The Supreme Court would arguably have the power to decide that a right is not reserved to the states either, but to the people only (the Tenth states that unenumerated rights are reserved to the states or to the people generally). In effect this is what was done when various antiregulatory Amendments from the First down were held through Supreme Court decisions to prohibit the states from committing certain acts as well.
The Supreme Court decided to apply select amendmenst to the states through the doctrine of "substantive due process", which holds that the due process of the 14th amendment, which clearly refers to procedural due process, refers to all "liberty" in general. The entire point of a federal system is to let states make their own decisions about all things not explicitly granted to the federal government. This is why things like the 14th, 19th, and 24th amendments exist. The framers never intended the judical branch to be the arbiter of what defines personal freedom, which is what we have today - a federal government of potentially unlimited powers, rather than limited enumerated ones.
The fact that the Constitution is silent on either, means that the federal government is intended to be powerless to regulate or prohibit either. Compare the text of the Tenth Amendment, with the context that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were considered unnecessary by many of the framers of the Constution because they considered them implicit in the main body to begin with.
The purpose of the 10th amendment is to reserve all powers to states not explicitly granted to the federal government. This is exactly why the federal government has no business striking down state anti-sodomy laws. Granted, such laws are asinine and stupid. However, it is up to state legislatures and state supreme courts to change them or strike them based on state constitutions or state-wide referendums. This is the essence of a federal system around a government with limited powers
Take a step back are read what I wrote. In reality, the text of the Constitution says nothing about sex, homosexual or otherwise. If you think the Constitution does say something about it, I'd love to discuss it. Try not to be so hostile, and maybe take some time to learn about someone else's point of view.
Substitute "heterosexual sex" in place of "homosexual sodomy" in that sentence. Your right to have sex IS EXACTLY EQUAL TO a gay person's. PERIOD.
The text of the Constitution is entirely silent on the subject of heterosexual sex and homosexual sex. This is not a judgment about homosexuality, it is just a fact. The only "right" to homosexual sex or any sex for that matter was created through interpretations that stretch the text of the Constitution far more than "public use" has been stretched today.
Now go do something productive, like volunteering at a hospital that does AIDS research.
I volunteer for an organization that mentors teenage girls who actually decide to keep their baby. I hope this is productive enough for you.
The minority opinion of today's decision is pretty much the group I normally harbor such incredible contempt. And YET, today it is so obvious they were the ones making the correct decision. I am stroking out just trying to grasp this contradiction to my world view.
Scalia, and particularly Thomas, are very principled judges who care a lot about fairness and rule of law. This is why Scalia, in the last term, has favored both likely terrorists (Hamdi vs Rumsfeld) and crack dealers (United Stats vs Booker). Ultimately, the twisting of the "takings clause" today is nothing compared the the tortured interprations of the Consitution that give rise to the fundamental "rights" to homosexual sodomy and abortion. The only real surprise today was Justice O'Conner's rather strident dissent.
However, I'm finding it hard to see them as particularly villainous here.
You are correct. First, Blizzard tolerated bnetd until people starting using it to play WC3 betas. Second, the name "bnetd" is an obvious copyright infringement and Blizzard pretty much has to go after them. Third, Blizzard has always included LAN support, and there is plenty of generic tunneling software for this (e.g. Kali). Blizzard simply isn't a compelling villian.
Don't tell *us* (i.e., me and the grandparent poster) what's important to *us*. We believe in the right to life among persons, but don't believe that a mere fertilized egg is a person, any more than we believe all the skin cells we scratch off our arms whenever we scratch an itch constitute living human persons, despite the fact that they are all living human *tissue*.
Except, at one point in your life, you were a fetilized egg. "Were" is the past tense of "to be". A fertilized egg is, by definition, a "human being" because contains the entire existence of a human. A skin cell or cancer cell is not a human being because it never represented the entire totality of a human.
And there *is* something preventing people from aborting *us*. We've been born. Abortion is the termination of a *fetus*, prior to the point at which it becomes a person. We are already people. If someone kills us, it's murder, not abortion.
