[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
We have enough of all other categories, except Bonobos.
They serve as a reminder that, even as primates, we do not have to be total dicks.
[/quote]
I was under the impression that Bonobo life is almost entirely and exclusively about dick.[/quote]
Nope. They love the pussy too. Especially the girls. [/quote]
True. The “uglies,” then.
~50 percent about dick.
Face to face, like the good lord intended.
I came upon this in wikipedia and couldn’t stop laughing: “When bonobos come upon a new food source or feeding ground, the increased excitement will usually lead to communal sexual activity.”
Bonobo: “Hey, a tomato.”
Orgy.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]opeth7opeth wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]opeth7opeth wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I respect someone who posits that no one can know what is on the Almighty’s mind far more than I respect those who would presume to know, and further presume to speak for him.
To your point of self-ownership and stewardship, I think this speaks to the intrinsic value of life: one is made a steward of a thing precisely because it has value. The lesson, I believe, to be learned from the story of Cain, and the answer to his rhetorical (and disingenuous) question “am I my brother’s keeper?” Is a resounding “yes”. We are, in fact, the keepers of our brothers and parents and children and neighbors precisely because of the intrinsic value of their lives.
I had wanted to avoid a theological discussion, but I am still interested in getting a Jewish perspective, because Lord knows we have had plenty of Christian perspectives.
In rabbinic tradition, does ending the life of an unborn baby carry the same moral weight as ending the life of an infant? Is the fetus’ life, in other words, as valuable as the infant’s, and what is the reasoning behind the answer?
[/quote]
How about a logical discussion? You wrote:
Those positing that no one can know what is on the Almighty’s mind are presuming to speak for Him. They are claiming (with metaphysical certitude) to KNOW what sort of being God is – a being who does not or cannot (for whatever reason) communicate His mind to man. But how do they know this? Where did they get this knowledge about God?
[/quote]
Do you posit that the mind of God can be known? Or that God is a being who communicates the entirety of his mind to man? Have you any direct, testable evidence that would support this position?[/quote]
I posit that your own words chide you to respect yourself “far less” since you’ve identified yourself with those who presume to know something (not everything) of the mind of God. You presume this without “any direct, testable evidence that would support this position.” You and I are both making truth claims about the mind of God. But evidently only one of us is willing to admit it.
Presuming representatives of the Almighty are gleefully proclaiming to know that “no one can know.” They are blithely unaware that this position is hypocritical and self-refuting.
[/quote]
On the contrary. Even prophets, who, we are to understand, received direct revelations from the Almighty (or via his angels, as the case may be) would not claim to know the mind of God.
Abraham and Moses could never anticipate God’s next move. Jesus admitted that there was information he himself was not privy to, and for Muhammad to claim that he knew even the tiniest fraction of the mind of God would have been shirk of the highest order. I am no prophet, so I make no claims to know anything about the nature or mind of God.
Having never personally met a legitimate prophet, and being highly skeptical of anyone I do meet who would purport to be one, I can only conclude that anyone claiming to know the mind of God must be a false prophet, and therefore less worthy of my respect than someone who admits, as Jewbacca did earlier, that the mind of God cannot be known.
[/quote]
So “direct revelations from the Almighty” to His prophets (e.g., Isaiah, Habakkuk, Nahum) do not come from His mind? Those prophets who exclaim “Thus saith the Lord” are saying nothing about God’s mind? Words have nothing to do with the mind?
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
So, opeth, do you actually have an opinion about the value of life, or did you merely show up to take issue with a sideways compliment I made to Jewbacca in passing?[/quote]
Value of life:
“And surely the blood of your lives I will demand. At the hand of every animal I will demand it, and at the hand of man. I will demand the life of man at the hand of every man’s brother. Whoever sheds man’s blood, his blood shall be shed by man. For He made man in the image of God” (Genesis 9:5-6).
“All the nations are as nothing before Him; to Him they are reckoned less than nothing and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17).
“Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31).
" … for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of the One calling, it was said to her, The greater shall serve the lesser; even as it has been written, I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau. What then shall we say? Is there not unrighteousness with God? Let it not be! For He said to Moses, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will pity whomever I will pity. So, then, it is not of the one willing, nor of the one running, but of the One showing mercy, of God. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very thing I raised you up, so that I might display My power in you, and so that My name might be publicized in all the earth. So, then, to whom He desires, He shows mercy. And to whom He desires, He hardens. You will then say to me, Why does He yet find fault? For who has resisted His will? Yes, rather, O man, who are you answering against God? Shall the thing formed say to the One forming it, Why did You make me like this? Or does not the potter have authority over the clay, out of the one lump to make one vessel to honor, and one to dishonor? But if God, desiring to demonstrate His wrath, and to make His power known, endured in much long-suffering vessels of wrath having been fitted out for destruction, and that He make known the riches of His glory on vessels of mercy which He before prepared for glory" (Romans 9:11-23).
