h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

hi Myst,

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'Potential' human I would say. But certainly and obviously alive.


Moth and Higg's Bosun,

I would doubt that an unborn child can 'think' though I agree that it does have a basic survival mechanism.

az

A bloody virus is 'alive'. Not a lot can hinge on that!

A virus in not a potential human.

az

A virus is a border line case of alive. But one could probably change virus to bacteria (definitely alive) without changing the point.

Is an egg human, or a sperm?

On current understanding many fertilised eggs fail to implant, or are rejected at a fairly early stage. Are they human?

On the whole I'm not a big fan of abortion, while pragmatically accepting that the alternative will sometimes be even less desirable.

Noggin

hi Noggin,

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Again . . . potential humans? Women often self-abort without even knowing it most of the time.

>>On the whole I'm not a big fan of abortion<<

Well, I should hope not. I have never met anyone who was actually a 'fan' of abortion. It is usually a very difficult decision for a woman to make. Of course there are always exceptions, people who may use abortion as a means of 'too-late' birth control, but these *are* exceptions.

az

"Exceptions"! I think not.

"But that may soon change. Access to low-cost, safe abortions -- a primary method of birth control for almost five generations of Russian women -- is about to be drastically curtailed by parliament, and many health experts fear it will drive women like Ms. Kareyeva to unsafe back-street clinics."

Source: http://www.prolife.org.ph/article/articleview/153/1/23

It all depends on if God has touched your life. There have been things that have happened in my life that I see as miracles(don't feel like looking up that word for spelling). Therefore, God has always existed for me. Even though, accoroding to a Baptist minister that tried converting me, I'm going to hell because I was not baptised. However, I am a little bit scetchy on the subject of Jesus. He could have been concieved by a virgin in a bath. In those days the men bathed before the women and if a man, shall we say, let some swimmers go in the bath water then Mary goes in, she could have concieved a child. So the big question remains. Does God exist? If it helps you sleep at night to believe than more power to you but I don't believe that anyone has the right to tell anyone else what to believe.

Alright then Boo. From here on I'm going to believe that you're an idiot, and you can't possibly stop me from doing so because "you don't have the right". (Actually I don't think you're an idiot, I quite like your post because of the point about Mary).

God has always existed for you? That statement is a fallacy. Either God exists or he doesn't. What I think you mean is, because of the course of events your life has taken, you believe in a God. Is this correct? If it is, let's hear the miracles that you're talking about please.

Myst, your reply to my last post was a bit of a shambles. It seems a lot of your arguments stem from misunderstanding and simply not being able to grasp the concepts we are talking about. Put the beginning of life in a historical context:

To me, 20 years seems like a fairly long time. Because I am unlikely to live up to a hundred, I find it difficult to imagine a hundred years. (This is NOT a rational argument against 100 years of time ever having passed). I find it still more difficult to imagine 1000 years, and so on for 10,000 and 100,000 and 1,000,000.

Fossil evidence, stratigraphic evidence and archaeological evidence puts the beginning of the human line at about 2 or 3 million years ago, I think. This is an incomprehensibly vast amount of time. But for a geologist, 1 million years is virtually nothing. (I'll call it 1M from now on). 65M ago, dinosaurs were wiped out. (I take it you do believe in dinosaurs?). Science puts the date of the first organisms at around 3,600M ago, 1000M after the formation of the Earth.

3,600,000,000 years ago, on the other side of an utterly enormous expanse of time, the Earth was effectively a chemical laboratory. You may remember from school chemistry that increased surface area means an increased likelihood of a reaction taking place, and we are talking about the entire surface of the Earth here. For 1 billion years, billions of chemical reactions between the potential ingredients of DNA's predecessors were happening in any one second all over the entire surface of the planet. Most of the new molecules were torn apart and reused.

Is it really so hard for you to believe that one molecule appeared in this massively big amount of time and space which could split in two, with each half picking up a number of atoms to form replicas of the original molecule? And that such a molecule, after a number of generations of replications, was inclined to mutate?

These are the scientific premises behind my dismissal of your preposterous statistics. Some people think of science as just another religious theory, like Buddhism or Christianity or Islam or whatever. In fact, religion is a scientific theory, which is scientifically unacceptable because it fails to account for anything at all and has become itself something that would need a lot of explaining.

Thanks for the tip about the anger management. I get very worked up sometimes. You are so sure that you are right that you are unprepared to accept the contrary, unlike me. If science proved tomorrow the existence of a God who cared for us and created everything and wanted to be worshipped, I would happily throw up my arms in defeat and become a monk. But the chances of such a revelation happening are infinitely smaller than the chance that standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is correct.

As stated in the article about Russian women being allowed safe and government sponsored abortion, it was clear that the state felt that educating women about how to avoid unwanted pregnancies was a priority.

To quote from the article:

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Further on, another quote from the article:

<<"The fact that we need to teach women to take precautions, and also to teach men to be gentle with women, is another matter. The child needs to be a wanted child, but imposing restrictions in this way, placing women in this difficult situation -- life is a lot more complicated than just these three indicators." >>

It is interesting that this article comes from the Toronto Globe and Mail. A further quote:

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One cannot compare life in Canada (one of the richest countries in the world that almost always ends up in the top three annual list of countries with the highest standard of living) to a place like Russia, where many people do not even have proper housing.

