Resonant Information - Religion - Comments

Try not to be offensive

Zed — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 11:52:54 -0500

Implying cowardice, approval of genocide, land-theft, and now lack of education or awareness are, in fact, attacks. If you want to discuss a specific incident of modern theocratic colonialism in the western world, you'll need to be, well, specific (and ideally, a little more polite). I am, however, not particularly inclined to prioritize the correction of 600 or even 60 year old injustices when there are more current ones to worry about.

"Manifest destiny" is, as far as I know, dead for now (and if you think otherwise, your cause would be better served by noting an example than by insulting strangers). If it gets resurrected, there will be people who attack it. Expansionism and religious hubris are dangerous enough on their own merits without forcibly conflating them.

I see

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:25:14 -0500

Sorry to have disturbed you from your slumber, I gathered by the quality or your articles that you were well educated. I'll go post elsewhere. Some interesting stuff here though, keep up the good work. I was not attacking you, I was trying to gird you into action because I think you are right but have not joined all the dots. We are currently reliving a 600 year old argument, go to the history books my friend. Its all there.

Huh?

Zed — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 07:50:34 -0500

I have absolutely no idea where you are coming from. Nobody uses the "God promised us that land" line to justify genocide and land-theft anymore, so there's not much point in railing about it. Nowadays it's "spreading freedom and democracy" that's used as justification, and most of the same people who are opposed to the destruction of science are also opposed to wars of aggression.

This is something you should be able to see evidence of on this very blog, if you cared to look.

That's all very well but...

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 07:17:47 -0500

Over here in Europe (the Old World) nobody gives a fig about the creationalists and any suggestion of changing the curriculum is met with the polite derision it deserves. I read quite a lot of criticism of these people in US based blogs and while I'm in no way supportive of their flat-earth polemic what puzzles me is the silence on the "God promised us that land" brigade who read from the same kooky book. Is it that you are too chicken to face up to them? Or is it that Americans just don't mind genocide and land-theft but bad science is just too wrong to take in silence?

Secession

Zed — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:19:51 -0400

Voters tend to be allergic to decisions that drastic unless there is extreme provocation, and to be honest, I'm not so sure that the feds wouldn't nuke California rather than see it secede. As soon as one splinters away, a lot of others would follow, and it would tear the country apart. It's not possible for states to win a civil war at this point unless they somehow gain control of a nuclear arsenal, so the best a state can hope for is to be a constant nuisance until they get their way, or follow Montana's example and openly declare that they won't cooperate with federal agents.

New York would be absolutely mortified to have something in common with Dixieland, anyway.

Such an optimist

Lynne — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:19:35 -0400

Quoting Zed: "I expect that this batch of silly bills will be soundly defeated, just like all of the similar ones before them, but it is important not to let the people around us forget the foundation stone, the reason for those defeats."

I hope very much that you are right. However, I think it is only a matter of time before such bills are passed. Why? Because they are constantly brought up. The sponsors never learn from their defeats -- they only take an even harder line and resolve to introduce the bills again. They are allowed to do this by their constituencies because the vast majority of people don't pay attention to what goes on in their state legislatures, so incumbants (who always have an advantage anyway) aren't usually voted out. Some may even think that this voter apathy amounts to approval. And, so long as these bills keep returning in these times when legislatures are full of right-wing fanatics, there is always the strong possibility of passage.

As for building a wall around Alabama... I am reminded of a discussion a while back about the Blue States leaving the Union. The Red States would learn very quickly just how dependent they are on money from those liberal, un-godly states when it comes to keeping their roads (and schools, and hospitals) in good condition. Sure, it wouldn't be fair to those people who didn't deserve to be in a Red State, and that is something that would have to be addressed. But it still might be worth it. How much are those states holding the Blue States back? What would life in California be like if they didn't have to send however many billions of dollars to the federal government each year?

Actually, why hasn't California (or New York for that matter) left? The last I heard, California's economy was something like the fifth in the world, and the federal government wouldn't bomb them into submission.

Losing personhood

Zed — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:42:14 -0500

I noticed that Alas, a Blog has a category devoted to Terri Schiavo, which covers some of these issues from the other direction: at what point you can stop considering a lump of flesh a person. From the scientific side, it appears to center around Mrs. Schiavo's loss of a cerebral cortex.

