Not remotely. An earnest review of our posting history would find plenty of times in which Max has been remarkably unsympathetic to my position; “savage” as a description of his rebuttals would not be a word out of place.
But never once have I felt that he was deliberately miscasting my argument or urging others to do so. It’s not sympathy, in short, but integrity that draws my praise.
I already did. I weighed the highly unlikely circumstance of a purely elective day-before abortion (as well as finding a doctor willing to perform such a procedure) versus the very real, very measurable incidence of serious late-term medical complications like eclampsia, gestational diabetes, fetal death and so forth. In order to restrict the hypothetical one woman, I see the potential for delays to thousands of real women whose far-along pregnancies have become serious and imminent threats to their health, with the result that some of them will die. For real. So don’t get all huffy because I’m not taking your unicorn seriously.
So be troubled. I’m not stopping you. If you want to troubled by how I’m not troubled, I won’t stop that either.
I suggest instead that the original issue has been fully analyzed (or as much as can be expected). This is the after party.
“One-day-before-birth”, not “one-day-old”
Well, I’ll take your word for it, disinterested as I am in delving into yours and Max’s shared posting history. The particular example of post 1073 is rather underwhelming.
I can’t quite say the same, since he miscasted my argument. I don’t think he did it deliberately, though. I don’t know him well enough to comment on his integrity.
Heh, I guess I read too quickly, since I assumed he meant “one day before birth” and responded accordingly.
One day old, of course, is passing what I’m content with as a legal bright line, the determining factor being the rather obvious “inside someone’s body” versus “not inside someone’s body”.
Except that it’s not that simple and straightforward. It’s not just the case that some laws are religiously motivated and some laws aren’t. And in fact the laws that should be disallowed due to religion are not, for the most part, laws MOTIVATED BY religion but laws ABOUT or PROMOTING religion. That is, it’s totally clear to me that there should not be a law stating that all schoolchildren should recite the lord’s prayer every morning. There also shouldn’t be a law forcing all teachers to lead the lord’s prayer every morning, even if it was technically “voluntary” for the students to participate or not. We can agree on that, I assume.
But in the real world, it’s not that simple. I’m either an atheist or a strong agnostic of some sort, depending on your terminology. If you take a variety of questions about how society should be, including ones that I have a strong degree of confidence about such as should-murder-be-legal (no) and should-gay-marriage-be-legal (yes); and ones that I’m much less certain about (capital punishment and gun control, for instance), and then start drilling down into my justifications for why I believe what I believe, layer after layer after layer, am I going to have truly secular logically supported rationally founded arguments for every single step along the way, so that I can come up with some Principia Mathematica in which I start with nothing but a minimal set of assumptions and end up proving that abortion should be legal all based purely on rationality? Of course not. I’d like to think I can come closer than some, but it would be hubris to say that every last bit of every position I hold on every single issue is entirely based on logic. So how does that make me better, or make my opinions more relevant, than someone whose positions are based on morals and ethics that at some level are informed by religious faith?
In other words, when the supreme court is deciding whether a law is invalid due to religiosity, should they take all the people who argue for it, all the people who argue against it, figure out what percentage of each people’s beliefs come from what percentage of religion-instead-of-rationality, then do some calculus, and then decide in favor of whichever side is less religious? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.
(I’ve retyped parts of this post over and over again because it’s such a complicated topic, so I reserve the right to claim that I did not express myself very well. Because, in fact, I did not express myself very well, and certain didn’t cover every aspect of this that I kind of wanted to touch on.)
Certainly possible. I wasn’t initially attempting attack or address or respond to any single specific argument anyone was making, which of course is a risk of trying to summarize an entire thread of discussion and then respond to it as if it’s a single poster making a single point. On the other hand, sometimes it’s impossible NOT to post in that fashion, purely based on logistics.
In any case, if you are willing to point out what argument of yours you believe I misrepresented, I will happily attempt to reunmispreresent it, or whatever the proper verb is.
Which is a reasonable LEGAL position to have, much as it’s a reasonable LEGAL position that people can not legally drink alcohol when they are 20 years and 364 days old, but can legally drink alcohol a day later.
