In an ideal world, 10 years from now we won't be talking about them at all because they've all been recognized as fellow human beings who deserve equal treatment (legally and otherwise).

But since this isn't an ideal world and more to the point since there are people like you as well as the people in this video who seem to actively want to treat them as less than human, I suspect we'll still be talking about these same issues... although hopefully on a smaller and smaller scale until one day far in the future we do reach the ideal.

P.S. Two consenting non-married, non-related adults wanting to get married is not the same thing as incest, bestiality, polygamy, or pedophilia (surprised you left that one out). Homophobes constant equating of homosexuality with these things gets pretty old "after a while."

It also explains why the one guy didn't get upset when Jack asked him if she was a good kisser. A real brother would have gotten pissed at the insinuation of incest. The guy wasn't really her brother, so thats why he was confused instead of angry.

... and more.

My anger at this and religion in general make me sick. The Catholics also "hate" women and almost all religions hate gays.

Fuck you islamists. Fuck you.

oh and this: from another of my posts.
It is a long letter to creationists but I'm re dedicating it to islamists too.
Call me hatefull but between this and the recent video of a child dying being circumsized, I AM FED UP WITH THIS BULL SH*T.

Religion HAS to go.
OH you're moderate you say? This stuff isn't what you and your flock believe? Unless you've gotten up in front of your church or temple to proclaim this crap WRONG, you are complicit in my eyes.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists, and Islamists,

You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

--------------------- I saw this on the interweb and laughed and laughed.

I would hope shineyblurry is NOT a creationist with his strong religious beliefs, but if so it's dedicated to him.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists,
You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

Tywin is a cold, calculating magnificent bastard, and in the books that's really all he is.

One of the reasons I love this scene (and it's substantially different from the books, where Arya never meets Tywin) is that it humanises Tywin somewhat.

Some fiction likes to portray the bad guys as inhuman monsters, but in reality most people (even the very worst) are not like that. They came to where they are through a series of small steps, each more horrific than the last, but each justified in their own mind.

That, to me, is far scarier than the likes of Joffrey or the Mountain. Joffrey is just broken, and Ser Gregor is almost literally a monster. But Tywin made himself into what he is.

And that's the brilliance of this story. When you can feel sympathy for a character whose first significant act is to push a small boy out a window because he was saw him engaged in incest, you have a good writer.

Actually, that's exactly what I say, and average modern human morality is considerably superior to the filth that the biblical God advocates.

The moral standard of western civilization is founded upon judeo-christian beliefs. Read:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-that-Made-Your-World/dp/1595555455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366921071&sr=8-1&keywords=book+that+made+your+world

Following the morality the biblical God advocates is the hardest thing you will ever do. The standard of today is a superficial, politically correct morality where you pretend to be nice to people but curse them when they aren't around. God requires a transformation on the inside where you have genuine love for your fellow man.

I am only saying that they are wrong by todays generally agreed upon moral standards. Some of these moral standards are extremely effective and have been around since very early human communities, so they only have the illusion of being absolute due to high adherence rate.

Are you saying nigh universal adherence to certain moral standards isn't evidence for an absolute standard of morality?

Murder, theft, oppression and incest are three fairly obvious examples. The evolutionarily advantageous trait of society building tends to list it's effectiveness when such things are widespread. But we have a very long human tradition of sanctioning and celebrating murder and theft as long as it occurs well outside our cohort. Killing other tribes is celebrated in the bible, as is stealing their possessions. Ethically justified slavery took another 4000 years to mostly get rid of, and hell, it was common practice to fuck your fifteen year old cousin all the way up to about the late 1800s here in the good old US of A as long as it was under the marital auspices of the church, of course.

Yep, but thank God that his just definition of morality - if we didn't have god's guidance through scripture, we'd probably do crazy shit!

You don't understand what God was doing in the Old Testament, or why He did it the way He did. It is morally consistent with His goodness and holiness, and there are logical reasons for why this is so. So far you are not interested in hearing them or discussing them. When you are let me know. In the end you don't have any excuse for suppressing the truth about Jesus, no matter what you think about how God acted in the Old Testament.

