Are you a Warrior?
Do you defend those offended? Take up fights for the defenseless?
Well and good. Commendable. True religion is taking care of widows and orphans who lack the ability to fend for themselves. So you fend for them.
Was just listening to a program which detailed all the encouragement and support being showered on a person who has changed...gender?
Well, not really changed-at the level of chromosomes, X is still X, Y can't say Y not X?
Until the DNA is configurable, recombinable...artificially altered Alfreds, deep down, are still Freddies, not Fredrikas.
Does pointing this out make me a hateful person?
For disavowing the pretense, by not going along with the gag, should I be subjected to a gag order?
Here's the point. Many people take up arms (figurative-they may hate all weaponry)
to fend, defend someone with whom they share zero common cause. Maybe it's a reflex.
They themselves are quite satisfied with the skin they are in. But they will rush to the defense of someone such as the him/her mentioned above.
Because why?
Why does that person need defenders? Who is attacking that person?
"Well, no one yet, but..."
So pre-emptive defense...which is actually offense.
"Yeah, BUT...the small-hearted bigots who hate minorities and gays and immigrants and 'other' religions...will not be loving and accepting of a her that had been a him. So pre-emptive or not, I'm on the right (left) side!"
Here where I'm tilling the already turned over sod: Be careful that some 'leaders' of social and political movements do not raise a cash crop by ginning up your emotions.
Don't allow anyone to make money off of your outrage-many politicians (yep-THEM again!) raise money for their campaigns (call it what it is-the financing of their ego trips) by keeping you angry and mis-informed. Truth may set you free, but lies will open your pocketbook.
Why do they attack you through your heart? Because you head knows better, and if they can inflame your emotions, the heart will override the brain and accept any nonsense they care to advance.
Take care of widows and orphans. Share a cup of water, and look out for the best interests of your neighbor. But don't allow anyone to enslave you to their particular movement through your heart. Protect your emotions. Peace, friend.
13 comments:
TL;DR for all of those not in the know means:
Too long-didn't read.
Hope that you will. I'd hate to think that at sometime in our future we will be reduced to pointing and grunting because Facebook has distilled all knowledge to images and 'likes'.
If what I wrote offends you in any way-let's talk.
Many people take up arms (figurative-they may hate all weaponry)
to fend, defend someone with whom they share zero common cause.
In other words, how can anyone empathize with someone who is different from them? Well, I've felt out of step, like the ugly duckling, marginal, outcast, different, shunned. At some point in our lives each of us has.
A better question, though, is how can you not empathize with someone who's not like you? The Great Commandment is: Love one another. Not love only those who look and think and talk and love exactly like you.
Truth to tell, I don't understand transgender either. I've never had the slightest inclination to dress or walk or talk like a man, much less to try to turn myself into one. But, should I ever meet her, I'll address Caitlyn Jenner according to her wishes, and I hope she'll do the same to me.
"In other words"
No. In the words I used. You extend what I said to a ridiculous conclusion, as if I can't understand how anyone can empathize with someone who is different.
I empathize plenty with all kinds of people from all walks of life.
My point, restated here: "Do you defend those offended? Take up fights for the defenseless?
Well and good. Commendable. True religion is taking care of widows and orphans who lack the ability to fend for themselves. So you fend for them."
"They themselves are quite satisfied with the skin they are in. But they will rush to the defense of someone such as the him/her mentioned above.
Because why?
Why does that person need defenders? Who is attacking that person?
"Well, no one yet, but..."
So pre-emptive defense...which is actually offense.
"Yeah, BUT...the small-hearted bigots who hate minorities and gays and immigrants and 'other' religions...will not be loving and accepting of a her that had been a him. So pre-emptive or not, I'm on the right (left) side!"
Now we are approaching the main point of the post:
"Be careful that some 'leaders' of social and political movements do not raise a cash crop by ginning up your emotions.
Don't allow anyone to make money off of your outrage-many politicians (yep-THEM again!) raise money for their campaigns (call it what it is-the financing of their ego trips) by keeping you angry and mis-informed. Truth may set you free, but lies will open your pocketbook."
