AZMike

Back to it being a child again.. Since we can not agree on that point, we really are arguing apples and oranges... No brain, no soul, not yet a human.. Sorry..

 

You don't have to apologize to me.

So you'd be okay with banning the abortion of a female once she has a brain? Does her brain have to be fully developed for her to qualify as a human, and if so, when do you think that is?

The brain continues to develop long after birth, by the way.

And if you think she doesn't have a soul yet, at what point do you think God implants that into the developing fetus?

If you happen to be wrong about that guess, do you think He might be a little angry at you supporting killing a female human with a soul?

If you're not completely certain when that event happens, would you agree that the mother's choice to terminate her daughter's life is morally equivalent to firing a rifle blindly through the windows of a house that may, or may not have a person inside?

Ahhh.

 

 

No, what we disagree on is the rights of a women to have control over her own body and her own life..

 

We also disagree on government getting between a women and her doctor :

1) making decisions for the women as proposals that the court or a governor decides each individual case of it an abortion is acceptable to them.

2) forcing the doctor to lie to the women or making it legal for the doctor to lie to women http://www.refinery29.com/2015/04/85242/5-lies-doctors-legally-required-tell-abortion  

3) making mandatory unnecessary procedures (forced ultrasounds, waiting periods between consultation and the procedure)

4) Forced closing of Planned Parenthood clinics with trap laws.

 

I will counter-propose your ridiculous proposal.. YOU get the embryo to answer your question intelligently as an embryo...

So, you feel just the younger females shouldn't have control over their own bodies or their lives? Mom gets to choose if she lives or dies, without her having a say-so in the matter?

But it's all okay if a girl can't yet answer intelligently? How about if she's just 6 months old? Or 1 year?

 

Pro-choice is as Calico states for everyone.. Pro-choice is not about forcing people who want to have a child have an abortion against their will.. Therefore there is no conflict to being pro-choice and supporting women who need a helping hand to keep and raise their children..

 

Does the daughter (or son) get a say in that choice?

I'm having t-shirts printed.  Who's in?

We could probably get Class B T-shirts to make us up some. I'm sure they would be popular.

Honestly, it is called Scouting.  Spending a weekend sleeping out in the wilderness, cooking over a propane stove, seeing boys of all ages get along because they live the Scout Law, observing what happens when there are no electronic devices to play with, watching boys do things they never thought they would do, sitting around a campfire exploring the lost arts of conversation and story telling, noticing the joy of kids playing with fire and knives, seeing how kids with helecopter parents function perfectly fine without them and truly enjoying letting boys be boys. 

Hedgehog is correct.

AZMike, I can't speak for other campuses. But this one still has the most imaginative extremes presenting to whoever decides to attend. They are not heckled. If the students or faculty disagree with it they write rebuttals in the paper. There's too much studying to be done to waste time heckling someone who is going to be forgotten sooner if you don't.

I think you're exagerrating the PC trend.

As for the transgender thing, vaginoplasty has been available for more than a decade. The surgery is fairly well-known and I'm surprised that you're not aware of it.

 

As for fantasy movies predicting the future...wow. I still enjoy going into the stacks and once in a while pulling a Popular Science magazine from the 40s or maybe earlier time..to look at the preposterous predictions we made back then. I have a very long list of profoundly wrong predictions made by smart people [for example, "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here"...right!] and esteemed deliberative bodies, going back about 100 years now. That list is good for great laughs. The point I try to make is that there is almost no one who can predict the behavior of complex systems even as far out as just a few years. A few people may have a lucky guess once in a while but that's all it is, a guess really. I like to remind administrators of this when they try to assemble such nonsense as 5-year plans etc.

 

As far as fear of death goes, anyone who fears death is not having much of a life in the meantime, IMHO.

Not sure which campus you're on and you probably don't want to discuss that on an Internet forum, but yes, I spend time on campuses, and yes, things are getting crazy on some of them. Thankfully. most kids are too level-headed to buy into the Social Justice Warrior nonsense, but I don't think the campus zeitgeist I describe is unusual. You want examples?

I'm not really interested in learning more about "vaginoplasties," Packsaddle. You understand that creating a vagina replica fashioned out of male flesh is not really a vagina, right? Whether female impersonators can reshape their bodies to impersonate a woman's isn't really the issue the protestors raised at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women's college in Massachusetts - their point is that you can be a woman and not have a vagina, or something. And if the "Vagina Monologues" play doesn't recognize this new reality, it can't be presented, according to the new orthodoxy: “At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman...Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.†(http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6202).