Using the word 'absolute' is a concession to brevity, but nice try - seriously dude, this is laughable and it wouldn't even stand up in Jr. High debate - absolutes do exist, they just need to be well justified, and yes if you want to be nitpicky about it there is an ever so remote chance that 1+1 is not equal to two in some distant corner of the universe. But as humans with an admittedly limited scope of understanding, we have to accept that level of certainty. If you want to relegate your theory to claiming its space somewhere in the possibility that we might be wrong about the whole 2+2=4 thing, go right on ahead.

There, that's what I meant by absolute. happy?

Basically, what you're saying is that because 2+2 probably equals four everywhere in the Universe, you are free to make absolute statements about morality? The fact is that your belief system leaves you with no justification for any absolute statement what so ever. Why should 2 + 2 always equal 4 in the first place? Can you tell me why the laws of physics should work in the same way 5 seconds from now without using circular reasoning?

Can you justify any piece of knowledge without God? If you can then tell me one thing you know and how you know it. Could you be wrong about everything you know?

Well then thanks for the offer, but I think I'll pass in the whole god based morality thing. I prefer to have a really good reason to never slaughter innocent kids. But thanks for finally answering my question: there has been a good reason to butcher a toddler after all! Praise The Lord, for he is good!

It comes back to the same question: As the giver of life, and the adjudicator of His Creation, is it wrong for God to take life?

And here's another interesting brain tickler. If everything god commands is right, and god has a track record of testing his faithful with their willingness to commit infanticide, how can you say that this lady isn't moral?

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2001-08-17/news/0108170166_1_baby-s-death-baby-s-father-documents

The scripture is finished and anything which contradicts it is not of God.

Wrong, I know that things are wrong because humans and cultures have a long history of interacting with reality, and certain strategies have been more successful than others. You haven't spent one iota of your time discrediting this notion, whereas I have given you plenty of examples crediting mine and discrediting yours.

What I am supposed to be discrediting? You're asking me to nail jello to a wall. You have not even defined what "successful" is supposed to mean beyond pure survival. In that case, every civilization has been successful. Tell me what your definition of success is supposed to be.

For the millionth time, I have no hopes of convincing you of anything - you'll defend your stance against literally any proof. But you seem to come here on the sift with the intent of demonstrating to others that there is some logical basis for your beliefs.

What proof? The foundation of atheism stands upon the shifting sands of relative truth. You, the atheist, ultimately make yourself the measure of all truth. Because of that, you can't tell me a single fact about the world that you can justify.

Well you're failing miserably, mainly because you are only capable of restating the following sentence as if it is an agreed upon truth:

"Not only is the entire concept logically contradictory, but it doesn't match our experience, which is that some things are absolutely wrong. "

I don't expect you to have any good support for that, but the audience out there just waiting to be convinced, they will need at least something.

Torturing babies for fun; not absolutely wrong?

I'm still waiting for you to give Stalin some kind, any kind of argument as to why he should adopt your morality and abandon his own. If you can't tell Stalin why he is wrong, then you have no hope of escaping the charge of incoherency.

"... If people rob and cheat you, you don't say that they are just executing their particular survival strategy, you say that those things are wrong. You know they are wrong because you have a God given conscience which tells you that they are. "

Actually, that's exactly what I say, and average modern human morality is considerably superior to the filth that the biblical God advocates.

I am only saying that they are wrong by todays generally agreed upon moral standards. Some of these moral standards are extremely effective and have been around since very early human communities, so they only have the illusion of being absolute due to high adherence rate.

Murder, theft, oppression and incest are three fairly obvious examples. The evolutionarily advantageous trait of society building tends to list it's effectiveness when such things are widespread. But we have a very long human tradition of sanctioning and celebrating murder and theft as long as it occurs well outside our cohort. Killing other tribes is celebrated in the bible, as is stealing their possessions. Ethically justified slavery took another 4000 years to mostly get rid of, and hell, it was common practice to fuck your fifteen year old cousin all the way up to about the late 1800s here in the good old US of A as long as it was under the marital auspices of the church, of course.