Unconditional hatred of some and unconditional love of others based on nothing in the person; but based solely in the sovereign will of the Almighty. So, then, to whom He desires, He shows mercy. And to whom He desires, He hardens.
The Almighty determines the value of the lives of Jacob and Esau, Moses and Pharaoh. The value of the vessels created for demonstrating glorious mercy are contrasted with the value of the vessels created for demonstrating God’s just severity and holy wrath.
So what you are saying, opeth, is that you have no opinion of your own, outside of what is written in the Bible. Fair enough.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I think the “value” of a life is completely subjective. For example, a female in Afghanistan who is an illiterate Muslim and will never amount to anything other than raising some terrorists to hate Jews and America, then I feel that life is worth SIGNIFICANTLY less than that of a person raised with values of tolerance and passed those values on to their children. Is the “life” in question “worth” living? Do they move the world in a positive direction or a negative direction? The world would be a better place if the former were to be killed in a drone strike vs. the latter.
I’d like to drill down on the concept of “stewardship” that JB brought up because I feel that’s a VERY significant aspect of value, as it will strongly contribute to that person’s potential. If one is born into a family of loving people with good judgement, than I feel that life is worth more than if one is born into a life of a 16 year old single mother who can’t fend for herself, much less a child. All things being equal, the child born into the family has a life of FAR greater potential, and hence, more value, than that of the child born into the single mother scenario. I’m sure that argument would be, “but it’s not the BABY’S fault where it’s born”. And while I agree that it’s no one’s FAULT, we are determining VALUE, here - not assigning responsibility. Life isn’t fair. And there are of course exceptions.
I also believe that life becomes more valuable the longer it has been invested in. So an unborn fetus, in my book is FAR less valuable than a three year old who has parents that have invested in him. Because, let’s face it, a fetus doesn’t really have a life. I doesn’t even know what life is. A COW has more awareness than a fetus and we kill cows all day long. Like several people pointed out in the other abortion thread, when the woman has a miscarriage after three months, it’s a FAR LESS traumatic experience than if it died during delivery at nine months. Why? Because it had less potential and not as much was invested.
I would also bring up the point of economics. Supply and demand. The Greater the supply, the less the value. And humans are multiplying at a pretty fucking unsustainable rate. I was born in 1974. In MY LIFETIME, the human population has DOUBLED. See the attached chart. For nearly all of human history there were less than 500 million humans on the planet. Then, in the 1700’s, humans begin multiplying EXPONENTIALLY. In a hundred years there wont be enough resources on the planet to feed everyone. Assuming we make it that far with out a Malthusian event.
Think about the future where instead of 8 Billion people, there are 35 Billion people. That’s where we are headed. China’s “one child policy” is just the beginning. If the world population continues to skyrocket the way it is currently trending, I assure you a few abortions will the the LAST thing people are worried about. It will be forced sterilization for the “have nots” coupled with some kind of “culling” of the herd. Sounds kind of “Biblical”, doesn’t it? There is simply no way this will NOT happen in a hundred years. Human life will be worth LESS than nothing at that point. So all the arguing about “every life is sacred” is kind of juvenile and only serves to move the planet FASTER toward a time when “every life is expendable”. I do not look forward to those times and I am preparing MY children accordingly.
Speaking of MY children, I hold their lives to have more value than any of yours. Not trying to be a dick by writing that, but it’s true. I value MY offspring over just about anything else. And I’m sure if you are honest, every one of you who is a parent will agree with me. Call me a selfish asshole if you want. I’m just keeping it real.[/quote]
Good. Very good. This is what I was hoping to see. A completely rational and honest assessment, unclouded by sentimentality and idealism.
People often associate rising technology with “dehumanization” or a devaluing of human life. I would argue the opposite: that technology has been the only thing that has managed to keep a complete devaluation of life from occurring. Without it, the resources our species would be able to exploit would be completely insufficient to support a population of eight billion at anything above basic subsistence level.