Lu, it's not about empathy.
It's about being discerning and not allowing anyone to use/abuse your emotions to advance their agenda. As I asked in the post, "Why do they attack you through your heart? Because your head knows better; if they can inflame your emotions, the heart will override the brain and accept any nonsense they care to advance.
Take care of widows and orphans. Share a cup of water, and look out for the best interests of your neighbor. But don't allow anyone to enslave you to their particular movement through your heart. Protect your emotions. Peace, friend."
Tomorrow is Father's Day and I hope that you have a nice time. I put a bunch of pictures of my Dad up on Facebook, as he went from a kid to a 'seasoned citizen'.
I may link my Facebook identity here on FDW, so if you want to check it out, stop by and we can be 'Facebook friends'. Never too many of those.
Thus writes the man prepared to defend all Republican endeavors and decry all Democratic ones because abortion.
"decry all Democratic ones because abortion."
Tell me true, Lu-is abortion murder?
We've already established that I do not believe first-trimester abortion is murder, and you do. The question is why you believe it. Time was when Republicans weren't automatically pro-life, and Protestants thought a pro-life stance was a quaint Catholic notion. So if you sincerely believe it because that's what your conscience tells you, fine; but if you believe it because some wingnut told you to, you're being manipulated.
(Notice that even when Republicans hold all the levers of power Roe v. Wade doesn't get struck down. It's too useful a rallying cry and fundraising tool.)
"The question is why you believe it."
Actually, it was a book by a Catholic Priest called "The Silent Holocaust" that changed my mind about Abortion-I read that over 30 years ago.
I can't understand why 'when an event happens on a timeline' changes the event from non-murder to murder.
Why should the first-trimester vs the second change anything?
How can something be murder in the fourth month but not murder in the third? That makes no sense to me.
It isn't as if there is no life to be extinguished in the third month-if there is life, at any point on the timeline...it is life. So to take that life is murder.
I think you will agree, Lu, that barring any accident, if an abortion is not committed, then eventually a person is born.
That is why I am against abortion.
And now I go to work. Looking forward to the 27th. Have a good day, Lu.
Ah, you caught me. The last time we went around this mulberry bush I argued not from the personhood of the unborn entity but from the woman's right to bodily autonomy. You will recall that we agreed that if my child, an already born, living, breathing, indisputable human being, needed material from my body to survive, I wouldn't be morally required to give it; I argued that I am likewise not required to surrender my bodily autonomy to an unborn entity inside me. (I'm using myself as an example here, even though I am long past any possibility of pregnancy.)
Now, if a woman's right to bodily autonomy trumps her unborn entity's right to life, you are entirely correct that, logically, it doesn't matter what trimester it is. So why did I say "first trimester"? Well, because I'm not quite so staunch a supporter of abortion rights as you think. The farther along the pregnancy gets, the stronger the unborn entity's rights get, imho. So I favor free and easy access to first-trimester abortion and restrictions thereafter. (If I spelled this out to a feminist, by the way, I'd probably be deemed not a feminist.) That's the way it is in a number of European countries, and that's the way I think it should be here. It's not logical, but it's where my conscience lands. And, by the way, birth control should be about as hard to get as McDonald's happy meals.
Why do I keep saying unborn entity instead of embryo or fetus or baby? Because the medical term is different depending on how far along the pregnancy is.
All of that said, the fact is that the unborn entity is manifestly not a person at one end -- how can a single cell or a ball of cells smaller than a pinhead be a person? -- and manifestly a person at the other. Somewhere in the middle a switch occurs. Saying it's always a person simplifies the argument, but reality isn't always simple.
About "barring any accident": if every zygote is morally the same as a person, every miscarriage is potentially a case of criminal negligence, manslaughter, or murder. Would you favor a police investigation into every one? Would you require every sexually active woman of childbearing age to take a pregnancy test every month, to make sure no suspiciously late period slipped by unnoticed? Would you require every woman to notify the authorities when she became sexually active?
It's simpler than you will accept, Lu:" Because the medical term is different depending on how far along the pregnancy is."