Yep, but thank God that his just definition of morality - if we didn't have god's guidance through scripture, we'd probably do crazy shit!

Do you see that these are absolute statements? On what grounds do you say there is no absolute morality? Saying there are no rules is a rule; this statement contradicts itself

Using the word 'absolute' is a concession to brevity, but nice try - seriously dude, this is laughable and it wouldn't even stand up in Jr. High debate - absolutes do exist, they just need to be well justified, and yes if you want to be nitpicky about it there is an ever so remote chance that 1+1 is not equal to two in some distant corner of the universe. But as humans with an admittedly limited scope of understanding, we have to accept that level of certainty. If you want to relegate your theory to claiming its space somewhere in the possibility that we might be wrong about the whole 2+2=4 thing, go right on ahead.

There, that's what I meant by absolute. happy?

When God issued the command to wipe out Canaan, it would have been immoral for the Israelites to disobey Him.

Well then thanks for the offer, but I think I'll pass in the whole god based morality thing. I prefer to have a really good reason to never slaughter innocent kids. But thanks for finally answering my question: there has been a good reason to butcher a toddler after all! Praise The Lord, for he is good!

Fake this is a hired acting group led by "Electric Eel Man"

you hire Electric Eel Man to come up with fake premises from incest to adultery, to faked confessions to air on the radio and boost ratings.

he's also used by Howard Stern almost daily

here's his promo advertisement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81xQxh2-I0o

he has a cast of about 10 and after you catch a few outrageous calls on radio you'll start to recognize the voices.

Phil Hendrie does his own voices but other "shock jocks" have to hire outside works like this guy 'Electric Eel Man'

That's some hot incest.

>> ^Murgy:

>> ^hpqp:
>> ^PostalBlowfish:
In the sense that Creationism is basically a fairy tale, it is appropriate for children. Unfortunately, it's not treated like that. It becomes part of an indoctrination that discourages critical thinking, and there is no question to me that such indoctrination is abuse.

I would not want my kids to be read the kinds of "fairy tales" found in the Bible. The Grimm tales are dark enough, without adding incest, genocide and mass genital mutilation to the mix. The Bible is more like Ovid's Metamorphoses; an important piece of literature you don't put into small children's hands.

Having read through Metamorphoses, I can honestly say I found far less basic ethical transgressions present than in the Christian Bible. Modern day societal value inconsistencies were about equal between the two books, assuming one accounts for the differences in length.
Now don't get me wrong here, I don't consider myself a literary historian, but when spending a day sick in bed one will find Wikipedia taking them in strange directions.


I agree 100% about the nonequivalence in moral transgressions. My point of comparison between the two was more how they both are cultural milestones whose influence permeate much of human artistic production and in that sense are an important part of adult cultural baggage, but not childhood teaching tools (Ovid perhaps more for the wtf-ishness).

>> ^hpqp:

>> ^PostalBlowfish:
In the sense that Creationism is basically a fairy tale, it is appropriate for children. Unfortunately, it's not treated like that. It becomes part of an indoctrination that discourages critical thinking, and there is no question to me that such indoctrination is abuse.

I would not want my kids to be read the kinds of "fairy tales" found in the Bible. The Grimm tales are dark enough, without adding incest, genocide and mass genital mutilation to the mix. The Bible is more like Ovid's Metamorphoses; an important piece of literature you don't put into small children's hands.


Having read through Metamorphoses, I can honestly say I found far less basic ethical transgressions present than in the Christian Bible. Modern day societal value inconsistencies were about equal between the two books, assuming one accounts for the differences in length.

Now don't get me wrong here, I don't consider myself a literary historian, but when spending a day sick in bed one will find Wikipedia taking them in strange directions.

@ReverendTed
You have been a courteous sparring partner so I will try to answer in kind, but I must admit being very exasperated by your last response. Moreover, I do not think I want to pursue a debate with someone who cannot see how adoption-in-place-of-abortion is neither feasible nor even remotely ethical (vis-à-vis the woman, the would-be child and human society in general). So this will probably be my last wall of self-indulgent dross.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: we both agree that we need more education all ‘round, on all subjects. And as you know, those most opposed to it are the same that are against abortion. Abstinence education is redundant when proper sex-ed is given, because it goes without saying that “no sex = no unwanted pregnancies” is a part of basic sex-ed. Of course, it is un-pragmatic to expect teenagers (or anyone for that matter) to forego sex, so why harp on it, other than for misguided religious purposes?

