Well, is this what we’ve come to? Letting Denise Paolucci and Planned Parenthood provide women with an iPod so they don’t have to listen to the heartbeat of the child they are going to abort? (NOTE: Texas law makes it optional.)
Here’s the story: Tuning out bad abortion laws
Note: Before the hate mail starts, understand that I agree it’s traumatic for the women involved. And just how do you think the baby feels? Or is that irrelevant?
And in related news: I Can’t Hear You by Eric Metaxas
Did you even read the links you provided?
Her story is tragic and she’s trying to help others who may be in the same cruel circumstances – forced by a cruel law to be treated with contempt and disregard as if she were a stupid or even criminal person. These kinds of laws reveal just how lacking in moral fiber and compassion are those who pretend a fetus is a child about to be ‘murdered’. The other links you provide demonstrate how the sanctimonious anti-choice crowd like to spin their narratives to justify imposing their religiously inspired immorality on others and think themselves oh-so pious. It’s revolting. How can you stand to be affiliated with such sanctimonious tripe?
Did you read the links, tildeb?
I think in your zeal, you may have misunderstood part of the Salon article. May I respectfully point out that in my post I specifically mentioned one woman’s name, Denise Paolucci. She is not the woman who had the abortion discussed in the Salon article. She was the one upset after reading an article about it. So, the ambiguous reference to “her story” in your comment I can only understand as referring to Denise. But, again, she was the one soliciting money for iPods, not the one who had the abortion.
And why did you avoid my last paragraph and the questions I asked?
You have once again used this blog as an outlet for your disdain for anyone who doesn’t hold to your beliefs. I’m not sure if I should feel honored or insulted.
Since you’re elevating your position over mine regarding abortion, I’ll add JW Wartick’s article “Atheism’s Universe is Meaningless and Valueless” for your consideration.
Joshua
Couple of things:
I was referring specifically to the woman’s experience of undergoing an abortion under this law. The iPod issue is simply one response to a terrible and unnecessary ordeal.
I avoided your question because it’s irrelevant. Although you may wish to imagine what a fetus undergoes during an abortion and honestly believe it deserves more protection under the law that the adult woman carrying the fetus, I don’t think you paid much if any attention to the actual and additional suffering imposed on this mother under this barbaric law. In addition, you presume it’s not strictly a medical issue between doctor, patient, and best medical practices but that the anti-choice crowd are quite right and deserve to be able to intervene in this matter on religious grounds.
Wartick’s article is a typical one that fails to keep what’s under discussion – the lack of evidence for any ‘objective’ morality that supposedly infuses the universe with meaning and value separate and distinct from those humans who inhabit their tiny sliver of it – front and center. He drops the term ‘objective’ to misrepresent atheism time and again as standing opposed to any meaning and value. It’s quite silly because, when this is pointed out to him, he fails to go back and FIX his argument but, instead, remains unwilling to let reality arbitrate his truth claim made about it. Atheists are just like everybody else; they assign meaning and value TO their interaction with the universe rather have these personally delivered FROM it via some supernatural critter he believes sort of exists.
Finally got myself one of them WordPress accounts. Sweeeeet…
tildeb – “… those who pretend a fetus is a child about to be ‘murdered’”
My friend, you are certainly entitled to your own opinion, but you are not, as they say, entitled to your own facts.
“To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence.”
(Dr. Jerome Lejeune, “Father of Modern Genetics”)
“By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
(Dr. Hymie Gordon, former Chairman, Department of Genetics at Mayo Clinic)
“The intricate processes by which a baby develops from a single cell are miraculous…. This cell [the zygote] results from the union of an oocyte [egg] and sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being….”, “Human development begins at fertilization.”
(The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th Edition)
“Human development begins after the union of male and female gametes or germ cells during a process known as fertilization (conception).”
“Fertilization is a sequence of events that begins with the contact of a sperm (spermatozoon) with a secondary oocyte (ovum) and ends with the fusion of their pronuclei (the haploid nuclei of the sperm and ovum) and the mingling of their chromosomes to form a new cell. This fertilized ovum, known as a zygote, is a large diploid cell that is the beginning, or primordium, of a human being.”
(Moore, Keith L. Essentials of Human Embryology. Toronto: B.C. Decker Inc, p.2)
“Embryo: An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus.”
(Dox, Ida G. et al. The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial, p. 146)
“The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.”
(Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, p. 3)
“Embryo: The developing individual between the union of the germ cells and the completion of the organs which characterize its body when it becomes a separate organism…. At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), a new life has begun…”
(Considine, Douglas (ed.). Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia. 5th edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, p. 943)
“The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.”
(Sadler, T.W. Langman’s Medical Embryology. 7th edition. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, p. 3)
“The question came up of what is an embryo, when does an embryo exist, when does it occur. I think, as you know, that in development, life is a continuum…. But I think one of the useful definitions that has come out, especially from Germany, has been the stage at which these two nuclei [from sperm and egg] come together and the membranes between the two break down.”
(Jonathan Van Blerkom of University of Colorado, expert witness on human embryology before the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel — Panel Transcript, p. 63)
“Zygote. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), represents the beginning of a human being.”
(Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, p. 1)
“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed…. The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.”
(O’Rahilly, Ronan and Müller, Fabiola. Human Embryology & Teratology. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, pp. 8, 29)
“Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)… The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.”
(Carlson, Bruce M. Patten’s Foundations of Embryology. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 3)
So, from my humble understanding, it seems no well-informed embryologist, biologist, or fetologist disputes the fact that, as per the evidence, the fetus develops AS a human being and not INTO a human being.
You are, of course, welcome to entertain the unsubstantiated notion that a fetus is not a child/human being, but that would simply be your philosophically speculative position on the matter. =)
Right on, Getic.Apolo!
Josh, you might find the following video interesting (as might you, tildeb, if you’re interested). Ray Comfort asks people on the streets some thought-provoking questions, with the goal of getting them to see the logic and horror of abortion. Trust me, this 30 minute film is well worth the time spent watching. =)
’180′ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y2KsU_dhwI)
Thanks, Getic.Apolo!
I have seen the 180 video from Ray Comfort. I’m not a big fan of his, but I do like 180 and his short book “Hollywood Be Thy Name”.
Joshua
Now go back to your list and review: nowhere does the ‘child’ come about in vitro. Human beings develop over time and the term’ child’ usually indicates that period between birth and puberty. The use of such terms applied to abortion is a typical ploy of the anti-choice regiment to intentionally misrepresent a medical issue into a religious one and actively try to get the state to codify certain anti-secular values into law and enforce them on everyone.
You are welcome to your religious views… including your moral views on abortion, which you are free to impose on yourself to your heart’s delight… but you undermine your own legal rights as well as mine when you extend them into the public domain and seek state sanction through punitive law to enforce them on others.
Don’t do that. Show a little bit of self control, self restraint. Set a good example of how your religious beliefs make you a better person, a better citizen, and perhaps others will follow your example into sharing your religious beliefs. But you have thoughtlessly trampled your civic responsibility to me and all your neighbours – believers and non believers alike – if and when you try to promote your religiosity by reducing the rights of others in its name… regardless of what you think are good moral reasons. This is always a shortsighted approach to abuse secular law this way and acts against the very tenet that allows you legal protection to exercise your religious freedom. Too many religious people simply fail to grasp this danger.
This advocacy for abortion laws – done no doubt with good if naive intentions – is badly misguided and very much anti-American (presuming personal support to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic).
I have another curiosity, one which highlights the benefits of comparing how different worldviews address various difficulties, as I believe it often makes for an illuminating discussion for all the people involved. So I do hope you indulge me, tildeb, I would appreciate it. =)
Take for instance, all of these comments you made:
“… she’s trying to help others who may be in the same cruel circumstances…”
“…forced by a cruel law…”
“These kinds of laws reveal just how lacking in moral fiber and compassion are those who pretend a fetus is a child about to be ‘murdered’.”
“… the sanctimonious anti-choice crowd like to spin their narratives to justify imposing their religiously inspired immorality on others and think themselves oh-so pious. It’s revolting.”
Hmm, “cruel”, “lacking in moral fiber”, “religiously inspired immorality”… For the benefit of everyone reading your phrases – and I do ask this in all sincerity because I really do not know clearly yet, we’re new to one another – tell us, tildeb, what do you mean here by “cruel”, “lacking in moral fiber”, “immorality”, and the likes? I mean, how is it delineated? =)
From the woman who experienced this law in action.
“From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.”
“In those dark moments we had to make a choice, so we picked the one that seemed slightly less cruel.”
“The hospital with which she’s affiliated (the obstetrician) is Catholic and doesn’t allow abortion. It felt like a physical blow to hear that word, abortion, in the context of our much-wanted child. Abortion is a topic that never seemed relevant to me; it was something we read about in the news or talked about politically; it always remained at a safe distance.”
“My doctor went on to tell us that, just two weeks prior, a new Texas law had come into effect requiring that women wait an extra 24 hours before having the procedure. Moreover, Austin has only one clinic (Planned Parenthood) providing second-trimester terminations, and that clinic might have a long wait. “Time is not on your side,” my doctor emphasized gently. For this reason, she urged us to seek a specialist’s second opinion the moment we left her office (later confirmed by another specialist).
“I was enclosed with a cheerful-looking counselor who had colored hair and a piercing in her nose. Feeling like someone who’d stumbled into the wrong room, I told her between choked sobs how we’d arrived at her clinic on the highway.”
“I am so sorry,” the young woman said with compassion, and nudged the tissues closer. Then, after a moment’s pause, she told me reluctantly about the new Texas sonogram law that had just come into effect.with the same advice).”
“My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine.”
““I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.”
“We have no choice but to comply with the law,” she said, adding that these requirements were not what Planned Parenthood would choose. Then, with a warmth that belied the materials in her hand, she took me through the rules. First, she told me about my rights regarding child support and adoption. Then she gave me information about the state inspection of the clinic. She offered me a pamphlet called A Woman’s Right to Know, saying that it described my baby’s development as well as how the abortion procedure works. She gave me a list of agencies that offer free sonograms, and which, by law, have no affiliation with abortion providers. Finally, after having me sign reams of paper, she led me to the doctor who’d perform the sonography, and later the termination.”
“When the description was finally over, the doctor held up a script and said he was legally obliged to read me information provided by the state. It was about the health dangers of having an abortion, the risks of infection or hemorrhage, the potential for infertility and my increased chance of getting breast cancer. I was reminded that medical benefits may be available for my maternity care and that the baby’s father was liable to provide support, whether he’d agreed to pay for the abortion or not.”
““When you come back in 24 hours, the legal side is over. Then we’ll care for you and give you the information you need in the way we think is right.”
“My experience, it seems, was a byproduct of complex laws being thrown into the tangled world of abortion politics. If I’d been there two weeks earlier or even a week later, I might have avoided the full brunt of this new law’s effect. But not so for those other young women I saw in Planned Parenthood’s waiting room. Unless they fall into one of those exemption categories—the conditions under which the state has deemed that some women’s reasons for having an abortion are morally acceptable—then they’ll have politicians muscling in on their private decisions. But what good is the view of someone who has never had to make your terrible choice? What good is a law that adds only pain and difficulty to perhaps the most painful and difficult decision a woman can make? Shouldn’t women have a right to protect themselves from strangers’ opinions on their most personal matters?”
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
To anyone who thinks this law is appropriate, you should feel ashamed… deeply and honestly ashamed of participating in the support of this misguided, misogynistic barbarity that imposes second class citizenship in the name of religious morality.
The role of government of the people, by the people, for the people is not to create or enable a theocracy that imposes Iron Age religious values antithetical to respecting the dignity and worth of enfranchised citizens in a free and democratic society, one based solely on legal respect for individual rights, and from which comes the authority to empower the government who serves in its name to pass legislation into law; it is not to restrict medical access to medical services and medical treatments deemed medically appropriate between a medical doctor and her medical patient; it is not to force cruel interventionist practices that suit the theocratic values of subjugated believers unto others by twisting secular law into religion’s handmaiden and whip handler. Yet there are fellow citizens who think this is the proper role of a pious secular liberal government, people who celebrate this cruelty and think it a victory for all by enabling their anti-choice, anti-human rights, anti-democratic misogynistic bullying. But what it is in practice is an additional cruelty to be imposed on some by the state over and above it respecting the equal rights of actual enfranchised citizens.
This law is an epic fail. It is a travesty of proper care and compassion for others, a repugnant abuse of state authority through law, one aimed at serving the brutal religious convictions of those who value their need to impose their warped sense of piety and the values they deem religiously sanctioned by their particular god on all, a law aimed at reducing respect for the dignity and legal rights of others… others who are supposed to be fully enfranchised citizens but who are now second class citizens through the hard work and misguided delight of the anti-choice crowd.