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign just commissioned a study of hidden "racial microaggressions," and ways to combat them. You can read the actual findings here: http://www.racialmicroaggressions.illinois.edu/files/2015/03/RMA-Classroom-Report.pdf

According to the study, one can apparently be racist simply by being, if one is a member of a mostly all-white classroom with a minority member in it.

Among their recommendations:

Require all students to complete a General Education requirement about race, White privilege, and inequality in the United States. The Cultural Studies General Education requirement should be changed so that students must take both a non-Western culture and a US people of color cultural course.

Include diversity and inclusion in a third of the curriculum of all college 101 classes.

Develop workshops and training sessions and create brochures about racial microaggressions to help students identify when racial microaggressions are occurring, and to enable them to “nail†the aggressions, thus reduce their reoccurrence. For example, create a slogan or language to be use throughout campus. For example, “Racism Alertâ€, “Watch it! Racismâ€, “That is racially insensitiveâ€, or “That makes me uncomfortable.â€

An engineer would say that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

A realist would say the glass is both half-full and half-empty.

Growing old makes you a stranger in your own country. 

When I saw the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" as a kid when it was first released, that was my blueprint for what I thought the future would be like - clean and shiny (at least the parts we saw - who knows, on earth it may have been more like "A Clockwork Orange"), manned space travel to the planets, and everything printed in Helvetica, the font of the future.

Instead, the year 2001 had a pretty-much dead manned space exploration program, tons of social problems I never would have dreamed of back in the 1960s, my mom died after a long debilitating illness, and maniacs hijacked planes and attacked my country.

Some of the changes were things I expected, like the omnipresence of computers in our lives, but the ways the Internet has affected us is amazing - who foresaw things like sexting, Wikipedia, identity-theft hacking, or sites like Tinder or Ashley Madison that facilitate adultery? As a teen, I had memorized probably 20 or 30 phone numbers that I frequently called - parents, friends, workplace. Nowadays, few people can remember any number beyond their own - we have grown comfortable with storing all those on the (also unforeseen) smart phone we carry in our pocket. The ready access to electronic storage and sources like Wikipedia seems to have stunted the memorization capabilities of the young, as well as everyone else. The access to spell-check like programs have made the ability to profread proorfeed proofread increasingly rare.

The biggest changes, though, seem to have been in social attitudes, as Eamonn suggested. The idea that two men could marry was considered kind of a ludicrous smutty joke when I was growing up in the 1970s. I remember a cartoon in a major magazine that showed two men in a bed with a tuxedo and a wedding dress hung over a chair. One of the men is reading a "marriage manual" and says "Wait a minute...according to this, one of us is supposed to be a woman." That cartoon (which could never be published today) pretty much summed up the idea of gay marriage back then.

The increasing social acceptance of previously unacceptable sexual lifestyles by many members of the Millennial Generation has been coupled with a retrogression in what is considered free speech, which is kind of bizarre. The "Free Speech" movement on campuses in the 1960s is pretty much dead, as speakers are increasingly denied a forum if it is considered hostile to prevailing attitudes among the young, or if it is thought to contain "triggers," "microaggressions," "privilege-based" statements, or anything else that requires retreat to a "safe space" among an increasingly infantilized youth culture. Even speakers who would have been considered on the Far Left are attacked and boycotted by anyone who can achieve a sense of notoriety and approval within their social network circles by claiming offense, who can generate an on-line petition and frighten a school administrator into pulling sanction for the event. Even applause has become considered a "trigger," so "jazz hands" are becoming the approved method of showing approval at campus events. The play "The Vagina Monologues," a play that for decades was considered a campus staple for feminist organizations, has been banned on campuses or censored because it doesn't acknowledge that "some women [i.e., transgenders] don't have vaginas."

Probably every generation feels that the next generation is dropping the ball, and maybe this is nature's way of making the old not fear death so much.

But yeah, one wishes there were more enclaves where one could avoid the craziness of modern culture.  

You might not be aware that the treatment for people with Gender Identity Disorder is to support them in how they view their gender. 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity_disorder

I know. We live in crazy times. If I declared I was an antimacassar, or that I was still 5 years old, I would hope someone would call the men in the white coats and they would try to talk me out of my delusion.

Send it to I&P.

 

Natural Law has nothing, nada, zip, bupkis to do with "moral sexual behavior" and to insinuate that a 9 year old girl trapped in a boy's body is somehow engaged in sexual behavior of any kind simply because she recognizes that she is a girl and not a boy is as immoral as one can get.

