Bak

http://bp3.blogger.com/_jmqW-WO5rvg/R2SN6DDtx_I/AAAAAAAACCo/DxDm7CkrI0o/s400/abstinence.jpg

do the part where it tells you to stone your children if they misbehave and refuse to apologize

I understand the meaning and still think it's childish. Just because something is a symbol doesn't mean it won't hurt your image with the rest of the world. Human sacrifice was largely symbolic too, but I wouldn't hesitate at labeling societies that actively practice it as less civilized.

Your links are broken?

That's why my first sentence says that individually there's a lot of crazy people, but the support by large chunks of Arabs of such childish behavior was what I found alarming. I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was trying to say that throwing a shoe out of anger is childish, not that the USA has never done anything stupid. Vietnam hurt the USA's world image, just like supporting shoe-throwing is hurting the Middle East's world image. Also, admitting you're applying a "straw man argument" is admitting that you're misrepresenting my positions, not refuting them.

Are you honestly claiming that all cultures (over all history) are equally civilized? throwing a shoe at the president is a better way of getting the troops out? who's being unrealistic? Also, nice assumptions about my views (natives are soulless savages, everyone should be a christian, I want to go back to vietnam). you're really good at arguing against beliefs that you make up.

no it wasn't

One guy throwing his shoe isn't so bad, there's crazy people everywhere; it happens. The problem I see is when a majority of Arabs asked about it say his actions were acceptable and right. It pretty much reinforces a stereotype that Arabs are less civilized than westerners and ultimately hurts their image. If they want the world to care about their opinions they need to stop acting like children. There are grown-up ways to express disagreement.

Marriage wasn't even a religious sacrament before 1200 AD. Let's preserve the traditional marriage we've had for 5000 years and take it out of churches!

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong. Thomas Jefferson The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. Thomas Jefferson Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man. Thomas Jefferson

List some of these off please. This would never happen, because if cloned scientists didn't produce novel results, research institutions would stop using them. The free market could handle the right balance of cloned and non-cloned scientists to maximize discovery. What you're claiming is that, in one lifetime, one style of reasoning discovers everything possible with that reasoning style, which is not true. Top scientists publish discoveries until they retire, which shows that they are limited by their lifetime, not their ideas. Eventually one line of clones may stop getting new ideas, and then we could stop creating those clones. No one is trying to replace traditional reproduction with a clone-only society. If cloning even a few scientists generates additional discovery, it is worth it to society and beneficial. If you take a random child and give them the best education ever, there's no guarantee they'll become a good scientist because they might not be genetically predisposed to such a career. If you clone a top scientist, however, you know that they have the potential to achieve great discoveries. Are you claiming that intelligence is not a genetic trait? Imagine you were trying to train Olympic swimmers. Would you be more successful training a random child, or a clone of Michael Phelps who you know is going to grow up to be 6"4 with ridiculously long arms?

I don't think this would happen. Why would a clone get more rights than a child of a super-rich person, for example? I'm also not sure what the problem was with clones traveling to space... how does this negatively affect me/future generations? Well right now what you look like is essentially a random combination of your parents. Is your life meaningless because your characteristics are based on luck? Your parents already decide several factors that have large influences on your life (where you live, what sort of primary school you go to, your diet). Meaning in my life doesn't come from genetics, but instead from experiences and accomplishments, which genetic clones do not inherit.

One thing we could do is clone top scientists in the hopes that genetics played some part in their accomplishments (which I think is quite likely), which would in turn benefit everyone by accelerating discovery. Additionally, real experiments could be done to determine how much genetics determine a person's future and how much of it is from environmental factors (and therefore influence policy for everyone's benefit). This doesn't need to be done unethically; for example we could create 100 clones and raise 50 in a city and 50 in a town and observe the differences years later. Right now all we have is identical twins separated at birth for these things, and 2 is a small sample size (using various pairs of identical twins helps, but introduces more variables from variations present among twin pairs). Plus, we don't outlaw things because there's no reason for it, we outlaw things because they're harmful. There's no reason to hop around on one foot around my apartment building, but we're not outlawing that.

Where have we already stated this? Isn't this what we're talking about??? Furthermore, I disagree that more organs to go around is "very ethically wrong", not sure how we got to that conclusion? This is where I'm interested; what is the non-religious argument that deems cloning unacceptable? Saying there exists such an argument isn't much better than saying "even without religion there are a lot of reasons why people would be against it." Enough meta-arguing; what are the actual points on the debate? The article is a bit out of date. It claims (in the translation, anyways) that human cloning has already occurred: "a step has been taken by South Korean researchers who, for the first time, managed to create a human embryo by cloning and to derive stem cells". That scientist was actually lying, and when other scientists tried to repeat his process they were unsuccessful. That data was fabricated and the scientist discredited (and will have trouble finding any scientific job in the future). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4554422.stm The same was probably said when surgery was being developed. If we perfect the process on animals we can minimize risk. We also have to be careful to separate actual risks from things we've seen in movies (superhumans? really?).

list some off. So far we have degradation of the genome, and the potential for failures while perfecting the process.