Our country was able to build a govenment around quasi-religious principles of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness precisely because it had the immense good fortune to have established itself on a vast and rich virgin continent that was sparsely peopled, and whose resources had never been extracted by an industrial society.
But liberty in a Jeffersonian sense can never survive the constant packing-in of more people, and sooner or later the exponential rise of the population of this country, and indeed this planet, will outstrip the technological means to support it.
Oh, certainly there will always be those who will be able to carve out comfortable niches for themselves and their families, just as the most desperately impoverished and overpopulated countries today have their tiny enclaves of the privileged classes, but these will be fewer and farther between: tiny islands of wealth, comfort and “liberty” in a roiling sea of misery, famine, internecine warfare and abject poverty.
The ruling classes will expend less and less of the dwindling resources that they control to alleviate the misery of the teeming masses yearning not to “be free”, but simply to survive another day. The value of life in such a society will be evaluated far lower than it is today, and the contentious issue of the day will not be the moral implications of abortion, but rather the moral implications of recycling human corpses to use as fertilizer to keep the barren soil able to support crops.
China and India have a population exceeding a billion people each. The United States has a population only about a quarter that size, and Indonesia, which has much less land area, is catching up. Imagine, if you will, this country, the same size as it presently is, with the same population of India. It is not an impossibility, or even an improbability.
The country with the highest population density is Singapore, at over 2500 people per square mile. The entire country is one big city, which survives only by importing 100 percent of its food and water, a GDP of over 60,000 dollars per person, massive investment in technological advancement, and a benevolent totalitarian government. Abortion is a right protected by law, and small families are strongly encouraged, to say the least.
There is no way the United States will ever approach the population density of Singapore: we would need a population of 68 billion to do that. However, by way of comparison, New York City, with a land area slightly larger than that of Singapore, has a population density over ten times greater. New York is an extremely rich city…or an extremely poor city, depending on where you look, and the gap between rich and poor bears more resemblance to Calcutta than to Singapore.
The penny analogy I talked about earlier is relevant here. The more pennies you mint, the less each penny is worth. They may all have equivalent face value, but eventually only a few rare ones will be worth anything at all. [/quote]
The great ‘moral relativism’ argument. You are only as valuable as people deem you to be. Sucks to be on the wrong side of that coin.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
One human life is as valuable as another. You cannot make an argument that one human life is more or less valuable as another. So it then boils down to how much you value your life. If you value your life highly and you are a human being than you must value other human lives as much as your own since you are human and you hold the value of your own life highly. [/quote]
You are speaking of subjective value. I value my own life because I own it, just as I value anything else that I own. Whether anyone else values the things I own depends on their subjective sense of perceived value. And again, you are speaking in tautologies: we must value human life because we are human and human life must be valued.
But some of the most horrible atrocities have been committed by people who valued their own lives, or the lives of their tribe, extremely highly. More highly, in fact, than anything else in the world. It does not follow that ascribing high value to one’s own life presupposes high value ascribed to the life of another. [/quote]
I am of all things speaking against subjectiveness. The value of human life is not subjective. Each one is as ‘valuable’ as another. And you have to accept that your life is as valuable or unvaluable as your own. You have to be willing to subject yourself to the same level of suffering or death as you’re willing to do to yourself.
If the life of others is subjective to external circumstances beyond their control, then so is yours. The only way to be consistent is to value yourself very little and act in a way that is consistent with that value.
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause. [/quote]
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause. [/quote]
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.[/quote]
How do you feel about unborn Palestinian children?
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause. [/quote]
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.[/quote]
How do you feel about unborn Palestinian children?[/quote]
I don’t know what a “palestinian” child is, but if you mean an arab child, he or she is an child just like any other and certainly should be protected.
This is why the arabs in Judea and Samaria get free medical care from Israel, the area has received more aid, per capita, than any other people in the world, get free electricity, education, and all other basic needs supplied primarily by the Israeli taxpayer.
I often pray for the suicide bomber who killed my first wife. He was severely afflicted with Down’s syndrome, and put up like a wind-up doll to kill everyone in a bus. I sincerely doubt he had any idea what he did. How a people would do this to someone who is effectively a child like this is beyond me.
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause. [/quote]
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.[/quote]
How do you feel about unborn Palestinian children?[/quote]
I don’t know what a “palestinian” child is, but if you mean an arab child, he or she is an child just like any other and certainly should be protected.