Your conception of consciousness is fuzzy at best. Everything we feel, experience, etc. is due to electro-chemical reactions in our body/brain. Magical thinking is saying some non-physical “me” exists attached to it, what religious people call a soul. Consciousness is not subordinate to cognition in terms of value, but in the sense that without the one (cognition) you simply don’t have the other (“subordinate” as in “dependent upon”). I mentioned blind-from-birth people for a good reason; they have no visual aspect to their consciousness, their identity/consciousness is built upon the other sensory input. Now imagine a being that has zero sensory input (or a central system capable of making use/sense of it), and you have a mass of muscles/cells/organs devoid of consciousness. And that is what is aborted before the 25th week. I must make it clear, however, that even if this developed much earlier it would still be the woman’s prerogative to choose what she does with her own body/life. In that respect I think the “viability” argument is a pragmatic (albeit conservative) one, because it draws the line between an excrescence and a (possibly) autonomous being.

After the first two paragraphs, your response goes from bad to worse. What I said about adoption v abortion still stands, but I would add that it is still forcing women to go through a pregnancy they do not want (thus still affecting the quality of their lives), not to mention leaving them with the guilt of abandonment, the kids with issues, etc etc. And all for what? So some third person’s unfounded superstitions be upheld? And then you have the gall to compare criminalising abortion with criminalising incest and crazy people locking up/raping their families. You seriously need to think a bit before making comparisons. In the case of child abuse and/or rape (incest itself is a victimless crime, but that’s for a different discussion), there are actual victims, for one, and secondly, the crazies would lock them up whether it was legal or not, because it is a question of absolute control over the other.

Since you cite Guttmacher statistics, allow me to suggest you read a little more:

• Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. For example, the abortion rate is 29 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in Africa and 32 per 1,000 in Latin America—regions in which abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries. The rate is 12 per 1,000 in Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds.

• Where abortion is permitted on broad legal grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is highly restricted, it is typically unsafe. In developing countries, relatively liberal abortion laws are associated with fewer negative health consequences from unsafe abortion than are highly restrictive laws.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_IAW.html

So basically pushing for the criminalisation of abortion is pushing for there to be more abortions, and more dangerous ones.

You note how a large percentage of abortion-seekers are above the poverty line. Obviously, they can afford it / are aware of the possibility. Ever notice how the poor/uneducated tend to have more kids than the others? Do you really think being poor makes you want to have more mouths to feed? Or perhaps it is because they lack access to contraception/abortion (not to mention the poor/uneducated tend to be more religious; religion thrives on misery). Of the “developed” world the US is a bit of a special case, because it is so backward with regards to healthcare and contraception. Notice how most women in the US pay for their abortion out of pocket, and “Nearly 60% of women who experienced a delay in obtaining an abortion cite the time it took to make arrangements and raise money.” (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html/) As an aside, the religious right here in Switzerland (not as influential but almost as stupid and backward thinking as that of the US) are trying to make abortion be no longer covered by the universal healthcare system.

On the “potential” question, everything has been said. I’d simply point out that your “95%” potential leaves out something absolutely crucial, namely the choice of the woman to terminate the abortion, which can reduce that to “0%”. You say “it’s nearly guaranteed”, but so what? Two people having heterosexual vaginal sex without projection over a long period of time will conceive of a child, it’s “nearly guaranteed”, therefore every possible pairing of male and female should have continuous unprotected sex otherwise they are depriving potential beings from existing. “But what if they don’t want to?” Exactly, what if the woman doesn’t want a child at that moment? See how absurd the “potential” argument is?