Shame.
tildeb, it’s pitiful to see how intolerant and, frankly, hate-filled your response is. You don’t seem content to merely insult us, you loath us. You absolutely do. Furthermore, you speak as someone who can actually sympathize with the woman who you’ve quoted. My wife and I surely can. And your insensitive essay doesn’t invite me to divulge any further.
You completely ignore the questions I’ve asked about whether or not the feelings of a child being aborted matter. You won’t respond to comments by Getic.Apolo and his extensive quotations showing that science agrees with us on the issue of when a human being is formed. So, don’t come to my blog anymore with this type of hate-filled, insensitive diatribe as you attempt to pose as some holier-than-thou judge passing out “shame.” You can post that junk on your own blog. Here, you are merely invited to comment. Not give speeches. Not write a commentary. But while I welcome any and all comments, don’t assume that I’m afraid to trash rants. And I’m seriously considering whether or not to delete this comment you’ve left, since it is the third such comment laced with insults that you’ve left here.
From reading your latest comment, I have to conclude that nowhere in your mind did you even consider that some of us could identify with the woman’s pain. But, regardless, even the terribly and justifiably upset woman agreed and understood that it was a human life she was ending.
Have you no shame?
Joshua
Indeed – shame on those who brought this law. What terrible, terrible people.
Andrew, did you read the law yourself?
By the way, you forgot to add “in my opinion” to your last sentence. Now, I know the democratic process is not satisfactory to your type, especially when it results in a law that disagrees with your personal view. However, that’s what a group of people decided as the morally right thing to do and they made it a law. You can say they’re terrible, yes. You can say they’re wrong, yes. But what standard are you going to appeal to to say that? The way I see it, the only basis you have for doing either is your opinion and personal opinions are not binding on anyone.
Besides, where’s the “tolerance”, man?
Joshua
Hate-filled? Intolerant? There’s no hate here: there are several criticisms why this kind of law is anything but good or moral. Supporting this kind of religiously inspired law undermines your freedom, your dignity, your rights. It elevates by religious justification abortion into a political issue rather than strictly a medical one.
Let me be clear: religion accepts no boundaries of where its tenets should pertain. It slides under the door of any and all issues and is presented by supporters as if it naturally belongs. It is the root cause of this so-called abortion ‘debate’ as if it brings anything to the grown-up’s table. This woman, for example, is all grown up and understands better than most what abortion means to her. It’s deeply personal with significant personal factors and repercussions. Yet the law demands that she be subjected to the indignities of mandatory ‘counseling’ by unknown people, the indignity of having to be subject to the mandatory insertion of a vaginal sonogram not for medical reasons but legal ones, to be read to like a child skewed information only about the dangers of undergoing an abortion and some of the potential risks (the breast cancer link is based on one discredited study) to soothe the concerns not of her, nor her doctor, nor her husband, nor her child, nor her extended family but those who don’t want her to have – who don’t trust her to have – any say in the matter of her occupied uterus.
Note the ‘catholic’ hospital that will not permit therapeutic abortions – not because they are therapeutically suspect but because this is a central tenet of modern day catholicism. Note the deplorable lack of medical facilities and services for these kinds of indicated procedures – except from Planned Parenthood vilified for providing such singular and often necessary medical facilities and services.
Now you accuse me of ‘hate’ for pointing out why this law is not only so insulting, so uncivilized, for pointing to the religious who advocate for these kinds of intrusive and unnecessary legal meddlings in what is a deeply personal and private medical concern, but barbaric. My effrontery to do so is labeled by you as ‘intolerant’. I do not think these words like ‘hate-mongering’ and ‘intolerance’ mean what you think they mean.
Did you offer any indication that you identified with this cruel experience? Offer her sympathy and condolences for having to undergo this traumatic event? Of course not because you think the fetus’ rights need to be championed by such law – and some woman’s additional suffering in the service of gaining an abortion doesn’t really amount to a whole lot compared to what you define as the death of child; instead you feel justified to spend your efforts here criticizing another woman who is trying to help others deal in similar unfortunate circumstances with this disrespectful and condescending law by plugging into an iPod.
You continue to use the word ‘child’ in your response. I previously explained to GA why this word is not appropriate. A child is a word we use to describe the period of development between birth and puberty. if we’re talking about fetus, then call it what it is: a second trimester fetus. I have no clue what a second trimester fetus feels but I do know what the woman feels, and that’s a sense of betrayal that there are misguided people who would empower the state to invade her most private sanctum in the name of exercising and promoting their piety rather than respect the rights and dignity of another human being. And if you can’t handle that criticism without assigning to me descriptions that simply aren’t true, then you need to revisit your own motivations for doing so. You have every right to feel offended at what I’ve written; that doesn’t mean it’s any less accurate.
hate (transitive verb)
1: to feel extreme enmity toward
2: to have a strong aversion to; find very distasteful
intolerant (adjective)
1: unable or unwilling to endure
2 a: unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression especially in religious matters;
b: unwilling to grant or share social, political, or professional rights
Note: I didn’t use the word “hate-mongering”.
tildeb wrote:
But I noticed that even your type is not satisfied with the democratic process. Laws don’t pass themselves. If it was a decision based on the input of a majority of the people in Texas, it makes it foolish to complain, in my opinion.
You’ve repeated that the “fetus” isn’t a child. I think Getic.Apolo has given extensive enough quotations to show that repeatable, testable science doesn’t agree with that. Of course the sad reality of the position your preaching rests on the mistaken idea that the child in the womb is not a child and is therefore not a person and is therefore not entitled to the most basic of human rights, the right to live.
Regarding why I didn’t show I identified with the woman’s experience. Well, I did mention that it was tragic for her. And surely you can understand that I’m not going to write my life history here on the blog. And I’m extremely sensitive about it. But suffice it to say, when my Wife and I were having our second child, the doctor we had been going to for ultrasounds had made my wife think that our child was handicapped (missing an arm). tildeb, we cried for nearly 2 days. The kind of tears that only parents faced with that kind of news know about, feeling helpless, confused, and disgusted. In that dark moment of emotion, abortion crossed my mind. I wondered what how could a handicapped child make it in this country. We never discussed abortion. Instead, we went to another doctor as soon as we were able. And I thank God we did because we’ve got a health, gorgeous genius of a child to enjoy and be blessed by.
Did you ever consider that maybe a doctor might mistakenly give the wrong diagnoses?
Joshua
Missing an arm does not equal ‘living a short life full of pain’.
You seemed to have missed the identifier of my detestation: this law. See it up there at the top of your long quotation?
The next paragraph talks about the role of government in the passing of just laws rather than this kind that appeals to those religious folk who think government is to be used to impose their beliefs on others.
Democracy without the establishment of and fundamental respect for individual rights and legal equality is nothing but mob rule, otherwise known as the tyranny of the majority. Civil liberties must always take precedence over the majority that wishes to reduce them. Those who do not understand or appreciate why this fundamental aspect of law must be upheld over and above any belief – no matter how pious, self-serving, or secure it may seem – is deserving of the strongest contempt because it is seditious: it undermines the root of our legal autonomy, the root of our rights and freedoms. I hate any idea that attempts to undermine OUR rights and freedoms.
This antipathy towards those who try to reduce OUR rights and freedoms is not intolerance but a recognition of why secular law, empowered by the legal autonomy and respect for the individual so governed, is abused when laws are passed to reduce the legal autonomy of the individual for some specific goal like this travesty of a law. Yet misguided people are quite willing to forgo, reduce, or constrain OUR legal autonomy by reducing some segment of the population in the name of servitude to some god… a willingness to switch OUR autonomy to YOUR obedience. This attempt is anti-secular, anti-human rights, anti-freedom, anti-legal dignity of the individual. It is the opposite of what empowers your equal legal rights and political freedoms, including freedom of religion, from some tyranny.
When one advocates and supports all of us to be subject to some other authority than the basis of our laws, then this fundamental tacit agreement between the governed and the governing (that is the bedrock of secular liberal democracies) acts directly against that legitimate use of political authority (and all secular law). When a person advocates for some submission to some god over this bedrock principle, one is advocating against it. All of us should be onside to block this abuse of political authority. This law attempts to use secular authority to further some religious agenda that reduces the equal legal rights of other fully franchised citizens, which undermines legitimate political authority, undermines legitimate legislation, undermines legitimate law, and replaces it with mandated obedience in the name of fetal rights to supersede and subjugate the rights and freedoms of pregnant women. It is wrong in every sense of the word if one is attempting to do in the name of religious freedom for it acts directly against the root of that freedom. Such willingness is deserving of legal intolerance for this seditious advocacy and in need of strong and sustained condemnation. At the very least, responsible citizens need to confront this advocacy and reveal it for the danger it is to ALL of us.
To prove my point, imagine a majority muslim community using the same motives you now hold to reduce your rights and freedoms in the name of allah. Seriously consider what this does to your religious freedoms before you label me with aspersions that you yourself would bring to bear against some other religious tyranny.
BTW, the definition of hate includes a desire that misfortune befalls another. I merely dislike intensely and detest any advocacy for the reduction of our common rights and freedoms. This law falls under that.
As for personal stories of pregnancy and trauma, let me assure you of my share of experiences. Few events cut to the heart of someone faster than problem pregnancies. But more importantly, grasp if you can that Canada has no abortion law and seems to produce far fewer abortions per capita than the State of Texas, far fewer teen pregnancies per capita, far older age of sexual initiation per capita, lower rates of STDs per capita, and easy access (with a few exceptions) to state funded abortion services. If you truly wish to affect abortion rates – and I think you honestly do – then punitive laws are the least effective method to use. This is where the discussion should head and not back to vainly trying to justify the imposition of religious tenets that directly harms civil liberties into law.
As far as the “hate” thing goes, I just wanted you to experience what it’s like to be on this side. Whenever I discuss abortion or homosexuality, we’re immediately told we “hate” and we are being “intolerant”. Not too fun.
But you were the one who said that people who supported the principles of the law were proponents of:
Not exactly a love letter.
By the way, did you know that listening to the heartbeat and viewing the sonogram are optional? Do you know who wrote drafted the law? One name? Two names? What are the religious convictions of the people who drafted the law?
Even some women are not required to hear the verbal explanation of the sonogram:
How do we even know that the person in the story is real? (Media outlets have created stories and characters before to suit their agendas, like this and this.)
I say, prevention is better. Let’s let young women and children know that it’s a child. Let them know that there are consequences, both mental, emotional, and physical, to having an abortion. The goal of prevention would be to let people having sex who are not prepared to handle the potential consequences understand what it is they are actually doing.
Joshua
Josh, thanks for speaking in my absence. In some instances, you literally took the words out of my mouth! =D
If I may digress a little, it is worth noting that when addressing comparative difficulties and worldview level considerations – as in this discussion on abortion – the failure of certain worldviews to stand up to close scrutiny becomes obvious. tildeb demonstrates this clearly with the increasing knots he’s tied around himself with his own replies here. And it’s exactly these instances that remind me of the various self-referential absurdities, contradictory positions, and internal inconsistencies that tildeb’s brand of materialist atheism reduces itself to (some of which I will highlight later), and why I have not been able to give up the well warranted insights and comparative soundness of Christian theism for something far less convincing.
Now let me address your replies, tildeb. It seems I may have hit a raw nerve in my single response to you so far refuting your belief that a fetus is a child/human being. I must admit, I was rather surprised at your impassioned response, one in which you said that:
(i) “use of such terms applied to abortion is a typical ploy of the anti-choice regiment to intentionally misrepresent a medical issue into a religious one”,
(ii) “Supporting this kind of religiously inspired law… …elevates by religious justification abortion into a political issue rather than strictly a medical one”,
amongst MANY other curious statements expressing anti-religious sentiment. Which is odd, because not only are all 12 of the quotations I put up taken from the likes of science encyclopedias, medical journals, university level foundational embryology textbooks and from various experts in the fields of embryology and genetics, NOT ONE of those quotes is taken from a creationist/anti-evolutionist website or from the Bible even. Do you notice that? =)
So,I actually met you on the terms of the science you put most of your faith on, and showed you in no uncertain terms that scientifically, a fetus is a human being, and life begins, right from fertilization. Now it leaves me to ask you one more time not to avoid it, and to kindly deal with the substance of my post, rather than engage in semantics.
Are you aware of, and able to agree upon, the scientifically established fact that a fetus is a human being, one with human life?
Are you comfortable with the fact that you are championing the rights of women to kill innocent HUMAN BEINGS in their wombs?
