AZMike

You don't have to apologize to me. So you'd be okay with banning the abortion of a female once she has a brain? Does her brain have to be fully developed for her to qualify as a human, and if so, when do you think that is? The brain continues to develop long after birth, by the way. And if you think she doesn't have a soul yet, at what point do you think God implants that into the developing fetus? If you happen to be wrong about that guess, do you think He might be a little angry at you supporting killing a female human with a soul? If you're not completely certain when that event happens, would you agree that the mother's choice to terminate her daughter's life is morally equivalent to firing a rifle blindly through the windows of a house that may, or may not have a person inside?

So, you feel just the younger females shouldn't have control over their own bodies or their lives? Mom gets to choose if she lives or dies, without her having a say-so in the matter? But it's all okay if a girl can't yet answer intelligently? How about if she's just 6 months old? Or 1 year?

Does the daughter (or son) get a say in that choice?

We could probably get Class B T-shirts to make us up some. I'm sure they would be popular.

Hedgehog is correct.

Not sure which campus you're on and you probably don't want to discuss that on an Internet forum, but yes, I spend time on campuses, and yes, things are getting crazy on some of them. Thankfully. most kids are too level-headed to buy into the Social Justice Warrior nonsense, but I don't think the campus zeitgeist I describe is unusual. You want examples? I'm not really interested in learning more about "vaginoplasties," Packsaddle. You understand that creating a vagina replica fashioned out of male flesh is not really a vagina, right? Whether female impersonators can reshape their bodies to impersonate a woman's isn't really the issue the protestors raised at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women's college in Massachusetts - their point is that you can be a woman and not have a vagina, or something. And if the "Vagina Monologues" play doesn't recognize this new reality, it can't be presented, according to the new orthodoxy: “At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman...Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.†(http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6202). The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign just commissioned a study of hidden "racial microaggressions," and ways to combat them. You can read the actual findings here: http://www.racialmicroaggressions.illinois.edu/files/2015/03/RMA-Classroom-Report.pdf According to the study, one can apparently be racist simply by being, if one is a member of a mostly all-white classroom with a minority member in it. Among their recommendations: Require all students to complete a General Education requirement about race, White privilege, and inequality in the United States. The Cultural Studies General Education requirement should be changed so that students must take both a non-Western culture and a US people of color cultural course. Include diversity and inclusion in a third of the curriculum of all college 101 classes. Develop workshops and training sessions and create brochures about racial microaggressions to help students identify when racial microaggressions are occurring, and to enable them to “nail†the aggressions, thus reduce their reoccurrence. For example, create a slogan or language to be use throughout campus. For example, “Racism Alertâ€, “Watch it! Racismâ€, “That is racially insensitiveâ€, or “That makes me uncomfortable.â€

A realist would say the glass is both half-full and half-empty.

Growing old makes you a stranger in your own country. When I saw the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" as a kid when it was first released, that was my blueprint for what I thought the future would be like - clean and shiny (at least the parts we saw - who knows, on earth it may have been more like "A Clockwork Orange"), manned space travel to the planets, and everything printed in Helvetica, the font of the future. Instead, the year 2001 had a pretty-much dead manned space exploration program, tons of social problems I never would have dreamed of back in the 1960s, my mom died after a long debilitating illness, and maniacs hijacked planes and attacked my country. Some of the changes were things I expected, like the omnipresence of computers in our lives, but the ways the Internet has affected us is amazing - who foresaw things like sexting, Wikipedia, identity-theft hacking, or sites like Tinder or Ashley Madison that facilitate adultery? As a teen, I had memorized probably 20 or 30 phone numbers that I frequently called - parents, friends, workplace. Nowadays, few people can remember any number beyond their own - we have grown comfortable with storing all those on the (also unforeseen) smart phone we carry in our pocket. The ready access to electronic storage and sources like Wikipedia seems to have stunted the memorization capabilities of the young, as well as everyone else. The access to spell-check like programs have made the ability to profread proorfeed proofread increasingly rare. The biggest changes, though, seem to have been in social attitudes, as Eamonn suggested. The idea that two men could marry was considered kind of a ludicrous smutty joke when I was growing up in the 1970s. I remember a cartoon in a major magazine that showed two men in a bed with a tuxedo and a wedding dress hung over a chair. One of the men is reading a "marriage manual" and says "Wait a minute...according to this, one of us is supposed to be a woman." That cartoon (which could never be published today) pretty much summed up the idea of gay marriage back then. The increasing social acceptance of previously unacceptable sexual lifestyles by many members of the Millennial Generation has been coupled with a retrogression in what is considered free speech, which is kind of bizarre. The "Free Speech" movement on campuses in the 1960s is pretty much dead, as speakers are increasingly denied a forum if it is considered hostile to prevailing attitudes among the young, or if it is thought to contain "triggers," "microaggressions," "privilege-based" statements, or anything else that requires retreat to a "safe space" among an increasingly infantilized youth culture. Even speakers who would have been considered on the Far Left are attacked and boycotted by anyone who can achieve a sense of notoriety and approval within their social network circles by claiming offense, who can generate an on-line petition and frighten a school administrator into pulling sanction for the event. Even applause has become considered a "trigger," so "jazz hands" are becoming the approved method of showing approval at campus events. The play "The Vagina Monologues," a play that for decades was considered a campus staple for feminist organizations, has been banned on campuses or censored because it doesn't acknowledge that "some women [i.e., transgenders] don't have vaginas." Probably every generation feels that the next generation is dropping the ball, and maybe this is nature's way of making the old not fear death so much. But yeah, one wishes there were more enclaves where one could avoid the craziness of modern culture.