I’ll risk making this wall of text even wallyer and propose an analogy, The Analogy of the Film and Camera. When you put a film in a camera, the potential for it becoming a strip of individual, unique photos goes up. But so long as no pictures are taken, so long as nothing is imprinted on the film’s receptive surface, you lose no individual photos by taking the film out, and there’s the same amount of potential if you put in a different film at a different time. It’s wonky, I know, but it illustrates that potential individual (the film) is not the same as existing individual (the photo), nor does destroying the first cause any damage to the second, because the second doesn’t exist yet.

The comparison with the IGB campaign is terribly inappropriate and simply false. In one case it is question of keeping living individuals from ending their lives, whereas abortion is about preventing eventual individuals from coming into existence because it would harm the quality of life of an already existing individual (as well as the one to be). IGB is about giving people options/hope, whereas criminalising abortion is about taking that away (from women, to give it to the mind projections of superstitious third parties). The only connection between the two is that in both cases the unsubstantiated beliefs of third persons impinge on an individual’s quality of life and liberty. I already addressed your “good from bad” argument, which you draw out again in an emotionally manipulative way (which frankly made me sick).

On eugenics, oh boy. What you’re saying is akin to saying “self-defence should be outlawed because otherwise some (like Zimmerman) might commit crimes and say it was self-defence”. Or, a little closer to home perhaps: “we shouldn’t have universal healthcare because some might fraud”. Yes, some people fraud the insurance, and yes, some people are aggressive and try to pass it as self-defence. That’s why we have a judicial system. Bringing in eugenics is seriously grasping at straws and you know it.

I’ll end my last contribution to this exchange with the following: having a child should never be an inevitability. Bringing a human life into existence is way too big a responsibility to be an obligation. A women’s body is her own, to deal with as she chooses, uterus and co. included.

Cheers

@hpqp
I am not at all ashamed of my verbose, self-indulgent dross, so here we go!

Something has to be extra-physical, as least based on our current model. I can fully accept that a brain by itself can receive sensory input, process it against memory, and thus act in a completely human way indistinguishable from a conscious human, but on its own can literally be no more "conscious" than a river flowing down a mountain. Our current view of the physical universe does not tolerate any rational physical explanation of consciousness. Any given moment of human experience - the unified sensory experience and stream of consciousness - does not exist in a single place at a single instant. To suggest that the atoms\molecules\proteins\cells of the brain experience themselves in a unified manner based on their proximity to or electrochemical interaction with each other is magical thinking. Atoms don't do that, and that's all that's there, physically.
I disagree that consciousness is subordinate to cognition in terms of value. Cognition is what makes us who we are and behave as we do, but consciousness is what makes us different from the rest of the jiggling matter in the universe.

A couple of posts back, you challenged my statement about abstinence education as demonstrating a lack of pragmatism. I didn't really address it in my reply, but I'd prefaced it with the understanding that it's not a magical incantation. I know people are still going to have sex, but I suggested that has to be a part of education. People have to know that you can still get pregnant even if you're using the contraceptives that are available. They have to at least know the possibility exists. It's one more thing for them to consider. People are still going to drive recklessly even if you tell them they can crash and kill themselves despite their airbags, seatbelts, and crumple zones, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it to educate them about the possibility. I fail to see how that's not pragmatic.

I didn't reply to your comment about adoption vs abortion because I'm not sure there's anything else to add on either side. As I've said, my beliefs on this are such that even a grossly flawed adoption\orphan care system is preferable to the alternative, even if it means that approximately 10 times the number of children would enter the system than have traditionally been adopted each year. (1.4M abortions annually in the US, ~140K adoptions, but there are several assumptions in that math that wouldn't hold up to scrutiny.) Many right and just things have unpleasant consequences that must be managed. (The typical counter here is that Pro-Lifers tend to also be fiscal\social conservatives and won't fund social services to care for these new individuals they've "protected" into existence. That's just another issue of taking responsibility for the consequences of choices. If they get what they want, they need to be held to account, but it's a separate issue. A related issue, but a separate issue.)

