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Originally Posted by Mike33
I addressed this already. A sperm is not a human life nor is an egg. Only the union of a sperm and an egg begin the human life cycle. What you call potential is merely a human in it's earliest stage of development.
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I agree totally. There is no need or room for spirituality in the discussion. Religious folk need not apply.
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You're contradicting yourself here, although only implicitly.
You see, without spirituality, the "human life cycle" is a morally empty concept. There is no a priori reason why we should not fuck with it - the reason we do not fuck with human lives (and I'm not talking mere potential here) is because their are conscious beings with the ability to suffer.
Moreover, and especially considering that what makes a human is nature plus nurture, not merely a specific set of genes, one could just as easily say that the earliest stage of development of a human is its parents meeting for the first time, in a specific cultural context. Or the moment the first life form started existing, for that matter.
You treat "human life", arbitrarily defined, as something sacred, rather than looking at characteristics of human life that make it valuable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike33
I'll take your word for that. I've never had a miscarriage and don't know what it's like. Many ppl are very distraught over having experienced a miscarriage.
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Yes, just like many people are very distraught over having an abortion. However, usually, those who have miscarriages are not quite as distraught as those who get to watch their children die, while those who have abortions generally are in a rather different mental state than those who murder their children.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike33
Correct, but the point stands that the egg is the bird and that's why we protect it. Without the former you cannot have the latter. It's the bird cycle of life. You can't have the butterfly without the caterpillar, or the frog without the tadpole.
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Ehm, no. We don't protect the egg because it is the bird, we protect the egg because it is essential for the species to survive.
Likewise, we protect the forest in which the bird lives, not because it is the bird, but because it is essential for the species to survive.
Likewise, we bring members of an endangered species together to breed, not because they are their offspring, but because we want their offspring to come into existence, which is essential for the species to survive.
If you eat an egg, you didn't eat a bird. You ate an egg. That egg, if fertilized, could have become a bird, but it didn't, because you ate it. Nevertheless, you didn't eat a bird, you merely prevented a bird from coming into existence.