You claim that the “laws reveal just how lacking in moral fiber and compassion are those who pretend a fetus is a child about to be ‘murdered’.” That seems to imply that you agree murdering a child is wrong, but that people pretend a fetus is a child. Now it is noble of you to share the belief that murdering a child is wrong, and I am sure you would agree that a child is a human being. So, if a fetus is an innocent human being, does taking the life of that human being become right just because you do not belief it is a child?
Do help us understand the logic of your position please, thanks.
There are other areas within your worldview where you do not seem to be internally or logically consistent, or seem to hold contradictory positions, and I would appreciate you looking into these areas, or at least sharing your point of view, so that we can all understand what drives you to these positions:
1) You said, in 3 different places:
(i) “Atheists are just like everybody else; they assign meaning and value TO their interaction with the universe…”
(ii) (in response to my question asking where you derive your morality) “From the woman who experienced this law in action”
(iii) In an earlier thread, in response to the same question from me, you said you got your morality “from biology.”
So, which is it, my friend? Do you personally assign objective value, do you base it on others, or on biology? Or do you not know for sure? =)
2) You express – albeit misinformedly – outrage at what you believe to be Professor Craig’s advocacy of genocide based on a serious exegesis by a serious philosopher of an event that took place thousands of years ago that he couldn’t know about for sure, AND in the same breath, you are able to freely advocate the killing of hundreds of millions of human beings since the invention of abortion. Do you see anything internally inconsistent about this at all?
3) “Let me be clear: religion accepts no boundaries of where its tenets should pertain. It slides under the door of any and all issues and is presented by supporters as if it naturally belongs.”
I am surprised you even mention this. That IS the point, my friend. The mark of any legitimate worldview is its ability to lend itself to as many issues as possible with reasonable warrant and consistency.For instance, Josh and I have a reasonable faith that is balanced at worldview level, and faith tradition level, with well warranted insights from authenticated scriptures being a part of the theological package. And in this, no-one is exempt from reasonable and civil, cross-examination. That you would say this begs the question: Is your worldview found wanting on a number of fronts, and unable to establish itself as a well warranted, reasonable faith? Should that not be cause for concern, or at least allow you to be more open-minded about the comparative soundness of other worldviews? =)
I think I’ll stop my questions here, for you have much to think about and respond to as it is. Do consider all that I’ve mentioned. You may feel that the right to freedom to abort is important, but like Josh mentioned, the right to live is much more basic than that, and surely not something that anyone should be denied.
To borrow your quote: “You have every right to feel offended at what I’ve written; that doesn’t mean it’s any less accurate.”
Cheers. =)
Some further points for your consideration, tildeb. =)
Do not get me the wrong way, I understand you have your concerns. I cannot speak for others, but when I say that I am against abortion, I am not in the least bit interested in “reducing the rights of others”. Nor am I not denying that a woman might have reasons to not want to go through a pregnancy, or that she has “the rights and dignity of another human being”, or a right to bodily integrity. I mean yes, abortion has, in my personal opinion, become an industry, a solution, an excuse to avoid responsibility, amongst other concerns. But even all that is trivial compared to my major issue with abortion.
The real issue, that some people including you, keep avoiding is the fact that the life in the womb – the fetus, if you will – has the right of existence because it is human by nature and it is alive, and this is backed up by medical science, as I’ve shown. And that is the one thing that matters most to me with regards to abortion: life. As a Christian, I value life, and seek to protect the weak and innocent, because that which is made in the image of God deserves honor and respect and protection. Why, I’d speak up even if it was YOUR life in jeopardy.
In fact, the Bible ties in very well with scientific understanding on the matter. Matthew 1:20 says, “But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.’” The fact that the angel tells Joseph “the Child who has been conceived” is “of the Holy Spirit” highlights that Jesus himself was a human being at the moment of conception. Moreover, in the Bible, the unborn are referred to as children, protected by the same punishment as for adults, and are known personally by God just like any other human being. Since abortion is murdering a person, abortion is morally wrong (“You shall not murder” – Exodus 20:13).
And yet, you and some others continue to miss or ignore this point repeatedly in order to support your view that it is okay to kill this human life. You remove humanity from the equation and the womb, and justify killing the human being by claiming that a woman’s right surpasses the rights of the fetus. So these human beings never get a chance at life, a chance they deserve.
Like this following girl, who got that chance. Though written off as severely retarded, she reveals that there is indeed a beautiful intelligence within her, trapped behind that wall between her mind and body. A wall that others see as severe retardation, and might cite as reason for abortion:
‘Severely Handicapped Girl Suddenly Expresses Intelligence At Age 11 – very moving video’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg)
This autistic boy got to make the most of his life too:
‘Jake: Math prodigy proud of his autism – 60 Minutes – CBS News – video’ (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7395214n&tag=re1.channel)
I’d also like you to take a moment to hear this amazing story. Gianna Jessen survived an abortion attempt while in the womb, and is a living testimony of God’s love who has to be heard to be believed. I especially love her joy and sense of humour in the face of persecution. Not to mention an extremely high and humbling view of God’s sovereignty too, to call cerebral palsy resulting from a botched abortion a gift from God.
Give this a few minutes. You’ll be glad you did:
‘Gianna Jessen Abortion Survivor’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPF1FhCMPuQ&feature=share)
Finally, I would like to refer you to bornagain77 (a regular contributor to Uncommon Descent) who shared these moving comments that someone with autism wrote on his Facebook wall.
“Charlie Wolcott commented:
I do find it interesting that the same atheists who support abortion and evolution all would have voted to have these people killed at birth because of their ‘defects’. They would institutionalize them to keep them away from society and never would consider their special gifts. I was one such child. I have Asperger’s and my early childhood was very reminiscent of Rain Man. It took a few years for my parents to discover my gifts with numbers and my ability to solve calculus problems in my head. I am no where near the Savant stage but when I was young, I had specialists that wanted to institutionalize me. I was given a very low ceiling and expect never to improve.
But God had other plans. I’ve broke just about every ceiling put on me and today most people can’t tell that I’m autistic. It’s fine with me that I couldn’t safely drive (operation of the vehicle was no issue, interacting with other drivers was) until this past summer. I got my license in January (I turn 29 this summer). I’m a college graduate from one of the top computer science departments in the nation (UT El Paso), when out of high school ten years ago, I would not have succeeded at all, in spite of my 4.0 high school GPA. I had no reading comprehension until I was 12 and now I am a published fiction author. Those that knew me in my childhood are completely amazed at what I’ve been able to do and it all because of God. I am a walking miracle, living proof that there is a God and any atheist who tries to tell me otherwise will not succeed. If they reject my testimony (and some try) it is evidence of their stubbornness and willful blindness that God not only exists but he cares for each of us individually.”
I’d like to hear you tell any of these wonderful people that they should have been aborted.
Do take my words to heart, tildeb, and do share your thoughts as well. =)
Thank you for the really informative comment, Getic. Apolo! The videos were encouraging, too.
You’re welcome, Josh. =)
I neither have the time or the space here to go over in detail the breadth and scope of your comment so I will select only those points that are widest of the mark and address them.
G.A., you continue to miss my point that using the term ‘child’ to describe a fetus is misleading. A child is the term we use to describe the age between birth and puberty. Please note the bold. This is important when talking about ‘murder’, which is a wrongful killing. You want to attach this notion of a wrongful killing to abortion and to do this you intentionally use the term ‘child’. A child is murdered when wrongfully killed because he or she is an autonomous individual under law. A child – like any individual – has legal protections and sanctions from such acts. You wish to extend these protections to a fetus for what you consider are good reasons. But there are also good reasons not to do this, especially when it reduces the legal rights and freedoms of the individual who gestates this fetus. this is not a small matter nor one that can be easily justified to subjugate an autonomous and independent individual to benefit a dependent one. Your personal choice is very much your own; what you wish to do, however, is impose your choice by eliminating the choice of another and to do this requires you to demonstrate support for the greater good of all. It is on this basis – supporting the greater good – that certain discriminatory laws are justified and enacted. But before we even go there, we must first establish if abortion is even a legal issue.
I continue to insist that abortion is not an issue of law or religion or politics or morality or rights. Abortion is a medical issue (involving medical ethics). Only by altering this basic approach do we then start getting into all these other very complicated and sophisticated side issues. As in Canada, the absence of any abortion laws (in spite of repeated attempts by evangelical christian politicians to bring it into legislation) allows the issue to remain a medical one whereby those who do not support it have the freedom to abstain from it for reasons they deem important while those who do (or must) consider it have the freedom to obtain it. Each case is highly personal, private, and pertinent only to those involved… many of which are therapeutic abortions deemed medically necessary. Why prescribed and punitive law rather than professional medical advice should take precedence in these cases remains an issue you have yet to justify. But please note that access is wide, the cost is free in the sense that all medical costs are carried by all, and the rates of abortions that are not therapeutic are quite low (it’s a terribly uncomfortable and highly intrusive form of birth control requiring many days to physically recover). This fact of achieving such low rates is worth serious consideration if you are truly concerned with reducing the number of abortions.
The right question from where I sit is how can we promote wanted healthy pregnancies and come closest to eliminating any need for terminating unwanted pregnancies through abortion? The use of a punitive law that trades off rights and freedoms of an autonomous individual in favour of promoting the rights and freedoms of a dependent fetus seems to be the least effective and most problematic method… yet the one most highly touted as some kind of solution to this ongoing politicized quagmire called ‘abortion’. It’s not. It’s a guaranteed fail as desperate women continue to try to end their unwanted pregnancies by any means possible – legal or illegal – and too often pay with their lives. We can do better as a civilization than assume that the blunt instrument of the law that reduces half the population’s rights and freedoms to that of a breeding stock is up to the task when we have overwhelming evidence that it isn’t.
This is the kind of legal tyranny abortion laws wields. Explain to me how the punitive law is a better instrument than medicine in the care of this woman?
Hmm, I believe you may not have read my full response. I actually wrote 2 posts in succession, but your replies here seem related to my post at “2012/06/07 at 6:31 PM”, not so much the one at “2012/06/07 at 2:30 PM”. If you haven’t already done so, do refer to that post, as that post has more critical pointers and questions meant for your response. Thanks.
In the meantime, to briefly run through your response:
“G.A., you continue to miss my point that using the term ‘child’ to describe a fetus is misleading… … You want to attach this notion of a wrongful killing to abortion and to do this you intentionally use the term ‘child’.”
Non sequitur, my friend. YOU are the one who continues to miss my point. I am not at all arguing for the fetus being a ‘child’, ‘toddler’, ‘elderly person’ or whatever. In fact, I have consistently been referring to the fetus as a HUMAN BEING, not a child, and have substantiated my point with ample evidence to show that no well-informed embryologist, biologist, or fetologist disputes this fact. So it’s the killing of a HUMAN BEING that concerns me.
My personal hunch is that you have a high regard for medical opinion, what with you claiming what “Abortion is a medical issue (involving medical ethics).” So tell me tildeb, with such widespread medical scholarly agreement on this, can you see that a fetus is a human being and that abortion is tantamount to killing an innocent human being? Why or why not?
“The use of a punitive law that trades off rights and freedoms of an autonomous individual in favour of promoting the rights and freedoms of a dependent fetus seems to be the least effective and most problematic method… yet the one most highly touted as some kind of solution to this ongoing politicized quagmire called ‘abortion’. It’s not. It’s a guaranteed fail as desperate women continue to try to end their unwanted pregnancies by any means possible – legal or illegal – and too often pay with their lives.”
This is an odd justification. Stealing, rape, murder and the likes are perpetuated by a very small minority of people within individual countries. Are you saying that all these countries should do away with laws against these crimes, and society will actually come out better? And yet, abortion is of a similar rank, it is the killing of human beings.
Just for illustrative purposes, I can easily show you how beastiality, for instance, fits neatly into your statement:
‘The use of a punitive law that trades off rights and freedoms of an autonomous individual in favour of promoting the rights and freedoms of AN ANIMAL seems to be the least effective and most problematic method… yet the one most highly touted as some kind of solution to this ongoing politicized quagmire called ‘BEASTIALITY’. It’s not. It’s a guaranteed fail as desperate women continue to try to end their unwanted SEXUAL URGES by any means possible – legal or illegal – and too often pay with their HEALTH.’
I hope you get my point. =)
Certainly, if abortion indeed is the systematic killing of innocent human beings, we would be in agreement that there should be laws against the killing of human beings. Isn’t that right?
From the post itself: provide women with an iPod so they don’t have to listen to the heartbeat of the child they are going to abort?
So I corrected that misrepresentation by criticizing those who who pretend a fetus is a child about to be ‘murdered’. A fetus is not a child anymore than an acorn is an oak tree.
