It's understandable why those with a religious worldview see the procedure as profoundly immoral, since the distinction between us and animals is that we possess a rational soul (i.e. image of God), making human life intrinsically valuable with "unalienable rights" that ought to be protected since the moment of conception.However, the concept of a soul does not appear to be an article of reason but of faith, and therefore escapes the bounds of rational debate. Just as one can argue from reason the existence of God, but cannot argue that baptism washes away original sin since such a claim relies on the testimony of God, which can only be assented to by faith, a supernatural virtue.Therefore, I'm curious how those who do not have a religious worldview AND view the practice as immoral justify their claim. I am also curious how Christians, Muslims, Mormons, etc. expect to "win the marketplace of ideas" if such a position is indefensible from reason alone, unless you think that the existence of a soul CAN be demonstrated from reason, in which case I would be interested to see a case to be made for that.
If you were coherent, you have no grounds to claim infanticide or murder are evil either.You have no grounding for real moral claims at all, materialism has degraded your morality.
>>18270543>the concept of a soul does not appear to be an article of reason but of faithOf mystical experience. Which is both.>escapes the bounds of rational debateUnless both parties are mystically erudite.That aside, I don't think I've ever heard a religious person defer to a soul in an abortion debate. The discussion usually boils down to when does a human being become a person - either during conception based on genetics or during development based on whatever or after birth based on relative independence. None of these positions require religious premises.
>>18270543Souls don't exist
Most atheists support legal abortion, unsurprisingly, so what’s confusing?
>>18270543The secular pro-life argument boils down to the idea that humans are born with rights and the right not to be killed is included in that.
>>18270543Who told you animals have no souls?Solo mon said: Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
>>18270805The animal spirit is of a different kind than that of man, because man"s spirit was given to him through the breath of God himself.
>>18270805Animals have souls, but they do not possess rational souls, according to Christian belief.
>>18270909This is not actually true. Humans are animals just like any other.
>>18270914There are animals with superior natural arithmetic intelligence than humans, i.e. many bird species.
>>18270916NTA but it does seem to me like humans are quite obviously different from most animals. For one, we form institutional religions.
>>18270921>guy who thinks birds opening jars means they have discursive reasoning
>>18270923We have larger brains/neo-cortices.Take any other ape and give it a brain as big as ours and they'd be as smart as us.It's purely about quantity, not quality. We are not qualitatively different, the quantity of the amount of our neurons is simply greater.Dolphins and whales also have religious practices and languages but we can't fully understand them yet, although there is work on creating trans-species translation AI and such.
>>18270931>take any other ape>they'd be as smartI wasn't appealing to hypothetical smarts, though the fact you have to restrict the size argument merely to apes betrays your sentiment greatly>Dolphins and whales also have religious practicesDo they have institutional religions?
>>18270931>Dolphins and whales also have religious practices and languages but we can't fully understand them yetIm literally dying of laughter
>>18270948>Do they have institutional religions?We don't know yet, but they do have different languages and cultures, this is known.>>18270950You're a low IQ shit for brained moron who doesn't know anything about the world. Why would your laughter mean anything?
>>18270952how do I pay tribute to the dolphin god? perhaps we can start proselytizing for them
>>18270952>>Do they have institutional religions?>We don't know yetRight. We also don't know if they talk to God in their dreams every night, but something tells me Ockham's razor is going to appear in your hand naturally at this point, won't it?If you want to suspend the idea that humans are special because dolphins could have their secret Flipperianity sects around, feel free. I think the rest of us will not be burdened by such a speculation.
>>18270914Why think that animals don't have rational souls?
>>18270956Youll have to ask them once the trans-species translators are done.>>18270964We literally know that they speak in languages as complex as human natural language, because we can analyze their sounds and compute it's complexity. General animals calls are extremely simple, theirs is as complex as human language. There already is massive work on constructing translators between us and them.
>>18270543>Therefore, I'm curious how those who do not have a religious worldview AND view the practice as immoral justify their claimjust like the reason most people believe any one thing, it makes them feel good. they dont care about the logic of it. i mean almost the only reason people believe in all major religions is an emotional one.also there is a difference in usage of "moral" here, you dont need objective morals to have "morals" in society, what is moral will simply be what most like. which i would argue is already the case anyway, as relgiions cant be proven.
>>18270973Atheist armageddon is the second coming of the Andromeda galaxy and Planet of the Dolphins and we must all devote ourselves to science so we can escape into the heavens
>>18270973>We literally know that they speak in languages as complex as human natural language, because we can analyze their sounds and compute it's complexity.Read the actual research, not just the headlines. Some animals use syntax and patterns that are bordering on primitive human languages, however, almost all recorded human languages are verifiably leagues above dolphins. Not just due to recursive grammar and the like, but due to the various levels abstraction that are embedded even in daily speech. Dolphins are impressive, but there is no real comparison here. It will be a bunch more millenia before you can translate William Blake into Flipper and a couple dozen more before they understand it.
