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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (17789)	4/29/2000 11:03:00 AM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

<<<I do think calling PROLIFE a liar was rude though.>>> Actually, Michael, this is what I said about PROLIFE: You have again created some misimpressions. I have come to believe that you are in a state similar to an hypnotic one, and are innocent of intentional lies. (Though I am unsure of this, due to your earlier comment to the effect that you believed that lying about this subject was acceptable because it was "to SAVE lives!") and I was right about the nature of the lie... It has been told for 18 years to fool people like you, who believe what they are told by those to whom they've given dominion over their minds, and don't examine the facts. and, Michael, I think if you look at every reference to a lie in this last post, you will see that the lie was attributed to the pamphlet. It is not rude to point out a lie in a propaganda pamphlet. I have never had an argument like this one with PROLIFE. Under normal circumstances, if you make a point, and prove it definitively, some obligation exists on the part of the other person to engage and rebut your specific points. PROLIFE hears nothing one says. Well, since he (he says) refuses to read arguments that rebut his, how could he? He is still, for example, calling zygotes "kids." I have addressed that contention in detail, showing the ways in which it is a contention unsupported in any way except by a religious stipulation, or one of two religious stipulations: Number One: that a blueprint for any object equals that object. Number Two: that only in this case does a blueprint for an object equal the object. The reason it would be different in the second case would of course have to be entirely a religiously stipulated, mystical one. This stipulation: that a thing called a "soul" enters that object at the moment the blueprint comes into being, and that that entry is an accurate and sufficient definition of personhood. Michael, one can join one of the religious groupings that accept that stipulation and still be a "respectable" person (one who can be respected) if one acknowledges what one is doing. But when one calls fertilized zygotes "kids," one is doing precisely, ethically and intellectually, what the authors of that pamphlet did-- lying by obfuscation. It is sophistry. It is dishonest. Its blurring of the categories is done for the purpose of creating intellectual and emotional confusion in furtherance of an agenda. No respectable Christian scholar or thinking Christian person would do that in his or her head, or in argument. Calling fertilized zygotes "kids" is about one thing and one thing only: confusing the gullible by blurring the differences that identify and distinguish classes of objects. The gullible are confused into accepting a mystical stipulation (Number Two above) by making those gullible believe, literally if inchoately, stipulation Number One above, ie that blueprints of objects are objects so zygotes are "kids." And such obfuscations based on these purely religious stipulations are being spread by lying pamphlets and by the gullible PROLIFE et al as though they were facts akin to other statements we call factual. And a great effort is being made to ram the obfuscations (using the power of the state) down the throats of those who reject both of the unusual stipulations, Number one or Number Two (ie, "a blueprint for an object equals the object either in all cases or in this one") in favor of more standard ways of arriving at definitions of objects. (Those more standard ways would involve, in all cases, agreeing upon what minimum characteristics an object would have to have to earn inclusion in any particular class of object. We do this all the time, from morning to night. It is called thought. Without expertise in this process, we would all be dead by Tuesday.) So, Michael, although it is hard for me not to see reiterations of disproven hypotheses as intentional lies, in PROLIFE's case, I have come to believe he genuinely doesn't know number one from number two.