm not trying to trap you. Just trying to work through your thought process. I'm adding this disclaimer because I think that question sounds a little inflammatory and I couldn't think of a better way of wording it.

Do you believe that should be a choice they are allowed to make for themselves?

That was in response to Raider's post.

If we're working off of the premise that abortion is always the murder of a child, what is the justification for murdering a baby just because it was conceived during a rape? You can't legally execute an innocent person because just because one of their parents committed a crime.

Is a baby not conscious or does it simply lack the capacity for complex communication? How intertwined are communication and thought and is there anyone "there" when you interact with a baby?

If you're drawing a map, and you run into a mountain that isn't on your map, the correct response is not, "Oh shoot, this isn't on my map. The whole map is wrong and I need to start over. Heck maybe cartography isn't even a valid way of describing the locations of things!" It's "Oh, I better fix my map and add this mountain in."

That's been a topic of discussion in this thread so far. I think you may need to focus a bit on reading what other people are saying and trying to understand it rather than asserting their points are monstrous and pro-murder simply because they take the opposing view from you. I'm not even suggesting that you actually change your opinion. It's entirely possible to crawl inside the heads of people with fundamentally different, and even outright abhorrent, views without subscribing to them. It does require temporarily withholding judgment and exercising some empathy though. I find analyzing even my deepest held beliefs from a perspective of "What if I am genuinely wrong about this?" on a regular basis does wonders for my ability to discuss a given issue. I don't usually change my mind, ultimately, but it keeps me from getting too bogged down in unhelpful dogma.

Well, not inevitably, but yes, there probably would have been good people in there. And just as inevitably (i.e. just extremely probably) there would have been some extremely bad people. There are also lots of people who would not exist if it were not for abortion if we're talking downstream consequences. And there are probably a lot more than 58 million people who would have been born, and possibly some very good ones, if it weren't for condoms and hormonal birth control. This is why the "What-if" or "Who might they have been?" argument falls down. You can run it too far up and down the line of potentialities that exist as a result of any of our decisions. The only way that it has any real impact is if you are relying on the person already accepting the premise that you are talking about a specific individual human that already exists and was killed, rather than a human in potentia that was simply never born. Yes, you make a convincing argument if one accepts that as a premise. But if you accept that as a premise, then abortion is already murder and it's quite irrelevant who or what might have been. If you don't accept it as a premise, then it's a rather meaningless bit of whimsy on par with arguing that you should sleep with every person you meet because what if the child you could potentially have became the next Einstein? If you want to make a convincing case for your position, you need to take some time to really get into the headspace of the other side and figure out what exactly it is they believe and why they believe it. If you can't do that, you're very likely to fall into the trap of trotting out arguments that are only convincing if you already agree with the position, instead of arguments that someone who has a different perspective might find convincing.

Eh, from a rhetorical perspective, I think there is a case for the terms not being mutually exclusive. If you're defining murder as a crime, then yes. If you're talking about murder as being the unethical taking of a human life, then you can talk about things that should, from an ethical perspective, be considered murder, but may or may not be from a legal perspective. Taking a strictly legalistic view of the definition of murder hampers the ability to discuss that kind of issue in terms that are not overly convoluted. Legal murder and the legal unethical taking of life communicate pretty much the same idea, but one of them is a bit cumbersome to use.

Two points there: "What if great person X had been aborted?" is not a terribly convincing argument, because the same applies to history's greatest monsters as well. I'm not, mind, saying that abortion should be legal "because what if Hitler had been aborted" so much as "This isn't really an argument that is particularly relevant or that supports one side over the other." If laws and circumstances were different, history would be different, and in rather unpredictable ways. Maybe plenty of people who would have been great were aborted throughout history and robbed us of a paradise on Earth. Maybe even worse monsters than actually lived were would have sprung from an aborted pregnancy and the human race was saved from a nuclear holocaust by abortion. It's a fruitless what-if that focuses on outcomes instead of the core ethical issue, and then posits that one side has better outcomes than the other with no actual support for the claim. It is, in effect, making a utilitarian argument that relies on results-based premises that more closely align with the case for abortion (drops in crime rate in the generation following the introduction of abortion, presumably as a result of fewer children being born to parents incapable or unwilling to care for them, for example) and it does a bad job of making that argument. I would steer clear of going down this track if you're against abortion on ethical grounds. It does you no favors.