So the termination of a fetus, 10 minutes before it would have been born, as somehow "not as bad" as killing the infant ten minutes after it has been born? Sorry, but "personhood", as you say it, has nothing to do with whether or not you still happen to be in the womb. Even the Supreme Court says the same thing by allowing states to criminalize third-trimester abortions. Surely you agree with that!
And I believe that EVERYBODY should be pro-choice - you signed up for it by being born into a social species that respects individual freedom.
You are a priori deciding that a fetus is not an individual, which is what the entire debate is about. Personally, when I see something with human DNA, 10 fingers, 10 toes, all functional organs, a beating heart, and brainwaves (in other words, a 10 week old fetus), I say "Aha! There is an individual who deserves all the protections of the 14th amendment". The view that a fetus is a person is fundamentally incompatible with belief in abortion-on-demand, which is why people like yourself go through such mental gymnastics, against all moral logic and scientific evidence, to convince themselves that a fetus is not a person that deserves the same protection as an adult.
Most pro-choice Americans actually fall into your Position 1 - this is the position Bill Clinton popularized with his "safe, legal, and rare" mantra. It is what allows them to sleep at night without nighmares of dismembered fetuses. They believe that in an ideal world, there would be no abortions. The real crux of the matter is whether or not abortion is a "big" moral wrong, e.g. that is the moral equivalent of first-degree murder. Most pro-lifers think it is, most pro-choicers simply think it isn't. Only a very few hard cases actually think there are no moral issues involved with abortion.
Step-by-step makes the most sense. No matter where you try to put the dividing line, it will be a problem. The actual moment of birth definitely is too late. The conception OTOH is too early. If a fertilized egg have any rights, then the use of a coil would be murder, wouldn't it? I see no reason why you couldn't graduate the crime, don't call it murder, but come up with another word. And the later you do it, the higher the punishment.
Why is conception too early? Then there is no dividing line - then there is no problem. Your analysis is correct - the use of an IUD and other birth control methods (including drugs like depo provera) that prevent implantation would be considered murder. But, so what - there are plenty of non-abortifacient birth control methods.
In a crowd of science-minded people, I would hope this concept is easy to understand. We know two things - an adult human being has the right not to be killed, and that there is no objective point at which the destruction of a human life passes from non-murder to murder. Because no such transition exists, we must assume that the human life was created with those rights intact.
It can't survive outside of that petri dish, and it certainly isn't a human being.
Can you tell me when it becomes a human being? At what point does it become precious human life, and you should get locked up for destroying it? It has to happen sometime.
Thanks for the link. Lots of good stuff in there, especially the descriptions of the court cases. Interesting that the Catholic church made abortion an excommunicable offense back in the 16th century. Although they also proclaimed that human life didn't exist before 40 days. While I agree with the Roe v. Wade decision for the most part, I don't agree with their reasoning -- reading between the lines to add new rights. While I'm happy that they realized the need for additional rights, that doesn't seem like the way to go about it. A better argument to me would be that making abortion illegal puts too many women at risk of clothes-hanger incidents.
This "reading between the lines" is probably the biggest separator between liberal and conservative thinking. It's frightening how many issues of today (such as gun control, pledge of allegiance, abortion, gay marriage among others) turn on how far one strays from the original text of the Constitution. Legalizing abortion because illegal abortions are dangerous is a circular argument that neglects to ask the question if abortion is murder in the first place - it simply assumes that it isn't.
I commend your ability to poke holes in my arguments. Although I knew the breathing argument was fairly weak. You make me question whether maybe my whole logical argument is rather weak, and my side is the more emotion-based. And I do understand the other side's fervor -- if you think it's murder, then you really have to stand up and say so. I'm probably more on the fence than most people. I just personally don't see how a non-viable fetus is any more an individual human life than some of my body parts. But I suppose you could argue that abortion could still be illegal in the same way that chopping my arm off is illegal.
IMO, the difference is that at one point in time, your entire existance was that of an unborn, unviable fetus, whereas you never consisted of being just an arm or a body part. If someone had destroyed that fetus, you wouldn't be here - it can't get simpler than that.
