Is all life sacred?

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riv6672
Or are there degrees in YO?
Also, are YOs in any way tied to/at odds with your religious beliefs or lack thereof?

Time-Immemorial
For you, yes.

Flyattractor
No..

Adam Grimes
Nothing is.

riv6672
Originally posted by Flyattractor
No..

Originally posted by Adam Grimes
Nothing is.

My bad, i lost the body of the post. Thanks for replying though.

Time-Immemorial
Must have been worthless.

Q99
Of course not. Bacteria life means almost nothing in comparison to even plant life. Plant life matters more, but not much. Animal life matters more still, and smarter animal life vastly more.

Finally, whether or not something is a person matters far more than whether or not it's alive.

riv6672
Originally posted by Q99
Of course not. Bacteria life means almost nothing in comparison to even plant life. Plant life matters more, but not much. Animal life matters more still, and smarter animal life vastly more.

Finally, whether or not something is a person matters far more than whether or not it's alive.
Interesting!
Thats pretty good, especially the last, thanks.

Flyattractor
Abortion pretty much sums that up..

Time-Immemorial
I name my worst shits are riveting.

riv6672
Originally posted by Flyattractor
Abortion pretty much sums that up..
Thats always an interesting one.
I know pro abortion anti death penalty people, and the reverse, both religious and non religious. Its a big hot mess of reasoning for all of it, too!

Time-Immemorial
http://i587.photobucket.com/albums/ss314/Uroboros/Funny/7041Riveting_tale_chap.jpg

Star428
Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
I name my worst shits are riveting.




laughing laughing

riv6672
^^^Whoa. Account restricted.
I didnt think your post in this thread was that bad, Star. huh

Mindship
As a *meta-panentheist* ( stick out tongue ), I would say all life is sacred, but that doesn't automatically mean Never Kill. Death is as much a part of the Big Pic as Life.

And now for a Grasshopper moment...

Years-n-years ago, walking down the street, I noticed a whole ant colony doing its Spring cleaning (y'know, you see that black line/mass from a distance, and when you get close, you go, holy cow! look at all those ants!).

Watching them, after a while I wanted to see what they'd do if I did some damage. So insignificant, I thought as I went into Godzilla mode. As expected, the colony got agitated, ants rushed about, yada yada. Then, finally bored, I stomped off into the hazy distance, continuing on with my godlike human afairs.

About an hour later, on my way back, I noticed the colony was still topside. When I checked it out, all was as before when I first saw it: ants calmly going about their insect business, all death and mayhem utterly gone...like I had never happened. I thought, Who's insignificant now...

Nibedicus

Q99
That makes sense.



Would you consider a being that maxed-out at baby level to be as important as one that was capable of developing further? I wouldn't. Babies are rapidly mentally developing the mental framework to be more advanced, and that IMO is what makes them noteworthy. And... I will say, if I'm in a burning building and I can rescue either a baby or a 3-year old and even if I try for both I can only get one successfully, I'll go for the one with the already developed brain.

Mental health issues and brain injury still leaves people waaay above any reasonable sapience threshold. Unless they're, like, 'vegetative state' brain injury or 'mostly brainstem' in which case there's really not much there.



No, because even if one does rate greater intelligences higher- and I'll just toss in God here for the most common example of such- that does not reduce the value of our intelligence at all.

Unless one holds the view that only the greatest life/intelligent matters and can override all other's value- a view which I do not.



Well now, potential is itself an argument fraught with complexities.

Potential decreases at conception, for example. Many possibilities collapse into a lot fewer. Not-having sex eliminates potential. Deciding to have a kid has a far greater impact on potential new people than any individual physical act. If you judge by potential rather than what-is, there's a lot of 'should people be compelled to do this...?' doors that are opened. Certainly does neatly toss any 'life begins at conception' issues, to be sure!


My personal view is, potential alone is mostly a modifier, that is separate from but added onto the base value. Factoring in potential on top of current state makes sense in determining courses of actions. Like... I think most people would save a teenager over someone in their 90s, while acknowledging both are equally people and of equal value in that sense, the teenager is simply going to live so much longer and the person in their 90s has lived most of their life.

On the flip side, if you give me a 90 year old, and a magic ball that has no brain or whatever at all, but if one activates it a teenager will pop out, I'm not going to save the magic ball over the 90 year old, because while the potential is nigh identical to an actual teenager, it is, at the moment, not alive at all, and as an object falls well below a person in value.

Surtur
It really depends how you define "life". People obviously, animals okay. Plants? Other people mentioned bacteria, etc.

If you're going by the most basic definition and including bacteria then there literally has never been a person alive to find all life sacred.

Q99
Originally posted by Surtur
It really depends how you define "life". People obviously, animals okay. Plants? Other people mentioned bacteria, etc.

If you're going by the most basic definition and including bacteria then there literally has never been a person alive to find all life sacred.


Though you can see how scientists get excited about finding bacteria in unusual places like other planets.


So on a sliding scale, one can still say it's a *little* sacred, but yea, by no means equally sacred.

Surtur
Originally posted by riv6672
^^^Whoa. Account restricted.
I didnt think your post in this thread was that bad, Star. huh

I don't think the restriction had anything to do with posts in this thread. It was the "Paris attacks" thread.

riv6672
Originally posted by Surtur
I don't think the restriction had anything to do with posts in this thread... see, i knew it wasnt that bad. stick out tongue

Got some good thoughts here, though from you and others. Very useful.

Star428
Originally posted by riv6672
^^^Whoa. Account restricted.




Whoa... Someone not intelligent enough to understand that not all bans are permanent. Not surprising though considering who's making that assumption. Time for me to make good on my promise I made to you on Herochat about placing you on ignore. smile

Bentley
I'm not sure we can say all life is sacred, Life is so abundant (in our planet) that it cannot be considered sacred in practice or isolated in anyway that matters. Should we cry for all the cells we shed as we grow up or are we considering cellular organisation as the basis of our valuable beliefs.

Anyways, life is so abundant that to give it a generic value would make such value pretty low. Our economics are about rarity after all.

riv6672
^^^cant say i agree with life as economics analogy. But thank you.





Originally posted by Star428
Time for me to make good on my promise I made to you on Herochat about placing you on ignore. smile
Bye! yes

Newjak
This is an interesting question.

Obviously there is a societal order on how we treat various forms of life. We tend to rate other living things as helpful, harmful, or neutral. In some ways this also includes other humans.

And their is an evolutionary aspect to this. If we know some snakes are poisonous in the area we live in we are going to be less likely to give any snake a chance to bite us or breed.

If we know a certain animal is helpful to us we are more likely to breed it and incorporate it into our society.

It makes sense. This also extends to plants and bacteria.

We also tend to rank forms of life and generally we always put humans at the top. Which once again makes sense. We are all humans and we can interact with each other easier. If it came down to saving a human vs a dog I think we would almost always choose the dog.

Also I tend to not like to use the word sacred but I do like to think of all life as miraculous and not from a religious standpoint. When you think about all the random factors that needed to happen for life to evolve even into bacterial form it is amazing. There I think all life is precious because all life was such an uphill battle.

Of course I can think this way because I don't have to be down in the dirt trying to survive.

Bentley
Originally posted by riv6672
^^^cant say i agree with life as economics analogy. But thank you.

It's not something I adhere to myself, but it makes sense as to why we outright refuse to admit the value of life as a society.

Economy is just an underlying logic to our social systems. It's not that life is as economics so much that economics is as life.

riv6672
Hmm. I can sort of see that.

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