They happen to align with my values. I was raised Christian, and I only became agnostic in college, so that probably plays into it.
For example, abortion, I think murder is abohherent, baby murder especially so. I don’t know when the right to life begins, so I err on the side of caution, at the earliest point, at conception.
Im not anti-lgbtq.
I dont hold contempt for atheism, I dont like /r/atheism
Christian nationalism is weird one because no one seems to know what that actually means. And hell, freedom of religion is one of the most important rights, right next to free speech.
You can equate the two, but they’re not functionally the same in reality. There is statistical evidence that banning abortion does not work and in fact has the opposite effect, so swapping the words makes no sense. A better comparison would be Prohibition in the US in the 1920s - banning alcohol didn’t stop the production or use of it, it just made it exceedingly dangerous, lots of people got sick, went blind, and died from homemade liquor that contained too much methanol.
If you truly care about the life of the child at conception and after its birth, you’d choose the option where there is never an unwanted or accidental pregnancy. Most unwanted pregnancies result in children suffering abuse, entering the foster system, and eventually aging out without ever having a permanent or stable family. Many of these kids live a life where they’ve NEVER been loved.
There are nearly 400,000 children in the foster system in the US right now and the number grows every day. There’s no one to adopt these babies. Forcing women to have children does not work. No child should ever be unwanted, every child deserves loving parents. This is the world that abortion bans create.
Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody likes or wants women to have abortions, especially the women getting the procedure…it is NOT pleasant. Pro-choice supporters would be thrilled if there’s never another abortion again, as long there were no unwanted pregnancies.
The best,statistically provenmethod to prevent abortions is education and easy access to contraception. Full stop.
The point behind this is that your argument boils down to essentially “people still break laws, so why have laws?” That is a poor argument that isn’t going to convince anybody who believes that abortion is murder. Particularly if you are saying that the “murderers” in this case are just putting themselves at risk.
I say this as someone who agrees with you, that the best way reduce the number of abortions is to provide better sex education and access to birth control.
My mother has been an anti abortion activist for as long as I can remember, so I’m familiar with the thought process.
We have laws that regulate abortion, alcohol, etc already. I said nothing about “why have laws?” in any part of my argument. I said banning abortion will not reduce abortions, much less stop them. That statement is a proven fact.
You and others seem to be applying my belief that abortion should not be illegal to all other laws, which is not the case. That is my opinion on a singular issue. I never stated nor implied other laws shouldn’t exist.
When a person sees abortion as murder, the view of abortion laws is the same as those of murder. If you say “making murder illegal doesn’t reduce the number of murders” anyone with any sort of a moral center will say “I don’t care, murder should still be illegal.” And that’s the perspective will not be changed no matter what the murder rates are. That’s how the argument gets reduced to “Why have laws?” To them, it’s basically saying “It doesn’t help enough, so why even draw that line at all?”
That said, let’s look at your proven fact for a moment. I don’t believe the data will help, because when you narrow the focus to the US, and look at reaction to legal changes, you see a very clear drastic rise in abortions in the 70’s, which didn’t begin to fall until the 90’s, and it fell at a much slower rate, and is still higher than it was in the 70s. ( source )
Which makes logical sense, if you increase access to the service, of course more people will be able to use it. At the same time, since Roe vs. Wade was repealed, there have already been multiple news stories showing that the strict abortion laws did prevent some (often medically necessary life-saving) abortions.
You may say these numbers aren’t statistically significant, but to a person who sees abortion as murder, preventing even one is better than not preventing it.
Anyway, all of this misses the major point of the abortion rights side to begin with. Which is that sometimes abortions are medically necessary and that should be between you and your doctor to decide when that is.
I want to say that the most effective argument is to show just how drastically the abortion rates fell in the areas where they increased access to birth control and sex education. However, when I showed my mother, she responded with a Youtube video that tells me how Planned Parenthood eats babies.
You’re missing the point. If you conflate abortion and murder, you’re either being willfully ignorant or exceedingly simple. Just because some people equate two things, doesn’t make them the same in reality. Whether you like it or not they are different, and applying the same standards to them makes no sense.