>>18270769>mysticalShut the fuck up gay pseud
>>18271092I can't be a real gay liking mysticism?
>>18270916Animals routinely eat their own young, murder one another without a single shred of conscience.That does not make it right for humans to do.Humans are not just like animals. We do not have the same excuse as the animals do. We hold people to a higher standard than animals for a good reason Maybe some of us are more like animals than others, being devoid of conscience, or empathy, or any sense of charity. This kind of person is rightfully called subhuman, because they are deficient in the virtues that elevate man over the animal.And often, for this kind of debased person, it is not a result of their environment or upbringing which has caused this end but a choice to abandon those higher callings or distinctly human virtue and indulge their lower urges.In fact, the fact that there are certain animals which have been seen to demonstrate this kind of virtue is even a more damning indictment of these profligate egotists.Admit it, your idea of morality has absolutely no room for the denouncement of infanticide.You only talk about abortion because it's more abstract and sterile than the real thing, which is the killing of an infant.
>>18271150Humans sell their children to demons in exchange for a lottery number.
>>18271154When a human behaves like an animal, it is more evil than when an animal does the same thing.Because humans are held to a higher standard. They don't have the same excuse animals do, which is why their fall in conduct is considered uniquely evil in a way it is not for animals.When an animal behaves like a human, that animal is said to be exemplary.That is because animals aren't normally expected to demonstrate virtues normally associated with men.When a cheesecake is dropped in the mud, it is considered worse than when a buffalo takes a shit in the mud.Why is this? It's because one has intrinsically more value than the other.
>>18271150Why is abortion equivalent to infanticide?
>>18270791>humans are born with rights but the fetuses that are being aborted literally haven't been born yet. lol.
>>18271221Not born as in successfully delivered, more born as in conceived.
>>18271211Well what's the difference?
>>18271239As long as there is no sufficiently developed brain there can't be anyone there, would you consider a body without a brain a person, and killing said body murder?
>>18271239The fact that one involves killing a person and the other doesn't is an obvious difference.
>>18271257What is a "sufficiently developed brain" to you? Is killing downies and coma patients murder by your standard?
>>18271265>terminate a baby one day before it's born>yas queen slay!>terminate a baby one day after it's born>nooo this is evil!What's the difference?
>>18271211It isn't, but they differ only in degree of cruelty.But if you are going to reject abortion as being immoral on the same grounds as you see detailed in the OP, you have absolutely no reason to call infanticide immoral either.You should be more consistent, and admit where your logic leads you if taken to it's natural conclusion.
>>18271257ah, so the brain is somehow different from the bodywhat you have done here is distinguished the body from one of it's organsin a sense, you have replaced the human soul with this idea of "brain"you're just pulling a cognitive switcheroo and hope nobody notices the shell game you're playing
>>18270543I am an atheist and rather hard-line against abortion. Here is the nutshell version of my thinking:Premise 1: It is universally preferrable to not want to be murdered. Therefore, murder is wrong by definition. If you WANT to be killed, it is not murder but assisted suicide. It is impossible for anyone to want to be murdered, so it is morally wrong.2. Other than location, which is arbitrary, there is no meaningful difference between a human which is inside the womb and outside the womb. Both are still dependent on the mother for survival. Neither are fully self-aware beings. 3. I am then forced to concede that the being in the womb is human, as I cannot identify which point it is not human sans conception. Anything one can point to can also be applied to some humans which are outside the womb as well.4. Since I acknowledge the creature in the womb as human, killing it would be ending its life without consent and for having done nothing to break the social contract other than exist by the choices of another, therefore it is murder and therefore wrong. 5. If I concede that it must be murder, all arguments that rely on the 'good of society' fail in my view, because any of those utilitarian arguments A. Have alternative solutions, if harder, and B. give precedent for various other heinous acts. for example: Blacks commit most of the violent crime in America and are net tax-takers. We could just kill them. From a utilitarian point of view, that would be the efficient thing to do. But we do not because that is murder, and murder is wrong out of principle. Back alley abortions suck, but there are other things we can do that don't rely on just allowing murder, even if harder. There's more to each point, obviously, but that's the basic rundown.
>>18271271Yes
>>18271278Late term abortions are a small minority of abortions. You could take issue with late term abortions, but this would not show what is wrong with abortion in the overwhelming majority of cases.
>>18271296It's not clear to me how you get from any of the claims in OP's post to infanticide being permissible. What's the argument?
>>18270543You think the "marketplace of ideas" is won through rational debate?
