chiquiliquis said:
Some Orthodox Jews believe beating off is tantamount to murder.
Yes, and it's a sin in Catholicism, most likely for that very same reason.
chiquiliquis said:
When does life start? Life doesn't start. Life is!
Our valuations of life (when it starts or stops, or what qualifies it as "human") are all functions of life. LIFE gave birth to reason (what some like to call, "humanity"); Not the other way around.
There is no other thing than life in this world, and it is singular. There are no "lives" except those that reason alone has lead us to judge or qualify in one way or another.
I'll say it again, cause it's worth saying: LIFE gave birth to reason; Not the other way around.
I see only one issue at hand... affirming life through choice.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, and I don't know what stance you have taken. Do you mean that everyone on Earth is part of a collective life, so therefore there are no individuals? Or are you perhaps saying that if a being cannot reason, then it is not alive (I hope you aren't saying that)? Or are you saying that life is in everything and should not be terminated? I'm afraid that I can't seem to make any sense of what you have said.
Lina Inverse said:
The point of your friend is absolute nonsense. Arguing that way, you could also say that shooting your sperm on the ground (or into a condom, or somewhere else where it can't impregnate a woman) is murder because it had the potential to mature and develop into a human being and yadda yadda whatever else.
I was thinking about this, and there seems to me to be a difference between a fertilized egg and one that isn't or a sperm. The reason is this, a sperm has about a one in one million chance of fertilizing an egg, right? Also, a sperm only carries half of the human chromosones. Same thing for an egg -- I'm not sure what the chances are of an egg becoming fertilized, but when you put that together with the chances of a sperm fertilizing an egg, you have a less than one in a million chance of a certain egg combining with a certain sperm.
Now, if you consider a fertilized egg, you will see that it is already a special entity, because it somehow beat the odds (even though there are millions of sperm in each ejaculation and there are several eggs available -- not every act of sexual intercourse results in pregnancy anyway). Aside from that, a fretilized egg can arguably be considered a human. For example, it already has all of the DNA encoding that it requires and will ever have throughout its lifetime. That means that height, weight, body type, build, intelligence, personality, sex, race, etc. are all there from the moment of conception. It just doesn't
look human yet. However, it is certainly not a frog or a moth. On the point of looking human, would you consider someone so disfigured that he didn't look human anymore to not be human?