Skeptical

[hide=other obvious answer is obvious] BEING PREGNANT IS A PRETTY RELIABLE INDICATOR THAT SEX OCCURRED This might not be as obvious as the first, so I'll elaborate. Abortion covers up the "accident". It allows for long term abuse to continue. At the very least, when a woman gives birth, its a pretty big event. One that most people would go to the hospital for. In an abusive situation, abortion covers up rape allowing it to go on indefinitely. Having a baby should at the very least disrupt it enough for contact with the outside world. [/hide] I'm fine with sarcasm, but would you please refrain from using larger fonts? I'll read what you say, but I see no reason to make your own argument unpleasant to pursue. So you wish to rely on pregnancy to reveal sexual abuse? That's idiotic, to say the least. ~750,000 teenage births per year. You expect that every one of these is going to be properly reviewed by a government official? And if you are honestly suggesting that people would inquire, than I fear that you've gone completely insane: when people learn of someone who has become pregnant/had a child, they say nothing since it is a socially humiliating thing to happen. I've known people to cover it up (not a statistically significant number, but still I wouldn't be surprised if it happens fairly frequently.)

I wasn't saying that my conclusion was necessarily correct, just that there really is not way to prove anything: look at how creationists deny evolution. As for human life being a process, I couldn't agree more. But it's a senseless argument: I know a woman who had a still-birth. Very sad, an accident that shouldn't have to happen to any mother. Now, condolences were offered by her friends and family, and a brief period of depression followed, which I am given to understand is not uncommon. Now, at my school there was a suicide, of a young man who was suffering from both various mental disorders and a particularly hostile social environment. Much sadness, print, silence, remembrance, grave-visiting, flowers, and condolences are offered every year to his family and friends. Odd how much more important a human life is when it's a person, not just a collection of non-sentient cells that has an excellent chance of having been aborted/being aborted due to natural causes. All because people insist on considering a fetus a child, when there is not only a social, but also an evolutionary drive to preserve children in one's species. (Not because it benefits the individual, however, as some would erroneously point out, but because it benefits the species as a whole. Just an interesting idea that I've been reading about.)

[hide=obvious answer is obvious] A PREGNANT 13 YEAR OLD GIRL WHERE THE LEGAL AGE OF CONSENT IS 14 IS A BIG RED FLAG duh. [/hide] Yes, thank you, I missed that. And that's still only an argument against underage abortion nothing else.

Opinion alert. ---- Oh, so you know it's an opinion? So don't state it as fact. After all, babies have fingernails. FINGERNAILS. Everything is an opinion; we just choose to use certain tolerances concerning scientific certainty to distinguish truth.

An embryo has no more in the way of rights than my sperm cells do, and certainly far fewer rights than that of a dolphin or adult human female. If you want to remove a man's right to masturbate and a woman's to ovulate without a resulting pregnancy, then I'll listen to the "moral case". To those arguing that abortion covers up child abuse, yes I'm sure that in those cases it did. But you're certain that none of the partner-less mothers were sexually abused or raped? Tell me, how exactly does having a child magically provide evidence of rape or abuse? And I certainly don't have a number to provide, but I have to wonder if that child isn't next in line for abuse.

Could be. I mean, I know that it really does belong here, but I do feel that there should just be a thread called "Books" in OT. Just my preference, though.

When something short of 20% of the world is Catholic, it hardly seems like an extremist position. I would oppose abortion if someone decided they just didn't feel like using a condom, and would use it as a method of birth control. But denying it in all cases, or claiming that you have the right to interfere with a woman's body is setting back human rights by at least a quarter century.

She's 9 years old, raped by her stepfather, and will have children. Now, please explain to me how her afterlife will make all of the suffering in this life acceptable, or how the innocence of a soul (an idiotic notion conceived by religion to maintain control of the fearful, uneducated, illiterate masses) justifies the cruelty being inflicted on this child.

What about when the pregnancy is a simply horrible burden: incestuous, underage rape comes to mind.

I would read it a few dozen times, say it out-loud, have a friend read it to me, etc, and then write it down a bunch of times. Then I'll test myself by writing it or saying it and checking it line by line until I feel confident that I've got it.

Pathfinder Core Rulebook, The Ringworld Throne, and Walden.

Yea, but as soon as it was moved, it just died.

I still think that it should be about homosexuality, but I don't believe that it should be constrained by something so restrictive as "right or wrong". I merely suggested this since it seems to bother people a lot when one strays off-topic in their posting.

However, when somone takes action based on their disagreements, it becomes an issue. "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins" as one prominent US Supreme Court Justice put it. Yes let's now argue legal rights over justice, timing, and trolls. He has an important point. I think that the topic of the thread should just be changed to "Homosexuality: Discuss" instead of right or wrong. It's stupid to have such a detailed and interesting topic on human rights and the failings of modern religious morality and pretend that the only thing we care about is whether or not Jesus thinks it's OK, and whether or not the people that believe that are idiots.

Eths: NaOCL

basically, but that only enforces what I said that sexual preference is controlled by culture. In a different culture where guys wouldnt find that to be hot no girl would ever do that. Except for the ones that are legitimately bisexual. Agreed. Really, it's doesn't matter, since it's not possible for someone to have the ability (or the right) to decide if someone is "honestly" bisexual.