And so, one cannot compare what a woman feels she needs to do in order to survive in dire straits to what a woman might decide to do living in 'a land of plenty'.

In this sense, I still see Russian women as being *exceptions* although the number of women seeking and getting safe government sponsored abortions there is higher than in other richer countries. Again, this is a question of proper education - which at this time is still not happening in Russia.

Having an abortion is no picnic. It is a physically and emotionally traumatic event.

If Russia abruptly changes their abortion laws without providing the much needed public education and assistance to women wishing to avoid pregnancy then this will probably result in women attempting to procure very unsafe abortions. And bear in mind what was said in a previous quote, which I think is quite important - "and also to teach men to be gentle with women" - is also fundamental in the education process. I mean, how could a Russian woman prove that she had been raped by her husband?

I do think it very unfortunate that many Russian women have possibly opted for abortion as a means of too-late birth control. But we cannot judge these women. We can, however, judge the conditions they are living in, which makes them resort to such behaviour.

To be honest, I think these Russian women have been very lucky. In many other poor countries women are not allowed the option of having a safe government sponsored abortion. And so I hope that Russia will be able to balance their new abortion laws with new public education freely available to both women and men.

az

Door,

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Very silly statement to make, I think. Science, being science, could never prove the existence of something that cannot be proved, as all god concepts only exist in the minds and hearts of the believers of such concepts.

How can one prove what only exists for you?

az

Glad you enjoyed it - I tend to get a bit shouty when I've had a drink No offence meant, if anyone took offence.

I'm from the good ol' UK (England). In my experience, the USA in general is more religious and more aggressively religious than England. There's a bit more evangelism and more "If you ain't with us, you're against us". That's not to say they don't tolerate aetheists, but the degree of toleration varies from state to state.

Glad you enjoyed it - I tend to get a bit shouty when I've had a drink No offence meant, if anyone took offence.

I'm from the good ol' UK (England). In my experience, the USA in general is more religious and more aggressively religious than England. There's a bit more evangelism and more "If you ain't with us, you're against us". That's not to say they don't tolerate aetheists, but the degree of toleration varies from state to state.

Door -

I'm sorry to say that the odds are too far against it for me to believe it. I have a hard time believing that creatures that had adapted perfectly to the ocean would bother trying to walk on land, little less that we all came from self replicating molecules, considering how many of those molecules it would take to make /anything/.

Again, to me it makes as little sense as God does to you.

However, religion is not a scientific study. Religion is what science would be once it knew everything about the world. Religion is devoted to honouring God.

Glad you enjoyed it - I tend to get a bit shouty when I've had a drink No offence meant, if anyone took offence.

I'm from the good ol' UK (England). In my experience, the USA in general is more religious and more aggressively religious than England. There's a bit more evangelism and more "If you ain't with us, you're against us". That's not to say they don't tolerate aetheists, but the degree of toleration varies from state to state.

well met my fiend Higgs
yes thats what i thought too. Although I'm not too keen about some parts of the USA I thought it would be a laugh to go there just so i could tell some self righeous shelterd prat that he's self deluded and there's no such thing as heaven and cause a bit of a storm. of cource there is silicon heaven though, because where else would all the calcutators go!

sorry sp there calculators and their everlasting souls

Oh Moth, it didn't work...

Toxxin, I'd like you to say more about Rawls' argument, it seems very interesting.
I don't think abortion providers would be comfortable with anaesthetising the unborn - it would be threatening to them, as too much of a concession! Tough. To me the unborn are definitely human, that's obvious to me as someone who has carried three of them - in less than ideal circumstances what's more - what can I say - I've always been unlucky in relationships...

> It doesn't make any difference, Higgs, he was still wrong.

If I do something that someone else (e.g. you) believes is wrong, but I believe it is right, then I'm wrong anyway? And if you do something that I believe is wrong, but you believe is right?

> Higgs you don't have to have developed a personality or a sense of
> self for a primitive survival mechanism to kick in.

That's roughly what I said (except I didn't go as far as suggesting a personality of any sort, simply an intellect capable of formulating the idea of death and the desire to avoid it).

What I was querying was the idea that a prenatal could 'want' or 'desire' life (or to avoid death). If you want to call a survival reflex a want or desire to avoid death, then I'd say that implies a pretty blurred definition of the semantics of 'want' or 'desire', which for me suggest an awareness of choices and some concept of the future.

> Does not require a fully functional brain to work the magic.

The healthy foetal brain is fully functional (it does just what is required of it), but not fully developed, therefore it is limited to the needs of the foetal environment, which, in terms of conceptualisation, are minimal to non-existent.

> There is certainly no individual thought process going on as an egg
> attaches itself to the lining of the womb and yet this happens and
> certainly not by happy accident or evolution as defined as the
> survival of the fittest.

So the egg attaches itself, if not by thought, 'happy' accident, or as a result of evolution by survival of the fittest, how?

> that survival mechanism, attaching itself to a food source, has no
> thinking behind it's action

So no desires or wants, just pre-programmed response to it's environment?