Would you really have asked to be excused from the table? Seems to me that your conspicuous absence might be seen as a bigger insult to your host and with to those with whom you’re about to share a meal. Simply sitting in respectful silence, head unbowed, seems the most polite compromise under the circumstances.
I’ve been in a situation like you describe and also where the person who customarily says a prayer before eating is in the minority of one. In the case of the latter, the observant person took a few seconds to bow his head and say a silent prayer. I noticed that everyone around the table allowed him that moment without comment or anything in the way of particular deference, and we all proceeded to have our meal.
What do you define as a religious argument? I’d say it is one derived from a god. Now, this means that either the person making it claims access to that god, which should be tested, or the person claims that the access comes second hand from religious books which claim access or religious leaders who claim access, which you are - rightly - rejecting.
So who gets to make religious arguments again?
OK, I guess that we really don’t have much of a shared moral universe then. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone argue before that murder is wrong only because it could harm that particular person, or their friends and family. Even if you could guarantee, to me personally, that neither I nor my family or friends would ever be the victim of murder, I would still oppose murder on broader moral grounds. That’s what humanism is: a concern with humanity more generally.
Sure, I’m fine with conception as the origin of life. But a heartbeat is, at the very least, measurable evidence of the presence of life, even if it’s not the only evidence. That makes it very different from a concept like the soul.
I see where you’re confused. You are misinterpreting my argument. I never argued that the moment the heart starts beating (or can be detected) is when life starts. I said that the presence of a beating heart is, quite clearly, evidence of life. That doesn’t mean that life requires a beating heart, because otherwise a variety of living micro-organisms, as well as the early stages of the fetus, would not be considered life.
Huh? This is nuts.
They believe that the fetus is life, and they know that the abortion terminates the fetus. Surely that’s an argument about “the harm that abortion does,” at least from their point of view. It harms a human life by terminating that life.
This also is ridiculous.
It’s not (necessarily) about religious or spiritual beliefs. It’s about moral and ethical beliefs, which we all have, whether or not we’re religious. I accept that a fetus is alive, and yet I also have a moral and ethical belief that the woman bearing the fetus has the right to terminate her pregnancy because the rights of the unborn fetus should (in my opinion, or my moral belief if you prefer) have less legal and moral weight in our society than the rights of the woman.
Some else might believe, exactly the same as me, that a fetus is alive, and yet also have a moral and ethical belief that the woman bearing the fetus has no right to terminate her pregnancy because the rights of the unborn fetus should (in their opinion, or their moral belief) have equal legal and moral weight in our society with the rights of the woman.
These are both moral positions that do not (necessarily) require faith or religion or spiritual beliefs.
It’s not quite either of those things. Or, perhaps, it’s a combination of both.
A two-minute old zygote might be living, but I also don’t think it’s a “living human” in the sense you’re talking about here. There are no easy answers here, and making these distinctions doesn’t require a person to be religious. Something can be alive, but not a human in the sense that the word is normally understood. Human beings, as we understand them, are more than simply an agglomeration of living cells.
When does an agglomeration of living cells become a human being? I’ll be quite honest and say that I don’t know. But to argue that a creature with distinct organs and skeletal structure and cardio-vascular system is a human being in a way that a two-minute old living zygote is not does not require any sort of faith-based or magical or religious or spiritual worldview. It requires simply that we understand how to tell the difference between things that are very different from one another.
This is, perhaps, the silliest part of your argument. Not because it’s wrong by itself—I agree that that there’s a lot of belief involved—but because it seems to imply that your own argument is one merely of logic, with no component of belief. But almost every moral decision we make is a product of some type of belief, even your argument that murder is wrong because it harms you personally. What makes something logically or objectively wrong just because it happens to harm you, personally? What if I could show you an objectively logical argument that the world in general would be improved by your death? Would you be willing to give up your opposition to murder, and allow yourself to be killed, for the logically-demonstrated improvement of society? Of course you wouldn’t, and nor should you.
As I said, I generally agree with you about what our society’s policy should be regarding abortion. My problem with your argument is that it’s fundamentally disingenuous, attributing only “belief” to your opponents, and only “logic” to yourself. Your opponents are not as bereft of logic as you would like to believe, and your own position is nowhere near as exclusively logical and devoid of belief as you have deceived yourself into thinking it is.
@k9bfriender: I’m enjoying all your posts here. Specifically as to this:
Underlining mine.
I might rephrase the underlined part as “… are all based on religious or spiritual beliefs, even if the poster in question does not recognize that’s where they came from.”
And that’s the danger with a society swimming in all this religious mindset. It becomes so pervasive that many people just don’t notice all the ways it’s coloring their thinking.
That’s exactly my point. To that girl, praying before eating goes without saying. In her narrow religion-infused world 100% of people do it.
She was as shocked about him eating with no prayer as she’d have been if he was stuffing the food into his nose instead of his mouth.
That is the depth of unawareness you see in the churchly monocultures of small town America. And much of the populace of citified America too.