Your argument is like saying “Advil and heroin are both pain relieving drugs, so the law should apply equally.” They are not the same, and we should not treat them the same, even if some people mistakenly equate them.
I completely agree. This is a much better argument to make. For example, I generally concede that abortion = killing, but not murder. In the same way that killing a person is justified (for example, self-defense applies here), sometimes it’s justified to have an abortion, even if that is killing a baby. And because it involves such personal, sometimes traumatic territory, that should be between you and your doctor only.
But that’s a different argument than what you began with.
More like banning any medical procedures during pregnancy will force people to get then somewhere else.
Also killing someone who is using our body without your consent is self defense.
Aborting a non viable pregnancy isn’t and never will be murder. In fact, stopping women with non-viable pregnancies from getting an abortion often can be murder itself. Therefore abortion != murder
I’m on team “glad you responded” but I still wanna respond to 2 things you said.
First, a lot of anti-abortion people want the abortion conversation to end at “this is murder”, but how do you address the bodily autonomy argument? Even if I accept any and all abortions as the full death of a complete person, why are women compelled to donate their bodies to save another person? I don’t support forced organ donations to save lives, and by that logic I also do not support forced pregnancies. Any opinion on that perspective?
Christian nationalism isn’t complicated in what it is, it is just the desire/push/beliefs from the people that want a nation with an explicitly christian government, a christian theocracy. If it completely took over everything, freedom of religion would be dead, everything would be christian. To try and rephrase it bluntly, Christian nationalism is the desire for and work towards a Christian nation. Some people take it seriously, some people don’t, some people outright support it, others deny it even is a real concept.
Edit to add: if you aren’t anti-lgbtq, will you call your representatives that you vote for and emphatically tell them so? The difference in opinions between conservatives and their politicians about lgbtq is something I hear from most conservatives I’ve talked to, but it makes me sad to see they don’t really care beyond saying “I’m not anti-lgbtq”. If you vote for an anti-lgbtq politician because of other policies they support, please at least tell them you don’t agree with their anti-lgbtq stance. It is literally the least amount of help I can think of to ask for.
I’m anti abortion once the fetus is viable. Prior to that point, a woman is refusing to let someone else use her body to survive, and while there are personal moral questions there, I think she should have the right to make that call. After that point, she’s attempting to kill someone else to avoid the suffering that a birth would entail.
I still support her right to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, I just don’t support abortion as the method.
I’m aware that late term abortions are so vanishingly rare that this is a pointless hair-splitting exercise, but I like to have a consistent moral system as much as I can, whether it’s currently relevant or not, and I thought someone might appreciate my .02.
In my mind, so long as lgbtq people have both free speech and the right to bear arms, the rest of their rights will come. See: The marches and protests that lead to gay marriage. Those two rights come before everything else, and support everything else.
Kudos for sharing. Feel free to ignore those who challenge your values. It takes a bunches of mental energy to argue and it isn’t necessarily worth it to argue.
With that said, I will still would like to ask you a question, if you are up for it.
How did you form your values?
I only ask because it is easy, when you are raised as Christian, to uncritically accept the teaching, values, and views of those around you as your own.
As kids we are conditioned through school, parents, and in general just information asymmetry to accept what adults say as fact and not question it. It is easy to carry that same tendency over into our values and viewpoints. Kids and adults have a hard time separating fact from opinion. We tend to treat widely held beliefs as fact instead of as the opinions they actually are.
Pro guns, all sorts of historical precedent, from the US in Iraq, to Roof Koreans, to the French Resistance, to Australia. (This is honestly my strongest belief, guns and free speech)
Free speech, how can you speak up if you can’t speak?
I understand your justification for your beliefs and even share some of your moral beliefs. It seems to me like you didn’t really answer in the way I meant to communicate it. I’ll try to rephrase my original question to what I mean clearer. What causes you to rank your own values in the way you do?
Why do you think access to guns is more important than your beliefs on abortion? Or why are they more important than not getting overcharged on everything from housing to education to healthcare?
TLDR: Without guns and speech, you have no rights, and I have historical evidence to back me up. But also they’re pre-crime laws.
