WIP

But, in the U.S. there have been at least 200 prosecutions of pregnant women for using drugs and/or alcohol during pregnancy and giving birth to children who suffered defects as a result, according to this report: http://www.reproductiverights.org/pdf/pub_...ishingwomen.pdf I don't think there have been prosecutions in Canada, although I recall the story of a native woman out West who was taken in to custody for trying to perform an abortion on herself by shooting herself in the abdomen with a pellet gun. Prosecutors had to prove that she was a danger to herself, since there was nothing legally to stop her from harming the fetus. But should that right to privacy be absolute, Even in situations where she is harming the fetus growing inside her? A child growing up with the mental and physical effects of fetal alcohol syndrome or drug abuse may not regard it has their mother's free choice. Good question! How many children has Rush Limbaugh adopted by the way? Then again, since he takes his viagra with him on jaunts to sex tourist resorts in the Dominican Republic, maybe it's a good thing to keep him away from children! There are many exceptions of course, but a lot of conservatives lose their respect for life once it has left the mother's womb!

Now that we are discovering how inept the "intelligence" was in the leadup to the war, chasing bogus stories like the 'yellow cake uranium' story from Niger, and bogus informants -- remember "Curveball" for example; the Iraqi defector who claimed to have worked at a secret chemical factory? The German secret service realized he was a fraud who didn't have real information or even knowledge of how to make chemical or biological weapons, and passed it on to the C.I.A. The CIA claims to have informed Bush Administration officials who are now playing the blame game, claiming they were misled. Even if they didn't get all of the memos, shouldn't they have been at least a little wary of taking stories at face value from a man who was rewarded with asylum and cash gifts for his stories? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) So take those stories about WMD's being flown out of Iraq before the invasion with a grain of salt! They are coming from the same sources and being promoted by the same pro war advocates who are still doing damage control and won't admit to being wrong! Ultimately, there is no sense arguing the WMD debate anyway! What good would a policy of stopping Iraq from getting WMD's be anyway, now that a similar invasion of Iran is impossible and the U.S. is trying to negotiate their way out of confronting North Korea about their nuclear program. Do Bush supporters realize now that "regime change" is a limited option, and that the U.S. can't overthrow every foreign leader they don't like?

I think conservatives and "Conservatives" are missing the reason why many people who are ideologically close to their views, are suspicious of conservative motives: on an issue like gay marriage, conservatives will publicly use "defense of marriage" for their objections and claim that they bear no malice towards homosexuals -- and then, when you scratch a little deeper, you find these people, like Tom Lukiwski, doing the same fag-bashing that their more uncouth supporters do! It's similar to the "school choice" and "separate, but equal" arguments used by George Wallace, Lester Maddox and other notorious segregationists used when they had to take off their hoods and clan robes and pretend to be arguing for racial separation for non-racist reasons. Richard Nixon jumped on the bandwagon using these same excuses to oppose the federal busing programs, and he tacked on his own code word - "urban crime" to inform the vast majority of white voters that he was going to seal the blacks into their inner city neighbourhoods and build new prisons to protect white suburbia from any further civil rights demands by blacks. There are many libertarians and fiscal conservatives who feel suspicious of tax-cutting conservative agendas. The tax cut starts to look like a carrot to be thrown out to bring middle class voters in to a pro- big business agenda; and defense of marriage, protecting our borders, and defending our Christian values etc. etc., also start to look like appeals to bring people onside for selfish reasons! The one thing missing from conservative political appeals are positive messages that could provide a little unity, instead of dividing the public in to warring factions.

Thank you! No need for apology; I was fairly new here at the time, and it's hard to get a handle on where many people are coming from when they discuss issues involving religion.

