You can quibble about whether stupid motivations imply stupid people until the cows come home, and it will still be an irrelevant hair-splitting diversion.
This is
your value judgement, Wong. It may surprise many people that moral issues became a major crux of this election, but then again, maybe liberals should have realized that
they were also voting on a social platform.
Not when it comes to that subject they can't. They shut off their minds and pray.
People often use religion to develop a sense of moral relativity. I think you’d agree that most of the “good neighbor” dictates of moderate interpretations of religion have positive worth, despite the fact that one can replicate them without necessarily believing in a higher power. In that case, when they vote for Bush, it’s not a matter of prayer at all – but a matter of conscious choice.
I was not aware of these people. So what? Have I ever endorsed such idiocy? No? Then you are appealing to the un-addressed issue as a mere smokescreen.
That’s the problem. Much of the supposed credibility of your criticisms is reliant on the fact that your whining supposedly reflects a broad spectrum of conservatives rather than a mere minority, and yet when challenged with evidence of liberal bias, you charge equivocation and bluster on the part of your opponents. But, if Bush mobilized evangelicals, Kerry and other liberals mobilized their own mindless social voters as well.
Something with no brain, hence no feelings or thoughts, hence no human rights. Duh.
A coma patient is not a human being? Are you suggesting that it isn’t murder if the victim is intellectually barren or brain dead?
You seem to suggesting that it is possible to identify a specific moment at which a developing fetus achieves a point of “sufficient potential,” at which point it begins to have worth as a future member of society.
But what determines that moment of potential? The passage of a few months?
All embryos are
guaranteed to mature to that point if left unharmed. Regardless of whether you think it serves a social purpose, you
are terminating
something with potential when you have an abortion. Because that “something” will eventually be a human being, you are preventing life.
There are many devout people who would argue that you have no right to terminate life once the process of creation has begun.
I am aware of what they believe. I am also aware that it has no validity, and that the vast majority of anti-abortion activists just happen to be religious; a correlation which I seriously doubt to be sheer coincidence.
No, you just
think it has no validity, because you’re drawing an arbitrary line above which you think potential should be deemed too great to kill.
Furthermore, are you saying that if morality is obtained through religion, that it must be flawed? You, who criticize me regularly for claiming an impartiality based on a
rejection of moral value-judgements as a means by which to organize behavior? You certainly seem to advocate injecting
some morality into the public forum through government. Are you saying that that changes if people got their morality from a priest rather than a philosopher?