>>18271346You reject abortion as being immoral on the grounds that humans are animals.And yet animals themselves practice cannibalistic infanticide.What's most chilling, is that you claim logic and reason to make this comparison.When anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of reason could see that there is a natural conclusion to this line of though that involves abortion and infanticide being morally equivalent.That is to say, you have not just rejected the soul as being an irrational falsehood.But morality itself is trashed as unreasonable, as a real and virtuous thing in itself.Everything becomes permissable.There can be no moral distinction possible between an act of charity and infanticide at that point, even if there were some merely coincident edge case.
>>18271385He has the mind of one who thinks truth is some kind of commodity that can be bought or sold.As if the truth were up for debate, as if a critical mass of people could simply declare a lie to be true and then it would be so.This is the materialist dialectic, a Marxist presupposition.Rather than an objectively real thing in itself, independent of ones subjective opinion or personal perspective.
>>18271391The thing is there is no good reason for getting an abortion other than being a whore.
>>18271402Most of the time, you're right.These infants (untold millions of not a billion at this point) are made to suffer, and yes being dissected limb from limb in the womb and vaccumed out is indeed suffering, because of the iniquity of their mother.That is unjust.The child is not the property of his parents, to do with whatever they please. We prosecute people who put babies in the dumpster for a good reason, they are not trash to be disposed of at a whim.Their parents have rather been entrusted with their care and upbringing.To the extent in which this trust is breached, be it in the most basic stages of physical development or during the moral development of character, it is the responsibility of their custodians.
>>18271391As a piggy-back observation to this anon, I would like to point out that abortion is not really any different than human sacrifices in the ancient world. it uses the same rationale. Sacrifice this human such that the universe may bestow upon us its bounty. That's just straight up what is it, except the human being sacrificed is inside the womb and not outside. That is the only different, and it's arbitrary. And that leads to some interesting things...In the west, where Christianity still underpins even liberal moral sensibilities, we have not yet gotten to the point where people are murdering babies regularly. But we have seen the utilitarian justification of murder for people like the UHC CEO and Charlie Kirk. And there has indeed been some serious conversation about partial birth and even post birth abortions in democrat strongholds in the U.S. This attitude that human life is not sacred has taken root slowly, with young people now more likely to believe that killing political opponents is justified. That is a direct result of the liberal being unable to identify the principle that says not to murder, and instead relies on arbitrary lines like location, and utilitarian argumentsThen look at nonwestern countries, where Chrstianity was suppressed or had never taken root. There, we see human life as being basically worthless if they do not benefit society. China, Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Africa until recently, I could go on. The exceptions like Korea and Japan were in effect western colonies post war and similarly underpinned by Christian-sourced law to an extent. If we, in the west, fail to hold onto our pro-human principle, it is not a matter of if, but when we decide to start making our human sacrifices more... obvious.
>>18271401No. I think that the rationality of one's position is a motive of credibility upon the eyes and ears of the masses, which, if sound, removes an intellectual impediment. However, this alone rarely suffices since most people have no ideals, principles, or convictions. Most of what people believe is derived from what gives them the most butterflies. But since I think it's accurate to say that, generally, people like to appear intelligent and rational, that a subscription to beliefs that appear to be intelligent and rational is what they are inclined to do. Logic is concerned with truthfulness; rhetoric is concerned with effectiveness. In this regard, the intellectual merit of a position presented in the "market place of ideas" serves a more rhetorical purpose. Truth, nevertheless, is not up for debate, but the purpose of debate is to convince someone that x is true so as to bring about change, typically in a democratic setting. If abortion is immoral, then the nations sanctioning this procedure are evil, regardless if the polity are convinced that is the case. But if Christians in America think abortion is immoral based from articles of faith, then debating this idea is impossible without divine grace illuminating the intellect upon the bestowment of faith by God, and is therefore a seemingly fruitless endeavor.
>>18271391I don't think there's anything morally special about human beings compared to other animals. So, there's nothing morally special about an insentient fetus just because it happens to be a member of the human species. The fact that animals sometimes commit infanticide is not relevant. It's also bad when animals kill their infants; animals just aren't morally responsible for what they do. On the other hand, it wouldn't be bad for an animal to kill an insentient animal fetus if they could do that.
>>18271456>rationality of one's position is a motive of credibility upon the eyes and ears of the massesTruth is not a democratic process, or the decision of a majority of liars.Reason, validity and soundness, axioms and predicates, do not give ground to the baying noise of mindless crowds.And credibility, virtue, is often spat upon and derided by those in positions to do so who deign to give the mere appearance of credibility to their own pawns.So that their own lie might take on the mere appearance of truth, they repeat the lie. They give it a white lab coat to appear professional, they put in on the news cycle, they teach it in your public schools.