You then arrive to tell me that you are certainly entitled to your own opinion, but you are not, as they say, entitled to your own facts as if I have merely made up this important difference between what the term ‘child’ means and what the term ‘fetus’ means. I have done no such thing. It is you who are ignoring why these terms factually matter.
You show exactly this lack of understanding when you present an unnecessarily long and multiple list of quotations that show the human embryo is widely considered by experts to be an early stage of the developing human and hop, skip, and jump merrily to the simplistic notion that therefore the dependent human precursor to an autonomous individual is equivalent to the developed human child. But, again, is this simple claim true? Is a fetus a child?
The answer is clear: No. A fetus is not a child by definition. This is the fact and not my opinion. There are many significant and important biological differences between these various stages (and the clue you seem determined to ignore is present in the different terms to describe them, like blastocyst, zygote, fetus, and child…meaning different biological stages of development.)
Why is this notion that a zygote is a child not true? Let us consider the mighty acorn. The acorn is a precursor to any oak tree; destroying the acorn you are trying to argue is equivalent to destroying an oak tree. But is this true IN FACT as your comment against me implies? No. No actual oak tree has been destroyed. What has been removed is the potential for an oak tree. And this is where your simplistic notion of equivalency between a fetus and child runs into fatal problems: if we are to endow potential human life with the same concerns we apply to actual children and call the removal ‘murder’ (meaning wrongful killing), then you yourself are just such a murderer (as am I); when you scratch your nose, you remove hundred of stem cells, each potentially capable of producing a human blastocyst. Does this make you an actual murderer? Does eating an acorn make you a killer of oak trees?
Of course not.
An acorn, like a human blastocyst, only holds the potential of becoming a developed autonomous adult but has not yet achieved this equivalent state. It, like the gestating human zygote, must successfully pass through all the intermediary stages of development to reach equivalency.
Beside, GA, you don’t even believe what you say you do: because about a third of all human pregnancies are spontaneously aborted, and you presume god designed our reproductive system that so often does spontaneously abort, then you cannot avoid the connection that god is the not just the greatest of abortionists who designed systemic killing of human beings, one that ‘murders’ children, on a scale that puts all human genocides combined to shame. And you don’t believe that for one second.
Well, tildeb, you seem to be saying that the human life in the womb is somehow not a human life, but some non-human blob. You support this by maintaining that a “fetus” is not a person. But when I check the dictionary, I don’t find that definition. In fact, the Merriam-Webster dictionary states that a fetus is “a developing human from usually two months after conception to birth”. Even the scientific definition would be “an unborn mammal” or “unborn offspring”.
So, I’m really curious: At which point does a fetus become a child (child = young person)? Perhaps you’ll say at birth. OK. What difference does the few inches or so through the birth canal make? Would it be OK to have an abortion up to 8 months and 29 days, since, technically, the “child” is still merely a “fetus”? (After they are born, they are no less dependent on their mother. It takes many, many years until they become “a developed autonomous adult”.) Maybe you might even be one of those people who want to extend abortion rights a few months after a child is born — a fourth-trimester abortion?
I think the quotations Getic.Apolo provided were showing, basically, how that a new, distinct human life starts at conception. That is a scientific fact. So, is a human life not equal to a person? The additional danger I see in your position is that it requires a group of people to grant and revoke personhood. And what gives someone the right to determine personhood? Whose list do we use? How big should the group that drafts the list of attributed be? I don’t know what you’ll say, but if you do say that it’s a group consensus, then I think you’re treading on very dangerous grounds.
By the way, where did you get your stats about a third of all human pregnancies being spontaneously aborted?
Try to keep your response short, please. I’m not asking for a lecture.
Joshua
No, I’ve never tried to suggest that a fertilized egg is less than a human. What I’ve been yammering on about is that an unborn fetus is not a child. I would yammer on that a child is not an adult but that does not mean I think a child is not human. The process of birth is not simply a matter of traveling a few centimeters; it is a complex biological change in state from a biological dependent critter to a biological independent critter. And this is where viability begins to make its presence felt in medical ethics. The current medical ethics (and best practices deduced from them) elevates viability to be an important consideration in treatment and practice. But rather than go into this thorny issue (which backs up legislation of constraining abortion services after this age is reached by the fetus), I would prefer to point out that altering the legal status of a fetus to that of a person necessarily competes with those same rights of the mother, and on this point the anti-choice crowd will lose its ethical footing. What happens (and does happen wherever religious legislation tries to elevate the rights of a fetus) is that women die in the name of protecting their fetus’ rights to life. This is an intolerable intrusion subverting the rights and freedoms of real people that establishes practices antithetical to the very rights and freedoms they supposedly champion. This is why a fetus’ rights in the legal sense must be held until after birth when they become children under the law. To attempt to do otherwise is an attack on the rights and freedoms of all of us. There are women, their nurses and doctors, in countries with catholic laws in jail for murder for performing necessary abortions that saved the lives of these mothers. There was even a recent case in Arizona where a therapeutic abortion was performed because both mother and baby would have died without it. The mom already had four children and it is medically unethical to allow both to die for the sake of a religious conviction. If you want I can link to both of these travesties brought about by solely by misguided attempts to criminalize abortion.
Rates of miscarriage vary but the medical dictionary I use agrees with “Up to 30% of pregnancies may end as spontaneous abortions, many caused by blighted ova that have congenital defects incompatible with life. Also called miscarriage.” The same link can be found here. My doctor friend tells me local rates are about 15-20% in his patient load and this locale is a world renowned medical center.
So now we’re using the word “critter”? Is that a technical term? ;)
Who determines the viability of a “critter”? Is a baby less dependent on its mother after its born or before its born?
I’m still trying to understand how “morality” and “medical ethics” are separate issues. Are you saying that its only in medical ethics that viability plays a key role (and distinguishes the two)?
I’ll have to ask my sister about these. She’s a pediatrician.
Joshua
Biology (and technology) determines the age of viability. The reason why this is important in medical ethics is because it is asinine to argue that legislation is the proper venue for deciding ethically complex in vitro therapies; best practices within the profession of medicine are the proper venue to discuss and arrive at practices within professional guidelines that incorporate not just medical need but also balances the patient’s best interests with the practitioner’s obligations that must also account for complex ethical considerations. (The bulk of evangelicals – never out any sense of inflated importance and arrogance but a revealed divine knowledge and keen moral insight – assume that everything is properly subject to adjudication by their pious beliefs. Those who dare publicly question this assumption are really the arrogant ones.)
Funny how when faced with life-threatening biological problems, most evangelical folk have no qualms about putting on hold biblical teachings about believing in the power of prayer and acting on the assurances of the coming Kingdom while firing up the Durango and heading off to the nearest MD for medical treatment.
Much to the surprise of atheists assured by evangelicals of the righteousness of their intrusive and pious pronouncements on all subjects, apparently believers themselves no longer think allied clerics are considered the best choice for performing brain surgery based on believing their shared god will guide the scalpel any more than nuns wedded to Jesus are particularly suited for performing open heart surgeries. Medical knowledge seems to have a role after all. Again though, religious hypocrisy is never a mitigating factor when reality’s push comes to self-serving shove. Even the most fervent believers in their special flavour of Oogity Boogity tend to yield to medical knowledge when its personal but always with a hand wave and a platitude or two towards god inspiring this hard-earned knowledge… while arguing that such knowledge blinds people who dare disagree with their pious and inspired decisions to the truth of a simpleton’s religious certainty… a certainty that human life begins at conception so ending it through a medical procedure for medical reasons is murder of an innocent child. Why let any other relevant considerations and medically mitigating factors enter into it when such a position is really quite divine and deserving of a blanket law that turns all medical issues raised about a woman’s implanted uterus into a matter of criminal law?
Why indeed, unless rights and freedoms and medical issues are to fall under religious purview? That’s the real agenda here: to impose religious tyranny on all.
Sorry, but your previous comment is nothing but another anti-religion rant full of verbal caricatures. It’s sad, really.
Joshua
“I think the quotations Getic.Apolo provided were showing, basically, how that a new, distinct human life starts at conception. That is a scientific fact.”
Thank you, Josh, you perfectly summed up the point that I was trying to make to tildeb. In fact, that he doesn’t see it is rather surprising, I don’t think I could be any clearer.
tildeb,
It’s rather unfortunate that you keep returning to a strawman and – whether intentionally or unintentionally – distracting from my key argument with all manner of peripheral objections.
Unfortunately for you though, confident blanket assertions of the unsubstantiated kind do not a case make.
Let’s take it from the top. While my extensive quotations may have served the ADDITIONAL purpose of reminding you that you should be open-minded to the notion that different people have different interpretations of what constitutes a child (in fact, many people share Josh’s view, that a fetus is a child), my MAIN REASON for citing those quotations – as should be patently evident from the words of those quotations themselves – was to argue specifically for the fact that a fetus is a HUMAN BEING.
And I am more than happy to walk you through this slowly, so that we’re both on the same page as to the crux of my argument =) To begin, kindly take some time to see what I actually said consistently throughout our discussion, right from the very first post, a brief sample of which I present here (with caps for emphasis):
“… it seems no well-informed embryologist, biologist, or fetologist disputes the fact that, as per the evidence, the fetus develops AS a HUMAN BEING and not INTO a human being.”
“So,I actually met you on the terms of the science you put most of your faith on, and showed you in no uncertain terms that scientifically, a fetus is a HUMAN BEING, and life begins, right from fertilization…”
“Are you aware of, and able to agree upon, the scientifically established fact that a fetus is a HUMAN BEING, one with human life?”
And so, see how you have set up and knocked over a strawman misrepresentation, time and again.
In fact, things could not get any clearer than my most recent reply to you, where you said I intend to call the fetus a child and I put it – in plain English and in no uncertain terms – that I see the fetus as a human being. In case you forgot what transpired, here it is:
“In the meantime, to briefly run through your response:
‘G.A., you continue to miss my point that using the term ‘child’ to describe a fetus is misleading… … You want to attach this notion of a wrongful killing to abortion and to do this you intentionally use the term ‘child’.’
Non sequitur, my friend. YOU are the one who continues to miss my point. I am not at all arguing for the fetus being a ‘child’, ‘toddler’, ‘elderly person’ or whatever. In fact, I have consistently been referring to the fetus as a HUMAN BEING, not a child, and have substantiated my point with ample evidence to show that no well-informed embryologist, biologist, or fetologist disputes this fact. So it’s the killing of a HUMAN BEING that concerns me.”
I don’t think my intention or argument could be any clearer, my friend. So I hope you can see why most of your last reply to me, while diligently written, was, sadly, well off the mark to begin with.
In fact, that you would find comfort in peripheral objections, while conveniently avoiding an answer to even ONE of the many questions I posed that are more fundamental to the abortion debate, is very, very telling. Thankfully though, I certainly do not intend to allow you to derail the heart of the discussion. You find that we’ll both be better off for it, as it will lead to a more illuminating discussion. That is, if you’re REALLY in this conversation for all the right reasons. =)
So now that that’s settled, let’s revisit some of the questions I posed. It’s okay if you’re struggling with answers, – after all, there are many questions that I struggle with myself, we are, after all, human – but I hope that in the end, you get down to the dirty business of actually seeking and then sharing your answers to those questions. I’ll place those questions in the next post.
Once again (and this time with feeling) my complaint was that presenting a fetus as a child being murdered is a misrepresentation common to those who wish to remove choice from individuals over their reproductive capabilities. It was you, Getic.Apolo, who first switched terms from child to human as if the two were equivalent and produced that long list of quotations. When I challenged you on doing exactly this, you ludicrously claimed my criticism was a non sequitur and built a straw man about me refusing to ‘answer your questions’ about when human life begins. You require me to state that human life begins at conception so that you can then play the bait and switch game and change the child-to-human fetus back into a human-to-child to apply the term ‘murder’. This argument is an obnoxious attempt to deflect criticism away from the original misrepresentation into one that misrepresents me into suggesting a fertilized human egg is not human.
Good grief.
It is hardly surprising that those who advocate most strongly for imposing their religious sensibilities on others are the same ones who pretend they advocate for less government intrusion. You and your fellow evangelicals who take your piousness into the public domain and think yourself divinely moral for doing so are really advocating for taking control of people by use of the state through law. You would have us police women’s uteri in the name of saving children from murderous butchers. This incredibly obnoxious governmental intrusion could naturally be extended by exac tly the same reasoning into The Handmaiden’s Tale whereby a woman’s diet and exercise regime must be regulated, that she undergo testing for ongoing fitness and suitability for breeding, that the state be in charge of determining who gets paired with whom… for the benefit of the in vitro ‘child’, of course.