Simply put, the right to bear arms protects every other right. But before you grab the ammo box, you supposed to actually say something. Protest, make yourself heard. Free speech and guns go hand in hand in my mind.
For guns specifically, guns protect rights I can point to any number of historical precedents. Even in America, gun control basically started as a way to disarm black people, and it’s still trying to keep poor people from arming themselves, and look how minorities are treated. In Nazi Germany, one of the first things they did was disarm the Jewish people. On a lighter note, Australia disarmed, and now they banned hentai. You can’t make this shit up
Guns are powerful tools, poverty stricken farmers in the middle east held off the most powerful military in the world for decades, whether or not you agree with them. The IRA successfully kept most of Ireland independent from the UK with guns. The French Resistance wouldn’t have been able to do anything without guns. Hell, the Roof Koreans wouldn’t have saved their stores without guns.
I can come up with more, but I think you get the point.
It’s a similar situation with free speech. Tons of historical precedents. Martin Luther King marching for example. (I came up with a ton of examples, but I realized just how long it was)
In any case, gun control and hate speech laws are pre-crime laws. What’s the actual issue? Murder, assault, robbery, that sort of thing. Simply owning and saying shit isn’t hurting anyone by itself. Murder should be against the law, not having a gun and not outing yourself as a bigot. It’s pre-crime, not actual crime.
Being a fetus doesn’t excuse a foreign body’s presence inside of mine. I do not intend to be pregnant and if my partner’s sperm invades my body when I do not want it I will take every step to eliminate it or the process that follows it. A fetus isn’t important. If anything forcing someone to exist is the utmost violation of bodily autonomy. As they say, just because something is natural doesn’t make it good.
They happen to align with my values. I was raised Christian, and I only became agnostic in college, so that probably plays into it.
For example, abortion, I think murder is abohherent, baby murder especially so. I don’t know when the right to life begins, so I err on the side of caution, at the earliest point, at conception.
Im not anti-lgbtq.
I dont hold contempt for atheism, I dont like /r/atheism
Christian nationalism is weird one because no one seems to know what that actually means. And hell, freedom of religion is one of the most important rights, right next to free speech.
I hope that helps.
Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion, it just shifts it to a black market where women are far more likely to die.
What does demonstrably reduce abortion to effectively insignificant levels is better sex education and easy access to contraceptives.
Prohibition has never worked. Education always has.
Let’s replace some words. I think that abortion is murder. So it becomes:
“Banning murder doesn’t stop murder”
Do you see the point I’m trying to make?
You can equate the two, but they’re not functionally the same in reality. There is statistical evidence that banning abortion does not work and in fact has the opposite effect, so swapping the words makes no sense. A better comparison would be Prohibition in the US in the 1920s - banning alcohol didn’t stop the production or use of it, it just made it exceedingly dangerous, lots of people got sick, went blind, and died from homemade liquor that contained too much methanol.
If you truly care about the life of the child at conception and after its birth, you’d choose the option where there is never an unwanted or accidental pregnancy. Most unwanted pregnancies result in children suffering abuse, entering the foster system, and eventually aging out without ever having a permanent or stable family. Many of these kids live a life where they’ve NEVER been loved.
There are nearly 400,000 children in the foster system in the US right now and the number grows every day. There’s no one to adopt these babies. Forcing women to have children does not work. No child should ever be unwanted, every child deserves loving parents. This is the world that abortion bans create.
Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody likes or wants women to have abortions, especially the women getting the procedure…it is NOT pleasant. Pro-choice supporters would be thrilled if there’s never another abortion again, as long there were no unwanted pregnancies.
The best, statistically proven method to prevent abortions is education and easy access to contraception. Full stop.
The point behind this is that your argument boils down to essentially “people still break laws, so why have laws?” That is a poor argument that isn’t going to convince anybody who believes that abortion is murder. Particularly if you are saying that the “murderers” in this case are just putting themselves at risk.
I say this as someone who agrees with you, that the best way reduce the number of abortions is to provide better sex education and access to birth control.
My mother has been an anti abortion activist for as long as I can remember, so I’m familiar with the thought process.
We have laws that regulate abortion, alcohol, etc already. I said nothing about “why have laws?” in any part of my argument. I said banning abortion will not reduce abortions, much less stop them. That statement is a proven fact.