Another issue is that the notion of "viability", that is, the ability to outside the mother's womb, is really just a measure of how technologically advanced society is. As time goes on, the line of viability keeps getting pushed further and further back. We also know that technically speaking, a one day old fertilized egg is viable (that is, capable of surviving outside the mother) because it can be created in a test tube and implanted later, perhaps into another woman. Some day we will have artifical wombs that will raise children entirely, which will further shape the debate.
I also don't believe that men should have any legal say in the matter. I know how difficult it is physically and emotionally for a woman to go through an abortion. I think that's enough of a deterrent in itself, and men don't have any real understanding of the process, nor of the burden of pregnancy.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Anyone (men included) should certainly act to criminalize abortion if you believe it is homicide.
Hmm, you make a pretty good point there about conception being the beginning of life. But there are several observations that would be to the contrary. One thing we consider to be vital to "life" is breathing -- if you stopped breathing for 2 months, would people consider you a living person?
The simple act of breathing certainly does not solely imbue so-called "personhood" - animals breathe too. Can someone who is alive not breathe? People can be put on respirators who cannot breathe for themselves. And, of course, fetuses have a different way of getting oxygen as well, and noone claims that a fetus is not alive
As for the "natural" conclusion, why have we not already made such a conclusion? Why do the laws not already see it that way? The way things work in this world is that the ones challenging the status quo are the ones who must go out of their way to convince the rest. Also be aware that if we change the assumptions, a lot of other things come into question. If a woman spontaneosly aborts, should she be charged with manslaughter (assuming abortion would be murder)? What does conception mean -- does it apply to zygotes in a test tube? What privelges and responsibilities do these fetuses have?
If you corner a pro-choice person and asks that they concede, if only for the sake of argument, that life begins at conception, they would still refuse to criminalize abortion on the grounds that you now have a balancing of rights. The "reproductive rights" of the mother supercede the rights of the fetus in every possible way, even to the point of destroying the fetus. As for the law, abortion had never been legal until Roe vs Wade - the people of Texas had, in legislation, declared that human life and rights begin at conception. This web site has a very neutral summary of abortion law, and why things are the way they are. In a nutshell, the Supreme Court has said that the Constitution guarantees the right to an abortion up to the age of fetal viability. The more you think about it, the more tragic and frusturating it becomes.
You are right that this view makes things more complicated. Several kinds of birth control that allow fertilization but prevent implantation would have to be banned. There could be no in-vitro fertilization treatments that implant 5 embryos hoping that at least one "sticks". There is obviously no creating of embryos solely to be used for stem cells. I don't think a miscarriage should be a crime however as this is a natural process. Abortion would only be legal to save the life of the mother, as this would technically be justifiable homicide.
And that (where I marked) is exactly where you took a leap of faith in your argument. Up to that point, I agree with you. We don't know where a "proper" demarcation of the beginning of life should be. I could just as easily say that "birth must be the mark of when a life becomes human". Society and the legal system have for the most part always held this to be the case. And you've made no factual argument that that would be wrong.
Why do you insist on make this more complicated than it is? One thing any high school biology teacher will tell you is that human life begins at conception - period. I would argue that the rights that people have exist solely because they are human - not because society has come to some sort of consensus. I find it unacceptable that "personhood" is defined by solely by what society defines as a "person", which of course is entirely relativistic - some societies have defined it to be well after birth. Thus, I find there is only one logical place where rights can possibly attach that guarantees that all people have rights - conception. Frankly, this is the obvious and natural answer, and it should be the burden of those who would call fetuses "non-human" to give scientific evidence (of which there is none) why this is not the case.
Just ask yourself what has happened when one group goes out of its way to declare another group "non-human". We end up with slavery and holocausts.
I'm extremely leery of extending full human rights to a newly-fertilized egg, or a group a a hundred cells. On the other hand, a baby that can survive with some help, even if extremely premature, is certainly more of a person than a blastocyst (at least in my conception).
I'm not entirely sure when personhood starts. It does have to happen at some point, but I'd be more inclined to think that it happens little by little, step by step. As the embryo develops toward maturity and eventual birth, so would its rights and protections develop from practically nothing to full human rights.
Unfortunately the polarization that surround so many arguments of this type prevents consensus on a stepwise definition of "personhood". I'm certain that it's this same polarization that prevents us from moving forward in so many debates in society today.