Thankfully, we still have some sane people in the judiciary who also appreciate just how odious is such an intrusion and quite rightly draw the line at birth for legal protections for personhood. To attempt to assign this legal status to a blastocyst is to turn the woman into a second class citizen with fewer rights than, but all the legal responsibility for, that blastocyst and remaking the govertnment into the ultimate babysitter (with a big punitive legal stick to ensure compliance) for the woman. This is insane. But it’s no surprise that the evangelical mindset – so accustomed to defining up as really just a version of down and black as really just a version of white – finds no discrepancy at allocating a new legal definition for a blastocyst as really just a version of a person… while pretending that they do this as way of making government smaller and less intrusive to their freedom-loving religious ways. It’s religious hypocrisy writ large.
Look back at my 12 quotations, they all convey the same message, that a fetus – and even the zygote that you are so fond of making references to – are human beings with life right from fertilization. I’ll present 3 of the 12 quotations here (caps for emphasis):
“By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, LIFE IS PRESENT from the moment of conception.”
(Dr. Hymie Gordon, former Chairman, Department of Genetics at Mayo Clinic)
“The intricate processes by which a baby develops from a single cell are miraculous…. This cell [the zygote] results from the union of an oocyte [egg] and sperm. A zygote is THE BEGINNING OF A NEW HUMAN BEING….”, “Human development begins at fertilization.”
(The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th Edition)
“Embryo: The developing individual between the union of the germ cells and the completion of the organs which characterize its body when it becomes a separate organism…. At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), A NEW LIFE HAS BEGUN…”
(Considine, Douglas (ed.). Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia. 5th edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, p. 943)
“ZYGOTE. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), represents THE BEGINNING OF A HUMAN BEING.”
(Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, p. 1)
And now, in quoting my own self, I leave you with some (of the many) questions I’ve raised at least 2 or 3 times, for which you have failed to provide ANY answer, let alone a decent one. Your part in this discussion matters. So here it goes:
“So,I actually met you on the terms of the science you put most of your faith on, and showed you in no uncertain terms that scientifically, a fetus is a human being, and life begins, right from fertilization. Now it leaves me to ask you one more time not to avoid it, and to kindly deal with the substance of my post, rather than engage in semantics.
Are you aware of, and able to agree upon, the scientifically established fact that a fetus is a human being, one with human life?
Are you comfortable with the fact that you are championing the rights of women to kill innocent HUMAN BEINGS in their wombs?
You claim that the “laws reveal just how lacking in moral fiber and compassion are those who pretend a fetus is a child about to be ‘murdered’.” That seems to imply that you agree murdering a child is wrong, but that people pretend a fetus is a child. Now it is noble of you to share the belief that murdering a child is wrong, and I am sure you would agree that a child is a human being. So, if a fetus is an innocent human being, does taking the life of that human being become right just because you do not belief it is a child?
Do help us understand the logic of your position please, thanks.”
Like I said, kindly address them. The more you avoid facing these issues, the more telling it becomes. ;)
“represents THE BEGINNING OF A HUMAN BEING.”
Right, not ‘IS a human being’.
So, when does a human being start to be a human being? And how do you know that?
” “represents THE BEGINNING OF A HUMAN BEING.”
Right, not ‘IS a human being’. ”
Andrew Ryan! It’s nice having you back, been wondering where you’ve been =) Maybe YOU would like to answer the questions that tildeb has been facing challenges with. I’ll give a brief overview.
First, let’s look at the fact that a fetus or zygote is a human being with human life, a fact that no well-informed embyologist, biologist or fetologist disputes. I provided tildeb with 12 quotations, here are 4 of those 12 (with caps for emphasis):
“By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, LIFE IS PRESENT from the moment of conception.”
(Dr. Hymie Gordon, former Chairman, Department of Genetics at Mayo Clinic)
“The intricate processes by which a baby develops from a single cell are miraculous…. This cell [the zygote] results from the union of an oocyte [egg] and sperm. A ZYGOTE IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW HUMAN BEING….”, “Human development begins at fertilization.”
(The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th Edition)
“Embryo: The developing individual between the union of the germ cells and the completion of the organs which characterize its body when it becomes a separate organism…. AT THE MOMENT the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the UNION RESULTS IN A FERTILIZED OVUM (ZYGOTE), A NEW LIFE HAS BEGUN…”
(Considine, Douglas (ed.). Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia. 5th edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, p. 943)
“ZYGOTE. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), REPRESENTS THE BEGINNING OF A HUMAN BEING.”
(Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, p. 1)
And now, some of the many questions I posed to tildeb. You are welcome to address them, including the following:
“Are you aware of, and able to agree upon, the scientifically established fact that a fetus or zygote is – from the moment of fertilization – a human being, one with human life?
Are you comfortable with the fact that you are championing the rights of women to kill innocent HUMAN BEINGS in their wombs?…
Do help us understand the logic of your position please, thanks.”
Also, let’s take things back a step. I mentioned earlier about the benefits of addressing comparative difficulties and worldview level considerations – as in this discussion on abortion – in helping a person assess well warranted insights and the comparative soundness of their worldview on a regular basis. For instance, Josh and I have a reasonable faith of a God who loves all of us (He loves you too) that is balanced at worldview level, and faith tradition level, with well warranted insights from authenticated scriptures being a part of the theological package. And in this, no-one is exempt from reasonable and civil, cross-examination. And likewise, I am confident that you live within the framework of a particular worldview as well. So, just so I can get to know you a little better, could you share a little bit more about your worldview. Like, are you a evolutionary materialist atheist, or pantheist, or something else?
Thanks man. =)
That’s like asking ‘when does facial hair become a beard’? I’d say at some point between, say, three weeks and a month after the last shave. The fact that there’s no exact point doesn’t mean we can’t tell a clean-shaven man from a bearded.
In direct response: it’s on a continuum between conception and birth, but I’m quite comfortable with the current legal cut-off point which is somewhere between 20-22 weeks I think, well before brain activity begins, and well before it makes sense to talk about the suffering of the unborn foetus.
Well, Andy, I hope you’re not a hunter. When people go hunting, they don’t just start shooting at things that move. They first identify what it is they are about to kill, then they kill it. Usually, if we’re unsure, we exercise caution. If you don’t know when a fetus becomes an actual human, isn’t it a little dangerous to kill “it”?
“If you don’t know when a fetus becomes an actual human, isn’t it a little dangerous to kill “it”?”
I already addressed that with my ‘fallacy of the beard’ analogy, the same post you just replied to!
Again: Just because I can’t say exactly when facial hair becomes a beard, it doesn’t mean I’m unsure of whether 5 O Clock shadow is a beard or not. It isn’t. Likewise, just because I view ‘becoming an actual human’ as being a continuum, doesn’t mean I can’t say that a blastocyst isn’t there yet.
Josh: “But what standard are you going to appeal to to say that? ”
Josh, you already lost that argument on the other thread. Go back to it if you want to continue it. If every discussion goes directly to the same argument over standards, then there IS no discussion.
And “where is the tolerance?” You may well ask Josh…
Well, you keep doing the same thing (judging the actions of other people by your own moral standard), so I’ll keep asking the question until you answer it.
You have yet to tell me where your get your morality and why it is binding on anyone else. (And it’s an important question, especially if you’re going to use it to judge other people.) As far as I can tell (and I’ve mentioned it to you several times), your morality seems to be the product of a group consensus. And that’s exactly why I’m telling you that you’ve got no right to judge another group’s consensus. The most you can say is that it’s different. You certainly can’t say it’s wrong, since they derived theirs from the same source and in the same way that you got yours (apparently).
So if your moral standard is not the product of a group consensus or your opinion, then where does it come from and why is it binding to me? Why the hesitancy to respond directly to such a simple question?
This time, please don’t hide behind an exaggeration. Simply tell me where and how you know that an action is wrong. If you want to pull out the Euthyphro dilemma card and think that settles the matter, then OK. I think it’s disingenuous then to really stand and condemn people for their actions, then turn around and say you have no idea where your morality comes from, what makes it binding, and what happens when one person’s morality disagrees with another. I’m trying to understand, too, how you seem content with accepting an inner moral intuition that the atheist position can’t account for and certainly one that can’t be made binding on anyone else. In the end, I think you’re merely left with a morality that justifies itself under the banner, “Because I said so.” So, as it applies to our topic, a law like the one mentioned in the story is wrong and the people who supported it are terrible simply because you said so. It might work with young children at home, but it’s not going to work elsewhere, I’m afraid.
Joshua
“You have yet to tell me where your get your morality and why it is binding on anyone else. ”
Same to back to you Josh.
“I think it’s disingenuous then to really stand and condemn people for their actions”
I could take every post you’ve made on this site and rather than engage with any of the arguments you make, simply post “Your post is invalid because your morality is based on circular reasoning. How would that advance any discussion?
And when did I ever say “I don’t know where my morality comes from”?
“In the end, I think you’re merely left with a morality that justifies itself under the banner, “Because I said so.” ”
In the words of Bart Simpson, the ironing is delicious Josh!
I think you meant “irony”, Andy. But I’m not saying morality is “because I said so.” I can appeal to three things: 1) a basic, innate moral sense within each of us; 2) the inability for a random process (evolution) to create that innate moral sense; 3) historical events recorded in the Old and New Testament which are additional evidence of the Law Giver, His standards, and His punishments. None of those depend on me personally to exist. I could even add a fourth: 4) the collective wisdom of 5,000 years or so of recorded history.
In contrast, what can you appeal to in order to establish your morality, something that doesn’t depend on you? If you want to say, “Well, I think you should do this or that”, well, morality becomes a mere suggestion. And since you don’t have the authority or ability to exact punishment for not following any certain break in the moral code (neither do I), how are you going to enforce it or make it binding?
Joshua
“I think you meant “irony”, Andy”
Jeez Josh, you’re hard work! It was a joke in Simpsons. Bart means irony, he says ‘The ironing is delicious’. But thanks for the snark.
” the inability for a random process (evolution”
Accept I’m pretty sure I already pointed out to you that evolution isn’t random. These conversations are going to go round in circles if you forget everything you learned each time. Don’t you think you shouldn’t base your arguments on what you believe about evolution when you make such basic mistakes as believing it is random?
Andy, I think you’re being overly sensitive. I wasn’t trying to be snarky. Did you ever consider that I might not watch The Simpsons (even though Matt Groening and I have a lot of similar interests)?
Evolution isn’t random? So the chromosome combinations that result from mating are non-random?
Mutation is random; natural selection is non random.
Andrew:
“That’s like asking ‘when does facial hair become a beard’? I’d say at some point between, say, three weeks and a month after the last shave. The fact that there’s no exact point doesn’t mean we can’t tell a clean-shaven man from a bearded.”
Your attempted refutation is irrelevant and erroneous, Andrew.
Irrelevant, because your facial hair, beard or moustache does not have the intrinsic value of a human. Shaving your face is not like murdering a human being, and trimming your beard is not like aborting a baby.
Erroneous, because it is based on an erroneous analysis, which you can discern from your own sentence: Your facial hair does not develop into hair, it develops AS hair, INTO a beard eventually, just as a fetus does not develop into a human, it develops AS a human INTO an adult eventually.
“In direct response: it’s on a continuum between conception and birth, but I’m quite comfortable with the current legal cut-off point which is somewhere between 20-22 weeks I think, well before brain activity begins, and well before it makes sense to talk about the suffering of the unborn foetus.”
As with tildeb, your answer is your philosophically speculative position on the matter. Life and death matters should not be decided on that basis. There is, however, no speculation about human life and the humanity of the zygote, embryo, fetus and the likes. Let me refer you to yet another scientific view:
“I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception…I submit that human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of human life…I am no more prepared to say that these early stages represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty…is not a human being. This is human life at every stage.” (Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni, professor of pediatrics and obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania)
That human life begins at conception, therefore, is a scientific fact.
So Andrew, do you support abortion? Does the fetus being a human being matter in your choosing to support abortion? Why or why not?
Also, I haven’t heard anything about your worldview, it is certainly relevant to our discussion. Do share the details with me, thanks. =)
“Irrelevant, because your facial hair, beard or moustache does not have the intrinsic value of a human.”
It’s an analogy – your objection is irrelevant to my point, which still stands.
Andrew Ryan
“I already addressed that with my ‘fallacy of the beard’ analogy, the same post you just replied to!”
And we already humbly put it to you that you’re appealing to a false analogy. Do you see it?
“Again: Just because I can’t say exactly when facial hair becomes a beard, it doesn’t mean I’m unsure of whether 5 O Clock shadow is a beard or not. It isn’t. Likewise, just because I view ‘becoming an actual human’ as being a continuum, doesn’t mean I can’t say that a blastocyst isn’t there yet.”
