Pro-Life Activist Gunned Down in Michigan

[Ben Kenobi]

Not to mention of course that we can go directly to the father, why would we ask other mortal people (who already died) to pray for us?

Why do we ask each other to pray for us? Because all prayer is good and a blessing. It's like asking whether you'd accept blessings from God, or blessings from your friends?

As for the saints, they are alive in heaven. You recall the transfiguration? Christ is a God not of dead men but of the living. The saints are alive with him in heaven. Go ahead and ask St. Mary for a blessing, and she'll be happy to help you!

[BlackCat]

The supreme court is a moral authority in that it upholds the rule of law.

No offense, but that is pure BS. No level of court has any kind of moral authority.

[David Floyd]

BK,

The Crusaders did what they did not because they were moral warriors of Christ looking to right a wrong, but because they were warmongering expansionists looking to empire-build.

[Ben Kenobi]

You don't know much about Edmund Burke, do you Black Cat?

[Ben Kenobi]

The Crusaders did what they did not because they were moral warriors of Christ looking to right a wrong, but because they were warmongering expansionists looking to empire-build.

What, did you interview them yourself? Who told you this?

[David Floyd]

When they rape and pillage their way across Europe and into the Holy Land, go after a target that has nothing to do with the supposed reason for the war in the first place, and then set up a kingdom after they conquer Jerusalem, I think we can pretty much stipulate they were a bunch of war mongering thugs.

[BlackCat]

You don't know much about Edmund Burke, do you Black Cat?

No, why should I ? Was he pro abortions ?

[Ben Kenobi]

No, why should I ? Was he pro abortions ?

Google him, and you'll understand.

[Ben Kenobi]

When they rape and pillage their way across Europe and into the Holy Land, go after a target that has nothing to do with the supposed reason for the war in the first place, and then set up a kingdom after they conquer Jerusalem, I think we can pretty much stipulate they were a bunch of war mongering thugs.

Who did they make war with?

[RoboCon]

I see that you are discussing Catholicism

No greater blow for freedom was struck than when Martin Luther sparked the Reformation by denouncing the evils of the papists. The backwards-thinking, bloated, rotting corpse of the Catholic church that had for centuries been responsible for superstitition murder and conquest had finally been put on public display to be scorned and spurned by all right-thinking Christians the world over. That this putrid beast lingers even to this day is a sad testament to the power that mankind has in twisting and diluting the teachings that God has passed down to all through the Bible. One day soon the Angels will blow their Trumpets and the last vestiges of the papacy will be destroyed by the righteous.

[David Floyd]

Who did they make war with?

A bunch of war mongering religious extremists.

Which would describe both the infighting amongst the Christian Europeans and the Crusades against the Muslims.

[Felch]

RoboCon is awesome.

[Felch]

Yes, but no.
I think I understand what you mean, but let me nevertheless answer on what you write (I hope different of what you mean).
If stealing or killing were only immoral (with no harm to anybody) they should not be forbidden in a secular state. Problem with stealing and killing is that they are not only immoral, but harmful.
A secular state has no business in morality, but has full authority in protecting people from harm.
Eating pork or being gay might be immoral to some people, but it doesn't harm anybody - except the pork, of course. Therefore, a secular society should have no law about those topics.

Abortion isn't eating pork. I have no problem with "immorality" that doesn't hurt anyone. As far as the public sphere goes, I'm pro-drugs, pro-alcohol, pro-porn, pro-pornography, pro-gay, and generally pro-freedom. But abortion is clearly harmful, in that a fetus is alive, and then it is killed. Stealing is immoral because it harms people, you're right. Abortion is immoral because it literally ends a life.

Yes, the whole point around abortion is how much a 'person' is a fetus?

It's a person. It's not born, and it's not able to survive outside the womb, but the genetics are all right there. It is a distinct person.

Is an ovary a fetus? Half a fetus? A person?

