Abortion: Who decides Who Dies and Why; Part Last.

Since you are leaving, I will try to be brief, but might not succeed.

1. You impute to me moral claims which I have not made. My claim is only that you do not have the moral authority to declare which categories of humans have no value and may therefore be exterminated. I don’t need moral authority to make that observation.

I do make a claim that the consequences for actions are as natural as cause and effect, and that denying consequences which are deleterious from being experienced by the actor leads to continuation of those actions, thereby producing more of the deleterious consequences - an empirical observation.

I also make a claim that this process institutionalizes the deleterious consequences.

And I make the claim that the deleterious consequences of abortion are 50,000,000 dead, dismembered humans.

2. ” I reject the claim that your deity is real, as it has zero supporting evidence.

And you refuse to understand that you are demanding material evidence of a non-material entity, a condition which you refuse to allow for yourself: Special Pleading Fallacy of the most transparent kind, and a Category Error. Not propitious for claims of "evidence and reason".

” Therefore I recognize it as fiction. There is nothing that differentiates your deity from any other fictional character.”

False. You make universal statements with the same abandon that you make universal moral judgments: without either evidence or support. If you had proof of the fictional nature of the first cause of the universe, you would surely produce it. You cannot. You are without either logical or evidentiary support. You have not disproven any of the actual deductive evidence for a deity. It is doubtful that you even know what it is.

3. The claim was not murder of children of course, it was purposeful mass production abortion, similar but different - you know, abortion is to prevent the woman from incurring any consequences or responsibility. There is a difference, but you are right, right up to the following point: Neither Christians nor Hebrews nor Jews have called for gratuitous, mass, on-going, child murder, since they realize that they haven’t the moral authority to do so. Atheists, on the other hand, feel that their thoughts on the matter are sufficient to pronounce them to be moral tenets for the world. Abortion must be available for terminating the life of any human at that stage of development. That specific human is an unbearable burden, and is expendable and may be exterminated.

Your condemnation of Christians for child murder while you promote child murder yourself is an interesting point: first it is a Tu Quoque Fallacy, as has been pointed out time and again, and second, it has no bearing on analyzing the moral arrogance of abortion proponents – those not in jeopardy of being aborted themselves, but willing to pronounce the death sentence on other, unknown but innocent, humans.

4. ” Re: Evidence of a god.

Ya, I really cannot articulate how moronic the position that it is atheists who need to provide evidence of the non-existence of your deity (who exists outside the universe) really is. The words do not exist in my vocabulary to describe the amount of double think required to hold such a position and charge those who reject the claim of a deities existence to shoulder the burden of proof to demonstrate his universal non-existence.

And once again, you invoke the Special Pleading Fallacy (on top of the obvious Category Error) because you cannot stand for the evidentiary criterion which you require of others to be applied to yourself. For others: OK. For yourself: moronic. And, again, you make claims you cannot prove – and yes, you have claimed that the deity is fictional. That is not a "rejection of claims", it is a positive claim, an assertion, a declarative. Your attempt to avoid that is glaring. When you make claims and then deny you made them, you are indulging in dishonesty. Yet you expect to be trusted.

” What do you want me to do? Pull out descriptions of your deity from the bible? You'll just pull some mental gymnastics to waive it away as a metaphor or some apologetic bullshit. Like your omnipotent deity is such a poor author he can't even convey his existence directly.”

Your anti-christian hatred is showing through, in spades. I have made no claim of omnipotence or omni-anything. Your hate is filling in for your thinking, replacing arguments with sarcasm – an act of desperation.

What do I want you to do? Just what you have asked of others: produce evidence. Use your own criterion. Can't do that? Why not? You demand it of others, but reject that demand on yourself: Special Pleading, aka hypocrisy.

” Perhaps I shouldn't have used that very common expression about spilling seed as it just seems to have confused you.”

Or perhaps you should have asked an actual question if you expected an answer. And, I have answered it in yesterday’s post.

” Maybe you should do some research on the origins and success of abstinence only education. Maybe you should look into how ignorant such products of "education" are in regards to sexuality.”