I was leery too, until I realized that it was only place to attach rights that actually guaranteed you got any rights at all. Rights simply cannot by obtained "step-by-step", as there can be reason under the sun that says killing someone at step #6,123 is murder, the most heinous crime you can commit against another person, but step #6,122 is not murder. It's simply illogical. Furthermore, there is no reason why that society when reaches consensus that you don't become a "person" until after birth, as some cultures have done. I think that the most enlighted (and logically constent) approach is recognizing that "rights" are not granted by society, but a natural part of our humanity - and thus are granted at the moment our human life begins, at conception.
This is your opinion, nothing more. After browsing around looking for information on parasites, there are many aspects of the mother / child relationship that simply do not meet the classical defintion of "parasite". For example, some definitions insist that the "parasite" enter the host externally. In this case, the fetus originates from within the woman. Some definitons mention that in a true symbiotic relationship, the organisms must be different species - clearly not the case here. Parasitic relationship are usually involuntary and permament, pregnancy 99% of the time is ultimatly quite voluntary and always temporary. True parasitic relationships are of no benefit to the host - here there is evidence of some benefit.
To address your main point, my sister was sicker than a pack of dogs throughout her entire pregancy, at risk of permanant kidney damage or worse, had to be put on IV fluids due to severe "morning sickness" (it actually can last *all day* and be severe enough to make eating completely impossible) and spent the last three months on strict bed rest. She also experienced excruciating pain that sent her to the emergency room on multiple occassions. Stem cells or no stem cells, this doesn't sound very symbiotic to me.
I don't care how it "sounds" to you, I am just going with any neutral definition I can find - many of which suggest that a fetus is not in fact a biological parasite. Probably the less specific a given definition is, the easier it is to classify a fetus as a parasite.
I think most people would agree that:
A hundred billion cells = maybe a person.
A few hundred cells = definitely not.
So, when did you become a person? If not by cell 100, then when? 1,000? 1,000,000? I mean, it had to happen sometime. Cell count just seems like a silly and arbitrary way to define "personhood", since it doesn't seem like few dozen cells (and by induction, a few hundered or hundred million) should determine if you are a "person" with a natural right to life or not.
Offensive to you only because of your insistence on moralizing a morally neutral phenomenon. In placental mammals, the fetus is parasitic on the mother. There's nothing offensive about that. It simply is the way it is. Your religious viewpoint is leading you to ascribe pejorative values to a biological term that has none.
People use the term "parasite" to justify abortion by comparing the fetus to an unwanted aggressive parasite. This is what FroMan was obviously reacting to, not the simple technical definition of a word. The fact is that the article was poorly worded because it accidentally invoked the entire abortion debate in the first sentence. He does not "moralize" the notion that a fetus may be, by a strictly biological defintion, a parasite - but rather that a fetus has no more instrinsic worth than what society commonly understands is a "parasite", such as a tapeworm.
Furthermore, the article itself casts doubt on the assertion that a fetus is a parasite at all. It is true it does absorb nutrients from the mother, but nearly every definition of "parasite" I have seen says that a parasite is solely disadvantageous to the host. Besides what is mentioned in this article, it has been establised that women who have been pregnant have lower risks of breast cancer, which is a benefit of pregnancy. Of the kinds of Symbiosis, the relationshup between mother and fetus could be more of a form of mutualism than parasitism.
I told them it wasn't working, but they didn't care. In fact, they were the ones who suggested the trade-in option. I guess they will recondition it again and sell it, or possibly use it for parts
How many people are buying new ones just to replace old ones? I had a bum unit that was repaired - $80. When it happened again, it was more cost effective to trade in the old one for $100 credit toward getting a new one. Perhaps more people are doing this now
Go with the tube, its more reliable, cheaper, and the picture is great. Plasma/LCD can't even display true 1080i anyway, which requires 1920 x 1080 resolution, which a lot of HD broadcasts are in - your shiny new Plasma TV has to downsample the image. If you're just looking to get in the HD game, a 30" tube is an incredible upgrade and its pretty affordable.
It's not the NFL - its the NFLPA, which is just a group of people. My guess would that the NFL would be against this sort of deal, as it would probably limit their ability to license team names and logos to other companies, who would stop making football games.