Criminalizing\prohibiting almost any activity results in some degree of risky\dangerous\destructive behavior. Acts must be criminalized because there are individuals who would desire to perform those acts which have been determined to be an unnecessary imposition on the rights of another. Criminalization does not eliminate the desire, but it adds a new factor to consideration. Some will decide the criminalization\prohibition of the act is not sufficient deterrent, but in proceeding, are likely to do so in a different manner than otherwise. The broad consideration is whether the benefits of criminalization\prohibition outweigh the risks posed to\by the percentage who will proceed anyway. Prohibition of alcohol failed the test, I expect the prohibition of certain drugs will be shown to have failed the test..eventually. Incest is illegal, and the "unintended" consequence is freaks locking their families in sheds and basements in horrific conditions, but I think most of us would agree the benefits outweigh the detriment there.

Is putting all would-have-been-aborteds up for adoption abhorrent or absurd? The hump we'll never get over is asking "is it more abhorrent than aborting all of them", because we have different viewpoints on the relative values in play. But is it even a valid question? They won't all be put up for adoption. Some percentage (possibly 5-10 percent) will spontaneously miscarry\abort anyway and some percentage would be raised by a birth parent or by the extended family after all. An initially unwanted pregnancy does not necessarily equate to an unwanted child, for a number of reasons. I do not have statistics on what proportion could be expected to be put up for adoption. Would you happen to? It seems like that would be difficult to extrapolate.

The "'potential' shtick" carries weight in my view because of the uniqueness of the situation. There is no consensus on the "best" way to define when elective abortion is "acceptable". Sagan puts weight on cognition as indicative of personhood. As he states, the Supreme Court set its date based on independent "viability". (More specifically, I feel it should be noted, "potential" viability.) These milestones coincide only by coincidence.
Why is it so easy for us, as you say, to retroproject? And why is this any different from assigning personhood to each of a million individual sperm? For me, it's because of those statistics on miscarriage linked above. The retroprojected "potential" is represented by "percentages". At 3-6 weeks, without deliberate intervention 90% of those masses of cells will go on to become a human being. At 6-12 it's 95%. This is more than strictly "potential", it's nearly guaranteed.

I expect your response will be uncomfortable for both of us, but I wish you would expound on why my "It Gets Better" comparison struck you as inappropriate. Crude, certainly - I'll admit to phrasing it indelicately, even insensitively. I do not think it poorly considered, however. The point of "It Gets Better" is to let LGBT youth know that life does not remain oppressive, negative, and confusing, and that happiness and fulfillment lie ahead if they will only persevere.
It's necessary because as humans, we aren't very good at imagining we'll ever be happy again when surrounded by uncertainty and despair, or especially recognizing the good already around us. We can only see torment, and may not see the point in perpetuating a seemingly-unending chain of suffering when release is so close at hand, though violence against self (or others).
This directly parallels the "quality of life" arguments posed from the pro-choice perspective. They take an isolated slice of life from a theoretical unplanned child and their mother and suggest that this is their lot and that we've increased suffering in the universe, as if no abused child will ever know a greater love, or no poor child will ever laugh and play, and that no mother of an unwanted pregnancy will ever enjoy life again, burdened and poverty-stricken as she is.
As you said, we're expecting a woman to reflect "on what would her and the eventual child’s quality of life be like", but we're so bad at that.
And all that quality-of-life discussion is assuming we've even nailed the demographic on who is seeking abortions in the U.S.
Getting statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, we find that 77% were at or above the federal poverty level and 60% already had at least one child.

On a moral level, absolutely, eugenics is very different debate.
On a practical level, the eugenics angle is relevant because it's indistinguishable from any other elective abortion. Someone who is terminating a pregnancy because their child would be a girl, or gay, or developmentally disabled can very easily say "I'm just not ready for motherhood." And who's to say that's not the mother's prerogative as much as any other elective abortion, if she's considering the future quality of life for herself and the child? "It sucks for girls\gays\downs in today's society and I don't think I can personally handle putting them through that," or more likely "My family and I could never love a child like that, so they would be unloved and I would be miserable for it. This is better for both of us."
Can we write that off as hopefully being yet another edge case? (Keep in mind possibly 65% of individuals seeking abortion declare as Protestant or Catholic, though other statistics show how unreliable "reported religious affiliation" is with regard to actual belief and practice.)