When someone says “maybe you should do some research…” or “google it”, it usually means that he has no case to be made, so he defers it to the internet. I admit to doing this occasionally, before I catch myself. In this case, you are arguing a Straw Man which you dredged up in order to knock down. No one is arguing this point but you. Knock yourself out.

In terms of “ignorance” produced by education, one can certainly make the case that government schools have produced a massive ignorance in the country today, on all levels. If the abortion rate is a measure of sex education and the ubiquitous condom, then I would not be bragging about its success.

” Such "education" doesn't stop teenagers from having sex. What it does do however is greatly reduce their odds of using contraceptives. Which leads to .... ABORTION! (Which despite your protestations to the contrary, neither of us sees as a desirable outcome.)”

Five decades ago, before the massive government intervention in education and morality, there were very few teen age pregnancies compared with today. And even fewer abortions. To say that teen agers cannot survive without taking down their pants is not the case, unless it is sanctioned through government policies and media anti-morality programming. Teen agers can wait. They have done so in the past. That also prevents STD’s. Even without condoms.

Abortion is part and parcel of the cultural destruction of this country. Yes, there are not homes for the 50,000,000 dead humans. That is no excuse for the continued moral destruction and killing. And yes, your "reasons" are just excuses. You defend the killing as necessary, with no thought of making it unnecessary.

” "A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position."

Nope, that's exactly what you are doing.”

Hardly. I condensed your position into numbered points; you have not pointed to any incorrect statements of your position. I argue against your stated positions; you have no defense, so you charge Straw Man regardless of its inapplicability. Yet another dishonesty.

” You don't have to be psychic to see that more women pregnant with unwanted children will produce more unwanted children without responsible parents. You avoid looking at reality in favor of your moralizing.”

The reality has been created by the release of our culture from morality. It is abetted by the sanctioned killing of humans, and that has hardened the culture into its wantonness. You don’t like morality? Well that’s the attitude that has caused this situation: abandonment of responsibility for consequence-free personal pleasure as a moral statement. And you think that the killing of those humans solves the problem and does it with no moral complications, i.e. killing is not a moral issue for you. Sure you say you don’t like it, but you still have no compassion for the victims of the forceps, except to make the incredible claim that it saves them from future pain (!)

” Oh? Like everyone who claims a deity exists but failed to produce any evidence to support that claim? Well, I may think they are a bit foolish, but not inherently untrustworthy.”

Again, Special Pleading Fallacy (also Category Error, btw), and it still doesn’t work, especially for someone who claims evidence and reason.

” I would certainly view as untrustworthy someone who claimed it was the skeptics responsibility to prove the non existence of something.”

Then you are not using logic, you are merely avoiding responsibility for your claims. There is the trust problem, right there. You can’t trust someone who actually knows and uses logic.

” The failure of religious claims is evidence for atheism.”

Really? Which claims? Another universal statement, without any back up. You have disproven all religious claims, and declared them failures? Of course not. You keep generating ever more reasons not to be trusted.

” Whereas if we assume that Darth Vader is fictional, and we observe the consequences of both pro-choice and pro-life positions, it is demonstrable which causes more harm to society.”

You are right, here. Pro-Life probably cannot work in a culture which has been deeply corrupted as far as this one has been. As being representative of the culture, there is no thought of personal responsibility in any of your thinking, no matter how often I mention it: it just doesn’t exist for you. No one should expect negative consequences, and killing someone is not a negative, or at least not much of one in your book, because the idea of a woman experiencing negative consequences outweighs the negative aspect of killing. Character plays no role in your moral equations. But despite the lack of moral grounding, you are able to make moral pronouncements of great evil, say, on the God of the Bible, for doing exactly what you advocate. And your self-righteous pronouncement is that such a God is a monster, while you are empathetic, killing them for their own good. All the while, you proclaim that I am a bigot, etc., etc. So I repeat: you are dangerous. And I’ll add this: you are irrational and you care nothing for logic, for any fallacies which are in your way, for any rationalization of non-credible reasoning. For you there are only Consequentialist tactics to reach your moral objectives, the morality of which is of your own personal fabrication.