This does beg the question why the Old Testament is part of the Bible, then. The real argument should be that Christians are bound by Old Testament except where the New Testament contravenes it, but even that comes up inaccurate. And still, it's not very difficult to find statements in the New Testament that require appalling behavior.
such examples of "appalling behavioir" are usually willfully taken out of context. The fact is that the central message of the NT is love - God's love for man, and how men should love each other. While it is certainly possible to find a few statements that can easily be warped to mean something else, the central message is love. If you read the whole NT cover to cover, you'd realize this.
Not right. Some did, but some did not. How did Paul (nee Saul) die again? Still, how does this support your point? The fact that they died for their words doesn't in any way prohibit those words from being designed to control.
It is commonly understood that Paul was killed in Rome, probably beheaded. My point is that modern obervers look at how Christianity has been used in modern times, e.g. to justify slavery to bilk money out of vulnerable people. They look at this, and figure that's why Christianity was invented in the first place. However, the earliest Christians all suffered persecution and lived lives of misery and suffering. It just isn't logical that they were maintaining some kind of sham just to control people and get wealthy, when they all knew the consequences of their actions would be to die a death that was likely to be quite gruesome. People just don't martyr themselves for what they know is a lie.
... Again true, but again it's not just the non-Christians that are ignoring this directive, and I could easily argue that no Christian has any right to ask my compliance to this unless he's willing to do it first.
I agree, and Jesus addresses this point directly - Luke 6:41-42 - "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye."
Very short-sighted of you to say this. You seem to think there's not enough blame to go around. It's possible that this society has major problems because people are selfish and lazy and because of Christianity, or maybe it's neither of those things alone. Your answer is so simplistic that it's meaningless.
You are confusing Christianity, the message with people who call themselves Christians, but who are not. If everyone truly did love their neighbor as themselves, many problems would go away - as you acknowledge. Somehow, it is hard for me to believe that a religion that says, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" is responsible for the murder, rape, and general mayhem that pervade this world. I feel comfortable blaming those who ignore or willfully distort that message to their own selfish ends.
Great, true Christians should follow the bible to the letter? So they should be out stoning people in the street and whatnot?
Christians are not bound by Old Testament laws, so no stoning is required
How about if we all base our values on what's best for society, instead of trying to follow some documents cooked up to control the populace thousands of years ago.
This is one of the silliest objections to Christianity - you realize that the people who "cooked up" the New Testament all died as martyrs, right? Also, what is wrong with the central Christian value of "love your neighbor as yourself"? Seems like if eveyone followed that value, then there wouldn't be problems with society. This society has major problems because people are selfish and lazy, not because of Christianity.
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The purpose of the 10th amendment is to reserve all powers to states not explicitly granted to the federal government. This is exactly why the federal government has no business striking down state anti-sodomy laws. Granted, such laws are asinine and stupid. However, it is up to state legislatures and state supreme courts to change them or strike them based on state constitutions or state-wide referendums. This is the essence of a federal system around a government with limited powers
See: Libertarians for Life. Also see some secular arguments against abortion. Folks, you don't have to be a Christian Fundamentalist to oppose abortion.
Most pro-choice Americans actually fall into your Position 1 - this is the position Bill Clinton popularized with his "safe, legal, and rare" mantra. It is what allows them to sleep at night without nighmares of dismembered fetuses. They believe that in an ideal world, there would be no abortions. The real crux of the matter is whether or not abortion is a "big" moral wrong, e.g. that is the moral equivalent of first-degree murder. Most pro-lifers think it is, most pro-choicers simply think it isn't. Only a very few hard cases actually think there are no moral issues involved with abortion.
You do not mention abortion on your page of issues. Are you a Libertarian for Life? Why or why not?
Why is conception too early? Then there is no dividing line - then there is no problem. Your analysis is correct - the use of an IUD and other birth control methods (including drugs like depo provera) that prevent implantation would be considered murder. But, so what - there are plenty of non-abortifacient birth control methods.
In a crowd of science-minded people, I would hope this concept is easy to understand. We know two things - an adult human being has the right not to be killed, and that there is no objective point at which the destruction of a human life passes from non-murder to murder. Because no such transition exists, we must assume that the human life was created with those rights intact.
