People regularly hold contradictory beliefs, or compartmentalize their beliefs so as not to challenge them too closely. How many people do you think actually have a fully consistent set of beliefs, having examined them all to make sure there are no contradictions? I mean, besides you that is. 
If I paint the two with the same brush?
Are both of them killers?
I think you’re assuming far more into what my definition of murder is than I have said is included. I haven’t said that murder is always wrong, always a bad idea, always the wrong thing to do - in fact, I’ve disagreed with that notion. You quoted it. With respect, I am not calling the sniper a murderer by* your* definition of murder, but by mine.
True. Have I suggested that my definition is a legal definition?
Yes, just as there would be if the current circumstance involved forced abortions. If someone showed up on my doorstep to force my wife to have an abortion, I would likely resort to a second amendment solution as well. But there’s nothing forced about our current circumstance. Am I misundertsanding your hypothetical?
What about fertility clinics, when the couple has their healthy baby, are the clinics required to keep the unused embryos forever?
The woman is forcing the abortion on the “innocent child”.
In that case, your definition of “murder” is incoherent. If any killing of a human being is murder, then the latter term no longer has any moral weight. It’s like calling all hetero sex rape, or all property theft.
This was not your hypothetical, John. Your hypothetical involved parents voluntarily surrendering their children to state execution. That scenario is very different from the government executing everyone’s children randomly. Because in this case, there is no advantage to being a good little citizen. The government’s going to fuck you up regardless. Might as well go out in a blaze of glory.
But let’s say the government only executes 10-year-old Johnny when his parents are anti-government terroristic thugs. Do you really think there would be a whole lot of people loudly talking about “2nd amendment solutions” then? Of course not.
There are a lot of gun-worshippers in this country. They all talk a good game about how they’d go Rambo if the government tried to take away their guns. But 99% of that is just talk. Most of these folks would be the FIRST to hand over their guns, because it wouldn’t be Obama Incarnate who’d be standing in their doorway with the warrant. It would be Deputy Jimbo, their brother-in-law or next-door-neighbor or friend-of-a-friend. Who’s going to go all Rambo on the good ole boy who’s just trying to earn a paycheck like everyone else? Only crazies would do that. And only crazies would try to fight against the mightiest military in the world.
People don’t get het up unless it is their own life that’s on the line. And even then, it doesn’t take long for them to back down and try to go about living without making things worse.
Certainly it has moral weight to me; it’s the taking of the life of a person who didn’t want their life to be taken. If you mean “the word murder has a lesser inherent moral weight by Revenant’s definition than Skald’s definition”, yes, you’re correct. What about that is “incoherent”? I get that you don’t agree with my term, but “incoherent” seems like a strange word to describe it; I’d use “incoherent” to describe something which was illogical, or gibberish, or self-defeating. I don’t see how my definition of murder is any of those things. So far as I can tell you just disagree with it. Which of course is perfectly fine in and of itself.
If you go back and read that post, you’ll find there were TWO scenarios; one of which involved the government picking who is executed.
But you’re changing the hypothetical so that it no longer resembles abortion. Abortion is a pretty random event, so it’s important to keep things random. Still, I think it would be hard for the government to find 1M kids of “terrorists” every year without stretching the meaning of the term beyond credibility.
Wait a minute. Is it Deputy Jimbo or General Schwartzcopf who is showing up at the door? You just shifted from the former to the latter without batting an eye. But we’re not talking about taking away guns here, so that’s an analogy that isn’t on point anyway.
Yes and no. Imagine if there were as many people today, proportionately, working to physically sabotage the abortion network as there were people working the underground railroad in the 1850s. We’d be reading about some act of sabotage in the newspapers every week.
But only one is analogous to abortion.
Um, no it isn’t. The government isn’t randomly executing fetuses regardless of the parent’s wishes. If the government was kidnapping random pregnant women and terminating their pregnancies against their wishes, then you could say that “abortion is a pretty random event”. But this isn’t happening. Not even a little bit.
If you’d stick with a hypothetical that halfway resembles current abortion practices, maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to fight it.