You and others seem to be applying my belief that abortion should not be illegal to all other laws, which is not the case. That is my opinion on a singular issue. I never stated nor implied other laws shouldn’t exist.
You’re still missing the point.
When a person sees abortion as murder, the view of abortion laws is the same as those of murder. If you say “making murder illegal doesn’t reduce the number of murders” anyone with any sort of a moral center will say “I don’t care, murder should still be illegal.” And that’s the perspective will not be changed no matter what the murder rates are. That’s how the argument gets reduced to “Why have laws?” To them, it’s basically saying “It doesn’t help enough, so why even draw that line at all?”
That said, let’s look at your proven fact for a moment. I don’t believe the data will help, because when you narrow the focus to the US, and look at reaction to legal changes, you see a very clear drastic rise in abortions in the 70’s, which didn’t begin to fall until the 90’s, and it fell at a much slower rate, and is still higher than it was in the 70s. ( source )
Which makes logical sense, if you increase access to the service, of course more people will be able to use it. At the same time, since Roe vs. Wade was repealed, there have already been multiple news stories showing that the strict abortion laws did prevent some (often medically necessary life-saving) abortions.
You may say these numbers aren’t statistically significant, but to a person who sees abortion as murder, preventing even one is better than not preventing it.
Anyway, all of this misses the major point of the abortion rights side to begin with. Which is that sometimes abortions are medically necessary and that should be between you and your doctor to decide when that is.
I want to say that the most effective argument is to show just how drastically the abortion rates fell in the areas where they increased access to birth control and sex education. However, when I showed my mother, she responded with a Youtube video that tells me how Planned Parenthood eats babies.
You’re missing the point. If you conflate abortion and murder, you’re either being willfully ignorant or exceedingly simple. Just because some people equate two things, doesn’t make them the same in reality. Whether you like it or not they are different, and applying the same standards to them makes no sense.
Your argument is like saying “Advil and heroin are both pain relieving drugs, so the law should apply equally.” They are not the same, and we should not treat them the same, even if some people mistakenly equate them.
I completely agree. This is a much better argument to make. For example, I generally concede that abortion = killing, but not murder. In the same way that killing a person is justified (for example, self-defense applies here), sometimes it’s justified to have an abortion, even if that is killing a baby. And because it involves such personal, sometimes traumatic territory, that should be between you and your doctor only.
But that’s a different argument than what you began with.
More like banning any medical procedures during pregnancy will force people to get then somewhere else. Also killing someone who is using our body without your consent is self defense.
Aborting a non viable pregnancy isn’t and never will be murder. In fact, stopping women with non-viable pregnancies from getting an abortion often can be murder itself. Therefore abortion != murder
Thank you for your response.
I’m on team “glad you responded” but I still wanna respond to 2 things you said.
First, a lot of anti-abortion people want the abortion conversation to end at “this is murder”, but how do you address the bodily autonomy argument? Even if I accept any and all abortions as the full death of a complete person, why are women compelled to donate their bodies to save another person? I don’t support forced organ donations to save lives, and by that logic I also do not support forced pregnancies. Any opinion on that perspective?
Christian nationalism isn’t complicated in what it is, it is just the desire/push/beliefs from the people that want a nation with an explicitly christian government, a christian theocracy. If it completely took over everything, freedom of religion would be dead, everything would be christian. To try and rephrase it bluntly, Christian nationalism is the desire for and work towards a Christian nation. Some people take it seriously, some people don’t, some people outright support it, others deny it even is a real concept.
Edit to add: if you aren’t anti-lgbtq, will you call your representatives that you vote for and emphatically tell them so? The difference in opinions between conservatives and their politicians about lgbtq is something I hear from most conservatives I’ve talked to, but it makes me sad to see they don’t really care beyond saying “I’m not anti-lgbtq”. If you vote for an anti-lgbtq politician because of other policies they support, please at least tell them you don’t agree with their anti-lgbtq stance. It is literally the least amount of help I can think of to ask for.