I'm going to make this today, if I can dig any cottage cheese out of the freezer. http://eatingwelllivingthin.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/love-my-quinoa-burger/ Made them, although they were pretty plain without any sort of vegetables or fruit with them, and required a great deal of spices. I would kill for a meatball sub at the moment. Going for one on Saturday.

So what's the general consensus on quality of show/dedication to the comic?

No, it's energy efficient, so I continue to support it. Got my Kindle today: it is pretty awesome.

^ Lol. I have a few very solid knives that I inherited from my grandfather, one of which carries no branding or markings, and is the best knife I have ever owned or used. I don't personally use my Swiss Army Knives very often (they are of excellent quality for the most part, but they still have far less functionality than a sharp length of good steel).

I don't think he was criticizing your statement, but mocking philosophy in general. I couldn't say why, but that's the way I read it.

you can get apples out of season because it is worth people in south america's time to ship apples to north america as there is money to be made. However massive food programs to africa have no incentive besides charity. No. It is worth multinational food corporations time to ship fruit from South America. It doesn't matter to the growers where it goes, and I don't blame them for it. I call [cabbage] on government food aid. The US offers cheap, or free grains to foreign countries, through subsidies to domestic growers, or through aid programs. Poor countries accept, since hey - it's free food. Suddenly, there's cheap grain to be had, something that subsistence farmers couldn't produce very efficiently. Those farmers are now out of work: who will buy grain for an extra $1 a pound? It now just happens to be the US now controlling the food market in this country. Political ends can now be achieved by using aid a threat: don't do what we say, the food stops flowing, people starve, and your government collapses. Sure, sounds like charity to me. It's charity if the intent was to help. What does the US have to gain by "controlling" an extremely poor, under-developed nation? <_< The reason that we give them food in the first place is because they can't produce enough, hence why the native farmers' food is so expensive for them to buy (as compared to free food, go figure). You're saying that they're in the wrong for doing nothing about their problem and leeching off US government aid instead of fixing their crippling issue, and then demonizing the US for helping them out. Can you offer me an example of how my country has decided to maliciously force weaker countries to do their bidding by keeping their citizens alive? Ahh, I do enjoy introducing people to the dark side. It's actually much more for corporations that the government, which is really just the step in between them and the organizations such as the WTO and World Bank. http://rajpatel.org/2009/10/30/tortilla-prices-an-analysis/ http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0506-09.htm Somewhere to start, but you really need to read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Stuffed-Starved-Hidden-Battle-System/dp/1933633492/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257882274&sr=8-1

I took a rather long break from TIF, while I attempted to restore my life to some form of order. It was hardly "overnight". I believe my first anti-theist blog post was well over a year ago, and the summary of it's content was written well over 4 years ago. My use of Skeptical as an internet tag is something I have been doing for many years now, and I only used Cooldog08 as I felt it was appropriate to use your gaming username when discussing the game. I already explained my conviction that people do not present the same person to everyone. Perhaps this was not always how I posted on TIF, but I also rarely posted in OT, instead generally wandering about Help & Advice, or at best posting what I was listening to at the moment, or arguing about genres in metal. My advice is to abandon the focus on sincerity: you will never achieve contentment, since you will never be prove insincerity to any significant extent. The person I am most myself around is my dog, but does that make me a poseur, a fake, my personality a lie when I am around others? Join us Iconic; the more there are the more to argue with.

I don't feel that I've ever attempted to deny that I have changed. It's human nature to change, and I completely embrace it. It seems arrogant to believe that you, someone who has had occasional contact with me on a forum, feels to need to not merely judge, but to insult myself, my choice of vocabulary, and to take every opportunity to drag me down to wherever it is you feel that I belong. Interestingly enough, this is not the first time I've encountered this attitude, and every time they used the same labels, and the same decision that they, and only they, were real people: what they present to the world is true: free of insecurity, fear, loneliness, a sense of not belonging, not caring. Everyone wears a different face, a mask behind which they truly lie. I've never met a person who wasn't different around their friends, who behaved the same way no matter what their environment, their mood, their company. I don't pretend to know who someone really is: there's no point, since it's just endless contradicting evidence for a useless hypothesis. I won't apologize for the way I write or speak: I learned to read from the pages of old books, out-of-date textbooks, and fantasy novels. Why my appreciation for the beauty of language should be suppressed by an incessant desire for brevity and familiarity is something that I suggest you consider. (I wonder how impressive The Declaration of Independence and The Lord of the Rings would have been if the creators restricted themselves to use of words of less than 3 syllables and the traditional use of language, respectively.) In a way I see it as a part of who I am, since it's where I feel comfortable, confident and free. I can tell that other posters (I believe Mask is an example) are often annoyed with me, and yet they don't insist on destroying something that they believe another has built, for little reason other than personal distaste formed by rare contact with someone through a fairly impersonal medium, Now I'm left unhindered to wonder why it is you're so intent to harm someone you believe is feeling lost and uncertain. Such cruelty from someone who offers so little help in return.

It hardly seems inferior than the traditional stance of justifying one's position through humorous dismissal of others arguments. Elucidate, o intellectual. I feel obliged to (once again) to point out that instead of refuting my argument, you employ childish attacks on my character. As the doctor in Doctorow's EST says to Art: "Criticize the person; not the idea." Sound advice, which I would encourage everyone to follow.