If a 9 year old girl is trapped in a boy's body like you say, you'd think she could tear her way out or something.  If that isn't the case and it's just a mental deiusion, like believing one is a chair or a platypus or something, then she deserves psychological treatment.

Hypocrisy on this issue is rampant from the lowest individual to the federal government.

 

Recently seen on FaceBook....

 

 

 

It just depends n who's ox is getting gored on what day and whether or not it's a Thursday.

That clip is a hoot.

We live on the border of Blackfoot and northern Chyenne. We choose Blackfoot. We contacted the nation and had a volunteer help use put together out regalia, showing us ancestral methods for making things. He's now our archery MBC. He was very appreciative that we elected to celebrate his nation by staying authentic. I guess we are lucky to have such a strong tie with our local nation. Well worth the extra work we did to establish the link.

 

Our lodge did NOT go this route. They just created a hodgepodge of regalia.

That sounds like the way to go.

What you are describing regarding Kant was what he referred to as hypothetical imperatives. These he contrasted with moral imperatives, ie categorical imperatives which were certainly NOT conditional.

 

Now we could go round and round regarding kant. But, i think if you did a bit more research into what it means to be absolute, you might find not just kant but other absolutists who do not agree with conditionals...it is these conditionals which make the principle relative. RRegardless I will allow you have the last word so as to let this thread die a natural death.

This thread can't die until we somehow bring homosexuality and atheism into it.  This is the Issues and Politics board, after all. 

You asked for an authority on why absolutes cannot contain conditionals. I provided one. I am not arguing for Kants categocial imperative. I am recognizing that an absolute which contains a conditiobal ceases to be an absolute. Kant, as an moral absolutist would agree. Now, if we both agree that conditional morality is "where its at" and you want to call it "absolute", the pragmatic in me doesnt care as the semantics of calling it absolute or conditional or relative do not change the process of reasoning through an ethical dilemma to include the details of the specific circumstance. If you want to call it "absolute morality with conditions" and someone else wants to call it "moral relativity", I couldnt care less what it is called.

Can imperatives contain conditional statements? Why do you think they Kant?

Sorry.

Kant's notion of a categorical imperative doesn't use the term "conditional" in the same sense that I think you are using it.  To Kant, it is an imperative because it is a command, and one which specifically commands us to use our wills in a particular fashion, not simply to perform some specific action. He uses the term categorical without reference to any ends we might wish to accomplish - i.e., "Give money to the poor and you will go to heaven." or "Give money to the poor and people will think better of you." Such modes of thought, to Kant, would be conditional - "If you do x, then you will achieve y." 

To introduce a conditional statement within an imperative - i.e., "Give money to the poor (unless you know they will use it to buy heroin)"? Kant would have no problem with that mode of expressing a categorical imperative, as not all imperatives can be stated without including a clause. What you are claiming is not the sort of "conditional" he discussed.

I would defer to Immanuel Kant, whom by many is considered a top-notch philosopher. His writings are part of most if not all philosophy courses. His own "categorical imperative" is an example of moral absolutism in which he defined it as unconditional.

The existence of a supposed or defined absolute that does not contain a conditional statement does not limit the existence of absolutes that do contain conditional statements. Just as the existence of a platypus does not deny the possibility of a duck. That is true even under a deontological viewpoint, which can seem to be congruent with a Christian viewpoint, but often isn't.

The hazard of Kant's deontological viewpoint is that by ascribing to a categorical imperative, one often acquires a checkbox mentality - "I have done right by this action, so I am a good person." One risks becoming detached from those people who are affected by your actions - people become things. Instead of people being recognized as inherently of dignity and respect, they become a means to an end, tools towards an abstracted sense of personal righteousness, conduits towards a task to be completed. The recognition of absolutes that do contain conditional statements leads us away from this error.

As one adds a condition, it is no longer an absolute; it becomes conditional. Another problem arises that even if one were to accept the condition, when/how/if that condition has been met becomes another rabbit hole to define. If one attempts to be vague instead, then it leaves the interpretation to others, not exactly an absolute either. One might as well go the full distance of vagueness and just say, "make ethical decisions".

No. Absolutes can include conditional statements. By what authority do you think they cannot?

There are things that I believe with all my heart. Can I prove them? No. Are they facts? No. They are things I take on faith. Can I be wrong? Yes, for I am human and being fallible is part of what it means to be human. But do I believe those things anyway? Yes. That is why it is called "faith". I know the difference between knowing and believing. Do I know God exists? No. Do I believe he exists? Yes. Does that mean I doubt he exists? No. I just know I am believing in something without evidence, that I am taking it on "faith". Does that make me a fool? Maybe, but I don't believe so.

