Posted on 10/29/2007 5:12:35 PM PDT by EveningStar
You are inconsistent by ignoring that.
No, I'm entering into the extreme pro-lifer's mindest and showing them inconsistent. Of course there are graduations in punishments for different degrees of crimes. The whole point is that many pro-lifers talk as if abortion were equal to or worse than 1st degree murder and therefore, if they are consistent, should support an equal or more punitive punishment.
I respect you for your consistency of thought.
Usually within 48 hrs.
Looks like a gay marathon...
No, it may be false but it's hardly naive or ridiculous. Trudy comes equipped with enough wedges to split off a plenty of conservative voters. Anyone who thinks Hillary! won't employ them through a willing media is the fool. The only legitimate question is whether enough people will dislike Hillary at election time to make up the difference. And if you think the media are fawning over her now, just wait till she's the candidate.
You obviously don't.
... suffice it to say that I caught you trying to pass off your faith as fact and I called you on it.
You definitely did not but it's certainly arrogant of you to say so. In light of the specific and detailed explanation I gave you of the process by which Buddhist views are personally verified by the practitioner you are just intellectually lazy to respond with what is little more than an ad-hominem.
I appreciate that your Budhist faith so shapes your worldview that you believe it provides a factual context for everything you see -- Good for you.
That's not good for me. It is not at all what I said and if it was how I looked at things I wouldn't even be a Buddhist by definition. One of the Buddha's strongest admonitions was to not take even his own words, much less written doctrine, at face value. I sure never have so you're very wrong about that.
But please don't try to pretend that Budhism is any more "fact" basesd then Christianity is. It is not. It is a design for living -- a spiritual structure to build one's life around. It is that "faith" which drives us and inspires us. The facts, well, they are everything else -- that comes into our life.
I never said that Buddhism was "fact based." That's a rather odd way to describe any religion but a lot of Christians do say the Bible is the living word of God and every word is truth. But your description of "spiritual structure" sounds like so much New Age mush to me. Sorry, that's how I see it.
Because as I have stated -- Our law and science see "Life" differently.
And you haven't addressed at all what basis the law rests on. The Constitution has no definition of life in it. No "between birth and death" anywhere in it.
Science does not agree that that "Men" are created at conception. Science believes that a cell which has genetic material from both the egg and the sperms is created at conception.
Talk about a semantic leap. Life is evident at conception (or at least at first mitosis as another FReeper pointed out) and so is the unique signature of an individual human being. You're just begging the difference between lay terminology and scientific terminology. "Man" is a living human being. A living being with it's own human DNA is a human being. You are quite the apologist for secular humanism.
Regardless. the law for hundreds of years has believed that life is created at birth.
We know better now.
Please don't get me wrong. I agree that life begins at conception. I just don't think that in our secular society, a credible case can be made that a zygote is a person-- a fuly formed and distinct human being.
No you don't you just don't want to. Or you believe life begins at conception but you don't want to suffer the consequences of standing on that belief.
And those precedents were arbitrary. More than that they lacked common sense as I also said.
You sure do work hard to shield the secular humanist view of pre-born life as a lump of tissue from common sense, scientific discovery and spiritual revelation.
OK. I guess you are consistent in that narrow context. I try to dispense with extreme views on either side of an issue.
A pretty narrow window if one were to use that as an argument for an acceptable contraception of a pregnancy. One would almost need a dark field microscope intalled inutero to ascertain the state of the egg. That might make an argument for the day-after pill.
Good, we agree. That was my point and it also was the point of this article.
Liberals typically react to statements of facts as if they were pejorative, emotive utterances. When confronted with a factual corollary of a FACT that YOU gratuitously brought up regarding your mother, you respond with ad hominem invective. Your mother, who sadly was the victim of a rape, in turn committed another act of criminal violence. In your own words:
"...had a backroom, illegal 1st trimester abortion in the 1950's after she was raped."
[emphasis mine]
And frankly, if you had called my mother a murderer for having an abortion after a rape ("Unlike your sibling, whom your mother had killed,) t my face -- I would have punched you out. And you would have deserved it.
That abortion is killing is factual and accurate. The word, "murderer" is yours, not mine. And since you kept your violence fantasy in the subjunctive, I can say that you might find me a much harder target than a pre-born child, and consequently much more capable of defending myself against physical attack.
What part of "an individual human being" don't you understand? Person is synonymous with human being. You are asserting a distinction between person and human being. Prove it. What's the difference?
A human being is the offspring of human parentage. Your argument that because Webster 1828 didn't explictly refer to a particular class of child, the child in the womb, in a general definition of "person" means that a particular class of child is excluded from personhood is a blatant category error, a non sequitar, and an absurd argument from silence.
If you think that "child" is not to be applied to one in the womb then the writings of Colonial era and prior will be gibberish to you. For example,
Thomas Paine. What does that phrase, "a child in the womb" mean?
The Age of Reason
1/6 PART FIRST.
But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb
Abortion "quick or great with child" was prosecuted as a crime under the common law in England and in Colonial America. The burden of proof is on you to show that a child in the womb is not a person, i.e. "an individual human being."
Cordially,
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