Hypothetically, that could mean abortion is permissible right up to the day before labour and the baby's delivery are due to occur. Assuming that you don't agree with infanticide, is there a difference between the 34 to 36 week old fetus and the newborn baby that justifies the distinction? The newborn may have moved outside of its mother's body but it is still totally dependent on the mother. Should it still qualify as a personal lifestyle choice in situations where it is causing detrimental effects on society as a whole, such as in India and China? A quick scan of the internet finds the abortion debate divided between "pro life" and "pro choice." The pro life lobbyists do not recognize a woman's right to privacy and personal autonomy at any point during pregnancy! Even some emergency contraceptives are forbidden because they might interfere with the magical point of "conception." On the other hand, pro choice usually doesn't regard the new life as having any legitimacy and personal human rights that would compete with the woman's right to privacy even at the very end of the development process. It leads to an ironic dilemma where medical ethicists are demanding anesthesia be used during operations on fetuses that are past 24 weeks of development because of the possibility that the newly forming pain sense will affect the child subconsciously later in life -- similar to the connection made between psychological problems and difficult, premature births. Is there is an ethical obligation to also anaesthetize a third trimester fetus that's being aborted? If so, it makes it harder to argue that the late stage fetus has not become a person, if it is deemed worth protecting from unnecessary harm and suffering! I can't find any polling numbers online for the breakdown in opinion on abortion beyond a simple yes/no question. The pro choice numbers are higher in Canada than in the U.S., but it's likely that we have a similar breakdown of the numbers as U.S. polling that asks more detailed questions. What's fascinating about the American abortion debate is that after 35 years of rhetorical warfare between two dogmatic positions, the majority of Americans are right where they were in 1975, with the majority agreeing that abortion should be legal in some, though not all situations: The nonpartisan public opinion research organization, Public Agenda, points out that despite a generation of constant wrangling over abortion, American public opinion remains as divided as it was when Roe v. Wade was first decided. In 1975, a Gallup poll found that 54 percent thought abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances; 21 percent thought it should be legal in all circumstances; and 22 percent thought it should be illegal. In 2003, another Gallup poll saw these numbers shift to 57 percent; 24 percent; and 18 percent, respectively. http://www.reason.com/news/show/35013.html From my perspective, the unmoveable middleground represents a feeling that most people have on this debate -- that there are two competing interests that make an absolute position unreasonable. The argument is where to draw that line where one set of rights would take precedence over the other.

Maybe you should go back to the original post for the "actual topic" since you seem to feel that we needlessly derailed the thread! The opener was taken from an article that bashed fundamentalists for comic effect -- there wasn't anything to provide any depth of understanding about religious beliefs or the motivating factors for belief in general -- but if you want to discuss Messianic Judaism, there's no reason why it can't be added to the discussion! Actually, Michele and I have exchanged a few pm's and will likely continue the discussion we were having on another forum anyway. I remember a little while back, you were mocking me for trying to explain the general differences in beliefs of Christians who adhere to Covenant theology vs. the Dispensationalist approach to Biblical History - how it affects their interpretations of what prophecies mean and when they are supposed to occur, and how these interpretations affect their views towards Jews and Judaism. Now that you've been approached by some of those Jew-friendly Christians who watch Messianic Jews on Pat Robertson's show and are trying to convince you that your Messiah already came to Earth (2000 years ago), maybe now you're getting the point that it might be good to know where they're coming from and have a few ready responses to conversion attempts! You are also likely aware that accepting Jesus as the Messiah will mean that you would have to accept a trinitarian God, and reject the Jewish interpetation of Messianic prophecies, and interpretation of many doctrines, so now, maybe you're starting to get the picture that it's good to have at least a basic understanding of what other people believe! If for no other reason than to explain why you have to make a choice between keeping your religion and accepting Christianity. You can't do both without reinterpreting Judaism in a way that is unacceptable to all of the traditional teachings. Maybe Wikipedia is a good place to start! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Judaism

Obviously the over 35 policy has a lot to do with the increasing likelihood of birth defects in women who get pregnant at a later age, but your point is valid that birth defects can set in at any age regardless of how healthy and careful a woman is! During my wife's third and final pregnancy, she was concerned about possible harmful effects of a drug that she had been prescribed, and her gynecologist could only say that she could only determine that the level of risk was very low, but still a statistical possibility. Sometimes the odds are in your favour and sometimes their not! Her doctor said that she had delivered perfectly healthy babies from crack-addicted mothers, while having healthy young women face severe complications -- one never knows! I agree with you that personal choice should be the main determinant in deciding whether to go ahead with a pregnancy when birth defects are discovered, but for the record, not everyone with Down Syndrome is an institutional case! My older brother has a woman with Down Syndrome working at his store -- she is likely the best employee he has since she has the most seniority on the staff; but even though her cognitive abilities are at least average or close to average, she has health problems related to her affliction that are affecting her overall health right now, and will inevitably lead to an earlier death, like others with the disease. In many, if not most cases, it's worth asking if a life with Down Syndrome is worth living? But there are at least some examples where people with the disease are still able to live meaningful, productive lives. The problem with making the decision a complete personal choice is what do you do with women who want an abortion because of more frivolous reasons, such as the baby is going to be the wrong sex? As far as I know, the sex of a child can't be determined before 16 weeks or so in pregnancy, so your talking about an abortion that's getting closer to the point where brain is developing the neural pathways to make control of movement possible later on in life. Does the fetus have a right to life at this point when it is well on the way to developing as a person? And allowing sex selection as a reason for abortion usuallymeans aborting females, since some countries where women are valued less than men, such as India and China, are experiencing a shortage of young women already. State authorities are worried about possible unrest resulting from this imbalance in the near future. Should abortion be allowed for the purpose of sex-selection? I would vote no and would override personal choice in situations like this.