That’s very possible. If I’d known in advance, we could have negotiated the best compromise. The bad part of this was the surprise. You may be right and my sitting still was the best possible outcome. For me, at the time, with no warning, it was the only reasonable thing I could do.
I was once in a group meeting and was the temporary group chairman. The meeting opened with an invocation, ie prayer. But I finessed it and asked the sergeant at arms if he would be kind enough to present us with an invocation. I’d worked that out with him in advance, and he was happy to help salvage the situation.
Any other disagreement, a political issue, whose better the Vikings or the packers, cake vs pie boils down to people having different beliefs on subjective topics. Which I can respectfully disagree with. I may not agree with you but its a free country and i support your right to your opinion.
The existence of God, the tooth fairy, other mythological beings, the paranormal, whether the earth is flat, do crystals cure cancer, etc is not a subjective issue up for debate.
But I have to “play along” with this narrative that religious beliefs are somehow like whether one is a democrat or a republican.
i’d put most responses to this thread into a few categories:
1)I’m religious how dare you. Prove God doesn’t exist
2)I’m religious, your entitled to your opinion, but you are being disrespectful
3)I’m Atheist/Agnostic, your entitled to your opinion, but why be a dick about it
4)I’m Atheist/Agnostic, i kinda agree with you, but what ya gonna do, they control society
And the society that I live in. I did say that, even if you didn’t quote it.
Moral are what are necessary for the continued functioning of society.
Sure, it is evidence of life. I never said otherwise. I asked why that is relevant. Is somehow being able to hear a heartbeat make something more alive than being able to see it in a microscope?
So is a blastocyst.
I didn’t say that you made the argument, I said that you presented the argument, and what you presented was:
Which is very clearly an argument that life starts when you can detect the heartbeat.
[/quote]
And from their point of view, homosexuality harms those who participate in it as well. That is why framing an argument based on how you think something harms someone else is doomed to failure. You can only make a rational argument based on how it affects yourself.
Tell me, as a fetus, were you worried about death? Were you worried about being aborted before you could be born? Did you have hopes and dreams and aspirations for what you wanted to do when you came into the world?
No, the only ones who cared whether you lived or died were those who had those hopes and aspirations for you. You yourself wouldn’t have cared even if you could.
A fetus is no more harmed by being aborted than it is by having never being conceived at all. The only ones harmed by the termination of a pregnancy are those who had vested dreams in that little bundle of life.
Is that just an arbitrary belief, or is that grounded in the idea that society is better off with that position?
Exactly, they assert those rights upon the unborn fetus based on their beliefs, not on logic or facts.
They do require beliefs, rather than logically defendable positions. At the point that you assert that the fetus has more rights than the woman, and I ask why, if you cannot answer without turning to beliefs or assertions, then it is a weak argument, and should be dismissed.
I know it is not a position that you hold, but can you tell me how giving personhood to a fetus will improve the world that you live in, how it will positively improve your life?
And that is where we differ. I think that a two minute old zygote is a living human, just as much as you or I. Just because it hasn’t reached some arbitrary milestones in development does not make it any less human, or any less alive.
It is the very belief that those milestones have relevance that I am arguing against here. That relies on beliefs that cannot be secularly justified.
Because it happens to me. What else should I care about? I specifically said that I was starting from the point of pure selfishness, that I value my own life and the enjoyment I get from it. I don’t expect others to consider something to be wrong because it harms me, I only expect them to consider something to be wrong because it harms them.
Together, we can agree that something is wrong if it harms or threatens to harm both of us.
Unless you can show me how my life would be improved by my death, then you are going to have a hard time convincing me.
Let’s take the contrived situation where I’m in the unique position that by my death, I can drastically improve the life of everyone else. Like I’m Bruce Willis in Armageddon? Sure, if things are stacked that heavily, I’ll give up my life in order to improve the world.
Keep in mind that my selfishness is aware of my mortality, and that I would like to continue to live on in the memories of others. I would rather die and be thought of fondly by the survivors than to live and allow the creation of a world that I don’t want to live in.
You do realize that anytime we send a soldier into battle, we give to them the objectively logical argument that the world in general would be improved by their risk of death.
I do no such thing. My opponents could use logic, I just have yet to have seen an argument that does so that doesn’t in some way hinge on an unprovable or even counterfactual belief.
I didn’t say that they didn’t use logic, just that they start from an assertion that is based on belief, and then go from there. That they use logic from that point on doesn’t mean that they aren’t using logic, it is just that the foundation that they are building upon is invalid.
I do acknowledge that I am invoking an axiom that I consider my own well being to be the most important thing to base my positions on. I declared that in my first post, and I maintain that it is the only honest position to start from.
We were in the same section, so for dinners, we shared a table. But I don’t think that we had much one on one time after that.
This was waaaay back in High School, when I was still more or less religious, or at least went through the motions. But in my family, we said a prayer before dinner, I’d never heard of a prayer before lunch before.