Again, Andrew, you miss the point. If you’re familiar with biology, you’ll know that a zygote comes chronologically before a blastocyst. What the various embryologists, biologists and fetologists I cited are saying is that, according to the evidence, the zygote develops AS a human being and not INTO a human being. The zygote is the first stage of that OBSERVED development. The only logical way to deny this fact is to say that the finished product is not a human being.
Simply put, your unsubstantiated claim, based on philosophical speculation, is that the blastocyst develops into a human being at some point in the process. While you’re entitled to have faith in that, it has been refuted by those who study the process and weigh the evidence. They explain clearly that a baby cannot become a mature human being without first being an immature human being, in the same way that a giraffe cannot become a mature giraffe without first being an immature giraffe. According to their report, a non-human cannot evolve into a human. If you’re suggesting as much, do help us understand the logic of your position please, thanks.
I also noticed you didn’t answer much of what I wrote at “2012/06/10 at 7:56 AM”. I am not saying you have to, but answering those questions would certainly aid this dialogue and allow us to appreciation your commitment to this discussion =) So I ask again:
Do you see the scientifically established fact that a fetus or zygote is – from the moment of fertilization – a human being, one with human life?
Are you comfortable with the fact that you are championing the rights of women to kill innocent human beings in their wombs?
Also, could you share a little bit more about your worldview. Like, are you a evolutionary materialist atheist, or pantheist, or something else? I believe this is the 3rd or 4th time I am asking you this, I would appreciate getting to know you better, I hope it is simple enough a question for you to answer.
Thanks again. =)
“Do you see the scientifically established fact that a fetus or zygote is – from the moment of fertilization – a human being, one with human life?”
I can quote you biologists who don’t class zygotes as human beings. In fact I’m pretty sure that the MAJORITY of biologists are pro-choice and see the ‘human being from conception’ idea as utter nonsense. I’ve heard my own doctor cousin on the issue saying he finds the notion absurd, pointing out that as an identical twin, he and his brother only divided from the same organism after a few days. Does that make him ‘half a human’ or the possessor of ‘half a soul’?
In brief: I don’t believe you are correct that there is scientific consensus for your view. You are not correct to call it a ‘fact’.
“and that the image of Christ is all over them, their sense of outrage at what they perceive to be unjust or cruel is a good thing, it speaks of some standard of morality that they appeal to.”
And the fact that most Christians instinctively recoil from the murder and cruelty and slavery sanctioned by God in the bible tells me that most Christians innately feel that their morality doesn’t come from the Christian God.
“They explain clearly that a baby cannot become a mature human being without first being an immature human being”
So do you view acorns as being ‘immature oak trees’, or maggots as ‘immature flies’?
Biopsychologist Michael Gazzaniga in The Ethical Brain:
“During a discussion of stem cell research that took place while I was serving on President Bush’s bioethics council, I made an analogy comparing embryos created for stem cell research to a Home Depot. You don’t walk into a Home Depot and see thirty houses. You see materials that need architects, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers to create a house. An egg and a sperm are not a human. A fertilized embryo is not a human—it needs a uterus, and at least six months of gestation and development, growth and neuron formation, and cell duplication to become a human. To give an embryo created for biomedical research the same status even as one created for in vitro fertilization (IVF), let alone one created naturally, is patently absurd. When a Home Depot burns down, the headline in the paper is not “30 Houses Burn Down.” It is “Home Depot Burned Down.””
See also developmental biologist PZ Myers on this issue. He’s written endlessly on the issue. Here’s just a single one, but if you google him you’ll find dozens and dozens of articles from him where he makes it clear that he disagrees with you profoundly on this issue: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/04/05/please-do-not-use-science-to-justify-your-superstitious-magical-views/
Josh:
Those are some excellent questions you’re asking with regards to standards of morality, my friend. I am of the firm belief that people like Andrew and tildeb are innately good people, and that the image of Christ is all over them, their sense of outrage at what they perceive to be unjust or cruel is a good thing, it speaks of some standard of morality that they appeal to.
And given Andrew Ryan did respond with, “And when did I ever say ‘I don’t know where my morality comes from’?”, I see it as a great step forward. Perhaps, Andrew, you could follow up on that by letting Josh and I in on where this morality that you know about comes from. Cheers. =)
Andrew Ryan:
“I can quote you biologists who don’t class zygotes as human beings. In fact I’m pretty sure that the MAJORITY of biologists are pro-choice and see the ‘human being from conception’ idea as utter nonsense.”
Confident, blanket assertions do not a point make. If you are “pretty sure”, how is it that you know nothing about the testimony of embryologists and fetologists? How is it that you don’t know that even the pro-abortionists who write textbooks on the subject agree with me and disagree with you? Indeed, why, after being informed about the OBSERVABLE scientific fact that the zygote is a human being, do you continue to argue against the point?
“In brief: I don’t believe you are correct that there is scientific consensus for your view. You are not correct to call it a ‘fact’.”
What you BELIEVE and place your faith on is irrelevant here. If you understood the science or read an embryology textbook, you would know the difference between metaphysical speculations and established scientific fact. The zygote has been observed to be a human being by embryologists and fetologists. They are qualified to make that judgment. You – and the single neuroscientist you quote – are not. No one who is well acquainted with the facts agrees with you. To kill a fetus AT ANY STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT is to kill a human being. No scientifically literate person denies the point that the development of a human life is a continuous process, and that the zygote is the first stage of that continuous process, which means that the zygote is human.
“So do you view acorns as being ‘immature oak trees’, or maggots as ‘immature flies’?”
Unfortunately, you’ve provided incorrect analysis, again:
An acorn is an oak that is not yet a tree.
A zygote is a human being that is not yet an adult.
An acorn develops AS an oak, not INTO an oak.
A zygote develops AS a human, not INTO a human.
A fully-grown oak is a oak tree.
A fully-grown human is an human adult.
Analogies are not helping you get any closer to the heart of the matter. It’s best we deal with the substance.
“See also developmental biologist PZ Myers on this issue. He’s written endlessly on the issue. Here’s just a single one, but if you google him you’ll find dozens and dozens of articles from him where he makes it clear that he disagrees with you profoundly on this issue: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/04/05/please-do-not-use-science-to-justify-your-superstitious-magical-views/”
You are a great fan of PZ Myers’ views, aren’t you? Wait, he wouldn’t happen to be the guy who went on record as saying that he doesn’t believe that newborn babies are fully human or to be regarded as persons, would he?
Oh, it’s him alright:
‘Newborn babies: not persons, and not fully human – P. Z. Myers’ (http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/newborn-babies-not-persons-and-not-fully-human-p-z-myers/)
So, in your view, one person (for whom babies are not even human, wonder if you agree with him?) with “dozens and dozens” of takes on the same matter is more authoritative than the dozens of people I’ve quoted from science encyclopedias, medical journals, university level foundational embryology textbooks and from various experts in the fields of embryology and fetology? Tell me Andrew, and I ask this with love: are you possible to entertain the difficult notion that pro-abortionists are helping to kill millions of human beings every year? You express – albeit misinformedly – outrage at what you believe to be Professor Craig’s advocacy of genocide based on a serious exegesis by a serious philosopher of an event that took place thousands of years ago that he couldn’t know about for sure, AND in the same breath, you are able to freely advocate infanticide through abortion. Do you see anything internally inconsistent about this at all? Do you see anything possibly WRONG with abortion at all?
Please don’t say that I don’t understand your non-arguments or why they don’t work. In fact, I do. Either kindly face that fact that a zygote is a human being or else reduce yourself to claiming that we adults are not human beings. Those are your only two logical choices.
[ P.S. I noticed you said to Josh, “And when did I ever say ‘I don’t know where my morality comes from’?”, I see it as a great step forward. Perhaps, Andrew, you could follow up on that by letting Josh and I in on where this morality that you know about comes from. =)
Also, I'm still waiting for the description of your worldview. Thanks.]
“So, in your view, one person (for whom babies are not even human, wonder if you agree with him?) with “dozens and dozens” of takes on the same matter is more authoritative than…”
Whether you agree with PZ Myers or not, he is a developmental biologist. You don’t get to dismiss him purely because you don’t like his opinions. Whether I agree with all or anything he says is similarly irrelevant. Either you’re saying that the experts’ opinions should hold sway or you’re not.
“which is funny, because from what I saw, he was struggling with understanding some of the concepts pertaining to its refutation.”
Right, ‘from what I saw’. In other words, in your opinions. You know what they say about opinions, Getic?
We were having the discussion on the other thread. I posted a bunch of stuff, to which you replied something along the lines of “I’m off abroad for a bit, catch you later”. Bar one further “Interesting stuff, guys!” post, you never returned. I stopped posting as there was already a heap of stuff I’d said that you never responded to. Regarding Euthryphro, you can claim I ‘struggled’ all you want. It doesn’t change the fact that you were offering circular arguments that gave no coherent account of the source of your morality.
What I talk about my morals, they ideas that rest on axioms relating to my values. Regardless of any claim you might make that this is an insufficient grounding, it is still an improvement on trying to define your way into a so-called ‘objective morality’ simply be starting with an circular, tautological assertion that amounts to “God is good, and goodness comes from God”.
“Consensus seems equal to ‘fact’ within his worldview”
Getic, I’m starting to think you’re being deliberately obtuse. It was YOU who was making claims based on a further claim about the consensus of biologists. It took me 20 seconds to find a biologist who disagreed with you. I never made any argument based on consensus, I merely pointed out than your own consensus argument was based on a falsehood. For you and Josh to now claim that it is ME making the consensus argument is the height of dishonesty.
Correction to my previous post (changes in caps):
“You express – albeit misinformedly – outrage at what you believe to be Professor Craig’s advocacy of genocide based on a serious exegesis by a serious philosopher of an event that took place thousands of years ago that he couldn’t know about for sure, AND in the same breath, you are able to freely advocate THE KILLING OF MILLIONS OF HUMAN BEINGS (not infanticide) through abortion. Do you see anything internally inconsistent about this at all? Do you see anything possibly WRONG with abortion at all?
“Do you see anything internally inconsistent about this at all?”
Duh, no – because we don’t see abortion as killing human beings. We already explained that. Do YOU see anything inconsistent about opposing abortion, but not seeing a problem with soldiers slitting open pregnant women’s bellies in the name of God?
Andrew my man, you don’t know this, but what you’ve responded to is just a small correction to a much longer post I wrote, ’2012/06/11 at 2:55 PM’, that somehow hasn’t cleared moderation yet (Josh, thanks in advance for sorting that out for me), and hinges on your belief that abortion isn’t killing human beings. If I were you, I’d reserve your comments until I saw the entire post. Watch this space. ;)
Hmm, that’s funny, I wrote a reply to this, but I’m not sure where it went. In any case I’ll say my piece again. Actually, the entry above, “2012/06/11 at 3:42 PM”, is just a small correction that I meant to insert into a much longer, earlier entry, “2012/06/11 at 2:55 PM”, which doesn’t seem to have cleared moderation yet (Josh, not sure if you might have missed, in any case, thanks in advance for looking into this!).
So, before you get comfortable with a reply that hinges simply on “we don’t see abortion as killing human beings”, I’d recommend sitting back and waiting for the much longer entry, because I am very much interested in your response. In the meantime, you might want to reserve your comments.
Watch this space. ;)
Getic, earlier I stated that I believe you’re wrong about biologists’ views on when human life begins. A very short google backs me up on biologists’ opinions on the subject:
“But in the international poll, only 22.7% of voters selected fertilisation as the point when human life begins. Detection of fetal heartbeat came highest, polling 23.5% of the 650 or so votes. Implantation of the embryo in the womb lining came third, with 15%.”
http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/dn15062-when-does-human-life-begin.html
Best to read as much of the article as you have time for.
So, again, we determine our course of moral action based on opinion poles?
Sadly, it appears Andrew Ryan does. Consensus seems to be a significant part of his worldview, with matters of science and maybe even morality, going by some of the things he’s said:
“I’m pretty sure that the MAJORITY of biologists are pro-choice and see the ‘human being from conception’ idea as utter nonsense”
“In brief: I don’t believe you are correct that there is scientific consensus for your view. You are not correct to call it a ‘fact’.”
There you go. Consensus seems equal to ‘fact’ within his worldview (a worldview, by the way, that we still haven’t heard anything about),
even if all he had to do would be to read any basic embryology textbook to inform himself on what actual science has to say on the matter (I already quoted some of those textbooks).
[P.S. : Andrew, Josh has already done me the favour of approving my comments on "2012/06/11 at 2:55 PM", do make sure to address the points I've raised there. If you can't find the comments, no worries, let me know, I can post them up again]
“So, again, we determine our course of moral action based on opinion poles?”
What an absurdly disingenuous non sequitur. Getic was basing an argument on the premise that biologists agreed on when human life began. I quoted a poll that showed his premise was false.