Oh for sure. There are plenty of legal and practical concerns, and practically I think drawing the line at the point where the fetus is viable outside the womb, thus allowing for a delivery, would make sense. But legally, practically and ethically are all quite different things. There are things that I think are not necessarily unethical on a case-by-case basis that for practical reasons need to be illegal as part of a larger class of unethical behaviors because allowing for exceptions undermines the ability to enforce the law in cases where there is an ethical breach. And I think there are things that are unethical that for practical reasons can't and shouldn't be illegal for similar reasons of practicality running in the opposite direction.

Which is not the same thing as capital punishment. (Well, I suppose you could describe capital punishment as a subset thereof, but the equivalence doesn't go in both directions)

This is one of those things where I perfectly understand both perspectives and don't see any means of resolving them, because they were each founded on fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of the world and value judgments that don't, I think, have an objectively discoverable answer. If a fetus/zygote/whatever stage abortion is allowed at for the sake of conversation is a person, then abortion is murder and it is a monstrous practice to allow it. If it is not a person, then preventing women from having access to the procedure and instead forcing them to have a child against their will, with profound consequences for their health and future well-being, is a monstrous practice. There is not really a middle ground, and I don't think there exists a point where you can point to a developing human and say "Yeah, it's definitely a human with rights that override the aforementioned concerns of the mother." A line has to be drawn somewhere, and different people draw that line at different times and for different reasons, and the fact that the line is a moving target is something that hasn't changed much throughout history. I don't know where the line should be drawn, although I do think it's best placed at some point after the time when egg meets sperm, rather than the precise moment of conception. There isn't anybody home at that point, but the fact that that is even a criteria for making the decision is a value judgement on my part, not really an objective assessment of anything. I will say that, if someone thinks abortion is murder, that making exceptions for rape and incest is horrifyingly inconsistent and I don't see how that can be justified ethically. You are either admitting that an abortion isn't really murder, but you're going to ban it anyway, which falls afoul of the second ethical problem I brought up. Or else you are saying that it is ok to murder children for the actions of their parent or parents. It's an ethical half-way point that places itself in the worst position from both viewpoints.

Technically it isn't, because it's not a penalty. It's not court mandated or even carried out by the state. Now, if you view it as murder, you could describe it as legal murder, but that is quite a different thing than capital punishment. If you want to be technical about it.

It took me a good coupl of minutes to figure out you were talking about abortion, which seems like kind of a non-sequitur.

Actually, that is a good point. Why is this combination of traits so important to some people? Why not intelligence by eye color? Or foot size by race? Why, practically, would it make a difference even if you could group broad human populations by differential average intelligence? I don't advocate having to have a strictly practical application for scientific investigation, but for the amount of effort that gets poured into this subject, I'm not seeing either the potential application or even the explanatory power that is derived from it that wouldn't be much better covered by something more nuanced.

It sounds like he was agreeing with you in general but saying that it is slightly more complicated, which of course it is. It always is.

He has a point. Trump lies constantly, but the lies are almost always blatant and exceedingly transparent. It's not that he is incapable of lying. It's that he isn't really very good at it.

Voting is the final stroke in a round of golf. If you show up at the end and try to take your final swing from the teebox, no, you're probably not going to get a hole in one. If you want to get the ball in the hole, you need to do all the work ahead of time. Vote in mid-terms. Vote in primaries. Donate time or money to candidates that you like. Built support for candidates, policies or parties in your local area and give them a base of support to build off of. You have to do all that work to really make change. Then the vote is just tapping the ball into the hole after you've put it where you want it. Voting is important, but it also doesn't take a lot of effort for most people to do. The amount of change that you get in a system is proportional to the amount of effort you put into changing things. If all you ever do is vote in Presidential elections every four years, you're putting in very little. If you don't even do that, you're putting in nothing.

No single raindrop feels responsible for the flood.

I didn't say that science had found anything that required a supernatural explanation. But that still doesn't make the actual origin of the universe's existence part of the Bug Bang Theory, nor does it make abiogenesis part of the theory of evolution. Objecting to either theory on those grounds is technically incorrect.

As a child, I thought the song went: "Then how the reindeer loved him, and they shouted out with glee, "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, you'll go down in his story!"" I always wondered whose story it was.

As has been stated, The Big Bang is about how the universe got to be the way it is now, and what it was like going back to the earliest time that we have evidence for. There's currently no consensus on what exactly created those initial conditions. There are some ideas, but they are largely highly speculative rather than being part of any serious cosmological theory. Adding: Also, incidentally, the official position of the Pope and Catholic Church is that there is no conflict between Christianity and evolution. That's more of an Evangelical thing than a general Christian thing.

So find a candidate and that wants to dismantle the system and then vote for them. Not voting certainly isn't going to make the system go away.

There are always political factions. The only thing that changes is how upfront people are about what they are and which ones they belong to.