We won't know until all of the dust settles, what level of security threat was posed by cabinet minister giving his biker chick girlfriend his briefing notes; but we do know that Harper was only concerned with burying the story, hoping that the public would quickly forget about it! As for your "Liberals did it too" argument, I have never been a fan of the Liberals, but I give Jean Chretien a few points for putting people he didn't like, such as Paul Martin and John Manley, in his cabinet. He kept Martin in finance for a long time, even after Martin's plot to replace him, was becoming part of public debate! Would Stephen Harper consider keeping any malcontents in his cabinet? I doubt it! A few days ago, Johnathan Kay in the National Post, made a good point that the Bernier affair highlights one of the weaknesses of parliamentary government -- a Premier or a Prime Minister has to select his cabinet from members of parliament, as opposed to the U.S. republican system, where the president can go outside of government to pick the people he wants. In principle, Kay's example is sound, but if you have an incompent president who picks a bunch of cronies for his personal staff, it ends up with the same mess! And judging from Harper's aversion to criticism, I doubt he would pick the best and brightest if he was governing a republican system either! In fact, a leader who's prone to cronyism would probably be making even worse selections if his choices weren't restricted to people who have to think about keeping their seats in parliament!

This thread is moving so fast, I can't keep up! But just in case it hasn't been asked already, why did Stephen Harper think this guy was qualified to take on Foreign Affairs in the first place? And why wasn't he yanked after making stupid comments like saying the local government in Kandahar should be replaced, potentially destabilizing Karzai's fragile government? Add to that, the latest scandal which Harper tried to ride out instead of immediately replacing Bernier, and it looks like Stephen Harper gives about as much thought to the actual qualifications for the job as George Bush does when he's picking his staff!

Why? Outside of Appalachia, Obama polls higher than Hilary. And Hilary and Bill have already had enough of a free pass from the MSM for using subtle and not so subtle race-baiting strategies to make Obama the "black candidate." They made a shrewd, cold-blooded assessment that the black vote was going to go to Obama after he proved he could win a white state in Iowa, and they were willing to feed white resentment of those "blue collar democrats" and worry about winning back the black vote in the general election. Good Riddance Clintons!

I have a theory! Maybe Scott McLellan's book is a CYA, like all of the other former Bush aides who are getting their memoirs out to minimize the damage to their reputations when the grand jury hearings for Rove, Cheney and possibly even Bush himself, start next year.

Well, after all of the lying and dodging, the truth is starting to leak out. There were a lot of us who voted for the Conservatives just to get the Liberals out, and now under Harper, the rot is setting in in record time! Even with Stephan Dion as leader, it looks like Harper isn't going to get a chance to spin the wheel and try for the majority government he's been dreaming about. And, the way things are turning out, I can imagine what he'd be trying to pull if he did have control of Parliament!

It would be nice if it prolife supporters could debate this issue honestly, instead of suffering cognitive dissonance and dodging ethical dilemmas their absolute standard leads to! It's not like prolife is a new cause! When I was young, abortions were illegal, across the board - and some girls received the death penalty for undergoing a botched, blackmarket abortion -- of course, the world was a better place back then in the good old days...............well, not everything was if you look at the past honestly without the rose-coloured glasses!

Being pointlessly argumentative! Right! Any criticism of Republicans is trolling. So, why are you here? Okay, so you're vaguely using the argument for potential life to propose that all fertilized embryos be carried to term. I first heard of this when I was on an American conservative forum and abortion and stem cell research are just about the only ethical issues they care about (children dying in Sudan for example, wasn't America's concern). Trying to be ironic: "Human fetuses do not metamorphosize lke caterpillars," doesn't address the problem that "potential" life means unfinished. It's the equivalent of having a set of blueprints and saying you have a house already to move in to! When that fetus is in the zygote stage, it is just a collection of cells with no sense of awareness in any manner that we can relate to -- there's no brain, no nervous system, no head, no arms and legs -- nothing to tell you what the blueprints are going to make. The absolute prolife position crashes and burns when it is faced with rare ethical dilemmas such as 'what to do with annecephalic babies" - the so-called brainstem babies that are born with no cortex, top portion of the skull, and cannot live more than a few days or weeks if they are carried to term. Prolifers insist that they cannot be aborted, regardless of the cost and emotional hardship of bringing a baby that never becomes conscious into this world, and lives a brief existence on life support! There are similar ethical dilemmas on the other side of the coin, in the euthanasia debate, and they underline the weakness of setting up rigid, arbitrary ethical rules instead of developing a set of principles like medical ethicists are trying to do. Why not? If you really believe it's about "killing dead babies!" A fertilized egg is not a baby! That's the thing that's confusing you!

