If not, then are you OK with millions of partially developed human beings existing in a sort of unconscious limbo for all eternity? If not, what should happen? — EricH

There a difference between keeping someone alive and killing them, just as there is a difference between murdering someone and killing someone who is attacking on high on acid

I'm not going to respond to you on this because there were other ways to respond to what I initially said instead of saying you'd be happy to perform an abortion. Since you're a Nazi I'm not going to reason with you because it's my reason connected with ethical sense vs your reason connected to evil. There no real way to have a discussion with you even though your arguments are the same as others. It's just about the best way to deal with you

I'll add this tonight:

Imagine you watched a nature show where a female bear violently hits her side against a tree to kill her cub inside her. You would feel your soul (you could feel that anywhere in the body I suppose) recoil in shock from it. Yet it's ok for humans to do it?

I don't think women are really pro-choice. A man can make up his mind about that anytime in his life but a woman really becomes pro-choice in her pregnancies (or pro-family). She does so by regarding the fetus as an extension of her sexual organs which is why they say "my body my right" even though it's not her body but her offspring that's at issue. She say's "my freedom for my sexual/reproductive liberation" without regard for whether her offspring may have that right too in seed form

Pro-choice arguments are all

1) low IQ arguments, as "pro-choice" indicates

2) an appeal to emotion, as the title "pro-choice", again, indicates

3) a pride filled attempt to make an arbitrary limit on who should lived based on a desire for maximal liberty to do what "I me mine wants!!"

Teenagers should learn morals instead of being taught its OK to kill their offspring. An abortion would ruin her life more

German idealists are different in some respects from each other, but there is a reason the four greats of that tradition are of one school in the eyes of academia. They pounded their tables in rhythm as they forced themselves to view the bland world of matter in novel ways

Fitche, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer all held the same philosophy after you put unnecessary details away. They are materialists and turn their mind to idealist psychology and *will* over the brute reality, although they could not deny that their life was purely biological. It is good to insist on a soul and all the idealist stuff is fascinating in its own way. The only trust idealists thinkers are people like Berkeley who came from a truly religious perspective. I imagine Hegel was happier than materialista who were more blunt ( "honest") who rejected him as con act. If you like, you could say he had more faith.

Lastly, Kant was a little different. He seemed to have a mind like Descartes but more into logic than math and incapable of finding a logic to believe in the way Descartes did.

I'm a materialist and I feel exactly like when I was a Catholic

My point was that how religious people think materialism must be like is kinda a myth. Materialists and religious people usually experience life the same. They just don't *like*how each other verbalize their "beliefs"

If they are not already dead then duh you don't kill them. Science is not blurry when life is, both at the beginning and end. It's people who say "not enough life there for me to respect" when they obviously don't have the right to say that. They have the civil right to express their opinions but they have the need to feel their souls on this issue. They make the matter fuzzy when its really clear. Watch pro-choice peoples' *faces* when they discuss the issue. Guilt micro and macro expressions all over the place. Being pro-choice is not going to make your life better. It hinders understanding of your own soul

You said Socrates wasn't an atheist because he believed in immortality. Yet you like Buddhism? Western religious people don't really understand was atheism means from what I can tell

Pro-choice people shut down their conscience and think of the issue with reason disconnected to conscience. What right have they to arbitrarily say where life begins?

The obvious answer is you respect it all

Morning after pill is obviously abortion. People have reasons for defending abortion and these reasons blur their reasoning. Just as people justified enslaving Native Americans, people do worse than enslave the unborn. A woman has the duty and right to be a mother once pregnant and can't say she can kill her child because it infringes on her freedom. Are we to say a pregnant women is biologically different and so she has no right to life?

It's pretty obvious what human life is unless you are trying to justify abortion

The basic premise of pro-life belief is that we follow common sense and respect all human life. It's not about philosophy. People used philosophy to justify slavery, killing Jews, and some philosophy some day may say anyone over 60 is no longer human. The mind can believe anything. The truth is about common sense and honouring life. That's all I'm gonna say. No more is needed

I'm not going to argue philosophy with a doodoo elderly Nazi

That's gross. I'm not a Christian btw. Christianity is pro-abortion because God in their system can command abortion and so maybe does

I'm an atheist who believes in morality

You have no proof a fetus isn't as sentient as you

We are to treat others as we would be treated. Would you have aborted yourself?

