Which is why I said, “If there is a God, and if we assume he has set of desires for humankind to follow…”
Of course if there is not a God, then, of course, you’re right. But you may not assume the lack of God to prove the lack of God.
And to forestall the obvious: I absolutely acknowledge that the weight of evidence you can see falls on the side of “There is no God.” I have excellent reasons for believing there is a God, but those reasons cannot be effectively communicated to you. So from your point of view, and indeed from mine in terms of debate, I recognize that the burden of proof falls to me and I cannot sustain it.
Where in your cite does it say that the growing embryo is not a tiny person?
I have no idea why you believe that I’m saying someone should feel guilty over an ectopic pregnancy. As to the proper therapy, Catholics have no problem with a partial salpingectomy, because this is not a direct attack on the innocent life.
So it seems that your criteria for “stupid comment” comes down to the fact that you don’t regard an embryo as a human life, and I do.
That isn’t an RCC rule. The RCC says you can kill to protect your life, your property, society, or your country. But if you’re a woman and they can’t cut bits out of your body and blame those bits for acting up, then you get to die if you have a dangerous pregnancy. The one risk women have that men can’t just happens to be the one time that direct killing is impossibly evil.
You’re obfuscating. The standard treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is a shot of methotrexate to dissolve the egg. Catholic church officials and you yourself have stated that a woman should instead go for tubal removal.
This is completely ridiculous. The egg is not a person. The egg is a cell in the wrong place causing a medical emergency for the woman in question. This notion that a woman should forgo non-invasive treatment in favor of invasive medical treatment because church officials can’t tell the difference between an actual person and a fertilized egg is vile.
Yes, but my point was to say that I was indeed comfortable with the expanded assertion you inferred that human behavior indicates that humans generally don’t think that there’s a god who is both omnipotent and doesn’t want things like murder to happen. It wasn’t an argument about the existence of a god, but an observation that most people act in ways inconsistent with complete belief in the typical assertions about gods.
I really appreciate this. And I acknowledge the inverse - if you have a personal revelation, and you don’t interpret it as some neural quirk, I’m not terribly interested in trying to argue you out of that belief.
For what it’s worth, I find you to be fairly honest and open to correction, which I admire. I even understand your Idi Amin analogy, and see what you’re saying there.
I mean, I still think you’re totally WRONG, but you’re wrong in a much more civilized and intelligent way than most believers are.
First I want to apologize to Bricker for being an ass earlier in this thread. After I posted I sat down and thought about things for a long time. I shouldn’t be treating people like that, and my sincerest apologies to him.
Secondly, I get Bricker’s views on abortion and the status of a fetus in a way but I don’t think that makes them above reproach. To me it still boils down to a sort of circular logic. In canon law a fetus holds the status of a living person because that’s what canon law says. Historically, that hadn’t always been the case–Aquinas argued that the fetus did not have a soul until after “the quickening”, and some popes agreed with that. But as Bricker would no doubt agree canon law is valid in Catholic theology whether it was promulgated yesterday or 1,900 years ago.
In a sense I suppose this is more consistent than the teachings of some other Christian doctrines in that those who adhere to that tenet. Some Christian denominations claim that the Bible states that a fetus shares equal rights with a human being. Not only doesn’t it do so, there is quite a bit of evidence that it says the opposite.
But I think as long as we are being precise, I put this question to Bricker on precision. Are you comfortable with the process of canon law in and of itself–that is to say, that the legal test of canon law is that it exists?
Lastly, is it perfectly within grounds of the SDMB to challenge your ideology as nonsensical if we see it that way? You have argued that one must “fight ignorance”. Are we not doing the same? Our lack of precision is as much due to emotion as your continued defense is.
Okay, assume he has rules he wants us to follow. Which ones? How does he contact us to let us know what they are? You could say that lack of knowledge of a law isn’t a defense, but if I wanted to know the law I could go to a library and look it up. Where do I go to confirm his rulings? Should I listen to priests who may be buggering children, or covering up such crimes? Should I read books that make little sense in today’s society? Really, should I give my daughter to the mob to protect a guest in my house?
The rules you say God wants us to follow are only given to a select few to pass along to the rest of us and we’re supposed to listen to them without question? And say the guy who does have the answer isn’t a good speaker and the message is lost? Should we listen to the obvious con men who created Scientology, Mormonism, and Islam? Many do.
Frankly, we’re back to this club of Catholics claiming some divine insight into how the world should work with no evidence to back up their claims. At least I can ask a politician to demonstrate that what they are saying has some factual basis in reality. Not so with the clergy. We must take their word for everything they say, from what god wants us to do with our bodies, to they’ve cleaned up their house regarding child molestation.
