You’re not serious, are you?
Is this a serious question in a thread about republicans defunding health insurance for poor children?
I certainly hope he is. are you?
Typically superficial, yes, but serious anyway.
Wolf pup,
My claim: the unborn entity is a human being.
Your restatement of my claim: the unborn entity is a sentient human being.
Please note and correct.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Bricker
Resolved: my position on abortion is unassailable.
Evidence: opponents are unable to counter it without strawman attacks.
Resolved: you’re a pretentious twatbasket.
Evidence: this post.
You want a debate on abortion? Make a debate on abortion, I’ll gladly join in. Don’t just point to the first moron who is not-entirely-reasonable in their assessment of your argument and say, “See, this moron disagrees with me, therefore I am right”.
I’ll assail it: The right to bodily autonomy trumps (or should trump) every other conflicting right or concern. The status of the fetus (as a human or not) is irrelevant. Every adult of sound mind has (or should have) the right to remove anyone or anything inside their bodies that they do not want inside them, for any reason and at any time, even if the person or thing inside them will die if removed. I’ll note that this does not necessarily imply the right to kill – in some hypothetical future in which we can safely beam fetuses out of people’s wombs and place them in artificial wombs, this right to bodily autonomy could coexist with laws against killing fetuses.
No, it’s a serious question in a thread that devolved into a an abortion debate, and that I was stupid enough to participate in for awhile.
By that argument the OP is unassailable, since you were unable to counter it without a strawman attack.
Your claim has involved many different synonyms for the blastocyst and zygote. These have included the claim that these containers of DNA are innocent human children and they are also women. The intended connotation and baseless attempt to evoke an emotional reaction are clear.
Here is the point that you are spectacularly missing, in your position and in your semantic wordplay. The pro-choice argument does not depend on supporting the position that such an interpretation is absurd. It depends, rather, on acknowledging the de facto reality that the question is extremely controversial and divisive; that the absurdity of such an interpretation is in fact a position held by millions of thoughtful people, philosophers, and medical professionals who perform abortions every day; and further, that many people are pro-choice without taking a position on the philosophical question of “when does human life begin?” because there are other strong pragmatic reasons for it, such as the health of the mother and the future well-being of a potential child.
Instead of acknowledging this reality and the very difficult ethical and moral questions that it poses, you and the anti-abortionists set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of supreme wisdom, and have the astounding arrogance to try to impose your arbitrary beliefs on all of society, and to enforce them with some of the most severe penalties meted out by the judicial system. It’s utterly barbaric, much like burning someone at the stake for not believing in all the dogmatic particulars of your specific god and religious texts. We left that behind centuries ago. Arguing at the same time against funding for health care for those who are indisputably “innocent human children” is just icing on this cake of irrationality.
I think the last time I tried to get Bricker to drill down to a specific benchmark of when human life began (or however it was phrased), he settled on “genetically unique individual” or something comparable, and this was after he sneered at my off-the-cuff suggestion of “sperm-meets-egg”.
And then I asked him “what about twins?” and I think his brain shorted out.
Resolved; you have realized that your position on dumping healthcare for children in favor of tax cuts for the rich is repulsive, unchristian and unsupportable.
You have therefore derailed the thread into a discussion of abortion, and will now try to use sophomoric debating tactics to further distance yourself from your initial position.
Since this thread has been hijacked by a holier-than-thou Pence supporter of the constipated ilk, let’s point out the amusing fact that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than U.S. Christians on average, and more than Catholics and evangelicals specifically. (I’m agnostic and had no problem with the video’s three example “hard” questions.)
Here is as far as I got on a discussion along similar lines with Bricker. It basically ended with him saying that he believes what he believes but has nothing to back it up.
For anyone who’s not interested in watching a six-minute video just to see three questions, they are:
1: What was the religion of Maimonides?
2: What religion do most people in Indonesia consider themselves to be?
3: According to rulings from the Supreme Court, are public school teachers permitted to read from the Bible as literature?
I have to say, I’m not sure how well-designed this survey is. For instance: The question least-often answered right was the one about Maimonides, and the religious group that scored the best on the test were Jews. Is it surprising that more Jews would know that Maimonides was Jewish? Did Jews fare any better than the various Christian groups on questions about, say, Buddhism, or Hinduism?
It does easily. Some people believe that justice is a thing that happens - or karma, if you prefer. Combine that with the normal recognition that pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex, and it directly follows that a person could say “If you didn’t want a kid, you shouldn’t have been having sex” with a stern and unsympathetic look. Closely followed by “And now that you’ve done it, you can’t just be murdering that poor poor fully-grown-sentient baby in your belly the next morning in order to get out of it.”
Whenever somebody says to ask if something passes an ideological turing test, they almost always are presuming that people are all both perfectly moral and perfectly empathetic. (And also that people always fully think out the consequences of their beliefs, too). This is kind of not always the case.
Was hoping Bricker would’ve answered the other questions in Septimus’s post, too, (#246) but these three, in particular, need to be addressed.
Quoted for truth. Getting self-righteous about abortion while simultaneously arguing for getting rid of healthcare for poor kids broke my irony meter.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. For Bricker, it’s all religious dogma, whether the religion is the version of Catholicism he happens to define for himself, or institutional loyalty to the Republican Party. Which means you can’t even get him to admit that it *is *dogma.