It's not about a legal defi of when Life begins, nor does a medical term change the fact that it is, indeed, a life which will be either allowed to survive or aborted.
"All of that said, the fact is that the unborn entity is manifestly not a person at one end -- how can a single cell or a ball of cells smaller than a pinhead be a person?"
I'm not using this verse to prove personhood, but it is interesting:
"9And, so to speak, through Abraham even Levi, who received tithes, paid tithes,
10for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him."
This is recorded in Genesis 14. Levi was Abraham's great grand son.
"every miscarriage is potentially a case of criminal negligence, manslaughter, or murder. Would you favor a police investigation into every one?" What, are you studying Zeno? Intent makes all of the difference, legally and naturally. Every miscarriage which is unplanned,which is not the result of someone's actions is a tragedy, but not murder.
But every potential mother who aborts, whether it is a mass of cells, or a eighth month baby...that potential mother is guilty of murder. That is just about the harshest statement that I have ever written. I wish that it weren't true.
I have had friends who have had abortions. It's not demagoguery for me. The Republican party, what's left of it, is trying so hard to 'go left' that they have left me behind. Ten years from now the Repubs may be proclaiming Abortion as a civil right. To get elected.
"Would you require every sexually active woman of childbearing age to take a pregnancy test every month, to make sure no suspiciously late period slipped by unnoticed? Would you require every woman to notify the authorities when she became sexually active?"
You're being ridiculous, Lu, and you know it. I can imagine such intrusion into the personal lives of people only under Democrats-I don't know if it is true, but one scrap of gossip going around is that President Obama has set the number crunchers to work, parsing every community by race. If a community isn't racially mixed, if it is too 'white'...high taxes burdens to redistribute wealth to 'others'.
Sounds like a paranoid fantasy but, you know, everything gets crazy around elections.
Right now I assume that Trump and Hilclinton are out there beating the drums, hoping to energize the populace so that the eventual candidates will have something to work with.
Neither one has a shot of winning, but as I say that, remember that I am notoriously WRONG about elections. The only one I've gotten right was the no brainer of Kerry/ Edwards failing. And so it goes.
You're being ridiculous, Lu, and you know it.
Well, yeah, that's sort of the point of reductio ad absurdum. And it is pretty easy to see the absurdity of actually treating every zygote as a full-blown human being with full-blown human rights. To be sure that no one-celled human slipped through the cracks, you'd have to severely circumscribe the rights of any woman of childbearing age... oh, wait, that's what you want to do anyway.
Intent makes all of the difference, legally and naturally. Every miscarriage which is unplanned,which is not the result of someone's actions is a tragedy, but not murder.
The police investigate every accidental death, precisely to determine if it's the result of someone's actions, and whether those actions showed reckless disregard for human life. Those actions could be intentional or not. If a driver comes around a corner too fast, slams into a pedestrian, and kills him, that's criminal negligence: a reasonable person should have known that they were going too fast for safety.
Similarly, if a zygote were legally a full-blown human being, a woman who miscarried after going out drinking with friends, or swimming in cold water, or running a marathon, could be held negligent, even if she didn't know she was pregnant, since she should have known she could be, just as that driver should have known a pedestrian could be around the corner.
Intent does matter: if the driver ran the pedestrian down on purpose, that would be murder, as opposed to manslaughter or criminal negligence. But the fact remains that if you really want to treat a zygote as a human being, you have an awful lot of criminals walking around free.
The verse you cite (Hebrews 7:9-10, by the way), is indeed interesting: it implies that the writer believed that all of a person's descendants were contained within his "loins." See this interesting article on preformationism. This notion has been debunked, to put it mildly.
(If you don't like Wikipedia, google preformationism and pick your own.)
One last thing: who are these Republicans who are going left on abortion? The 2012 GOP platform states, "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed." Not a lot of wiggle room there, and I've heard nothing about any intention of changing it. The presidential candidates are divided between "no abortion ever, whatsoever, end of story" and "no abortion except to save the mother's life, end of story." If I recall correctly you are in the first camp, but from where I (and the vast majority of the country) sit, either position is pretty extreme.
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