And if we lived in a society in which your proposed law was in effect, and we were debating whether some particular instance of killing-a-baby-or-maybe-not was illegal or not, having that nice bight line law would be useful in all but the most contrived cases (“oh, one foot of the baby was still in the birth canal! and the umbilical cord was partway, but not completely, severed!”).
But what we are discussing is what the law SHOULD be, and while your proposed bright line law has some advantages, there are plenty of ways for reasonable people to come up with other proposed laws. And the fact is that non-religious-you thinks that there should be a bright line at birth, and non-religious-me thinks that viability-outside-the-mother is the best line but am troubled about it, and religious-Bricker thinks that the best line is conception. So how is society to resolve troubling debates like this one? Well, I don’t have an easy answer, but whatever it is, it certainly is NOT that Bricker’s opinion doesn’t count because he’s religious.
Well, I feel I have reason to object to the suggestion that I’m unsubtle or incapable of appreciating subtlety or that my argument was lacking necessary subtlety. It’s as if I said “all swans are white” and then someone mix-metaphored their way in (dipping a toe in a train-wreck?) to try to take me to task because I didn’t also mention that swans have feathers and that they have beaks and that they have webbed feet and any number of other characteristics, when an actual refutation would have been just presenting a black swan.
In my effort to explain my position regarding the justification for laws in unemotional terms with as few base assumptions as possible, I’m neither expressing nor avoiding a definition argument on what is “human life” or if or when a fetus qualifies as such. It’s not relevant and I don’t care.
What I was presenting is not, as you described it:
so you finding it not to be “satisfying or decisively compelling” is not my problem.
And that’s just post 1073. I also have reason to object to your later “Principia Mathematica” characterization, but it wasn’t directed at me (or at least I’m not certain it was) so I’ll let YogSosoth address it.
Well said. Perhaps having this parsed out for him as well as you have here will cause it to actually penetrate the astounding thickness. Though at this point, that seems doubtful.
[record needle sound effect] Wait, what? What law am I supposedly proposing? The law to remove abortion laws? If so, I already live in a society like that.
Yeah, well, again… you’re advancing a hypothetical case when my concerns are with the real-life consequences to real-life women. I don’t have a problem with Kermit Gosnell in jail. I object to the some of the circumstances that make women seek out someone like Gosnell in the first place.
I don’t care in the least how religious Bricker is. It’s none of my concern. I’m discounting his opinion because he can’t back it up with facts. The atheist pro-lifers he has cited are also lacking facts. He’s said that I wouldn’t accept any facts he comes up with. Well, he’s free to claim that, but it sounds weak to me.
And whatever the law SHOULD be, I can’t see a good reason why it should resemble Wisconsin’s.
Ha, I thought you were ignoring me. Well, maybe you are but at least you get to read my comments when other posters quote and respond to them.
Except that there’s one really key issue (is a fetus a human being?) in which neither side is backed up by facts. It’s neither a fact that a fetus is a human being nor a fact that fetus is NOT a human being in any meaningful sense of the word “fact”. And frankly, plenty of public policy debates have sticking points that don’t come down to facts. I think that the speed limit should be 85 because to me, the increased benefit and freedom of being able to drive faster outweighs the human cost of increased traffic fatalities. You don’t. That disagreement isn’t about facts. I admit that I only skimmed some parts of this very long thread, but I don’t think the SDMB is served by “haha, he believes in magical crackers” being used as a rebuttal to just about anything.
To answer the 2nd part of the paragraph first, I agree, there shouldn’t be a law favoring a religious prayer or even a voluntary offer of one
For the first part, I believe that the abortion issue isn’t a law simply motivated by religion but stem from a desire to promote one over others. That is why I feel so strongly against it and why the irreligious should make the law
Based on what you said, we’re probably never going to come to a consensus. I believe that yes, absolutely, that every law should be logically supported. Why not? Does logic not apply in certain cases? Are we unable to use basic reasoning and rationality when speaking of certain subjects? Every law out there must and should have a secular, irreligious basis. Otherwise, why have it at all? For any law you can name, one that I believe is a valid and proper law, I think there can easily be a logical, secular basis found for it. Protection, safety, fairness, equality are not religious concepts, they are human concepts. I cannot fathom that only some wizened friar working in a church with candles is the only one capable of decreeing something like abortion, or gay marriage, or animal slaughter. There are legions of smarter people, philosophers, scientists, humanists, and hell, even mathematicians, who are better able to understand the concepts behind something like sex before marriage.