Personhood, etc.

Zed — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:39:32 -0500

Hello Abby. Thanks for stopping by.

Quoting Abby:

I appreciate your response, but this is what I cannot accept: that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it.

It's not that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it, but that many reasonable people can disagree over whether something has any significant value at all. If that is the case, then it is wholly inappropriate for half of the population to attempt to imprison the other half for choosing to preserve something that everyone agrees has value at the cost of something for which there is no such agreement, not even a significant majority.

The sets of situations I presented weren't chosen at random; they represent a gradient of risks. Forcing a woman to bear a child can place that woman's life at risk. Forcing a woman to raise an unwanted child is a painful experience for both, often harmful to their development, and harmful to the society around them.

Quoting Abby:

The terrorists tell you that you have to choose who will die - your spouse or the 10 people from India. What do you choose? If you choose to save your spouse, does that somehow mean that the people from India weren't really 'persons' or worthy of legal protection because you have a greater emotional attachment to your spouse?"

There are three fundamental differences in your scenario. First and foremost, you've brought another free will into the equation: my decision to say anything does not prevent the terrorist from choosing not whether or not to kill anyone. Second, the (presumably adult) Indians are not in questionable status as to whether they are people (you might have a better analogy by having the terrorists forcing you to choose between gassing two boxes, one of which has your spouse, whom you can clearly see through a glass pane, or another completely sealed box, that might or might not have people in it, in sort of a twisted version of the Schrödinger's Cat experiment). Third, the truly important question isn't about whether or not the ten people from India are worthy of legal protection, but whether or not you are worthy of legal protection if you choose your spouse and let 10 people die. Are you willing to put someone in jail for choosing their spouse? If the answer is no, then you should be very wary of being willing to put someone in jail for choosing the mother over the embryo.

Quoting Abby:

You're saying that almost everyone will disagree about when a fetus becomes a person, so we should allow abortion anyway because it makes room for "differences of faith." The thing I don't get about this is that this can be applied to so many other things. If someone believes that, say, redheds aren't "persons" because there's something about their hair color that makes him think of witchcraft, and he goes on a murderous rampage, killing all the redheads he sees, we wouldn't say, "Well, he has a right to do this. We ought to allow differences of faith, after all." OK, this may seem like a hopelessly inadequate analogy, but it's much more similar to the abortion position than you think!

Actually, I don't think it's similar to the abortion position at all, because we already have a number of globally accepted standards about how to recognize people (they deliberately interact with their surroundings, have roughly human shape, communicate with us, contribute to society, etc.), and although nobody claims this list is complete, it is definitely sufficient. If you're walking, talking, and building it doesn't matter if you're a redhead (in fact, it doesn't matter if you're an embryo — if you show me an embryo deliberately manipulating its environment in more than an instinctive fashion and carrying a conversation, I'll change sides) because you have already met conditions that everyone can agree on.

The problem with an embryo is that it doesn't meet these conditions, and you would have been better off looking for other examples that are more marginal because they also don't meet those conditions, such as people who have taken brain damage and have been left in a vegetative state. These situations are controversial for almost exactly the same reasons, however, and are rife with arguments over when someone can override a Do Not Resuscitate directive, or can pull the plug on someone who isn't going to recover. The arguments over DNR have gotten so bad, in fact, that physicians and nurses have started getting DNR tattoos, to make sure that there is no dispute about their wishes.

Quoting Abby:

And as for "jailing people for having differences of faith," isn't that the purpose of laws to begin with?

No! Good heavens, no, absolutely not, at least not in the United States; the First Amendment explicitly forbids it, in fact. The purpose of laws is to prevent harm to contributing members of a society. This might be different in a religious state, such as Israel or Iran, but I am quite happy not to live in such places and am quite willing to concede them whatever insane laws they desire, as long as they keep them strictly within their own borders.

Quoting Abby:

Second, you are exactly right that there's no scientific evidence for the beginning of "personhood." In my post on Feministing, I meant to point out that the concept of "personhood," is, in itself, vague and arbitrary. There *is* scientific evidence, however, about when a human life begins.

