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[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by Bababooyee

The rest of your post is not worth responding to. I thought we were having a calm, rational discussion. Clearly, I was mistaken.

i'm sorry you feel that way, i thought we were still having one.

i feel that the portion regarding forcing a woman to carry her rapist's baby to term and the psychological trauma that could ensue was compeltely legitimate. it seems to lay a hierarchy to human life if we are to assume that conception equals life in this situation for the sake of argument.

and obviously i was being ridiculous and irrational in my example of bacteria evolving into humans. however, it cuts to the very root of our conversation. you say that since i cannot be SURE that life does not start at conception, that we should err on the side of caution and not have abortions. i say that if we cannot be SURE that bacteria is not the next step in human evolution, then we should err on the side of caution and not kill it.

it seems like perfectly sound logic....don't get tripped up by the ridiculous and impossible hypothetical i used to illustrate that.

[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by Bababooyee

Fair enough. I thought I pissed you off as your post seemed to veer off into emotional/irrational rant!




It still doesn't seem that you are fully appreciating the pro-life stance, and I could argue the same thing in reverse.



It may seem to be perfectly sound logic, but it isn't. Either I am not conveying myself well or you are not trying to grasp it... I've laid out the general science and basic argument above. Basically, bacteria != a zygote (with all the attributes listed above).

i think i have a fine grasp of it, but i may be wrong, and i'm very willing to try to figure it out.

the thing you confused me on there is the very end, the bacteria = zygote. if that is true in the examples we are using, then why the uproar about the zygote while lowly bacteria gets killed with no forethought?

if i'm missing something you're getting at, i'm sorry we're not clicking in the words we're using. i DO understand the general pro-life stance and most of what you've been saying, but have not understood where we're misfiring back and forth

[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by Bababooyee

I used ":=" which is geek-speak for "does not equal". You're a musician and not a geek, so that is my bad. lol

oh ok! then THAT is what i am not understanding at all. potential is potential is potential.

alive is alive.

so how do we insist on saving one and not the other when we cannot gaurantee that the other is not potential for human life?

maybe you've explained that a dozen times already and i just havent understood where you've explained that,

[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by Bababooyee

Well, I am arguing that a zygote is a human life with potential. IOW, it is a human at a specific stage of normal human development. Just as, for example, a toddler is a human at a specific stage of development and has the potential to develop into the next stage (eg an adolecent-->teen-->adult-->senior citizen) under certain (and generally "normal") circumstances. This is manifestly different than a "potential life". IOW, a zygote is a human being (with potential to develop into the next stage) and bacteria is bacteria (not a human at all).

ok, i understand that argument perfectly now. this, however, illustrates that from the get-go we are not even approaching this from the same place -- so the discussion was at a standstill from the very first post.

i don't believe that a zygote is a human at a specific stage, and i don't think that the comparison to toddler-stage humans really works. though i DO see how this argument can be made and why it is compelling.

i just don't believe that to be true. it's the age old question of when it becomes a human being. i can't give you an exact answer, but i tend to gravitate towards when it can survive outside of the mother's womb.

glad it took me over an hour to understand you, killed some great time at work