Why are we so bad at this?

Christians have ALWAYS been casual about all forms of homicide. It's in your book and throughout your history.But to answer your specific inquiry, that’s easy.We don’t all agree with your religious views on the topic. Many of us do not attach any sacred status to the fetus. In a lot of secular societies, the fetus is another growth in the body whose disposition is to be determined by the mother. You priests have no say in the matter.There are a lot of compelling human-centered reasons to justify abortion. The mother’s health being a big one but we also account for the social and economic impact of birth upon the mother and family on a case-by-case basis. The final decision is the mother’s in consultation with her support group. It is not the decision of the priest in consultation with his fictitious spirit and the politicos he keeps on a leash.I would think the vast majority of abortions are sought for the economic and social benefit of the mother. The proposed mother is not ready to accept the responsibility and bear the costs of the child. A quick vacuum pump and problem solved. In a secular society, a society centered on the human condition, economic and social concerns are not just necessary elements in the decision process they are adequate, in and of themselves, to justify the action.I know you will have all kinds of horror stories about late-term, post-birth, slice ‘em ‘n dice ‘em abortion fictions but, except for your own ghoulish delights, don’t bring them up here. That is hype, not reality, and should have no part in this discussion.

You don't. If that was the goal then it was chosen by a jester. Fool's errand.These discussions are not for persuading Candle3, or any of the other candles, that their views need adjustment. Neither Dunning nor Kruger can help at this point. Reality just does not exist that far out into La-La land.We, each of us, battle the Evil Ones in this venue for the sacred hearts and innocent minds of the lurkers, the peanut gallery, the void with a million eyes. There, there may be minds on the verge of awareness. There, synapses about to close around a critical thought.We can only hope that in countering the Candle(s) in this world, without any hope of healing them, we can vaccinate others from the disease they carry and seek to spread.

And yet there is the example of Trump's election as a counter. With all the sunlight of a G2 star, that inanity of uber corruption and blindingly stupid politics managed to get re-elected despite the intense spotlight.Seems we no longer can just point and laugh to make the point of "stupid". We need to rub their face in it.Taq, you are right. It all starts with the stupid on open display. But we need a backup plan. Lions in the Colosseum didn't work. Kinda like Lions in Ford Field but different.Education - the constant rubbing of the nostrils of the priests and the public in the excrement of religious delusions. There is so much stupid in this world. We didn't do enough education on Trump and our lack of vigilance has cost us big time. Religion should be more strongly, more publicly and more loudly ridiculed.I wish I had done more. I wish I could do more. I wish we all could do more.

Of course you are. You so casually accept the murders of the Exodus and Noah’s Flud myths (even knowing neither one happened). Here, this one is more complete: Actual Law ***He’s a fiction. I’m thinking that bitter-sweet bile taste for righteous revenge, that blood lust you are feeling for payback, for justice, that is all you, your heart, your mind. A god has nothing to do with it. You are quite emotional about it.You, I don’t trust. And you think this justifies forcing a 12 year-old rape victim to carry to term? Yep, Abortion rights like right out of the 60’s. Took you long enough to catch on. Correct. See this. The right to terminate any unwanted pregnancy. That is the goal. Rights to bodily autonomy that women have and fetuses with all their priests in a row, do not.Now, you’re going to have to spend extra time in the pulpit trying to wash out your eyes. I’m not sure if your cult of Christianity has holy water but maybe that would help. Oh I have the empathy. What I lack is the power to change 7 ½ million years of human evolution. We must deal with the human condition as it is. Humanism deals with the reality of the species, not a violently imposed religious program.Abortion is a useful tool for women in our society. When women decide how and when to construct their families those families are, I would argue, stronger, last longer, and are more important and instrumental to society than your typical Christian experience.*** Abortion in Arizona is legal up the point of fetal viability as a result of Arizona Proposition 139 recently passed.

