Really? Lawyers use pictures all the time to get to a moral decision. Graphic photos of autopsis, injuries, crime scenes, They aren’t shown to illicit emotion, but to show facts. If you look at a picture of a mangled, dead baby you can ascertain many things:
I agree, although I think I have a different understanding of moral feelings and sensitivities. The important difference is that we disagree on where that balance is.
I don’t think it is necessary to argue this. I gave my reasons for participating in the thread.
Mary makes some good points here. I have to add, being the son of a physician. My mother saw an abortion (she’s the physician) and her reaction was, “It’s a baby.” Having been married to a physician, my wife saw pictures and films of partial birth abortions at a workshop for physicians and said, “This is murder. That baby was squirming once they cut the umbilical cord, he had no oxygen and was desperate for air. They would not pull the head out of the vaginal canal. When the physician punctured the cranium and suctioned the brain, everyone in the room clapped. I almost vomitted. I was never so ashamed of the people in my profession.”
Yes, a fetus is a human, and it does not look like a “clump of cells”. I never thought that. I am not sure the pictures necessarily demonstrate how it died. It could be killed with drugs first, and then cut to pieces (if that is what the pictures are showing). I know that medical abortion is the most common method in my country, not surgical abortion.
There are different theories of natural law. I am going to assume you are speaking of the natural law theory proposed by the CC.Does natural law give man the right to terminate his life?
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
Hiyas
Neuroscience does not deny a soul, that’s first. Second, the study of the soul does not fall into this discipline. This I do know a lot about. I’m a neuropsychologist. and a theologian, they are different disciplines and do not contradict each other. The soul is really the proper subject for metaphysics, you’re right. It’s not for theology or neuroscience.
But wouldn’t you say that advancements in neuroscience are making a soul increasingly unnecessary? We now can identify the particular areas of the brain that are concerned with memory, language, higher cognitive function, emotion, motor control and so on.
This is a fair question. Before I answer, I have to be honest. I practiced neuropsych for many years, but gave it up to become a religious. I do very little in that field today. I went on to study theology and philosophy, which was the requirement for religious lfie.
Actually, neuroscience believes that Freud’s construct of the mind is obsolete. It defines the mind as brain functions that are influenced by cognition, affect, instinct and conditioning. For the neuroscientist, there is no such thing as a mind that can be isolated from the brain. It’s really an umbrella term that combines brain activity as it is influenced by these other stimuli to produce certain behaviors. That’s why the neurosciences do not use the concept of mind to argue that someone is alive or that he is a person. Because not all behavior is the same. Some people can’t speak, because of brain damage. Others can’t reason. Others can’t remember and so forth. It is not the role of neuroscience to define person, but to explain why these anomalies exist.
Every living thing has a soul. This has been an argument that predates Christianity. Interestingly enough the conclusions reached in the west by the Greeks is are very similar to those reached in India, China and South America by their ancient philosophers.
Right, that is the point I was getting at. Current scientific evidence leads to the conclusion that the mind is brain activity.
But the knowledge of neuroscience can inform the philosophical definition of personhood. For me the minimal requirement that simply must be met is the presence of self awareness, thoughts etc. In principle this should one day be measurable, and neuroscientists would be the people most qualified to measure it.
What is your opinion on strong AI? Theoretically, if we had the technology, we should be able to replicate the human brain as well as the process of learning and growing up. (We do this already in a limited way with neural networks.) Do you think this creation would have a personality, thoughts, feelings, and so on? Say we could go further, and make a body for it as well. Everything exactly the same, except it would be a machine. Would it have a soul, is a soul necessary for it to think, to dream, to love life?
Notice what I underlined. If each of us sets ourselves up as an authority that decides what is or is not human, we have chaos. We have to adhere to what has been revealed to us. This is why you’re having problems with the idea that abortion is wrong. You’re too focussed on what you think. Until you come out of that and begin to listen to what has been revealed, you’ll be spinning your wheels on this subject and on many others.
You answered your own question. It would be a machine. It’s ability to think is heuristic, not natural. There is a difference. Let’s get out of sci-fi and stop avoiding the issue.
I thought about this quite a bit and I do have to believe that pregnancy could be considered an affliction (at certain times as it is defined as “to distress so severely as to cause persistent suffering or anguish” - I guess for some people this does cause anguish and suffering - what I do think a pregnancy is each and every time is “An organism that lives in or on and takes its nourishment from another organism” and can not live independently -
I just want to address what has been posted here as parasite. The child inside the mother is not really a parasite. Biology describes it as a symbiotic relationship, which is different from parasidic. There are several reasons why parasite does not work.
I didn’t ask you that question to argue, I asked you because I am honestly curious what you think.
with all due respect, your assertions get more and more nonsensical as this thread goes on. this makes no sense and isn’t based in facts or reason.
I apologize for my rudeness. When you have done Gospel of Life Ministry for such a long time and dealt with so many crisis pregnancies, elderly people whose lives are threatened by someone who wantst to kill then, and chronically ill people entering a hospital who are asked to sign papers allowing doctors to terminate their lives, when the patient does not understand the language on the paper, I tend to become very focussed on these grave issues. The question of an android threw me completely for a loop. What you’r describing is an android. No he/she would not have a soul. It would be an artificial life-form.
So, if an infant doesn’t possess “self-awareness” she doesn’t exist, right? So, it wouldn’t be killing to uh, dispose of her uh, body because there is no person there. She doesn’t exist.
THEY CLAPPED??? Oh my God, that is just so horrible. I can hardly believe it. People clapped while the baby was murdered and his brains were sucked out? It sounds like a Robin Cook novel, not something that could happen in real life.Mary makes some good points here. I have to add, being the son of a physician. My mother saw an abortion (she’s the physician) and her reaction was, “It’s a baby.” Having been married to a physician, my wife saw pictures and films of partial birth abortions at a workshop for physicians and said, “This is murder. That baby was squirming once they cut the umbilical cord, he had no oxygen and was desperate for air. They would not pull the head out of the vaginal canal. When the physician punctured the cranium and suctioned the brain, everyone in the room clapped. I almost vomitted. I was never so ashamed of the people in my profession.”
Both of these women made very significant contributions to medicine in their respective branches. Neither was less intellectual than a lawyer or barrister.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
