Man's morality

[Darkstar]

Even when it is obviously right to make an exception to a rule, god won't allow for it.

That is why our righteousness/morality is not dependant on our ablity to follow the rules. With attonement righteousness/morality comes through Christ apart from our ablity to follow the rules.

So the rules are essentially pointless?

One cannot have absolutes. I mean, you can, you'll just be wrong whenever an exception to the rule should be made.

Not true. Right can be right an wrong can always be wrong so long as there is grace and attonement.

Only if you redefine 'right' as 'what god wants'.

They are clearly breaking the golden rule, unless they themselves would want to be dehumanized.

Which is an absolute is it not? (The golden rule?)

In a sense, I suppose. But it gets trickier when figuring out how to treat wrongdoers. For example, someone might want to get away with doing something bad, so they should let others also get away with it?

I did not think that a baby could be aborted at birth.

That what partial birth abortion is. The mother is dialated, and the child is pulled/ripped out of the mother (all except the head) then a pair of scisors are inserted at the base of the child's skull, and then his brain is scrambled, and then suction is added to suck out the child's brain.

I should clarify: I did not think that a baby could be aborted at birth legally. And they can't.

Though the procedure has had a low rate of use, representing 0.17% (2,232 of 1,313,000) of all abortions in the United States in the year 2000, according to voluntary responses to an Alan Guttmacher Institute survey,[2] it has developed into a focal point of the abortion debate. In the United States, intact dilation and extraction was made illegal in most circumstances by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart.

Only a very small portion of abortions are late term.

AHHH A Perfect example of Man's Morality at work, It always selects the lessor of two evils rather than identifing an absolute like it is always wrong to kill babies.

What if that baby were patient zero for the next zombie apocalypse? I don't actually mean to suggest that any such thing is likely, but rather that even this judgment is technically not absolute. I would not argue that "killing babies is generally not immoral" but rather that a partially developed fetus isn't what one might consider a baby. (A fetus that, if born naturally at that moment, could survive outside the womb, is a different story.)

Regardless, one could ask "If I were a fetus, how would I feel if people decided to abort me?" Well, you wouldn't feel anything, you wouldn't think anything, you wouldn't even be aware of your own existence.

Here is a sonigram video of a baby screaming as he is being ripped from his mother. It looks like he is pretty aware of the pain.

This only is true for late term abortions.

I have to ask, though, how far back do we go? If we call a fetus, which has no self-awareness and is not conscious a person, should we go back another step and call the egg a person?

Life starts with a heart beat.

If I took this at face value, does that mean that a fetus that does not yet have a heartbeat can be aborted? Also, does this mean that organisms without a circulatory system (or more specifically, a heart within said system) are not really alive? Personally, I think that the brain should also be alive before an organism (as a whole) is considered truly alive (unless
it does not develop a brain normally).

That, then, is not a failure of the golden rule itself, but a failure of people to adhere to it.

I totally agree. What you fail to see is the reasoning people adhere to it is because they are 'morally' justified in their other options. If morality is not an absolute then it can be used to justify anything.

Under the right circumstances, yes. And no, I don't mean WWII concentration camps. I mean exceptions to general rules of thumb that are not in blatant contradiction to the golden rule (other than in dealing out 'justice' to wrongdoers, however you might define that.)

Do you see what I am saying? The Golden rule is not morality. It is an absolute. One that God gave us.

I'm pretty sure it existed before Christianity. It also basically seems like common sense.

The use of the golden rule upto a certain point (where it becomes bothersome or one is looking at an 18 year prision sentence with a kid in tow) and abortion is justified is the point the golden rule becomes apart of morality.

I am pondering whether you actually meant 'apart', or have again made 'a part' into one word. Opposite meanings, really. I would agree that if you merely think the golden rule is inconvenient, then it would be apart of morality. On the other hand, I wouldn't say that the existence of abortion shows how all of society is immoral (though the illegal partial birth method is rather sickening, and I personally would not encourage late term abortions unless absolutely necessary).