Well, if that’s how you interpret it. I’m still trying to figure out how you determine whether or not something is moral or immoral, right or wrong. That’s why I said it. If you want to say you yourself determine it, are you going to extend the courtesy to everyone else, including people whose decisions you don’t agree with? If 99% of biologist said that a human life begins at conception, then would abortion still not be the unlawful taking of a human life? I think that’s a distinct difference between our views. Even if 99.9% of people said that it was OK to kill your neighbor or steal their things, I could still maintain that it’s wrong.
We can’t just merely appeal to our own individual, limited experiences as the basis for morality. There’s so much we haven’t experienced. And that’s why I consult a book that has guided at least one nation over 2,000 years. Surely 2,000 years of recorded history have something that we can learn from it?
Joshua
“Consensus seems equal to ‘fact’ within his worldview…
even if all he had to do would be to read any basic embryology textbook to inform himself on what actual science has to say on the matter”
Aside from the fact that as I already pointed out, I made no claim that consensus equals fact, and was merely pointing out the problems with your own ‘factual’ claims, can you clarify something for me please:
What are the contents of the biology textbooks based on Getic? Where do their ‘facts’ come from, given that you’ve stated clearly that consensus among biologists doesn’t count, or even the opinions of individual biologists?
By the way Josh, I also noticed that he also declared a victory for himself over you with regards to the Euthyphro dilemma, which is funny, because from what I saw, he was struggling with understanding some of the concepts pertaining to its refutation. It appears he was at a totally different discussion from us! =D
So let’s play around and imagine every zygote receives the full measure of legal protection that any citizen enjoys. What effect would this have? Imagine… oh wait, we don’t have to imagine. We have examples.
Well, other than celebration by the anti-choice column, what we would see I think runs along the line of states that have tried to legislate exactly this, namely, abortion is outlawed, clinics that provide them are shut down, people who participate in abortion services move on, medical students no longer study this area of obstetrics, and hospitals stop performing them. Accompanying these kinds changes, legislation always seems to go even further, targeting any medical intervention that might bring about an abortion… interventions like medication, telephone prescriptions, RU486 (the morning after pill), and even restrictions on the availability of birth control as well as insurance coverage. We create the kind of lunacy that has the local bishop of Phoenix Arizona excommunicating a nun who decided to go ahead and save a woman with pulmonary hypertension – a mother of 4 – from death by aborting the fetus that was killing her, but find not a single Nazi involved in the Holocaust treated as harshly by this ‘moral authority’.
What I see put into practice over the abortion issue is not best medical practices at all but a political and religiously motivated agenda, an agenda that in practice is a systematic attack on the legal rights of women to obtain proper and informed medical services regarding their reproductive choices. It’s not about life. It has never been about life. It’s about control. It’s about authority. It’s about imposing religious beliefs on women even if it kills them because they don’t really matter. Their desire to have control over their own body doesn’t matter. What matters is serving this belief, under the false pretense that life is sacred, you see, even if you have to die for me to continue believing this nonsense.
Josh,
Excellent job driving home the point about the failure of Andrew Ryan’s worldview to account for non-arbitrary moral standards. =)
I applaud your diligence in keeping to the heart of the matter, even as Andrew is reduced to agitated responses and clearly tying himself in knots with all manners of deflection (provocations such as “Don’t you think you shouldn’t base your arguments on what you believe about evolution when you make such basic mistakes as believing it is random?” remain, unfortunately, hot air when Andrew has not shown that he understands evolution enough to commit EVEN ONE definition of evolution, even when I repeatedly asked for one previously).
Note, also, his CONTINUED failure – even when asked multiple times – to account for his worldview and to make it plainly clear or, at the very least, suggest, where within his worldview he has a foundational IS that grounds an ought. It is certainly telling, and the passing reader is sure to appreciate the thought processes you inspire, even if Andrew struggles with the concepts.
Keep driving home the point, my friend. And rest assured that your persistence, when done with love, is sure to be rewarded. For it will keep our apologetic work focused, and help to separate the ideologues from the seriously seeking. =)
“provocations such as “Don’t you think you shouldn’t base your arguments on what you believe about evolution when you make such basic mistakes as believing it is random?” remain, unfortunately, hot air when Andrew …”
Let’s cut to the chase Getic. I’d like to know whether it’s worth taking you – and your claims to scientific learning – seriously for a single further minute.
Do you agree with Josh that evolution is a random process?
If no, then it’s not hot air for me to point it out.
If yes, then you’ve shown yourself to be a BS machine of the highest order and I’ll leave you to your nonsense.
G.A., you sure seem comfortable with applying the word ‘failure’ to others. That’s a bit premature. Yet your (and Josh’s) notion of ‘objective’ morality is a fail from the get go. Prove me wrong. Show me where this ‘objective’ morality resides outside of ourselves! You can’t. You just wave your hand and suggest it comes from god. So I say, show me your god. You can’t. You fail at every turn to back up your claim to have access to this ‘objective’ morality with anything other than your belief. As I dismiss all claims for morality deriving from Muk Muk of the Volcano, you dismiss all equivalent claims for all other god locales… other than the singular exception you make for your favoured god.
Quelle surprise. Not.
Biblical scripture – like all other major works considered ‘scripture’ – reveals what any child knows is considerable ‘immorality’… in its god-ordered genocides, slavery, theft, retributions, and eternal tortures for temporal effrontery. It’s a perversion of ethical standards you yourself hold to be ‘normal’. But this blatant scriptural immoral brutality and injustice falls under your tautological god-bus. If god orders it, it must be good… and seem to argue that because you are pro-life, you can be pro-death too… as long as you can foist off responsibility for holding incompatible moral high grounds on your god. But this only reveals the depth of your failure to understand why your claims for ‘objective’ morality is incoherent and reveals the breathtaking scope of your inability to exercise analytic thought consistently.
But rather than deal with these obvious and continuous fails in your own tautological position, you assign the problems they raise to others who reveal them. This is not surprising although disappointing. To claim that Andrew doesn’t understand evolution or cannot provide a definition for it is simply and obviously ludicrous. But you don’t see it as either because you fail to understand the difference between can’t and won’t… assuming that your demands for others to do your bidding fails not for your impertinence (but it’s based on love, right?) but because those you impose on lack the ability and or knowledge. Not a very perceptive approach. You think poorly of others if they don’t agree with your simplistic and bizarre opinions while claiming you value their input. You have a funny way of showing this: failing to address the criticisms they raise and assigning motivations and abilities to them that are not true, you once again show why empowering by your belief (accompanied by annoying little emoticons) is a method to fool yourself.
Can you detect the pattern here, G.A.? The fail you liberally bestow on others starts with you. Take care of that little problem and you might be surprised at just how perceptive Andrew is and better appreciate what it is he actually offers (and continues to offer in spite of your determination to fail to comprehend).
tildeb, your reading of the Bible is clearly clouded. You can’t appeal to other gods because there is no other book of Scripture that place importance on history and historical events as the Bible does because those are the things in which God revealed Himself. You’re not an idiot. If you’re honest, you’ll admit that is one of many distinctions — the the Bible takes history seriously. If you don’t want to admit the distinction, then I have to try to expand your reading a little so that you might see it.
You ask us “show me your god”, as if God is some sort of card we keep stuffed in a wallet. God can’t be showcased in what human hands can make. That is obvious to anyone who has read the Bible. Israel’s history is strewn with incidents of people making statues to “show people god” and God judged them for it. Making idols to represent deities is nearly as common today as it was 2,000 years ago. And the Christian response is still the same. As Paul said:
Did you see him pointing toward an historical event, the resurrection? The Person that is going to judge the world with justice is Jesus.
Tell us once again what you do with God’s greatest revelation, Jesus.
Joshua
“An acorn is an oak that is not yet a tree.”
No, it’s an oak nut, or nut of an oak. You’re playing with semantics. A zygote is human in the sense that it’s not a giraffe or cat. But my sperm are ‘human’. So’s my hair.
No matter how many points I address or questions that I answer, I’ve lost track of the number of questions you say “Notice how Andrew keeps avoiding x”.
My worldview? I see no evidence for a God or anything supernatural. If evidence comes along, I’ll consider it and if I’ll change my mind if it’s warranted. To many of the great questions my answer is: “I don’t know”. With regards to morality or where everything comes from, or many other questions, I don’t see what difference it would make if we posit a God. At best you have the same question but pushed back one notch.
What else do you want to know? Ask me a specific question regarding my view on a specific thing and I’ll answer it.
“So, in your view, one person (for whom babies are not even human, wonder if you agree with him?) with “dozens and dozens” of takes on the same matter is more authoritative than the dozens of people I’ve quoted…”
So how many biologists do I need to quote? Is it about consensus or not? When I get to the point when I’ve quoted MORE than you, does that mean I’ve ‘won’ in your view? Here’s another:
“Biologist Scott Gilbert, an expert in human development, tells us that there are at least four distinct moments that can be thought of as the beginning of human life. Each can be said to be biologically accurate.
The genetic view (the position held by the Roman Catholic Church and many religious conservatives) holds that life begins with the acquisition of a novel genome; it is a kind of genetic determinism.
Those who hold the embryologic view think life begins when the embryo undergoes gastrulation, and twinning is no longer possible; this occurs about 14 days into development. (Some mainline Protestant religions espouse a similar view.)
Proponents of the neurological view adhere to brainwave criteria; life begins when a distinct EEG pattern can be detected, about 24 to 27 weeks. (Some Protestant churches affirm this.) Interestingly, life is also thought to end when the EEG pattern is no longer present.
Finally, one can say that life begins at or near birth, measured by fetal viability outside the mother’s body. (Judaism affirms something close to this position.) After all, somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of all embryos conceived miscarry.”
I don’t even see the ‘do we call it a human being’ argument as any more than semantics with regards to abortion. You’re still talking about a bunch of cells with no capacity for thought or ability to feel pain. And I don’t believe you genuinely see the spontaneous natural abortion of a three-week little blastocyst as a tragedy equivalent to the death of, say, a five-year-old child. I don’t believe that if you were in a burning laboratory and had to choose between saving a ten-year-old girl or two test-tubes containing day-old embryos that you’d choose the test-tubes. I doubt the rhetoric of Christians who compare abortion to the holocaust. They just don’t strike me as genuinely seeing it as a comparable crime. If half the country tried to enact another holocaust in America, the other half would treat it as civil war and rise up to fight. They wouldn’t just wave placards or draw cartoons about it.
Josh, evolution – defined as genetic change in a population that is inherited over several generations – is not a random process. If you’re starting with the notion that it is random, and using this as a basis for an argument about what could or could not be explained by the process of evolution, then you’re setting your argument on a foundation of quick sand.
Now, I love discussion evolution with people. It’s one of my favourite subjects. But one of the most basic ideas about evolution is that it is a non-random process. That you don’t get this, and that Getic calls it ‘hot air’ when someone points it out to you, shows you both have such a poor grasp of the science I think I’d have a mountain to climb to explain anything about the subject to you at all. Worse, there’s an apparent Dunning–Kruger effect here that convinces you both you’re actually well-informed.
Until either of you get the basics of what evolution is, I’m wasting my time, and so is Tildeb.
To address two other points:
1. “Well, if that’s how you interpret it.”
Josh, I’ll make it really clear for you:
a) Getic has repeatedly tried to base his argument on quotes from biologists, in a bid to say the science is on his side.
b) I quoted alternative views from biologists, including developmental biologists, showing that not all share his view.
c) I was not in any way making a ‘consensus = right view’. I was merely showing that his own argument didn’t stack up.
If you’re saying “Even if 99% of biologists agreed with you, it wouldn’t make you right”, then your quarrel is with Getic, not me, as it was he who was basing his argument on “Virtually all biologists say x”.
2. “And that’s why I consult a book that has guided at least one nation over 2,000 years.”
Yes, your answer is to defer to a bronze age book that guided many nations to justify stoning, slavery, subjugation of women and still to this day is used to justify homophobia! The same book that was used for decades to outlaw your own marriage! Regardless of your defence that they were all ‘doing it wrong’, the fact is they all used the same method as you – deferring to their interpretation of the book. That’s working out great, right?
That aside, your cure for everyone forming their own differing moral opinions is… everyone forming their own differing interpretations of what they think their God wants them to think. Net result – just as many arguments and wars, but an even lesser willingness to consider any other views or change your mind because you’re convinced your morality is ‘objective’.
Tildeb: “Take care of that little problem and you might be surprised at just how perceptive Andrew is and better appreciate what it is he actually offers (and continues to offer in spite of your determination to fail to comprehend).”
