Lets assume there are no laws against murder.
So a guy is robbing someone's house and gets caught. The robber now goes through a quick cost/benefit analysis - if I kill the homeowner (get rid of the witness), it won't worsen my legal situation in any way and actually increases my chances of getting away with robbery. Since robbery nets me a nasty punishment (8-15 years in my country), I now have an incentive to kill the homeowner in order to increase my chances of avoiding justice.
However, if there are murder laws, the robber knows that if he kills the homeowner, his legal situation worsens dramatically. What's worse? 12 years of prison or life imprisonment? Should I gamble and murder the homeowner and hope I get away with? Maybe I should just run away? Thus the robber could, ideally choose the optimal solution, which is to run away.
One of the functions of criminal law is to make sure that crime is unprofitable - that the potential costs far outweigh the potential benefits. So, for the deterrent to work, the laws must be enforceable and there must be a very good chance that the perpetrator will be caught and punished - and the perp knows that. Murder laws are just one example - you can take any penal provision.
While criminological theory can be weighed and criticized, it is obvious that criminals do at least some elementary level cost/benefit analysis. A mugger probably won't restrain himself and is willing to inflict far higher degrees of violence if he knows that it won't make his legal situation any worse. Or take rape for example and assume that there were no murder laws - the rapist can then reason that there really is no downside to killing off the victim. It won't make his situation any worse and actually increases the chances of him getting away with it - in this case, murdering someone only benefits the rapist.
Are you implying that penal laws do not deter anyone? That if we got rid of them overnight, nothing would change?
You fundamentally do not understand the pro-life position. If you did, you would not make such an argument.
For pro-lifers, the unborn is a human being with the right to life. To them, abortion constitutes murder. What you're essentially saying is that ''Well, people (mothers) are going to murder others (unborn) anyway. So, we might as well make sure that at least the murderer doesn't get hurt.''
There is nothing wrong about making murder more difficult and dangerous for the perpetrator. In fact, it is a very good deterrent.
You cannot kill other innocent people to save your own life, especially when you yourself created the danger in the first place. If the mother had voluntary sex, then she placed herself along with the fetus in harms way voluntarily.
If the baby is going to die, then abortion is not okay. We're all going to die some day, that doesn't mean it's okay to kill us prematurely. If I shoot a patient in the head with a shotgun, and then tell the authorities that ''Well he had terminal cancer, he was going to die anyway very soon'', then the cops most likely won't take me seriously.
The mother suffering long term damage is hers to bear. Emotional or physical trauma does not justify the killing of another innocent human being. I cannot kill someone just because his continued existence causes me emotional damage. If economic damage is enough to kill someone, why can't parents kill their already born kids? After all, these kids don't work and are only a drain on resources.
I'm not an american, so I don't know or care about the US justice system.
If we operate from formal legal theory, then there is no discrimination. Gays can still get married to a member of the opposite sex, and nobody will deny them that right simply for being gay. It's just that gays are not interested in exercising this right. In the same way, heterosexuals cannot get married to the same sex as well. Therefore, there is no discrimination.
Under the banner of equal treatment, gays are asking for the creation of a totally new right - the right to marry a member of the same sex.
I can't comment on due process and equal protection, cuz I don't know shit about the US legal system.
Abortions would still not be okay. Pregnancy is a reasonably foreseeable outcome of sex and no contraception is 100% effective. As such, you need to take responsibility for your actions and the reasonably foreseeable consequences, that follow from them.
Secondly, if we start from the premise that the fetus is a human being with the right to life, then whether contraception fails or not is completely irrelevant. The right to life outweighs the temporary limited freedom of the mother.
Your emotional rhetoric has very little to do with the actual analogy at hand - that atheism is a religion in the same way as not being a stamp collector is a hobby.
As it turns out, by your own admission, that atheism isn't simply a lack of some belief - it's actually an ideology with a very clear purpose, which is to wipe out religion.
You didn't answer my question. This isn't about percentage, this is about principle.
Does it makes sense to have clubs and societies about not playing football, or not liking cake or clubs about not being a stamp collector? If atheism can't be called a religion, because that would be the same as calling not collecting stamps a hobby - then it stands to reason that it makes no sense to have atheist clubs or whatever.