>>18271468You could just say morality is nothing more than circumstantially useful fiction and end it all right there.Be honest, it's how you really feel.You're a nihilist.>>18271442It's funny how you equate Kirk to that asshole CEO nobody even remembers the name of.Kirk never did an ounce of the evil that disreputable suit ever signed off on to the time of millions.He was assassinated for being politically inconvenient, nothing more.
>>18271271>What is a "sufficiently developed brain" to you?Unironically something that only happens a few months after being born, before that a person is no dissimilar to a dog or pig in mental capacity, which would warrant equal ethical considerations, but since that would certainly be very abhorrent for most since they are very accepting of the killing of pigs I'd say around week 6~7 (which shouldn't matter much anyway because that person doesn't have the right to the woman's body anyway).
>>18271486>You could just say morality is nothing more than circumstantially useful fiction and end it all right there.I don't think that, though, nor is that implied by anything I said. You just seem confused.
>>18271489>which shouldn't matter much anyway because that person doesn't have the right to the woman's body anywayIt's so bizarre how male feminists exist. It's like those wageslaves and poorfags who support capitalism
>>18271509How exactly does feminism harm you?
>>18271518Because if women are given independence, they don't settle with men.
>>18271509>It's so bizarre how male feminists existI don't think this has much of anything to do with feminism, at least for me, it just so happens that only women can get pregnant.>>18271525>Because if women are given independence, they don't settle with men.Oh well, you don't see women as humans, the previous statement makes more sense now
>>18271525Okay, well that doesn't affect anyone who isn't an incel loser.
>>18271533>Oh well, you don't see women as humans, the previous statement makes more sense nowLiberal vibes-based babble. You can perceive the capitalist class as "humans" while not wanting to be under their boot at the same time.
>>18271518If a man wants to multiply and create a tribe of descendants he is no longer allowed because he cannot own a wife and have her give him offspring. If she has offspring they don't belong to him. She can take them away and have ownership over them. All because of feminism.God gave men women so they could multiply and create tribes. If I buy a plot of land and plant seeds in it then the fruit that comes from the land is mine, it belongs to me.
>>18271541Reddit sadism
>>18270758That's nice anon... Anyways.>>18270772Found the person who can't read.>>18270776Can't read>>18271310>as I cannot identify which point it is not human sans conception.Loki's wager lmao.>>18271391>Everything becomes permissable.Facebook boomer Christian>>18271489>Unironically something that only happens a few months after being born, before that a person is no dissimilar to a dog or pig in mental capacity, which would warrant equal ethical considerationsI think this is why veganism is a "leftist" thing
>>18271554There is an inherent class antagonism between men and women, an internal contradiction that cannot meaningfully be reconciled. Marx talks about this. Fuentes talks about this.
>>18270543The position from a Christian perspective does not need to be "rational." It doesn't need to be reasonable from your framework, because we don't subscribe to it. "Erm, your believe isn't rational" means literally nothing if nobody cares about that. People with genuine faith find faith more valuable and useful than rationality.
>>18271494You should not consider abortion to be moral while simultaneously claiming infanticide to be immoral.You have not given sufficient reason to establish this position.While I have made a good case that argument is incoherent.
>>18271593>"Erm, your believe isn't rational" means literally nothing if nobody cares about that.:/ that's true only on paper
>>18271602What do you mean by this?
>>18271601Making assertions is not "making a case."
>>18271442Yours still falling into some arbitrary west vs non-west or Christian vs non-christian duality that makes zero sense if you zoom out a bit.One can easily argue that the systems of economics and justice perpetuated by le west don't value human life from all the horrific working conditions, economic pressures, and debt traps that many countries are subject to just to maintain any form of access to the global system.Abortion is something that is inflamed by structural and institutional powers, and going off of OP, the secular view to argue against abortion is that the shit hamster wheels we grind people on are part of the link that causes someone to think ending their child's life is acceptable.
>>18271607Beliefs have meet the real world eventually so it's not like you can "just not care lol"
>>18271554Property doesn't exist if there isn't any institutional powers that define and enforce it.Property without any larger societal view controlling it is nothing more than the "laws" of the jungle, which while you feel like planting your seeds somewhere means you own it, but if someone else comes in and steals the fruit, or kills/drives you out and takes over that area, your ownership had no reality if you weren't there to physically defend it, and win. If you impregnate a women, if she is able to flee, what do you own?
>>18271630Her fleeing is not the problem, the government facilitating her rebellion is the problem.
I can't take 'pro-lifers' seriously when they also support death penalty and waging wars.
>>18271707There are pro-lifers who don’t.
>>18271707Pro-fetuses*, since after you are born you can go fuck yourself (no school lunch, no day care, no food stamps, no paid leave, no anything, pull yourself by the umbilical straps).