Can you tell me when it becomes a human being? At what point does it become precious human life, and you should get locked up for destroying it? It has to happen sometime.
IMO, the difference is that at one point in time, your entire existance was that of an unborn, unviable fetus, whereas you never consisted of being just an arm or a body part. If someone had destroyed that fetus, you wouldn't be here - it can't get simpler than that.
Another issue is that the notion of "viability", that is, the ability to outside the mother's womb, is really just a measure of how technologically advanced society is. As time goes on, the line of viability keeps getting pushed further and further back. We also know that technically speaking, a one day old fertilized egg is viable (that is, capable of surviving outside the mother) because it can be created in a test tube and implanted later, perhaps into another woman. Some day we will have artifical wombs that will raise children entirely, which will further shape the debate.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Anyone (men included) should certainly act to criminalize abortion if you believe it is homicide.
The simple act of breathing certainly does not solely imbue so-called "personhood" - animals breathe too. Can someone who is alive not breathe? People can be put on respirators who cannot breathe for themselves. And, of course, fetuses have a different way of getting oxygen as well, and noone claims that a fetus is not alive
If you corner a pro-choice person and asks that they concede, if only for the sake of argument, that life begins at conception, they would still refuse to criminalize abortion on the grounds that you now have a balancing of rights. The "reproductive rights" of the mother supercede the rights of the fetus in every possible way, even to the point of destroying the fetus. As for the law, abortion had never been legal until Roe vs Wade - the people of Texas had, in legislation, declared that human life and rights begin at conception. This web site has a very neutral summary of abortion law, and why things are the way they are. In a nutshell, the Supreme Court has said that the Constitution guarantees the right to an abortion up to the age of fetal viability. The more you think about it, the more tragic and frusturating it becomes.
You are right that this view makes things more complicated. Several kinds of birth control that allow fertilization but prevent implantation would have to be banned. There could be no in-vitro fertilization treatments that implant 5 embryos hoping that at least one "sticks". There is obviously no creating of embryos solely to be used for stem cells. I don't think a miscarriage should be a crime however as this is a natural process. Abortion would only be legal to save the life of the mother, as this would technically be justifiable homicide.
Why do you insist on make this more complicated than it is? One thing any high school biology teacher will tell you is that human life begins at conception - period. I would argue that the rights that people have exist solely because they are human - not because society has come to some sort of consensus. I find it unacceptable that "personhood" is defined by solely by what society defines as a "person", which of course is entirely relativistic - some societies have defined it to be well after birth. Thus, I find there is only one logical place where rights can possibly attach that guarantees that all people have rights - conception. Frankly, this is the obvious and natural answer, and it should be the burden of those who would call fetuses "non-human" to give scientific evidence (of which there is none) why this is not the case.
Just ask yourself what has happened when one group goes out of its way to declare another group "non-human". We end up with slavery and holocausts.
This is your opinion, nothing more. After browsing around looking for information on parasites, there are many aspects of the mother / child relationship that simply do not meet the classical defintion of "parasite". For example, some definitions insist that the "parasite" enter the host externally. In this case, the fetus originates from within the woman. Some definitons mention that in a true symbiotic relationship, the organisms must be different species - clearly not the case here. Parasitic relationship are usually involuntary and permament, pregnancy 99% of the time is ultimatly quite voluntary and always temporary. True parasitic relationships are of no benefit to the host - here there is evidence of some benefit.
To address your main point, my sister was sicker than a pack of dogs throughout her entire pregancy, at risk of permanant kidney damage or worse, had to be put on IV fluids due to severe "morning sickness" (it actually can last *all day* and be severe enough to make eating completely impossible) and spent the last three months on strict bed rest. She also experienced excruciating pain that sent her to the emergency room on multiple occassions. Stem cells or no stem cells, this doesn't sound very symbiotic to me.
I don't care how it "sounds" to you, I am just going with any neutral definition I can find - many of which suggest that a fetus is not in fact a biological parasite. Probably the less specific a given definition is, the easier it is to classify a fetus as a parasite.