It makes you better because without the cloud of religious superstition over you, and let’s face it, they are absolutely superstitions written down by ignorant people thousands of years ago to try and explain the natural world, you are better able to discern what is real, what is fact, and base an opinion on that
No, but what they should do is take a look at which arguments are religious in nature and stem from that belief system and automatically reject that. If they don’t, they are mandating that other people not of their faith follow that one religion. Nobody should have to do that, and because there are lots of competing religions, one cannot take any of them into account. The only recourse is to take none into account
To the best of my knowledge, states are currently free to restrict access to abortions in the third trimester, which clearly includes day-before-birth. Am I confused?
I don’t know what this is in response to. It’s pretty far removed from anything I said, though I accept the possibility my phrasing might have been ambiguous on some points. I don’t recall ever speaking disparagingly about Host rituals, for example, though I can picture myself using puns or wordplay if opportunity presented.
Just for the heck of it, I did a search of my posting history for the word “host” and incidentally found this (Catholic-unrelated) comment from three years ago that could almost have fit seamlessly into this thread, lest anyone else get the idea of accusing me of inconsistency.
For actual Eucharist-themed comments I’ve made, there’s this from 2008 (and I don’t mind admitting it was pretty lame) and this, which I think is not disrespectful in the least, and there was plenty of ridicule going on in that thread.
Well, I’m Canadian. This has never been a secret. There is no Canadian abortion law at the federal or provincial level, though there are regulations and in many rural areas access is limited not by law but by practicality. Third-trimester elective abortions are rare in part because there are few doctors willing to perform them, and I don’t anticipate nor do I support forcing them to.
Not to seem hair-splitting, but I’m not advocating a law that makes abortion legal, I’m advocating the overturning of laws that make abortion illegal or those that introduce useless hassles, as Wisconsin’s law does.
Huh. So you think abortion being illegal would make the US a more Christian nation, or something? Interesting. I’m awfully touchy about things like “under god” and “in god we trust”, and it never occurred to me to think about it that way.
I have two responses to that:
(1) A silly aside, but… what about a law that just doesn’t matter much? If 70% of a town passes a law saying that all the houses must be painted purple because, damn it, they just want to… can they? Important to that hypothetical is that painting houses purple does not infringe on the rights of anyone else, unless you consider “the right to paint my house any color I want” a fundamental right on the same level as free speech etc. Or to think about it another way, is “because a majority of the population wants it and it doesn’t violate any of the various things laws can’t violate” a logical enough reason?
(2) More seriously, simply saying “every law should be logically supported” doesn’t really help us much in a situation like this. I can make an extremely logical argument against legal abortion. I can also make an extremely logical argument FOR legal abortion, and I think that the second argument is stronger than the first, which is why I support legal abortion. But this is not a case where one side has facts and logic on their side and the other side has, I dunno, appeals to tradition and flag waving obfuscation. The key in determining whether abortion should be legal is not, imho, “well, let’s look at what the facts say, and then make a logical determination”, it’s “there are reasonable and logical arguments on both sides, but we can’t do both, so which side has the stronger arguments, and/or where can the best compromise be drawn”. And the fact that a bunch of the people supporting one side of the argument happen to be religious, and happen to place particular value on the arguments for their side due to their religious morals, does not mean that there are no logical arguments on that side.
But by Bryan Ecker’s reasoning it is irrelevant whether a fetus is or is not a “human being”.
Post 1024 in this thread. As I said a few posts ago, I was commenting about a strand of posts in this thread initially, not simply trying to address you specifically.
My purpose in this thread was never to debate Bryan’s position on abortion, specifically. I’ll just say that any position which has no ethical objection to one-day-before-birth abortion is not one that either I nor a huge majority of Americans, including plenty who are pro-choice, are very comfortable with. But really debating it in depth is clearly outside the scope of this pit thread.