It's a gamete, which has half the genetic material of a person. Since my concern is with unique genetics and senescence, I'm comfortable considering an egg to be an incomplete person.

Is a condom a weapon of mass destruction? (That would be the position of Vatican, as they ban masturbation and preservatives).

The Vatican's concern is with the separation of sex and reproduction. I think your characterizing a condom as a weapon of mass destruction is a silly straw man. Sperm are not human. No one says they are.

Is a 2 cell egg a person? 4 cells? 1 million cells?

Yes, it's a brand new organism, and that organism is a person.

Nobody has those answers. Yet the legislator has to draw a line somewhere. But where?

The legislature should draw the line where the vast majority of people are in agreement. A law that most people reject will not be enforceable. But that's a matter of practical politics and not a moral question.

For some people, the soul is there, right at conception; so even a 1 cell egg is a 'person'. For other people, the 'soul' is slowly built with time, for others, there is no such thing as a 'soul', for other, we, humans are all one soul.
Who is correct?
And, is having a 'soul' required for being a person?
Is the christian view correct? The pantheist view? The atheist view?
Many christians claims their view is the only valid one (one cell egg = a person). And that aborting a birth process (to stop it before it is completed) is murder.

Majority of people however say it needs more than one cell for an egg to be a 'person'. But they probably disagree on how many are needed.
And law has to draw a line.

So, yes, the law draws an upper limit when a group of cells becomes a 'person'. And, yes, it hurts the convictions of some, who sincerely believe the limit is too high, even one cell should be a 'person'.

Now, if you ask me, where is my limit, I would have a hard time telling. I certainly have no problem with aborting the process of human life for a group of 4 cells, but I would have a real problem having to decide on a precise number of weeks or months.
As far as I know, law has made his (her?) decision based on what science knows about the life process (viability, reactions, independence, ...).
And I agree that relying upon science to make a decision is the best way we have.
Might not be 'moral', but it is the least subjective one.

Since we try not to mix religion and politics here in the States, I don't concern myself with souls. Privately I believe that souls are formed at conception. Publicly I may as well believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What matters in the debate, as far as I'm concerned, is human rights, specifically the right to life. I consider humanity to be based on ancestry (if your mother is human and your father is human, then you're a human), and I consider individuality to be based on unique genetics and senescence, since identical twins could otherwise be considered one person.

[Dry]

Uh, some choices are wrong. We can't choose to kill people. Part of the job of government is to protect people from being shot by other people who don't much care for the rights of another person. WRT to abortion, all a prolifer is saying is that personhood begins at conception, and thus, the unborn child must be protected in the same way we protect other people. Abortion is only wrong because it kills someone who's already alive.

A fetus is a potential human, a future human, a human-to-be. But not a person yet.
And yes, there is a f*ing fuzzy line of where that 'human-to-be' becomes a human.
The 'abortion' concept is precisely to abort, stop the process before the group of cells becomes a human child.

To deny that some persons are not fully persons is reminescent of laws permitting slavery. A mother no more owns her child, than she is owned by her husband.

Maybe I missed something, but I saw no one posting about a mother owning her child.
From my part I said something about parent having responsabilities toward their children. That's quite different from owning them.

Just the opposite. Who benefits from abortion? It isn't the mothers. It's the men who don't want to have to support a child for the rest of their life. The mothers suffer from their abortion, while the men? They go on. How is it paternalistic to keep your child?

No one 'benefits' from abortion. In many cases - all the cases I know - abortion is done reluctantly, with much thoughts and as some kind of last resort.
It is paternalistic to have an outsider telling people: Know what, I have no clue about what you are going through, I don't care about what the life of that fetus might be, I do not care if all of you mother, father, brothers, sisters are going to live in hell, but from my high moral ground, I tell you you have to bear that child up to birth. Screw the mother, don't care how much she suffers now, how much she might suffer in the future, and well, if she even dies, who cares, there are plenty of them, just find a new one.

