Why The Judaeo-Christian God Makes No Sense to Me

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the woman has a right to bodily autonomy. if the fetus dies as a result of removal, that is sad but an acceptable byproduct of preserving autonomy. if a fetus is removed and lives, the woman already has autonomy and killing adds nothing to the woman. it becomes a callous act.

So viability isn't really important to your position at all. Any woman who wants a fetus/baby removed at any stage in pregnancy should be allowed to do so?

how did you get that from my argument? it's just a thought experiment on why viability matters.

Last edited by cathylynn on 22 Sep 2017, 3:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's possible I misunderstood, but that's what I got from your words. It seems to me the status of the fetus has no bearing on bodily autonomy. Either it's a right, or it's not. How does a woman still have bodily autonomy if you will not allow her to abort after the fetus is viable?

once the fetus becomes viable, it has its own rights that have to be balanced with the mother's.

And we're back to square one. How does viability or bodily independence give a human being rights it doesn't have before...

viability isn't sacrosanct. if the mother is very likely to die if she carries to term or if this fetus is very likely to NOT survive outside of the womb ever, later abortions can be considered.

I wouldn't disagree in this scenario, but even if we find common ground on the extreme cases, that does not make every other abortion legitimate.

...and babies are not children, and children are not teenagers, and teenagers are not adults, and... Do you see how ridiculous such "reasoning" is? What possible justification could one ever have for something as patently immoral as the taking of a life for no good (or in most cases, any) reason?

Cathylynn, you may not think that foetuses are babies, but would you agree they are human? For that reason alone they should not be killed.

Nihilism - "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless."

From this search on Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=nihilism&q ... CAFFBFC170

Modern-day Western atheists are people who not only do not believe in the existence of God (or "gods"/supernatural entities in general), they also believe life to be ultimately meaningless and without purpose, that we don't have free will, there is no afterlife, morality is relative, and that the sciences will one day be able to fully account for who we are as human beings and why we are that way (if they cannot already do that).

When I rejected atheism I did not automatically adopt an alternative to it. For most of my life I just wasn't sure, and it's only been recently that I have finally decided in which direction to go. I've examined other religions (ex. Islam, Buddhism) and although I cannot claim to have a comprehensive understanding of these alternatives, I do know enough about them to know that they cannot possibly be true.

Ah yes, I've come across this nonsensical comparison before. Apparently there is practically no physical difference between a parasite and a baby, and this (utterly lame) argument is used to "justify" the destruction of human life.

How low will people go? Have they no shame, no conscience, no SENSE?

Sad but "acceptable"?! Preserving "autonomy" is apparently so sacrosanct, and we can't have anyone being inconvenienced by the presence of an unwanted child, so let's just kill the child. Such a neat solution, one that pleases everyone... except the one being murdered. They don't have a say in any of this.

None of those things logically follow from the rejection of organized religion. To you life is meaningless without religion. To many others life is still meaningful.

Also, even if life is "meaningless", there is nothing I can do about it. Trying to force myself to believe in a religion just because I don't like the fact that I have no idea what will happen to me after I die is not only illogical to me. It's downright impossible. You know I tried really hard to "make myself believe" in my teen years. I gave up when I realized I couldn't fool myself into thinking I was a believer. It was ultimately self-honest that lead to my disbelief.

Also, I've never fully accepted materialist reductionism (or whatever you want to call it). The physical laws of the universe do not explain consciousness as I experience it. Qualia seems rather superfluous to me. I don't believe science will explain the "meaning" of my experience. There is a philosophical wall separating the physical universe of science and measurements from the inner subjective experience. I simply leave it at "I don't know".

Perhaps I will find a semblance of satisfaction in some form of mysticism some day, but I'm almost 90% certain I will always be deeply distrusting of the religions followed by the masses. Actually I'm extremely distrustful of humanity as a whole. The more aggressively people appear to be selling me something, the more skeptical I become. I see through the power games, the attempts to assert control of one group to benefit another. I just don't see much redeeming value in the major world religions, especially the historically violent Abrahamic ones.

Actually it's also a beautifully practical argument for some serious social Darwinism. Babies are parasites on their mother's bodies, poor people on government assistance are parasites on the public weal... hey wait a minute... that's an idea! Euthanize those who can't make a living, raise the average IQ, and also put a dent in that population boom issue! You say a baby isn't conscious but poor people are? Prove it! According to enough researchers none of us our conscious - we're standing in the way of a deep gene-cleaning for the sake of a hallucination!


I think this raises two points:

a) Quite a few people (a large minority if not slight majority) really don't care about what's true, they care about what's convenient to them - now. This argument about babies being parasites, when you think about it, really paints the particular women who propose it in a bad light.

b) What's expedient or convenient to us has no correlation to making a better world, genocide for that matter can be wonderfully convenient and expedient at the right times (our genes seem to know that better than we do), and we should probably snap out of the stupor or malaise that caused us not to seriously challenge that idea, as well as the idea that any friction in life for anyone whose neither not male or caucasian is the product of The Patriarchy TM or vestigial colonialist imperialism.

http://www.liberalamerica.org/2017/10/1 ... oes-knots/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ess-arise/

very few people would want to abort a being that could experience pain outside of the most extreme circumstances.

The first link has a pretty interesting thought experiment, but one that doesn't present much of a problem to my position laid out here:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=215207&start=105#p6852809

Save the child naturally.

Edit: I understand the emotional side of this debate, I feel differently about a crying 5 year old than I do about a ball of cells. It's logic and reason that tells me if one deserves protection, so does the other.

As for the other link: consciousness and pain arguments hold little sway over me. It's not ok to kill someone while they are unconcious or numbed by anasthetic. To know why that is wrong, is coming half way to my position on abortion.