The problem with this is that a doctor is a life/death scenario, or potentially life altering. If a restaurant serves unsafe food, yes eventually people will stop going there but we don't need a dozen people to die or more likely hundreds of people to get sick. We can do better as a society (and hence the government handles food safety issues). Similarly, if a doctor allows people to die when an abortion could have increased their chances of living, eventually people may turn away, but the deaths are unnecessary. Having a baby is life-altering, not knowing one of your options may dramatically change your life. This is the reason we require doctors have licenses. It may be impossible to answer a specific point, it might even vary between individuals. However, this doesn't mean we can't place some necessary conditions on conscious life. For example, all conscious beings have brainwaves. Therefore, no brainwaves, no consciousness. So the one-day embryo versus three-month fetus question can be solved easily (assuming the goal is preserving conscious life). A one-day embryo is not conscious while it is undetermined if a three-month fetus is conscious. If the goal is not preservation of conscious life, but instead preservation something [made up] like souls, then there is no difference. However, it's more likely the doctor wanted to preserve both souls and conscious life, as well as minimize pain. Using this combined metric, the morning-after pill still beats a later abortion.

The morning-after pill will "kill" an embryo before it has a brainwave, and therefore before it has any chance of feeling pain. Three months later the fetus may have a partially developed brain. Can it feel pain... is it conscious? Probably not, but it's no longer clear cut. Hence, killing a one-day-old embryo IS different than killing a three-month old fetus. Lynx: what if they trained to be doctors before the morning-after pill was around, or before abortions were legal? They went through all that training but now that the law changed / technology developed they have to get a new career?

Except for reasons from a 2000 year old book, why shouldn't we do human cloning? I think it would be cool to have a clone of myself. If we mess up and create some deformed mutant we could obv detect that while it's still an embryo and abort before any brain waves or anything. But this is only with the development of the process, which is one aspect of the problem. The other question is that if we had a perfect process to clone humans, would it still be immoral/wrong... and why. For those of you that don't know how cloning works it's basically they inject some adult DNA into an embryo (after sucking its original DNA out), and then a genetically identical being develops (like an identical twin, it doesn't keep your memories and ages at a normal speed). In the way I see it happening, the clone would have all the same rights as any human, we couldn't use them for wars or for organ harvesting. Incidentally, religions might not see these as immoral since they might make the case that clones lack souls... but that's a bit of a strawman. Related: http://www.slate.com/id/2205310/?GT1=38001

software that comes with a warantee/guarantee? That'll be the day!

when computers are doctors who are we going to sue when they screw up?

lool Left. One more moderate and we have a nice monotonically decreasing distribution

(you can't deep link youtube videos on ssforum with start times? )

That's assuming that you can figure out that your doctor is withholding information. But you went to the doctor for the information. The thing is, from an atheist perspective, the belief that abortion is murder is arbitrary. What's stopping a tailor of religion X from saying masturbating is also murdering millions of humans and then refusing to make pants that have pockets (while staying on the pants company's payroll). Why can't Amish people get jobs working with computers and then not do any work because technology is against their religion (and not expect to be fired)? No one is forcing the lady to gay marry, she can quit/get fired. on something related to what aceflyer was saying, what do you think about pharmacists refusing to give out the morning after pill and such? The problem with this is that some places only have one local pharmacy, so that if you need a pill that day (the morning after pill doesn't work the week after), you now have to travel several hours which isn't feasible for everyone. Then again, if there's a demand wouldn't the free market solve this? I think the story I read was someone getting fired for refusing to give out pills... is that the free market at work? The main questions here are should the boss be allowed to fire the employee, and should the state be allowed to force the pharmacy to stock such pills.

your first mistake was citing(or rather pasting) the wikipedia article on "Traditional marriage movement" 2nd story is about someone getting in trouble for not doing their job. if the state pays you to conduct marriages and you don't conduct marriages you lose your job... it IS the equivalent of if she were to "refusing to marry a black person" not sure what point you were trying to make in the 3rd paragraph, you probably don't understand what "adversely" means. 4th point has little to do with marriage. stop pasting and express your own thoughts with sources