That is a measure of the corruption that has taken hold in American society, and in the minds of Americans who promote abortion as a “good” which outweighs the killing involved. The issue, as you seem to have pointed out is exactly this: morality vs wantonness. And you don’t like morality or moralizing.

” I surmise that you were an atheist for 40 years because you never gave it any thought one way or another. I suspect you converted because of a woman. I suspect this entire blog is a manifestation of your hatred to your previous unhappy self.”

Nice try, but wrong again. Another Tu Quoque failure. Atheism places no burden on the Atheist. It represents a freedom from having any absolutes to answer to. That’s why new Atheists feel such freedom: they aren’t bound to any limits on their thinking or their behavior; they are free-thinkers, untethered to any actual grounding principles. They are ethicists because they have no grounding morals. They are elitists, merely by saying those three magic words: ain’t no God. They can create their own reality, and live happily inside. Nope not unhappy. The faux elitist is always happy with himself.

To question that worldview takes courage and intellectual responsibility. Skeptics never question skepticism, and seldom realize that skepticism merely destroys knowledge, it never creates it. Skepticism denies the existence of any actual truth, thereby denying its own value on the one hand, and blinding itself intellectually on the other. Questioning involves questioning everything, including skepticism and its denialism which is based on only ideological belligerence.

Nope, no woman involved. Lots of logic books though. And philosophy, history, science and biography.

I do have a love/hate relationship to this blog. I love the pursuit of truth and the promotion of grounded logic as a path to accurate worldviews, and I hate to have to deal with pompous self-supremacists who come here to declare their view of reality to be the only true view, despite the non-existence of truth. And I admit that I thoroughly dislike the nation of entitled, amoral whiners that the USA has come to be taken over by. The death of personal character and responsibility, and the death of personal and intellectual integrity is very annoying, as is the culture of death-for-convenience. The rotting carcass stinks.

A sort of post script:
On second thought, I can see why you would think that it takes moral authority for someone to question your own presumption of moral authority: How dare anyone attempt to supersede your moral principles, given your personal, careful moral positioning of those principles: one must have superior moral authority to even attempt to question your principles. Or so you might think.

But no, all it takes is having moral principles, not having moral authority. Apparently your moral principles contradict even themselves, with you trying to dislike that which you support. Internal contradictions are a sure sign of irrational arguments. When it is immoral to kill innocent children, then one shouldn’t support it. (As opposed to merely disliking it).

So your morals are ripe for being questioned, because they lean decidedly toward killing, as opposed to personal responsibility. And as we have seen here, applying the techniques of skepticism to the skeptic produces some interesting results.

” There are plenty of scholarly articles a mere google search away. Please go and educate yourself.”

The last ditch insult-attempt of a failed arguer. You still have presented no evidence and no reasoning to support the absolute truth of your belief system, Atheism. You have not even argued against the Category Error inherent in both Atheism and Philosophical Materialism, nor the Special Pleading Fallacy which you continue to use as reasoning for Atheism. Yet you audaciously claim to be more educated.

” The pregnant woman. Because it's her body.”

Actually not. She is harboring, temporarily, another human entirely. She doesn’t kill her own body; she kills the other human. Bumper sticker slogans rarely work out for irrational causes.

Now as a parting gift I will repeat the enumeration of your principles, as a reminder that I have read and understood your moral positioning, based on your comments here on this blog:

” What the subject here is, and remains, is the Atheist position on killing humans. Your justification for killing certain categories of humans is to claim that if they feel no pain and have no memories, it is your opinion that it is OK to kill them, AND besides, Christians have an evil deity. Moreover, no female should have to endure pregnancy if she decides not to. These are your morals.

Maybe we should enumerate them:

It is OK to kill certain categories of humans if:
1. they feel no pain and have no memories;
2. The Christian deity is evil;
3. no female should have to endure a pregnancy if she doesn’t want to.”

To which should be added this:

4. Killing them is an act of mercy, preventing their future pain as you discern and predict it.
5. Those humans are a burden, financially.
6. Too many of them to adopt out, because,
7. Teenagers just can’t keep their pants on.

Adios.