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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (19795)	7/31/2001 12:24:35 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I have never said that babies were just smudges of sperm That is the exact phrase you have used on multiple occasions. For just one example: Message 15984097 You used the term very specifically, in referring to a human life. I suppose you're going to say "well, I wasn't talking about babies because they aren't babies until they're born" or some such. Of course, if you define the terms that way, you are right. Just as if I define the term "human" to include every person except Solon, you are nonhuman. Which you may well be, but not for that reason alone. You love to go off into the scientific basis for not calling unborn babies people. You are forever going off into how these are only bundles of cells, protoplasm, etc. But equally, then, you have to accept that biologically all of us are just collections of cells. We have so far found no biological basis for consciousness. There is no biological structure for that thing we -- some of us, maybe not you -- consider our soul. If you want to limit the discussion to biological principles alone, you have to accept the consequences of that approach, which is that killing an embryo, a newborn, you, me, a spider, are in all cases simply taking life from a bunch of cells. Same thing. No difference. As long as you insist on arguing on those terms, if you are honest (doubful, but not yet totally proved false) you have to accept the consequences. As long as you define life purely in biological terms, there is no coherent basis for placing different values on different bundles of cells. I wonder what makes it any of your business? That shows a lot about you, that you even think in those terms. What makes it my business is the same thing that drove me, as just one example, to go on the picket lines, sit-ins, and into jail in the 60s to protest the treatment of black people I had never met and never would meet. What makes it my business is the same thing that made it the business of the Quakers on the underground railroad who risked their lives saving blacks from slavery, or that made it the business of people in Poland, France, etc. who saved jews from transfer to the death camps even though they had never before met or known those people and would never meet them again. What makes it my business is the same thing that makes me give money to relief organizations to help people I will never see, in ways I will never specifically know of. It is my business -- no, my obligation -- to care about what happens to other people. That you can even ask such a question shows that no matter how much you know about science and biology, you know little, if anything, about what it means to be a member of the human race.