I know. We live in crazy times. If I declared I was an antimacassar, or that I was still 5 years old, I would hope someone would call the men in the white coats and they would try to talk me out of my delusion.

If a 9 year old girl is trapped in a boy's body like you say, you'd think she could tear her way out or something. If that isn't the case and it's just a mental deiusion, like believing one is a chair or a platypus or something, then she deserves psychological treatment.

That clip is a hoot.

That sounds like the way to go.

This thread can't die until we somehow bring homosexuality and atheism into it. This is the Issues and Politics board, after all.

Can imperatives contain conditional statements? Why do you think they Kant? Sorry. Kant's notion of a categorical imperative doesn't use the term "conditional" in the same sense that I think you are using it. To Kant, it is an imperative because it is a command, and one which specifically commands us to use our wills in a particular fashion, not simply to perform some specific action. He uses the term categorical without reference to any ends we might wish to accomplish - i.e., "Give money to the poor and you will go to heaven." or "Give money to the poor and people will think better of you." Such modes of thought, to Kant, would be conditional - "If you do x, then you will achieve y." To introduce a conditional statement within an imperative - i.e., "Give money to the poor (unless you know they will use it to buy heroin)"? Kant would have no problem with that mode of expressing a categorical imperative, as not all imperatives can be stated without including a clause. What you are claiming is not the sort of "conditional" he discussed.

The existence of a supposed or defined absolute that does not contain a conditional statement does not limit the existence of absolutes that do contain conditional statements. Just as the existence of a platypus does not deny the possibility of a duck. That is true even under a deontological viewpoint, which can seem to be congruent with a Christian viewpoint, but often isn't. The hazard of Kant's deontological viewpoint is that by ascribing to a categorical imperative, one often acquires a checkbox mentality - "I have done right by this action, so I am a good person." One risks becoming detached from those people who are affected by your actions - people become things. Instead of people being recognized as inherently of dignity and respect, they become a means to an end, tools towards an abstracted sense of personal righteousness, conduits towards a task to be completed. The recognition of absolutes that do contain conditional statements leads us away from this error.

No. Absolutes can include conditional statements. By what authority do you think they cannot?

I believed in moral absolutes even when I was an atheist. I just couldn't argue for them as well.

It is a moral absolute that you treat parents who are not moral monsters well.

I would say that it is a "fact" that specific moral absolutes exist, and that those absolutes order what we "should" do.

If they are moral imperatives, they are also "facts" if the field of inquiry is morality.

a) It is a fact that one should do x, y, and z. b) Give us an example, and we will reason it out. Abraham was confronted with one such.

It's a two-sided street. Once parents act like that, they abdicate the parental role and need no longer be honored.

These things that I listed as moral facts are all affirmative duties, not negative: - Human life is precious and should be preserved. - One should honor and respect the Creator and holy things. - One should help and give to others who are in need. - One should honor one's parents and give them respect and obedience.

If we had to use two words to describe God's shaping of man's morality, it would be "Baby Steps." I suspect He realized that His creations don't do well if the change that is demanded is too drastically different. God allowed israel, "Out of the hardness of its people's hearts" to have slaves, to have kings, to practice polygamy, etc. - just like all the neighbors they wanted to emulate did. But He forbade many of the things they wanted to emulate (like Canaanite infanticide) and placed restrictions on other practices to moderate them beyond anything their neighbors observed, and gradually brought His chosen people along to a higher state of moral observance (even as they repeatedly erred, were chastened, reformed, then committed the same old mistakes again). By the time of Jesus, the Jews no longer practiced polygamy or slavery. This is recurrent theme throughout the Old and New Testaments.

I would say no, the moral code (of which social varieties are just adumbrations) was established by God and placed in us.