yeah and the man could've easily used a condom, yes i knwo she couldve also used the pill or other methods, but why is it all down to the woman all of the time, shouldn't the man be help accountable
A reasonable stance on abortion
- Thread starter francois
- Start date
yeah and the man could've easily used a condom, yes i knwo she couldve also used the pill or other methods, but why is it all down to the woman all of the time, shouldn't the man be help accountable
You mean why should a woman be responsible for her own body? I don't know. The same reason why everybody should be responsible for their own bodies, perhaps?
It just makes sense. If I don't want STDs, I don't go around having sex with every slut I see. If I do get STDs it's my fault because I wasn't careful. I understand this and accept this. Similarly, if women don't want to get pregnant, they have the means. They can only have sex with high quality men who won't dupe them into having unprotected sex. They can not trust the man and use the Pill on top of him using a condom. It's her body, she should be responsible.
Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
The point system is still arbitrary, as different people will disagree how "close to murder" various acts are. The Pope believes that wearing a condom is a sin (so maybe men can get a few sin points) because every ejaculation lost to the latex is may contain a sperm that God wanted to turn into a human. Damn that free will.
Other's believe that life begins at conception, and so aborting embryos is "very sinful."
A biologist can explain the various stages of embryo and fetal development in great detail, but he cannot say whether killing the embryo or the fetus is "worse" at any given moment. Everyone may develop an opinion on that, but there's no objective metric to which we have access.
Plus, even if the biologists had some sense of that, all killing has to be evaluated in context. If I shoot a man dead, that sounds bad. If you later learned that that I killed him in self-defense, that is circumstance on which it is widely agreed should obviate the gravity of the killing. If I killed him because he previously molested my son, opinions will vary, but there is a very strong possibility that a jury will acquit me.
Also, in a way there is a point system for murder. There are two of them, in fact. First there are different degrees of murder in the law and second, if convicted, there is leeway in sentencing. There is no point system for abortion, because legally speaking abortion is not murder. There is no need to worry about "degrees" of abortion or variations in the range of sentences imposed. If abortion were made illegal, then I'd expect the law would start drawing distinctions, and some states would probably make those distinctions based on the ill-defined "humanness" of the "victim."
Then again, for those who believe in "souls" I think a binary, bright line could be set up. If you murderer a fetus that has a soul, you are guilty of first-degree murder. If the fetus does not yet have its soul, then you merely excised some useless cells, almost like a combination of a tumor and a tapeworm.
Other's believe that life begins at conception, and so aborting embryos is "very sinful."
A biologist can explain the various stages of embryo and fetal development in great detail, but he cannot say whether killing the embryo or the fetus is "worse" at any given moment. Everyone may develop an opinion on that, but there's no objective metric to which we have access.
Plus, even if the biologists had some sense of that, all killing has to be evaluated in context. If I shoot a man dead, that sounds bad. If you later learned that that I killed him in self-defense, that is circumstance on which it is widely agreed should obviate the gravity of the killing. If I killed him because he previously molested my son, opinions will vary, but there is a very strong possibility that a jury will acquit me.
Also, in a way there is a point system for murder. There are two of them, in fact. First there are different degrees of murder in the law and second, if convicted, there is leeway in sentencing. There is no point system for abortion, because legally speaking abortion is not murder. There is no need to worry about "degrees" of abortion or variations in the range of sentences imposed. If abortion were made illegal, then I'd expect the law would start drawing distinctions, and some states would probably make those distinctions based on the ill-defined "humanness" of the "victim."
Then again, for those who believe in "souls" I think a binary, bright line could be set up. If you murderer a fetus that has a soul, you are guilty of first-degree murder. If the fetus does not yet have its soul, then you merely excised some useless cells, almost like a combination of a tumor and a tapeworm.
Probably not. I hardly see how that matters.
Pandaemoni, thanks for the comments.
Let's not bring theology and religion into this. What the Pope thinks is or isn't sinning really does not matter in a rational debate.
I would agree with you that the point system is partially arbitrary, but not so much as to make it a fruitless endeavor. For example, you and I can both probably agree that terminating a single celled zygote isn't morally wrong and that terminating an eight month old fetus is getting dangerously close to murder. The reasons for this are not arbitrary. The late fetus is much more developed and humanlike than the zygote. Similarly, the termination of a fetus in between those stages would not be arbitrarily perceived by us as being somewhat worse than the terminated zygote and somewhat less worse than the termination of the eight month old fetus. When the nervous system of that fetus develops to a certain stage when it can feel pain from when the sucker comes in and vacuums its brains out the sin value would increase correspondingly. What's arbitrary about that?
Let's not bring theology and religion into this. What the Pope thinks is or isn't sinning really does not matter in a rational debate.
I would agree with you that the point system is partially arbitrary, but not so much as to make it a fruitless endeavor. For example, you and I can both probably agree that terminating a single celled zygote isn't morally wrong and that terminating an eight month old fetus is getting dangerously close to murder. The reasons for this are not arbitrary. The late fetus is much more developed and humanlike than the zygote. Similarly, the termination of a fetus in between those stages would not be arbitrarily perceived by us as being somewhat worse than the terminated zygote and somewhat less worse than the termination of the eight month old fetus. When the nervous system of that fetus develops to a certain stage when it can feel pain from when the sucker comes in and vacuums its brains out the sin value would increase correspondingly. What's arbitrary about that?
Then I don't think you can call it a sin point.
Why not?
Look it up? Really. So when a woman says "Its not a sin for me to have an abortion" that's gonna be your response? The dictionary says so. Isn't that like saying 'the bible says so'???
You do know more than one woman is gonna try and beat you with that dictionary.
You do know more than one woman is gonna try and beat you with that dictionary.
snake river rufus
Registered Senior Member
Why should an atheist care about arbitrary "sins" assigned by a superstition?
I'm using the word "sin" in a general way.
Murder is a sin, whether in the religious sense of the word or not! Christ.
You never even acknowledged my core argument Orleander (lol), which is not all abortion is equally moral, let's do something about it. I took it for granted that killing a two week old blastocyst is not as bad as killing an eight and a half week fetus, ceteris paribus. Do you disagree?
Okay, so presumably you think killing *born* babies is wrong, am I correct?
But you also said that you think that killing a fetus that is 8.5 months developed--or even a baby that is almost completely developed, but is still in the womb is completely acceptable.
You have said that killing a baby of the same level of development is completely different depending on whether it is inside or outside the womb. One is murder; the other is not, simply because one is in the womb and the other is not, even though they are at the same level of development. They have the same capability to feel pain, the same instincts, the same brain development, etc. They are the same, except one is in, the other is out. But murdering one is okay, and murdering the other is not. That makes zero sense.
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