It doesn't even make sense to have the word ''atheist'', because we don't define people by negation. I don't describe myself as a non-football player, because that doesn't tell you anything about what I actually am.
Does it make sense to have separate forums dedicated to discussing atheism? By your view it doesn't make sense, because you don't generally make forums for non-anime watchers and non-book readers or whatever.
And despite that, atheism is something that is constantly talked about, justified, criticized, embraced, rejected etc. Whole movements have rallied under atheist banners etc etc. So it's pretty disingenuous to say that it's something akin to not-collecting stamps when it clearly has ideological connotations. If people are defining themselves through atheism, organizing clubs to discuss atheism, then clearly there is more to it than just not-stamp collecting.
No, she shouldn't be allowed back. Her contribution to the site has been primarily harmful and she managed to transform this site from a debating arena to a personal message board.
I'm sorry, but during her stay here the content of the site suffered an immense drop in quality - the first page was mostly flooded with trite, empty and annoying personal statements that had nothing to do with any particular topic. Those ''I wrote a poem'' or ''I'm a badass bitch'' or whatever type of topics are detrimental to a site that's supposedly dedicated to the exchange of worldviews. People come here for the sole reason of testing their views, policies and philosophies. They don't come here to socialize as in some other message board, because there are other places for that. Seeing these topics flooding the main page sends the message that this site isn't serious about debating, it may actually send the message that debating here isn't even the main focus.
As long as this sort of content with questionable value is tolerated - this site will always live in the shadow of other debate sites such as debate.org, which take debating far more seriously and have a far stricter policy on what constiutes as garbage content. I'm not saying that you need to moderate the shit out of this place, i'm saying that clearly certain topics have nothing to do with actual debating and should be reserved for some other websites.
It is clear that a lot of people have left this site or have assumed a very passive, lurking role. It's because they feel alienated, they feel that this site has been hijacked by people who use it as a platform to vent their personal issues.
TLDR - This site can't grow any real credibility as long as it tolerates users such as Dana, whose only real contribution to this site is flooding it with garbage content that has no place in a site dedicated to debating.
Personally I would have wanted to see Channing Tatum as the new Batman. I feel he has both the body and the jaw to pull off Bruce Wayne.
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Sense, to make, is something. Treasured, yet notwithstanding; while a man may pretend to understand, in truth it escapes. Though skill, it looks upon - troubled by its interlocutors and constabularies - the message strives towards crypticity.. it remains.
See, I can do that too.
No, I would say they do not have the right to die. The right to life is inalienable - nobody can give it to you, nobody can take it from you. You cannot even surrender it. If I make a public statement that I revoke my right to life - that doesn't mean that any random guy can come and kill me.
Suicide devalues the intrinsic value of human life and human dignity. It subjectivizes human worth and makes the value of human life contingent on the moods of the individual.
Is child molestation objectively bad? Is the killing of innocent human beings objectively bad? Is slavery objectively bad?
If they are, then why? What are we going to appeal to when we say that the above mentioned things are always bad, without exception? Clearly we cannot appeal to moral relativism or subjectivism, we need to appeal to some standard of moral realism and if we do that, we can safely say that there are things that can be called objectively good or bad.
If we, however, take the approach that nothing can be called objectively good or bad - well, if it isn't objective then by its very nature it becomes subjective. If it becomes subjective, then it becomes arbitrary - good or bad cease to exist. All that will be left will be preferences. To say that something is wrong is simply to say ''I do not like it'' or ''I am socially conditioned to not like it''. From a relativistic view, you can't ever condemn anyone for anything, because ultimately to condemn someone you have to appeal to your own biases and relative views.
Taking into account the cultural context and general attitude towards traditions and national pride, it would not make sense to intervene in Russia's war on homosexuality.
The thing is that the bill passed by Putin enjoys tremendous public support and is probably one of the few instances, where the Kremlin reflects public opinion and interests. This basically means that any sort of intervention and forcing Russia to recognize homosexual marriages will most certainly be undemocratic.
It's a waste of time to try to intervene - gays and LGBT's have virtually no local support in Russia.
Props to Russia for being one of the few countries that has the backbone to stand up against cultural and moral relativism.