Abortion is often a necessity to save the mother’s life. You say, no, your god wants both dead. Actually, it is you who wants both dead. You don’t have to believe in your own fantasies, you know. It’s you in the midst of an emotional storm who is demanding blood.I too grieve for the lost potential of aborted fetuses. Not from any “life force” woo-woo stance but from the unfulfilled discoveries and abilities these unique combinations of human genetics may have developed. This species is in deep trouble. Our technology and resultant lifestyles have placed us on a path to early extinction. Making more babies is not the solution but neither is killing those we have already made. A great potential for fixes and answers may be in that new genetics. But abortion is still much too useful a tool in our modern culture.What no one is asking is why abortion is so useful a tool.We refuse to fund the family support programs. We refuse to fund the mother/infant health and nutrition programs. Unless a woman has a strong emotional and financial structure behind her in this modern society a baby is often more than she can handle alone. Mothers and societies suffer from the burden of unwanted children. Abortion provides a quick and easy remedy.The potential fix?Fund more science into safe ways to stop conception. Educate our children on safe and preventative sexual practices. Bring the number of troublesome conceptions down. Then have the social infrastructure (food, housing, medical) fully able to contribute to whatever level is necessary before, during, after the birth.Candle3, are you willing to double, triple, more, your taxes to fund all these necessities to child life?Abortion will continue until society makes birth preferable. Restricting access, criminalizing, threatening bloodlust revenge, will only drive the practice underground. The need is still there and will be used, just more brutal, bloody and painful.The best and most permanent way to lessen abortion is to provide the mother and child support.Candle3, are you willing to stop hating and criminalizing and restricting others freedoms with no hope of success? Are you willing to do the moral, humane thing, and pay more $$$ (a lot more $$$) to lessen the social need for abortion? Instead of calling for blood, spend money. Can you do that?

Yes, we u/s (a dumb usage given the nature of the English language but I u/s so it does meet one criteria of effective communication if not others).We disagree. In the vast majority of cases the procedure is performed early enough that we recognize no viability to the growing cellular mass. We also recognize there are no screaming fetuses. We have a highly emotional religious preacher that loves him some fetus while having no care for the state of present humanity.Embryos are not sentient beings. Your religious pronouncements that they are does not change that. If the mother does not want the future baggage then she is free to dispose of it. We give the mother the right to decide whether to watch the child graduate from HS in 18 years or gets pitched into the bucket for human waste today.No priests necessary unless the mother wants one. Define "right"?- Acceptable to your conception of Deity?Don't care. Your thoughts on behalf of some frivolous fantasy ghost deity do not impact human reality.- Personal bodily autonomy?Along with freedom, taxes and tort claims, yes, this is exactly the kind of stuff we built our courts to help decide. They have the authority we give them. The use of the courts is the way we determine the limits to human actions. Your gods (or rather you priests) do not write our law because we have found you write terrible, evil, blood soaked law. The priests of gods are too inhumane. We rule ourselves. I don't u/s why it is necessary to explain the value and worth of personal bodily autonomy as a most vital concept to stem evil from our species.

No, no, he’s not an exception, Tangle. He’s a nutcase. A case of nuts. An enclosure enwrapping the nuggets of a weak minded religious fantasy.

Not so. You have no evidence to even propose such an absurdity. Your god does not exist. Your mind came as an emergent property of physics, chemistry, biology. There are substantial points in evidence given by the universe to confidently conclude that life, the universe and everything are massive collections of matter and energy in constant motion through a universe full of energy gradients. Gods do not appear in the inventory. QFT can work in strange and mysterious ways.Except for the amoebae bit (it was the chemicals that leeched out of a rock billions of years ago, not the bug) you are right. Our best evidence goes like this: after gastrillions and gazillions and lots and lots of trying over 100s of millions of years some of these chemicals spread across an energy gradient and sparked a cascade of potentials that added structure to the gradient. The first spark of life. No gods necessary. Yep. Gall “Я” Us.Ok, so like those dioramas they made you do in grade school, we can’t place every piece of cotton ball and tape in our past into the shoebox but we know they were there. We have the evidence of what happened those billions of years ago and nothing in there evidences any form of celestial spook.Again, you lose. I never said that, lying priest.This universe is NOT built on your fallacious random strawman. We have seen and used the rules of creation and manipulation to recreate reality in our own image. We know and use those rules with exceptional fidelity and there is nothing random in our skills.But, to answer your larger question, I cannot trust my brain until its functions have been calibrated by others. That’s the scientific method.Insert religious BS about Colorado River, Occam's Razor, C-14, soft tissue dino’s, as the list of Candle(n)’s other intellectual fantasies grows to meet the Talking Snake ®. Lying priest. Yes, we do witness evolution happening today just as we witness it in the fossils from millions upon millions of years ago. You turn blind to this because it shatters the illusion and denies the exitance of your celestial spook. Yes. It is good to go into the study of universal reality unhindered by the stupidity of religious fantasy. Your bible is evil and should be burned.

Whoa ... did I get that all wrong!I thought Prince evolved into