 

Are there moral absolutes? I believe there are. Are what those absolutes are a matter of opinion? Yes. Is it fair to say there are moral facts? No, because facts are not things taken on faith. 2+2=4 is a fact (math jokes aside*). Why? Because of the definitions of 2, 4, addition and subtraction. "Murder is immoral". Is that a fact? No. Do I believe it to be true? With all my heart.

 

* 2+2=5 for moderately large values of 2.

I believed in moral absolutes even when I was an atheist. I just couldn't argue for them as well. 

Then it is not an absolute.There is a reason philosophers have been debating this for millenia. I highly doubt we will find the magic solution. There are problems with moral absolutism, relativism,pluralism, realism, etc... Those much smarter than I couldn't satisfy this. Kant, Plato, Nietzche, etc... In the end, the only thing "I" can do is "do my best" as I travel this world.

 It is a moral absolute that you treat parents who are not moral monsters well. 

I thought that a fact "is" rather than "should" be.

 

I certainly claim no expertise in the special language of morality, should it exist.

I would say that it is a "fact" that specific moral absolutes exist, and that those absolutes order what we "should" do.  

AZ, I am all in with your message except for calling them "facts."  Moral universals, imperatives or absolutes?  Sure. Torturing English is, I think, unnecessary to the message.  

If they are moral imperatives, they are also "facts" if the field of inquiry is morality.

AZ,although all your "facts" contain the word "should" which makes them not absolutes. Secondly, what happens when "should" is replaced with "must" and then someone is faced with the moral dilemma of having to make a decision which must violate one of the "facts" if the situation puts two of the facts at odds with each other? That is the fundamental problem with moral facts, or absolutes is that with more than one, a situation could/will arise in which they contradict. If one trumps another, then the inferior fact is not an absolute.

a) It is a fact that one should do x, y, and z.

b) Give us an example, and we will reason it out.  Abraham was confronted with one such.  

AZ I could see where Duct Tape's moral dilemma would come into place especially with #4

 

 One should honor one's parents and give them respect and obedience.

 

So what happens when you have an abusing parent that hurts you, you have witnesses kill the other parent or another sibling, makes you commit crimes, pimps you out...

It's a two-sided street. Once parents act like that, they abdicate the parental role and need no longer be honored.

Back out of the weeds... and trying to play nice.

 

Here's one word: Exegesis. I think it's a fascinating subject.

 

I've noticed in this thread that examples of moral facts are all things people shouldn't do. That's very un scout like considering we're always trying to encourage scouts to do the right thing rather than punish them for doing the wrong thing. The idea of human dignity is one idea in the Bible (and probably all other religion's basic tenets) that has passed the test of time and been elevated, via exegesis, to the point where it can trump most other rules in the Bible.

 These things that I listed as moral facts are all affirmative duties, not negative:

- Human life is precious and should be preserved. 

- One should honor and respect the Creator and holy things.

- One should help and give to others who are in need.

- One should honor one's parents and give them respect and obedience.

And what happens to that code when social varieties over-ride the moral code established by God?  After all the 12 sons of Jacob (Israel) were from 2 wives and their handmaidens.  Makes a mess out of our modern moral code of today.  Jacob had 13 kids from 2 wives and 2 adulterous affairs according to today's moral code.  

 

If God gave us this code, why is it mankind changes it to fit their agenda?

 

Good thing hypocrisy isn't one of the 10 Commandments.....

If we had to use two words to describe God's shaping of man's morality, it would be "Baby Steps." I suspect He realized that His creations don't do well if the change that is demanded is too drastically different.

God allowed israel, "Out of the hardness of its people's hearts" to have slaves, to have kings, to practice polygamy, etc. - just like all the neighbors they wanted to emulate did. But He forbade many of the things they wanted to emulate (like Canaanite infanticide) and placed restrictions on other practices to moderate them beyond anything their neighbors observed, and gradually brought His chosen people along to a higher state of moral observance (even as they repeatedly erred, were chastened, reformed, then committed the same old mistakes again). By the time of Jesus, the Jews no longer practiced polygamy or slavery. 

This is recurrent theme throughout the Old and New Testaments.

But moral codes are established by societies.  Common laws among like minded individuals.

 

If one doesn't like the code of a certain community, don't move there.  It's kinda like buying a house next to the airport and then complaining about the noise.  Don't blame the world for your stupid choices.

I would say no, the moral code (of which social varieties are just adumbrations) was established by God and placed in us.