This is why the arabs in Judea and Samaria get free medical care from Israel, the area has received more aid, per capita, than any other people in the world, get free electricity, education, and all other basic needs supplied primarily by the Israeli taxpayer.
I often pray for the suicide bomber who killed my first wife. He was severely afflicted with Down’s syndrome, and put up like a wind-up doll to kill everyone in a bus. I sincerely doubt he had any idea what he did. How a people would do this to someone who is effectively a child like this is beyond me.[/quote]
You are a credit to your nation. I know a good number of your countrymen and tribesmen who would not be so charitable.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
I know a good number of my countrymen and tribesmen who uncharitably support the death of millions of American babies. Thing is, they have no underlying reason(s) to hate the parents of said children. Instead they ironically use the term “freedom to choose” to advance their platform of uncharitableness.[/quote]
Define “support”. Are you referring specifically to people who actively contribute money and resources to Planned Parenthood, or to everyone in general who doesn’t necessarily agree with the antiabortion platform?
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
This is a followup to the running (and persistent) debate over abortion on the Planned Parenthood and Teen Pregnancy thread, and on a few others. I alluded to the question in passing, but I’d like to address it more fully here.
The presumption in the abortion debate is that a human fetus is just as alive and just as human–and therefore as valuable–as an infant, or a child, or an adult.
Let us agree that a fetus is alive. This is self-evident. If it were dead it would not grow. Let us also agree that it is human. It could not be otherwise. Human sperm and human eggs cannot combine to form anything other than a human embryo, which will inevitably become a human infant, unless the process is interrupted by biological, chemical or mechanical means.
So. No arguments so far, correct? A zygote, an embryo, a fetus and an infant are all equivalent in their being alive and human.
Let us for the moment sidestep issues of sentience or viability outside the womb. Let us assume that the living human embryo will, if not hindered from doing so, develop into a healthy baby.
Now, the question. Does this embryo have objective, inteinsic value, by virtue of its being alive and human?
We’ll also sidestep the fact that even a dead embryo or fetus has some value to scientific and medical science. Let’s confine the conversation to a living human organism. Is it a thing of value, and is its value determined by the fact that it is alive, or the fact that it is human?
How valuable is it, why is it valuable, and who decides?
The answers I’ve heard range from the tautological (“a human life is valuable because it’s a human life”) to the legalistic (“a human life is valuable because we all have the right to life”) to the religious (“a human life is valuable because we are created by God in his image”) to the non-argument (“it just is, and how can you even ask such a question?!”)
(Parenthetically, I hear the same arguments about money. Why is a US dollar valuable? It just is. The government tells us it is, and we believe it. But that’s another matter.)
I said on the other thread that everyone falls into a continuum of perception of the intrinsic value of life. On one end, we might find a person who believes that all life, from the lowest orders to the highest, is equivalent in value, and it is wrong to end the lives of any living thing, animal or vegetable. Far off on the other end, we have what we might term the sociopath or psychopath, who believes that only his own life is valuable.
In between we have those who think the lives of their family members are more valuable than the lives of others, that the lives of members of their own tribe or nation are more valuable than those of other tribes or nations, and those who believe that the lives of members of their own species are the only lives with any real value.
Understandably, we all fall on different points of the “perceived value of life” continuum, which is why I anticipate getting a range of different answers.
So tell me: is life intrinsically and objectively valuable, does some life have more value than other life, how valuable is life (in concrete terms: words like “priceless” or “precious” are meaningless), and why?
[/quote]
Only in response to you Varq, as you are someone I respect, and this is a subject I studied a bit.
Consider the concept of ends in themselves vs. means to ends. There are things which have instrumental value, like cash. Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Cash can get you this and that, which might bring you to and end in itself called happiness, or power depending on what you consider as ends in themselves. Intrinsic and Instrumental Good
An end in itself is something that has intrinsic value. Like the aforementioned happiness. But there are also things like love, beauty which are wrapped up in our very agency. You seem to categorize human agency as an end in itself, I feel the same and so did Kant.
The problem with this argument (because I have argued very similarly before) is that we are pitting a womans agency against an unborn potential persons agency. It’s basically agency vs. agency and both are ends in themselves.
So, from here the only leg you can argue from is if the woman had sex willingly, and was aware that with sexual intercourse comes the risk of pregnancy. So, one could argue that a woman had agency in her choice to have sex and therefore as a rational agent could be in the wrong for eliminating or killing (however strongly you want to call it) another fetus or person. It feels like a very weak place to argue from, as the fetus isn’t yet a rational agent.