Again, the killer himself admitted that he shot James Pouillon because of his prolife activism. What more proof do you need?

Well, I didn't saw this information in the first post.
Ok, so he was not killed for being a christian.

So when then does a child become a person? My arm, as cool as it is, is not going to suddenly grow as a completely new person.

I think I was not clear enough in my comparison. I do not see the fetus (not the child) similar as an arm or a leg, I see the medical operation called 'abortion' as being as 'a bad idea', 'wrong' or 'moral' as the medical operation called 'amputation'.
I do not see why someone who cut off his arm or his leg, just for comfort, or without giving it more thoughts.
And, on a same level, I do not see why anyone would consider abortion as 'comfortable', or with 'benefits'.
Amputation is most of the time performed to save life, not for convenience. And so is abortion (should be).
Amputation, like abortion should not be punished by law, except of course if amputation was performed without medical justification .

Really? Why then do you permit babies to be killed? They are not your 'future' child. They are your child when they are in your womb.

So, you don't permit to remove an egg that will cause an extrauterine pregnancy?
If any egg, from conception is a person, a child, removing such an egg is a crime?

No, again, some choices are just wrong. People ought to be protected from being killed by another person, and that includes unborn children.

No one except people in the situation can tell if a choice is wrong or not.
The arrogance of external people, who know jack sh!t about the full situation is amazing.
You don't know the situation, yet you claim to have the ultimate moral answer.

I know absolute devout catholics (not fanatics, though) who, through tears and real hard moment have decided against their souls, their most profound conviction that an abortion was the solution, They have suffer from it all their life, but they were really convinced it was the least bad solution.
THEY had all the informations about consequences, or potential consequeces (potential death of a mother of 5 other children and sisters is something you put on the plate). They had their belief that indeed they had killed a child, but they were human enough to put the 'confort' of the father in raising alone 5 children, and the 'confort' of 5 brothers and sisters in growing up without a mother, and the 'confort' of the mother in being plain dead in the balance.

How is a position which renders unborn children akin to body parts 'humanist'? You are treating human beings as objects, which is precisely the opposite of humanism.

No, the closest I am to what you states is that I agree that somewhere in the process, the egg is at best a human-to-be, but not yet a human.
As I said in a previous post, a 4 cell egg is not yet a human to me. It is certainly a human-to-be. And as such, it has to protected as any other life form. But when a choice has to be made, it has to be done with at least, the same reluctancy as an amputation.

What is humane, is being gentle, mercyful, charitable,...
Part of what is humanist, is to think that man is capable of moral choices. Humanism comes in absolute opposition with christianity when it comes to morality. From the Genesis account, mankind has no morality whatsoever (see the story of the tree of knowledge).
The humanist point of view puts humans at the center (as opposed to god), and humans being able to make morale decisions.

Parents do not have the right to kill their children. That is the difference. Yes parents have the rights to make decisions for their children, but they cannot simply kill them.

No one has the right to tell parents they have to play dice with death, but they cannot abort a life.
No one has the right screw up the life of an entire family by just claiming moral high ground.

[Felch]

From the Genesis account, mankind has no morality whatsoever (see the story of the tree of knowledge).

People read the Bible and walk away with different lessons. The Tree of Knowledge didn't make people amoral, it gave them the Knowledge to make moral decisions.

The humanist point of view puts humans at the center (as opposed to god), and humans being able to make morale decisions.

Okay, if humans are at the center, how does that make abortion okay? We are talking about aborting humans, right?

No one has the right to tell parents they have to play dice with death, but they cannot abort a life.
No one has the right screw up the life of an entire family by just claiming moral high ground.

It's not "claiming moral high ground," it's expanding the definition of human to an extent you disagree with, and applying our understanding of human rights to those people. It's not like we're a bunch of old bible thumpers trying to put an end to rock and roll. We're interested in human rights, and we regard fetuses as humans.