So, when did you become a person? If not by cell 100, then when? 1,000? 1,000,000? I mean, it had to happen sometime. Cell count just seems like a silly and arbitrary way to define "personhood", since it doesn't seem like few dozen cells (and by induction, a few hundered or hundred million) should determine if you are a "person" with a natural right to life or not.
People use the term "parasite" to justify abortion by comparing the fetus to an unwanted aggressive parasite. This is what FroMan was obviously reacting to, not the simple technical definition of a word. The fact is that the article was poorly worded because it accidentally invoked the entire abortion debate in the first sentence. He does not "moralize" the notion that a fetus may be, by a strictly biological defintion, a parasite - but rather that a fetus has no more instrinsic worth than what society commonly understands is a "parasite", such as a tapeworm.
Furthermore, the article itself casts doubt on the assertion that a fetus is a parasite at all. It is true it does absorb nutrients from the mother, but nearly every definition of "parasite" I have seen says that a parasite is solely disadvantageous to the host. Besides what is mentioned in this article, it has been establised that women who have been pregnant have lower risks of breast cancer, which is a benefit of pregnancy. Of the kinds of Symbiosis, the relationshup between mother and fetus could be more of a form of mutualism than parasitism.
I told them it wasn't working, but they didn't care. In fact, they were the ones who suggested the trade-in option. I guess they will recondition it again and sell it, or possibly use it for parts
How many people are buying new ones just to replace old ones? I had a bum unit that was repaired - $80. When it happened again, it was more cost effective to trade in the old one for $100 credit toward getting a new one. Perhaps more people are doing this now
Go with the tube, its more reliable, cheaper, and the picture is great. Plasma/LCD can't even display true 1080i anyway, which requires 1920 x 1080 resolution, which a lot of HD broadcasts are in - your shiny new Plasma TV has to downsample the image. If you're just looking to get in the HD game, a 30" tube is an incredible upgrade and its pretty affordable.
It's not the NFL - its the NFLPA, which is just a group of people. My guess would that the NFL would be against this sort of deal, as it would probably limit their ability to license team names and logos to other companies, who would stop making football games.
such examples of "appalling behavioir" are usually willfully taken out of context. The fact is that the central message of the NT is love - God's love for man, and how men should love each other. While it is certainly possible to find a few statements that can easily be warped to mean something else, the central message is love. If you read the whole NT cover to cover, you'd realize this.
Not right. Some did, but some did not. How did Paul (nee Saul) die again? Still, how does this support your point? The fact that they died for their words doesn't in any way prohibit those words from being designed to control.
It is commonly understood that Paul was killed in Rome, probably beheaded. My point is that modern obervers look at how Christianity has been used in modern times, e.g. to justify slavery to bilk money out of vulnerable people. They look at this, and figure that's why Christianity was invented in the first place. However, the earliest Christians all suffered persecution and lived lives of misery and suffering. It just isn't logical that they were maintaining some kind of sham just to control people and get wealthy, when they all knew the consequences of their actions would be to die a death that was likely to be quite gruesome. People just don't martyr themselves for what they know is a lie.
I agree, and Jesus addresses this point directly - Luke 6:41-42 - "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye."
Very short-sighted of you to say this. You seem to think there's not enough blame to go around. It's possible that this society has major problems because people are selfish and lazy and because of Christianity, or maybe it's neither of those things alone. Your answer is so simplistic that it's meaningless.
You are confusing Christianity, the message with people who call themselves Christians, but who are not. If everyone truly did love their neighbor as themselves, many problems would go away - as you acknowledge. Somehow, it is hard for me to believe that a religion that says, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" is responsible for the murder, rape, and general mayhem that pervade this world. I feel comfortable blaming those who ignore or willfully distort that message to their own selfish ends.
Christians are not bound by Old Testament laws, so no stoning is required
How about if we all base our values on what's best for society, instead of trying to follow some documents cooked up to control the populace thousands of years ago.
This is one of the silliest objections to Christianity - you realize that the people who "cooked up" the New Testament all died as martyrs, right? Also, what is wrong with the central Christian value of "love your neighbor as yourself"? Seems like if eveyone followed that value, then there wouldn't be problems with society. This society has major problems because people are selfish and lazy, not because of Christianity.