Maybe I’m very cynical, but I think people will buy any propaganda message that assures them they are “safe”. “I pay my taxes and don’t break any laws. The government only targets people who don’t do these things. The government doesn’t hurt good people like me. I don’t have anything to worry about it. No need to protest. No need to fight.”
If people didn’t have this tendency to rationalize oppression, countries like Cuba, North Korea, and Syria wouldn’t exist.
You don’t seem very keen on using an analogy that jibes with abortion. So I don’t see why I should I care either.
I’m pro-choice through-and-through. But if the government was aborting fetuses “randomly”, I’d be angry enough to throw a garbage can into a storefront window. If the government was executing children randomly, I’d also be very very angry. I’d probably not go to work for a few days. But if the government was executing children that were, say, profoundly mentally handicapped or terminally ill, and they had parental permission, then I wouldn’t be very very angry. I’d only be concerned. I might be persuaded to sign a petition. But I wouldn’t be lobbing any bombs. I seriously doubt most people would be much different.
I think the difference is that a lot of the conductors of the Underground Railroad were directly affected by slavery. They had been previously enslaved and/or had family members/significant others who were enslaved. Slavery wasn’t just a theoretical abstraction for them.
But none of the conductors were under the delusion that helping a few thousand slaves find freedom was going to dismantle the institution alone. I liken the Underground Railroad to crisis pregnancy centers. I think those places receive a lot more funding than an Eric Rudolph would. I’m guessing Harriet Tubman had a lot more support than John Brown did.
I don’t understand the leap from believing someone is a murderer to believing that I have to kill him. I believe OJ is a murderer (don’t we all?) but why would I kill him? Perhaps the argument is that abortionists are GOING to murder, but how does killing an abortionist stop a single murder? Does killing a dentist stop root canals?
Any pregnant woman intent on killing her baby can do it; how does my killing the local abortionist stop a pregnant girl from throwing herself down the stairs? The OP’s underlying premise is ludicrous.
If the ultimate motive of pro-lifers is to save lives, and we’ve established shooting doctors isn’t something even a staunch activist could morally do, why aren’t they seeking to promote the best proven methods of birth control?
There is an assumption here that vigorous pro-lifers are logical and calculated but nonetheless stymied by the law and so reserve themselves to picketing clinics and other ineffective methods. There is incontrovertible proof sex education works in reducing unwanted pregnancy, there is proof readily available contraceptives reduce pregnancy.
And yet Pro-lifers evidently don’t care enough about dead babies to do even that.
To their vast credit, some of them do. There actually are a handful of Christian Protestant churches that have swung about and come to a supportive stance of contraception. Some of these still disapprove, but are willing to take the course of the lesser evil. Some few of them actually approve of “family planning.”
Almost all secular opponents of abortion are in favor of contraception.
Yep, a handful of liberal church groups and let’s not pretend secular opposition makes up the bulk of even this group. VAST credit, huh? The bar is pretty low for what constitutes religious sacrifice in this country.
SO…if they are really Pro-LIFE,… they’d be out killing …
:smack:
:dubious:
How do the PETA “meat is murder” people keep from going on murderous McDonalds rampages?
Protein deficiency renders them incapable of carrying enough weapons and ammo for a proper massacre.
Its not about contradictory beliefs but the severity of those beliefs. I can accept that deep down, people outwardly spout nonsense about abortions being murder but inwardly they know its not that bad. I think most pro-lifers are in that camp. What I have a problem with is true believers who don’t do what they really believe. You can say its cognitive dissonance, but I can’t read their minds, I see them simply as being insincere hypocrites
If I were a mad scientist, I’d experiment on unwilling subjects to prove it. I’d create a situation where 2 real live birthed humans are in danger, and one pregnant mother and see how often they try to save the 2 people vs. the mother
Some are. They go to prison and are put to death.
Many, many more, far too cowardly to ever take up arms for the cause themselves, seem to approve but don’t participate. Or they “disapprove,” because “murder is wrong,” but kind of see it as “killers killing killers.”
One mix that weirds me out is how some people are insistently “pro-life” when it’s their own people but extremely callous about the lives of foreigners. Like, is that even “pro-life” or just nationalistic natalism?