Even if you grant that a fetus is an agent, there are still circumstances where say a perfectly healthy woman who wanted to get pregnant may suffer from complications which may cause her to be maimed the rest of her life or risk death, if we force that woman to give birth then we violate her agency. I don’t think pregnancy should be a death sentence, considering how hit or miss pregnancy itself is, eggs get fertilized and passed all the time naturally. Those are potential person too, but we aren’t fighting to keep them alive, so God must really want those souls in heaven or whatever if that’s how some of you have to rationalize this trivialization.
Birth and population control are things we will be very concerned about in the next 100 or so years. If we truly treat every agent as an end in themselves, we would all be fed today… But can the world sustain a human populace if we let everyone live? Will we have enough food and other means to treat people as such in the future? Probably not… As it is how many babies starved to death this week? We are too greedy and wrapped up in instrumental value to even feed the hungry, and we bitch about food stamps…
This is where I’m at… I reluctantly support, “freedom of choice.” Because there are no better options… I’m friends with several perfectly healthy women who have had abortion(s), trust me, they go through enough shit already for us to be trying to regulate their bodies.
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.[/quote]
How about an unborn kitten?
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause. [/quote]
I am not in it for me. I think it is the most morally repugnant, barbaric and horrific action a ‘civilized’ society can dole out. They pick on the most innocent lives and destroy them, most of the time for no other reason than inconvenience. I am in it to save lives. Nothing more.
This is real death, caused by real people. I think it’s disgusting that people can sanitize murder, try to call it something else and feel good about it. It’s murder, it’s barbaric and it needs to go away.
Calling it a ‘procedure’, done by people wearing with gowns with gloves in a doctor’s office does not change the fact that it’s the willful taking of human life. I just happen to care about human life. There is nothing in it at all, for me personally. As a matter of fact, its more of a hassle and it gets me harassed if anything. But I won’t sit around and let people think it’s ok to kill another human, especially when the number of deaths is so extremely high.
Why is it so hard to believe that a person can care about people without anything to gain for themselves?
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
[quote]kaaleppi wrote:
You are not following my line of thought. You are supposed to take the gist and not ponder if I know the difference between abortion and vasectomy. I had an abortion done some 15 years ago, by the way. After that I expect to hear why abortions should be banned, and above all the most important, why that will give the best societal solution. [/quote]
I am sorry for your loss.
I’d love to have a 15 year old kid; I want to be a dad so bad I don’t know.[/quote]
I’ve had two kids who once were 15. For the life of me I can’t think of a single reason I wouldn’t have wanted them.
Of all the things I’ve done in my life, or ever could do, NOTHING beats being a dad.[/quote]
One of my best friends had a child at 16. He man’d up and raised a child who turned into a fine young man. Sure there were plenty of challenges along the way, but he explained to me that never once did he even consider an abortion.
Nothing bad came of it. He shouldered the responsibility and took care of business. We took the kid everywhere as teenagers. He was just one of the guys.
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Honest question, Pat, and it may be more personal than you are willing to answer, and that’s fine.
Why do you care so much?
I care about personal liberty and firearms rights because I don’t want my own liberty and right to defend myself taken away.
But the rights of the unborn is a banner you have marched behind stalwartly for years, and I am honestly curious about the motivations behind your zeal. What do you personally hope to gain, and how will your victory or defeat benefit or degrade you and your family?
Will the quality of your life be improved if more of the unborn are allowed to survive? Will it be lessened if they are not?
I truly mean no disrespect, I think your cause is a noble one, I am just curious as to what you hope to gain, other than the satisfaction of supporting a noble cause. [/quote]
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.[/quote]
Well if you look at the trickle down effect of the merits of our society, we value celebrities and ball players more than our military, scientists, intellectuals, etc.
Why does miley cyrus gyrating ever make front page news? Who cares what she puts her sorry pussy on, seriously? Especially over mass slaughters going on in Syria and Africa, or the SEAL’s taking out a terrorist target. Those get a blurb miley gets weeks of coverage. We are a superficial society.
[quote]zecarlo wrote:
[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
The merit of a society is measured by how it treats the weakest and those without a voice.
I can think of none more vulnerable than an unborn child.[/quote]
How about an unborn kitten? [/quote]
No thank you. I’ve already eaten. And cats aren’t kosher, anyway.
But thanks for asking.