Thanks Tildeb. To reference Matthew 7:6, “Pearls amongst swine”. I’ve done my best in the face of obtuseness, snark and continued ignoring of what I was actually saying. I think I’m done. If there IS a God, I’m sure he’ll reward me in heaven for my patience on this site alone!
Another atheist claiming not only the moral high ground, but the intellectual one as well?! I always find the intellectual snobbery of atheism entertaining. In fact, atheist I meet seem to miraculously know nearly everything about morality, science, the Bible, you name it. Not only that, but they seem to know that everything every Christian knows is wrong. But I really thought better of you, Andy. I’ll gladly stand corrected on evolution not being a random process, if you’ll at least admit, as tildeb has, that mutations are random and a part of the process of evolution.
Oh well. Your latest comment has shown me two things: 1) You don’t care anyway. 2) You don’t care about accurately representing the Bible.
But, hey, thanks for gracing us with your presence. Oh, and before you go, do this for me: Recommend the best book on evolution that you have personally read. If I can find it here and it’s not outrageously expensive (like over $30 USD), I’ll try to get it (many companies don’t ship books here because of credit card fraud, so my pickings are limited). Or you can forward me to the best on-line presentation of evolution (I’d appreciate that one more).
Good day,
Joshua
I write this for the benefit of the many genuine, reasonable and rational people who are visiting this site for all the right reasons.
Firstly, I would like to commend you, Josh, on your measured response in the face of hostility, for the image of Christ in you really shows. I appreciate that you are responding with grace and humility, and keeping true to your virtues, in spite of the fact that Andrew Ryan and tildeb have – from the time they first entered discussions on your site – constantly retreated to what is commonly known as the the trifecta combination fallacy, and has been described as such:
A red herring distractor, used to drag attention away from the main issue, then led out to a strawman simplistic misrepresentation of the presumed argument in the main being objected to; the objector then soaks the strawman in attacks against the credibility or character of those making the case being caricatured, and he – almost always the case — then triumphalistically lights up the same through incendiary demonising rhetoric; all, to distract attention from the main issue, and also clouding, poisoning and polarising the atmosphere with blinding hostility.
My fellow readers, I would like to humbly point out, at this juncture, the importance of addressing comparative difficulties of various worldview level claims and commitments, on factual adequacy, coherence and simplicity/ad hocness, leading to a position that can be called “reasonable faith.” In so doing, reasonable principles of assessing fact-claims and associated basic beliefs can be applied, on a fair and balanced basis. May I also add that this has mostly led to, in my experience (and I believe in the case of Josh as well), wonderful conversations between atheists, agnostics and people of other religious inclinations, all of whom have genuine difficulties in sufficiently addressing some of life’s most pertinent questions.
And so, that is the context in which we must responsibly take a dim view of those like Andrew Ryan and tildeb who, sadly, want to push toxic talking points as though they are knockout arguments that allow them to get away with failing to think through their own worldview base from first principles and dealing with the many worldview problems they are avoiding or are not even aware of.
I am currently overseas again. When I return (in 5 days), I will put forward to Andrew Ryan and tildeb, and address, amongst other things:
(i) the selective hyperskepticism exhibited by Andrew Ryan and tildeb, and the varying degrees of question-begging they bring into debates over a variety of topics and on other subjects calling for balanced, critically aware, analytical thought;
(ii) the numerous, serious issues they have conveniently avoided within their own materialist atheistic worldview in misinformedly attacking the Christian theistic worldview (such as just how evolutionary materialist atheism is inescapably self-contradictory, and how it is inescapably amoral and so cannot ground OUGHT in a foundational IS, so it undermines rights and justice);
(iii) some of the non-arguments and dishonesty that tideb and, in particular, Andrew Ryan, have resorted to in engaging Josh and I in dialogue, (there are some rather surprising things I have uncovered that Josh does not know about, and tildeb and Andrew Ryan are not aware I have discovered, Andrew Ryan in particular will be most excited about this segment of my upcoming post); and
(iv) as a resultant conclusion, why we have reasonable warrant for believing that Andrew Ryan and tildeb are nothing more than – for lack of a better description – militant atheists who are taking valuable time away from us that can be best spent helping and responding to serious seekers who are genuinely interesting in respectfully and critically evaluating various worldviews for the sake of illuminating their own or coming to embrace a new one.
I’ll be flying off soon, Josh. Before I go, here are some words for you to take to heart before I go:
“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires.” – 2 Timothy 4:3
Keep shining, Josh, and may the Holy Spirit continue to guide your ways. =)
You seem to think that pointing out Josh’s argument was based on a falsehood – evolution is not a random process – is ‘dishonest’ and a non-argument. When I challenge you on this you have no response.
As for your faintly sinister quasi threat – “there are some rather surprising things I have uncovered that Josh does not know about, and tildeb and Andrew Ryan are not aware I have discovered” – let me take a wild swing in the dark. You’ve googled my name and found that I’ve also posted on other sites? Shame you post under a pseudonym so that we can’t do the same back to you, eh? Either that or you’ve discovered that I share a name with the atheist villain of BioShock. Never played it but people sometimes point that out to me online…
Anyway, both you and Josh have now responded to my last post, and neither dealt with its substance at all. From Josh we’ve just had accusations of intellectual snobbery, despite the fact that he and you have in recent posts between you tried to correct my grammar and accused me of not understanding evolution. In fact your response throughout has been to automatically assume that any disagreement from me is explained purely by me not actually understanding the arguments!
Oh, I see that Josh edited his last post to add some more text, and softening its original tone. Sorry, too little too late, if I start responding to it then I’ll get dragged into further pointless discussion.
In answer to your question Josh, the talkorigins website is a great one, especially for beginners. It’s written by both theists and non-theists.
Start with the ‘popular misconceptions’ section – http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html#chance
Then go on to the ’29 evidences for macro evolution section’ – http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ –
I’m not expecting it to convince you, but it might at least allow to avoid some of the more egregious howlers.
Thanks, Andy!
You have my word that since you’ve taken the time to put up the links (and not ask me to Google it), I will print these out, read them, and add them to the stack that tildeb has submitted to me in tha past for consideration.
And, man, I have to plead with you: Don’t be too upset. In the part about “irony / ironing”, I told you honestly that I don’t watch The Simpsons, so I didn’t get the joke. Part of being an English teacher means I sometimes have the annoying habit of correcting spelling and grammar (ask my wife). It wasn’t meant to be offensive.
I did go back and change the overall tone of my original post because I was trying to do several things while writing it originally (had unexpected visitors showing up late at night to buy rice wine from my mother-in-law). I found that after reading it again, I let the emotions that were the result of me in a rush get the best of me. My apologies!
Joshua
No worries. A few final points:
1) the second talkorigins link is MASSIVE, probably not printable.
2) FYI, I generally always read your posts via the email I get sent. ie, It’ll be the first, unedited version that gets read. Anything you added in a re-edit probably didn’t get seen.
3) I’m a grammar corrector by trade too remember!
4) finally, if Getic’s last post meant he’s going to come back with the fruits of ‘cyber-stalking’ me, I hope I can rely on you not to allow them to post. It’s not relevant to my arguments, is creepy and rude. I’ve got two kids, but post with my real name as a courtesy to you. It leaves me open to cyberstalking so.., anyway, enough said. I hope I merely underestimate Getic.
Hey, Andy.
1) I noticed how long the second link was after I converted a print out of the pages to a PDF and then saw the links! @.@
2) Thanks for the information. I didn’t know that!
3) I remember. It must drive you nuts reading posts online where grammar is so often abused. :)
4) Don’t worry. I’ll keep my eyes open and I’m going to write to Getic.Apolo. Ol’ tildeb has already explained to me the troubles he encountered when using his real name. It helped me better understand his need for anonymity. (After that, I stopped accusing him of hiding behind a username.) I can sympathize, believe it or not. (Details of which shall remain undisclosed.)
Joshua
Andrew Ryan:
Please don’t flatter yourself. I have too many fulfilling things on my plate to be hanging out online ‘cyber-stalking’ Internet militant atheists. In fact – as you will soon discover – almost all of what I learnt about you was provided directly BY YOU, from the various claims you made, as well as links and Google search suggestions YOU provided (which I will cite). So I guess you have yourself to thank for the things I discovered. =D
Besides, even as you toxify and polarise the debating atmosphere while branding and dismissing Josh and myself based on your self-perceived superior understanding of ‘science’, I – having objective moral values grounded in a loving Creator who reminds me to love my neighbours, which includes you – have a duty of care to morality, objectivity and truth. That is why I laid out, as clearly and transparently as possible, the contents of my next post, so everyone reading can see their relevance to this discussion.
So you might want to stop making yourself out to be some victim, appealing to emotions, and just look forward to my upcoming post. To allay your concerns once and for all, it should be crystal clear that (i) your kids are not going to be implicated, (ii) I never said I was going to demonize you, and (iii) my post will not just be relevant to your arguments, it will be VERY relevant. And yet, that doesn’t mean you may accuse Josh and I of “the height of dishonesty”, only to later expect to get a free pass from being accountable for some rather dishonest claims and behaviour, right?
In fact, I have reason to believe that it is that last point – pertaining to some of your dishonest claims – that is the real bone of contention for you. It explains why you seem remarkably quick and eager to urge Josh towards censorship of posts which haven’t even been created yet. If you have nothing to hide or that cannot be accounted for, you have nothing to worry about, right Andrew Ryan? Trust you to parent Josh on how to discern if a post is relevant or not to the discussion. I have full faith in the fact that Josh is more than capable of handling that on his own, without your persuasions.
I will be back home in 4 days, my post should be up in 6. Watch this space. ;)
“I have too many fulfilling things on my plate”
Yet you managed to find time to bang out another 400+ word rant to me, despite apparently being about to ‘fly off’ somewhere…
“while branding and dismissing Josh and myself based on your self-perceived superior understanding of ‘science’”
I only pointed out that Josh had made a major error about evolution, an error he has since conceded.
“Trust you to parent Josh on how to discern if a post is relevant or not to the discussion”
I don’t know Josh from Adam, and I care less about your relevance – my priority is protecting my family. I have nothing to hide, but a cyber-stalker could probably, for example, discover my home or work address and post them places unpleasant.
“Watch this space”
No thanks, I’m unsubscribing from this site, so won’t receive any more post notifications. Josh and Tildeb both have my email address if they want to contact me, but your conversation has long since taken a most unpleasant tone, and discussion with you has stopped being any fun. Adios.
I, too, get the sense that G.A. intends to move beyond the issues under public debate and past the differences in public opinions and into the persona realm as if this is threatening. I think this approach to disagreements is a mistake and subverts the intention not just of the posts – intended to prod and poke these differences into the open where they can be examined and debated – but into the use of the site itself, assuming an us-vs-them approach is desired.
I understand the temptation to do so, and I certainly feel that Andrew Ryan and I share much of our scepticism about belief claims, but this doesn’t mean we are some Team Atheist. We’re not, although our agreements tend to outnumber of differences (and Andrew Ryan will correct me if I’m wrong in this claim).
I know I write stuff he disagrees with and he writes stuff I sometimes disagree with and this is the nature of expressing opinions. But what I do find important is that I understand his reasoning. I can follow his argument easily and usually find that it contains good points I may or may not have considered. Whether or not I agree or disagree with his conclusion doesn’t matter in this sense; I find his writing – of how he expresses his reasoning – of value regardless.
I think when we move towards personalizing (and too often demonizing) differences of opinion, difference of reasoning, we assign motivations that may or may not be true. I suspect all of us fall into this trap effortlessly. It takes effort not to fall this way. I may disagree with an opinion Andrew Ryan (or a Josh, a G.A., a Wartick) raises but I am the one making a mistake if I associate that difference to be personal (unless it intentionally IS personal). Think of dialogue bubbles in cartoons assigned to be the words spoken by a character – poking one with the needle of a good argument and having it pop is not the same as poking and injuring the character who says it; the former is the public debate, the latter a personal attack.
Having come across his writing in various places of the blogosphere, I realize Andrew Ryan’s approach and manner is far more polite and social than my own (he pops these bubble ideas with a gentler and deter touch than I tend to exercise). I can learn from how he engages the ideas of others. I have a ways to go to improve, granted, but the value for me is not necessarily in the agreement or disagreement of his position (although many times this is of value to understand why we share a conclusion); rather, it is in the manner of how he accomplishes this. That’s what the blogging community should try to reinforce – to improve the nature of these debates by at least recognizing the reasons raised in defense or in scepticism of ideas and beliefs and opinions. When the reasoning carefully written out for the disagreement is ignored or the objection to a premise not addressed, then the point of responding is in peril. This is what should concern all of us… to do a better job respecting the intention of revealing these differences not to win but to learn which opinions contain the best reasons and a willingness to change opinions when better reasons come along.