Should religious issues be pushed on to the general population?

[hasikelee]

Lets see:

pregnancy & child

Well: NO child NO pregnancy
NO pregnancy NO child

I was alluding to the way technology has allowed us to save children at a very young age. For example, a baby was just delivered under 22 weeks of gestational age and survived.

 

[hasikelee]

My uneducated theory is that if both sides took all of the money they are putting into the current fight and put it into research development. The ability to abort a pregancy but spare the child migh be a reality. But that is not ot say it wouldn’t generate a whole bunch of other moral issues.

I agree completely. I often wonder what we are missing out on since we have an easy answer: abortion.

Of course, it does take us back to test-tube baby debates.

 

[Contarini]

I don’t see how wife burning could possibly be a religious issue. To me, if you burn your wife, you’re guilty of either assault or murder.

As for polygamy, I think it should be legal but that’s just me. I am against polygamy religiously but not everyone is against it as I am.

I already admit the existence of ethics independent of religion. And frankly, I don’t find your post to be very convincing either. Wife burning is obviously violating someone else’s right to live. Of course you would probably say that abortion is also violating someone else’s right to live but then we get in to the debate of when the fetus has rights and when it does not.

And the same is true for women, or slaves, or non-human animals, or any other group of beings whose status has been or will be debated.

Also, since the burning of widows was theoretically voluntary, your rights-based argument doesn’t exactly work. A purely libertarian view of rights would allow for a right to suicide, wouldn’t it? To make a case against suicide (including very specific forms of suicide such as sati) one has to make a broader argument about human dignity–that there is something wrong about a society in which women have a conception of their worth such that they see no point in living after their husbands are dead (and of course the harsh way widows who didn’t kill themselves were treated is relevant as well). But all of this is “religious” in the sense that one’s religious views influence how one views these issues.

Indeed, the word “religion” is itself problematic. Just what makes one view “religious” and another view “nonreligious”? Why do nonreligious views have special status, being favored over religious views? Does the role of religion in the abolitionist movement or the civil rights movement render those movements invalid in some way?

Edwin