Scum of the earth..

Abortion doctors should all literally be crucified. If you wouldn't actually kill a fetus yourself you shouldn't be supporting it

Yes I believe the universe is limitless potentiality with an eternal actual element that has always existed and moves by the laws of physics. Potentiality makes every day new

I made a specific point about Aristotle: that "cause" and "reason" are not *necessarily* related. I thought it was connected to what you were saying, but you don't seem to ever say anything specific, so I'll go read and do something else tonight

Maritain was a modern student of Aquinas whom more than all Catholics worshipped the sun. Aquinas relentlessly talked about natural light and color, and in his most famous portrait he wears a symbol of the sun God. When Popes took the place of Roman Emporers in the West they brought Roman sun worship with them.

Maritain wasn't spiritual

There is no way to prove purpose in Nature fom science so if natural explanations work for someone then you can't reasonably talk of "reasons" for Nature with him. I believe in Kant and Hegel's philosophies, which are very intricate or at least specific. I understand how science makes sense of the universe on it's own terms and i work with philosophy on top of that foundation. This dialectic reveals subjective truth and is the best psychology ive come across (regular psychology books i dont really get).

But trying to force "cause" and "reason for something" into a single idea is a sophistry and that's why I pointed this out

The ends of life are interior but you mention Aristotle who put ends in everything and who is always incoherent.

I'm emphasizing that not everyone expresses their inner experience the same. So the ends of one person may seem different from someone else. We don't really know how others experience life. But the material ends in nature do not point to a reason in nature that is discernable. Fatalism has causes without reasons, for example, because those are different concepts

Aquinas's arguments are grounded (unfounded) in a very specific ontology. There can't be two "Pure Acts" he says, even though they CAN be distinguished by their individuality (it seems to me). This is an example again him uniting arguments with a desire for a meaning in life, although God and such might not have anything to do with a meaning of life. He argues that God is infinite because God has no "potentiality" although he doesn't prove that this follows or that God has no potentiality at all. He makes leaps of logic in every step of every argument he makes and but Thomists can't see there are other ways of doing philosophy that are perfectly valid

I got the reference but my point was that scientists who study Aristotle do worse in science than those who purposely reject it

I'm saying that life doesn't has to be seen as predetermined by a Final Causality that permeates everything. You don't seem to disagree

Kant's hard to understand correctly, but Aquinas thinks it's self evident that material things are contingent and something necessary is needed and it must be spiritual and unextended

Points are always tricky things. They are dimentionless but not nothing

I guess I'll add that Aquinas held the idea of simplicity vs corporality very close to his heart. Without this distinction his arguments fails. If you accept spiritual simplicity (no parts plus life or no parts equal life) then he goes on with a further assumption that causality must be thought alongside "reason for" in the same thinking moment. So he assumes an infinite past series of finite causes is unsatisfactory because it explains how but not why and his assumption is that why and how must be thought of together. His next step is that God must be the reason and cause of the series but his arguments for what God is become weaker as his arguments enfolds from there.

Leibniz invented calculus and seemed to say objects have infinite parts (monads). He argued for God using the ontological arguments, which was best expressed by Descartes actually. Keep thinking critically, Greg

There is no "final cause" because the end of the universe hasn't happened. Ends are within the framework of an eternal set of effects with the latter caused by the one before. There is no reason for a rock except in the reason we perceive it with

The fact the "ideas of physics" are not the same as "ideas of biology and chemistry " means we cannot reduce the latter to the former. Ideas are the only way we understand things

Many scientific ways of thinking about it

That's looking at one aspect life when there are infinite ways of seeing it

No, the Aristotelian error is thinking of cause and reason in the same line of thought

The cause of the universe is the infinite series of physical effects. That might not have a relationship to a reason for the universe

Physicists have to think in lots of novel, unintuitive ways to come up with breakthru ideas. Aristotle thinks unintuitive thinking is by definition wrong thinking and he is at fault there. As for compressed strings, I've routinely heard from physics videos that compression increases mass and that we can measure that, but I don't want to derail your thread