brianp@shark.UUCP (Brian Peterson) (08/12/84)
w From: davew@umcp-cs.UUCP
w I wish to complement Laura on her statement that truth is not a matter of
w public opinion. Truth is truth no matter who (if anyone) believes it.
w I happen to be a fundamentalist Christian. Sometimes when I talk to
w my friends about Jesus, they tell me that their God is different than
w mine, that their truth is different from mine, and that we're both
w right. But the way I see it, we all have different opinions and
w speculations about what the truth is. But having these opinions does
w not at all change what the truth really is.
Please post an algorithm for determining "truth", given any
proposition or topic. There may be an "absolute truth", but we
never see it. We see a "subjective truth", because we can never
leave out the "subject" when observing anything.
How applicible is "absolute truth" to the abortion issue?
Sperm and ova are alive, and have homo-sapiens DNA, when they are
made, which is well before conception and birth. Those "facts"
are not in question, are they? They are not the root of the
issue, are they? The root (as I see it) is what we want to
let live. We let people live because we like them. We don't
let everything else live, because A: we need to eat other life,
and B: it is impossible to preserve every tad of live because
something in nature needs to kill it anyway.
(unless, of course, you can take waste products and sunlight, and
feed every living organism. and also ensure that they don't
>overpopulate<, so that the waste products can still feed them all.)
We have to decide what we want to let live. We prefer our own
species (probably a built in desire) and probably any others
similar to us in our main characteristic, intelligence. Yet
we must the laws of nature. We must invest time and resources
to support the life of either a whole race of humans, or single
individuals.
I assume that there is more to life and civilization than racing
with the rest of nature to make more of ourselves. Life is
meaningless if we live life as mere mindless animals.
Whether we explore the universe, create beauty, or delve for "truth",
we are doing more than just eating, breathing, populating, and dying.
These functions in themselves are only necessary, not what
we want to devote our>selves< to. (How many of you out there
have wanted to give up eating and sleeping so that you could
pursue some interesting activity or idea?)
Assuming that there is a finite amount of resources available,
either to the human race as a whole, or to any individual, then
we have a tradeoff between supporting >more< human life, and
supporting >better< human life. We may not have reached the
limit of our resources yet, and thus do not have to decide.
We may already have. We can certainly use what resources we
>do< have more effectively (by adopting and giving to charity
instead of screaming about "right to life").
We must now decide how much we value quantity of human life
(an enlarged gene pool, greater chance for nature to take part),
and how much we value the quality of human life (any purpose
to our lives: do we want to reach the stars, discover the
"meaning of life", be more civilized, whatever).
Brian Peterson {ucbvax, ihnp4, } !tektronix!shark!brianp