I’m anti abortion once the fetus is viable. Prior to that point, a woman is refusing to let someone else use her body to survive, and while there are personal moral questions there, I think she should have the right to make that call. After that point, she’s attempting to kill someone else to avoid the suffering that a birth would entail.
I still support her right to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, I just don’t support abortion as the method.
I’m aware that late term abortions are so vanishingly rare that this is a pointless hair-splitting exercise, but I like to have a consistent moral system as much as I can, whether it’s currently relevant or not, and I thought someone might appreciate my .02.
If you had been aborted once viable you wouldn’t have neither cared or known.
If someone shoots me in the head while I’m sleeping I wouldn’t care or know either.
In my mind, so long as lgbtq people have both free speech and the right to bear arms, the rest of their rights will come. See: The marches and protests that lead to gay marriage. Those two rights come before everything else, and support everything else.
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Murder is wrong. There’s some argument to make for self-defense, but tbh I haven’t heard that argument made well.
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Unborn babies are human too.
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Murder of a consciousness is abhorent, but that doesn’t really happen. So are you also against pulling the plug on the brain dead?
Why do you consider conception as the earliest point? What about at arousal? 😜
https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk
Kudos for sharing. Feel free to ignore those who challenge your values. It takes a bunches of mental energy to argue and it isn’t necessarily worth it to argue.
With that said, I will still would like to ask you a question, if you are up for it.
How did you form your values?
I only ask because it is easy, when you are raised as Christian, to uncritically accept the teaching, values, and views of those around you as your own.
As kids we are conditioned through school, parents, and in general just information asymmetry to accept what adults say as fact and not question it. It is easy to carry that same tendency over into our values and viewpoints. Kids and adults have a hard time separating fact from opinion. We tend to treat widely held beliefs as fact instead of as the opinions they actually are.
Well, abortion is basically a modified pascal’s wager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal’s_wager
Pro guns, all sorts of historical precedent, from the US in Iraq, to Roof Koreans, to the French Resistance, to Australia. (This is honestly my strongest belief, guns and free speech)
Free speech, how can you speak up if you can’t speak?
I understand your justification for your beliefs and even share some of your moral beliefs. It seems to me like you didn’t really answer in the way I meant to communicate it. I’ll try to rephrase my original question to what I mean clearer. What causes you to rank your own values in the way you do?
Why do you think access to guns is more important than your beliefs on abortion? Or why are they more important than not getting overcharged on everything from housing to education to healthcare?
TLDR: Without guns and speech, you have no rights, and I have historical evidence to back me up. But also they’re pre-crime laws.
Simply put, the right to bear arms protects every other right. But before you grab the ammo box, you supposed to actually say something. Protest, make yourself heard. Free speech and guns go hand in hand in my mind.
For guns specifically, guns protect rights I can point to any number of historical precedents. Even in America, gun control basically started as a way to disarm black people, and it’s still trying to keep poor people from arming themselves, and look how minorities are treated. In Nazi Germany, one of the first things they did was disarm the Jewish people. On a lighter note, Australia disarmed, and now they banned hentai. You can’t make this shit up
Guns are powerful tools, poverty stricken farmers in the middle east held off the most powerful military in the world for decades, whether or not you agree with them. The IRA successfully kept most of Ireland independent from the UK with guns. The French Resistance wouldn’t have been able to do anything without guns. Hell, the Roof Koreans wouldn’t have saved their stores without guns.
I can come up with more, but I think you get the point.
It’s a similar situation with free speech. Tons of historical precedents. Martin Luther King marching for example. (I came up with a ton of examples, but I realized just how long it was)
In any case, gun control and hate speech laws are pre-crime laws. What’s the actual issue? Murder, assault, robbery, that sort of thing. Simply owning and saying shit isn’t hurting anyone by itself. Murder should be against the law, not having a gun and not outing yourself as a bigot. It’s pre-crime, not actual crime.
Being a fetus doesn’t excuse a foreign body’s presence inside of mine. I do not intend to be pregnant and if my partner’s sperm invades my body when I do not want it I will take every step to eliminate it or the process that follows it. A fetus isn’t important. If anything forcing someone to exist is the utmost violation of bodily autonomy. As they say, just because something is natural doesn’t make it good.