At least in my family, which is an Italian Catholic family, ever since well forever, it had a lot to do with how many kids they could afford to feed and properly take care of. I’d say that is a reasonable and responsible “just” reason. One of my memories is as a kid, overhearing the women of the family talk. This was somewhere back in the 60s, when there was a lot of talk about the Pill, and the “policy” such as it had been filtered down was, to not use the Pill. The general tone was:
“We aren’t a bunch of rabbits that can keep popping out babies, and furthermore the Pope can support all these kids and buy all their food”.
It’s not an exact quote becaues it’s been a LONG time, but it captures the general sentiment. Being worried about supporting and raising an endless train of spawn is a real concern. It’s a hell of a lot more responsible than simply making another baby every year, without a care in the world about who is gonna take care of all of them. That’s just stupid.
Is it safe to say that ectopic prgnancy is one of those cases where the medical indications would say you either abort or risk losing both the ectopic egg AND the mother? I’d think that simply folding your hands and doing nothing, when you could have saved at least ONE of them (either the egg or the mother) would account to criminal negligence. Abortion kills one of them, the egg. Failure to act kills BOTH. Some things may be evil (maybe), if we even buy into that nonsense, in this sort of case. But sometimes you have to choose the one that is the lesser evil? To me, saving one is a lesser “evil” than condemning both. By a huge margin. In my mind, deliberate falure to act, when you could have saved someone, contributing to their death, IS tantamount to murder.
Obey a rule
Save a life
Obey a rule
Save a life
I’d go for saving the life. Rules can, and have been changed. Dead is permanent.
Because I think it’s only fair to judge the RCCC by the standards of (a) the Gospel, and (b) the RCCC, where reasonable. Took 'em four centuries to forgive Galileo, y’know. Within that context, the idea that the RCCC quickly adopted a new and relatively untried theory of the moment, same as everybody else did, is not exactly a defense of the RCCC; quite the opposite. Smacks of the idea that they were looking for a way out, more than anything else.
(a) Tu quoque. (b) At least they were doing it out in the fucking open, where everyone knew who they were letting off the hook.
You know, if the same thing could be said of the RCCC back then - that Fr. Martin had fallen victim to the temptation of child molestation in his last assignment, but that he had been to therapy and had fully worked through that problem, so please welcome him to your parish - maybe there’d been a lot fewer victims over time. Because moving the molesting priests around was only half the problem; the other half was keeping the whole thing a secret from the [del]marks[/del] flock.
WTF?
Look, nobody’s arguing that Joey the Rat is a cannibal, or that eating babies is an RCCC rite. Or even that the RCCC is unfair. Just that it’s morally reprehensible - and that charge is a hell of a lot more germane when we’re talking about the RCCC, an organization that is supposedly peddling God and truth and moral wisdom, than with, say, a corporation like BP that we more or less expect amorality from.
That’s not fair (not fair to BP). BP did openly admit there was a problem (rather than attacking the states and any other businesses affected), and whether they are successful at fixing it it or not, BP is at least doing something to try and stop the leak.
I really thought you’d have had to have existed in the world beyond your progenitor to actually obtain personhood status, but that’s just me and my opinion.
I’m be okay with the RCC (and organized religion in general) vanishing, but that’s not relevant except to someone who sees it as an excuse to disregard my position. You’d have to prove that I have some kind of anti-Catholic bias and that I would not feel the same way about any other organization that had behaved in a similar manner. As an example, suppose it came to light that OXFAM employed a few field agents who were known to assault children and simply reassigned them to other posts when the accusations started. Since I’d feel the same way about OXFAM that I do about the RCC (i.e. they have zero credibility and must work very hard to get some, and nonmolesting OXFAM employees must be prepared to ride out the storm because of the decisions of their superiors), your comment on my motives is dismissed.
Would you feel differently if OXFAM faced the same accusations? If not, examine your own biases.
What if I’m MORE moved by the plight of the sexually abused? I have to make a decision, here, weighing the inconvenience some individuals might face of being wrongfully accused against the harm caused to molested children. I don’t feel this is some hypothetical “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?!” overreaction where a line a toys gets banned because some study suggests one child in 10,000 might be harmed. The harm is known and significant and up until very recently, tolerated and concealed by the RCC hierarchy. If the RCC wants to convince me that their enabling behaviour has ended, it’s going to take more than a few official announcements to that effect. A decade or so of no further scandal (i.e. no more concealment) would be minimum, I estimate, with strict policies to address problems the moment they come to light. The RCC has done significant damage to its own reputation through its own actions. Let them face the same problems any organization with the same actions would face and undergo the same long slow rebuild of reputation.
I’m not aware of any other organization that has shuffled child molesters on the same scale for as many decades as the RCC, but I daresay if another one came to light, I’d view them the same way. Can you please clarify what you mean by canon and civil law? I wasn’t talking about involving secular authority, just what the RCC would have to do to clean up its own house.