No. No there isn't. All you've done is switched out "personhood" for "human life", but it's exactly the same concept. I highly recommend you go through that link, as it covers most of the differing philosophies (and their history), inside the scientific communities and out, but inside or out they're still only philosophies. Science can only show us chemical or electrical behaviour, the rest we make up ourselves. I'm from the (admittedly somewhat extreme) school that believes that consciousness defines humanity, and thus human life; most people don't like that argument because conscious decisions don't become apparant usually for several months after birth. For the sake of peace, I am willing to bend over backwards to support extending protection to birth, the state at which care can (more or less) easily be given to another, or with a lot of argument perhaps as far as 7 months after conception, the point at which neural connections are formed. Few would claim that an adult with the brain completely scooped out and only the body kept alive by the miracle of modern life support technology was still a person, however, so I can only see the claim that a body with no brain at all developed is a person as ludicrous.

Even granting as far as I could possibly go, just for the sake of argument, the law already protects a fetus 7 months into development, however (well past the second trimester limit). This isn't what the anti-abortion crowd is looking for.

Quoting Abby:

And this is the ground on which I ultimately base my position. There's nothing even remotely "religious" about it. Human life exists in a continuum, and I believe that all human beings, regardless of stage of development, size, or certain attributes they happen to possess, have a right to live.

And this is the reason that many people find your position completely untenable. You say there's nothing religious about it, but all you've done is state completely unsupported beliefs. You are taking it on faith that a few cells constitute a human being, despite the fact that those cells can't do any of the things we expect human beings to do. They don't communicate. They don't even move. They don't laugh, cry, become curious, panic, or love. They can't. They don't have two neurons to click together, at least not at early stages of development. Treating them as human leads to absurd connections, as were pointed out so well in the Reason article I linked to in the main entry: 80% of fertilized embryos are lost naturally. Are we to reshuffle our priorities to try to save the millions (billions?) of zygotes lost to nature every year? If we are to accept fertilized cells as complete human beings, this is the leading cause of death in the world by a gigantic margin. Are we to do so at the cost of health for grown adults? Shall we arrest those who spend money on vitamins, but refuse to contribute to a fund for zygote rescue?

Quoting Abby:

Oh, and how is a fetus be a "potential human being"?

It's a potential human being because it isn't a human being yet, but if given the proper environment and support, might become one eventually. A seed may be a potential tree... but it is not a tree.

Quoting Abby:

I really appreciate your response; I've never been quoted on a blog before!

Stop by more often, and I might quote you again.

Personhood, etc

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:01:44 -0500

Zed, this is Abby. I appreciate your response, but this is what I cannot accept: that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it. I've heard tons of arguments that go along the lines of, "if stuck in a burning building with a three year old and a fetus in an artificial womb, which would you rather save?" This is based on the false assumption that a value of a person's life is equal to whether or not we would mourn if they died. One blogger puts it better than I can: "Terrorists have kidnapped you and your spouse. They bring you into a room with a television screen where they have a live feed of other terrorists in India who are pointing guns at the heads of ten innocent people. The terrorists tell you that you have to choose who will die - your spouse or the 10 people from India. What do you choose? If you choose to save your spouse, does that somehow mean that the people from India weren't really 'persons' or worthy of legal protection because you have a greater emotional attachment to your spouse?"

And another thing. You're saying that almost everyone will disagree about when a fetus becomes a person, so we should allow abortion anyway because it makes room for "differences of faith." The thing I don't get about this is that this can be applied to so many other things. If someone believes that, say, redheds aren't "persons" because there's something about their hair color that makes him think of witchcraft, and he goes on a murderous rampage, killing all the redheads he sees, we wouldn't say, "Well, he has a right to do this. We ought to allow differences of faith, after all." OK, this may seem like a hopelessly inadequate analogy, but it's much more similar to the abortion position than you think! And as for "jailing people for having differences of faith," isn't that the purpose of laws to begin with?

Second, you are exactly right that there's no scientific evidence for the beginning of "personhood." In my post on Feministing, I meant to point out that the concept of "personhood," is, in itself, vague and arbitrary. There *is* scientific evidence, however, about when a human life begins. And this is the ground on which I ultimately base my position. There's nothing even remotely "religious" about it. Human life exists in a continuum, and I believe that all human beings, regardless of stage of development, size, or certain attributes they happen to possess, have a right to live. Oh, and how is a fetus be a "potential human being"?
I really appreciate your response; I've never been quoted on a blog before!