So a two-minute old zygote “is a living human, just as much as you or I,” and yet it cannot be harmed in any way by being aborted?
All of which is a belief system that is no more or less irrational than the ones you are criticizing. As a belief system, there’s nothing wrong with it (even if it’s pretty silly), but it has no more inherent logic than a whole variety of other belief systems. You say, about those who oppose abortion, that they use logic, but that “the foundation that they are building upon is invalid.” But if they’re starting from a secular position, their argument is no more or less inherently illogical or invalid than yours.
I’m sure that I’ve seen less logical and rational arguments than yours before, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a less logical and rational argument that was presented with such a dogmatic belief in its inherent and exclusive logic and rationality.
So I’ll guess I will echo @mhendo a bit here, in that I consider that a terrible underpinning for an ethical framework. At any rate most ethical systems at least ask how would you feel if said thing happened to you, even if it never could. I will also note that your moral code is based on an unsupported belief itself: that your selfish desires actually matter.
Not to mention I see nothing in your statements that seem to indicate that a just born child shouldn’t be killed either. Would I be correct that that would be your positions (say if the parents could not take care of it prior to when it could show agency - though in that case it would require belief as to when agency happens as well. Although killing a 1 month old wouldn’t really affect you or your friends and family)
What in the world are you taking about? We discuss on this forum all the time. And no religious faith isn’t like being a Democrat or Republican. It’s far more of an identity for most religious believers. But who says you can’t argue about identity? We also do that all the time here.
I know people who absolutely say a prayer before eating anything… but being (highly religious) Jews they don’t demand anyone else do so and tend to be discreet rather than obvious about it. Which is how I tend to prefer it.
Why really annoys me is the rambling, off-the-cuff improv prayer before a meal which is at least as much about the performance as any sort of reverence - most recent one being a Thanksgiving dinner I was invited to. I knew they were that sort before I arrived, though, so it didn’t take me by surprise. As a guest I went along with the show. Hey, their house, their rules.
I do get peeved when folks start expecting this sort of thing in other settings.
Not particularly. What I’m arguing against is a particularly perverse and blinkered type of moral absolutism being displayed by k9bfriender, one that takes its own axioms as inherently correct and objectively logical, and that draws invidious and arbitrary distinctions between arguments based on definitions of “belief” and “logic” that are unsustainable.
One more thing about your basic starting point.
If this is, in fact, your starting point, why would you care at all about whether or not someone opposes abortion? You can’t be aborted, so it’s irrelevant to you. The fact that some woman you’ve never met might be prevented from having an abortion has no direct bearing at all on your life.
If I subscribed to your dictum of selfishness, I’d probably ignore politics altogether. I’ve benefited financially from Trump’s tax cuts. I already have my Green Card, so Trump’s immigration crackdowns don’t hurt me at all. I’m a white, middle-class guy who has only been pulled over by the police once in the last twenty years for speeding, and I got let off with a warning, so why should I care about black people getting shot or suffocated by the cops? I’m straight, so why would I make any effort to support LGBTQ rights or gay marriage?
And yet I do care about all of those things. Go figure.
Not only that, but what about an adult human? After all, k9bfriender believes that “A fetus is no more harmed by being aborted than it is by having never being conceived at all.” And also believes that “a two minute old zygote is a living human, just as much as you or I.” Why don’t we apply the same morality to ALL living humans?
What about an adult human? If I walked up behind a 40-year-old man and shot him in the head, surely he is no more harmed by that than if he had never been conceived at all. After all, now he’s dead, but he had 40 full years of life behind him, which is more than you can say for the fetus.
Why should that be an argument for anyone in the world other than you, if you’re unwilling to acknowledge an argument about harm to somebody else?
Every single one of us is “somebody else” to everyone else in the society (and for that matter in the universe.) If you’re claiming that an argument against harm to me doesn’t count for you, then it logically would follow that an argument against harm to you can’t possibly count for anyone else; in which case there’s no sense in your making it.
That I agree with; and add that those assumptions vary from religion to religion, although many people who have what I call back-of-the-head assumptions (not all of them are religiously based) assume that everyone’s got the same ones.
So do we all.
I believe that you are actually a person who I’m arguing with, and not a figment of my imagination. I believe that this keyboard I’m typing on exists, and is not a figment of my imagination; and so is the cat who wants me to pat her instead of typing. I believe that people exist who need to have abortions if their lives are not to be screwed, and that other people exist who want to stop them from doing so.
But the foundation of all of that is, in essence, a leap of faith. Or, I suppose, multiple leaps of faith; I have direct physical sensation of the keyboard and the cat, after all, so that only requires believing that my senses are in at least some form reporting something that’s actually happening; but my knowledge that people who I don’t personally know are debating abortion comes only from reading about it.
Religious Jews (as I now see Broomstick has also pointed out) say a prayer before eating anything at all.
Did you have a back-of-the-head assumption that nobody does that?