_{"Argumentation"? I have learned a new word today, thanks to hpqp. High five!}

Millions of real children with real feelings are killed by wars and sanctions the same "pro-lifers" can't seem get enough of not to mention an attitude to the environment which will see most life on Earth extinct in a few hundred years. I have to admit abortion is a tricky moral issue but that's just the point, it's a moral issue not a legislative one. So where you say abortions are immoral and I say carpet bombings are immoral. I guess we all have different ideas on morality and thank Christ for that otherwise I might think like you. >> ^ReverendTed:

As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with bobknight33 here.
I believe a woman has the right to choose what to do with her body. I also believe we should be responsible for the consequences of our choices. I believe a woman has the right to decide whether to have sex. (So, yes, I do believe in exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and threat-to-life.)
Seeing how quickly a fertilized egg develops into a fetus is striking (there can be a detectable heartbeat at 5 1/2 weeks), and that's where I get my opposition to elective abortion. I cannot accept that this is merely some part of "a woman's body" to be excised and discarded when it is so clearly a developing human.
I sincerely believe that we will one day look back on our tolerance for elective abortion with the same reprehension as we currently hold for slavery, ritual sacrifice or witch trials.
I know how difficult it is to have a rational discussion about abortion, but I find it hard not to say something. I try to keep an open mind and view issues from others' positions, but I can only really see this particular argument coming down to a discussion of when "life" begins; where does it go from being "termination of pregnancy" to "termination of a human life"? At conception? Birth? Or somewhere in between? Obviously, it's murder to kill a newborn, and it seems like there's a general consensus that it would be unethical to terminate a late pregnancy, but how far back does that reasoning go? And if we don't know when human life begins, it seems rational to err on the side of caution.

>> ^ReverendTed:

As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with bobknight33 here.
I believe a woman has the right to choose what to do with her body. I also believe we should be responsible for the consequences of our choices. I believe a woman has the right to decide whether to have sex. (So, yes, I do believe in exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and threat-to-life.)
Seeing how quickly a fertilized egg develops into a fetus is striking (there can be a detectable heartbeat at 5 1/2 weeks), and that's where I get my opposition to elective abortion. I cannot accept that this is merely some part of "a woman's body" to be excised and discarded when it is so clearly a developing human.
I sincerely believe that we will one day look back on our tolerance for elective abortion with the same reprehension as we currently hold for slavery, ritual sacrifice or witch trials.
I know how difficult it is to have a rational discussion about abortion, but I find it hard not to say something. I try to keep an open mind and view issues from others' positions, but I can only really see this particular argument coming down to a discussion of when "life" begins; where does it go from being "termination of pregnancy" to "termination of a human life"? At conception? Birth? Or somewhere in between? Obviously, it's murder to kill a newborn, and it seems like there's a general consensus that it would be unethical to terminate a late pregnancy, but how far back does that reasoning go? And if we don't know when human life begins, it seems rational to err on the side of caution.


i err soo far on the side of caution, i convince pro-life women have sex with me by saying that if they don't, they are aborting the child i have conceived of having with them

its a human life they are ending if they don't

better to err on the side of caution

the real hypocrisy of the pro-life forces out there, is once the kids born, that kid is someone else's problem... yeah, we'll fight to make sure you are born, but if they parent's can't afford to raise you in the first place... or are unfit... well that's their fault... and we should in NO way be responsible for that (y'know, even though our movement forced them to have you in the first place)

better for you, the uncared for, under educated, malnurished child to suffer and us to feel righteous
than
not create this suffering (on both your parents and your behalf) and us to not feel so accomplished

support you!?! give you a hand up? that sounds like a hand out! stay outta my wallet you socialist!

prolife is supported by Christianity!!! abortion is attacking God! because desert dwelling sheep herders knew more about life, dna, the reproductive process than we do today!
of course, we'll ignore all the socialist themes in the Bible while saying this
we'll ignore things like charity for the poor and sick
we'll ignore things like throwing the money lenders out of the church
etc etc

compassion just doesn't feel genuine if $ makes it go away