Tougher! In what sense is it "tougher? Is it ethically more challenging......... a bigger mess to clean up.............. anything more specific than snide, trolling comments? If you're concerns about abortion go beyond trolling, why couldn't you at least provide some updated information on Quebec's abortion policies, since the latest news article I could find on the dilemma of Quebec women going to the U.S. for third trimester abortions is four years old! This CTV article states that Quebec health officials were planning for at least one doctor to provide this service for the 30 or so, women who need this service each year. Do you have any new information? For all I know, it may not even be issue anymore! Quebec health officials said they are hopeful a newly trained doctor will set up practice in the province next year, offering a service that even staunch pro-choice Canadian doctors like Henry Morgentaler refuse to provide for ethical reasons. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...55_7?hub=Canada In other words, it's just another political football for you to try to score points with people who are also caught up in the "my country's better than your country" idiocy! I've noticed that you haven't bothered getting into specifics and even took the trouble of deleting my comments where I stated reasons why I support efforts to limit late term abortions, so I'm not going to bother repeating myself. The majority of reasonable, rational people have consistently agreed with restricting third trimester abortions to situations where the mother is at risk or serious birth defects have been discovered. And the prolife, alarmist propaganda you read consistently fails to point out that late term abortions are still a small percentage of the total number. Because of the ethical issues and health risks, most women who plan to have an abortion are going to get it done as quickly as possible! In Canada, according to numbers from 2003, 6.5% of induced abortions were performed between 13 to 16 weeks, 2.2% between 17 to 20 weeks, and 0.8% over 20 weeks. and notice that the U.S. numbers after 16 weeks are double the equivalent Canadian stats, likely in large part because of the confused policy, which you support, that does not distinguish between early and late abortion................................... In 2003, from data collected in those areas that sufficiently reported gestational age, it was found that 6.2% of abortions were conducted from 13 to 15 weeks, 4.2% from 16 to 20 weeks, and 1.4% at or after 21 weeks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-term_abortion I mentioned these numbers not because of some twisted point-scoring motivation, like you continually exhibit, I put it out there because I believe that the policies of throwing roadblocks in front of early access to abortion (especially for teenage girls) pushes more abortions into the later weeks. Which means what exactly? You believe it's "killing babies" but because it's dependent on the mother for survival, it's okay to kill them? I get the impression that you wanted to jump in and score points without having to actually think through a difficult ethical issue! If you believe abortion is killing unborn babies, then you are defining when human life begins! Hiding in muddled, equivocal language is being dishonest! Make your case by defining when human life begins and when it should be protected, like real prolife advocates do!

And once again, the key word is "late" in your paragraph! Late term abortions are the ones that are the most controversial, because the fetus is more developed, it may be able to survive outside the womb, it's cortex may be developed sufficiently to sense pain, according to some medical researchers, and it is also the period in development when an abortion may be requested for arbitrary or capricious reasons such as the discovery of minor birth defects or that the child is not the desired sex. Sounds like you're still more concerned about criticism of Republicans than you are about the fate of the unborn! I gave you a few reasons above, why people who view anti-abortion laws in general as an infringement on a woman's personal liberty, may still be in favour of restricting late term abortion; but why should the majority feel the same concern for a newly fertilized embryo that has attached itself to the wall of the uterus? Should it qualify for full rights as an individual person just because it has its own unique strand of DNA? It has no brain or central nervous system in the first few weeks, or any features to identify it as human -- so I'd like to hear your case that early termination is the moral equivalent of "slaughtering unborn babies!" Here's an interesting little example of how similar fetal development looks to other vertebrate animals in the early stage: guess which one is the human embryo! http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/embr...mbryoflash.html

Wow, that's going even further than the Idealists who consider everything outside of their ego to be illusion or unknowable. The way the picture looks to me now, is that the hardware inside our heads does not have perfect knowledge of our interior selves or the external world. The brain has to generate a conscious self for us to interpret all of the sensory data coming in from the outside world and make unified decisions. Recent research by John Dylan Haynes has confirmed studies done 20 years ago, that a flurry of brain activity begins up to 7 seconds before a person makes a "free will" decision. http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDoc...0414/index.html As far as the outside world goes....sure, we don't see the natural world as it really exists -- a bunch of tiny particles whirling around in empty space, but the "maps" our visual cortex puts together enable us to function in this world. The map may not be the territory, but it's still a good way of finding your way around. Comparing your map of the world with past experience should give an adequate approximation of the real world to make predictions: like if I knock my coffee cup off the desk, it will smash on the floor, and guess what! It does! And if what we see, matches the pictures that others have, then we have a reasonable basis to verify that what we see is real! It may not be absolute, but it's good enough for me! But, if the self is an illusion, there is certainly no reason to believe it is going to carry on after the physical hardware that generates it has died and disintegrated. So in that sense, death certainly would be real!

If you actually read my post, I left a few questions to answer (I can add a lot more if needed) regarding the mind/body problem before your faith-based belief in a spirit that animates the body can be taken seriously. The simple fact is there are no aspects of mind or consciousness that aren't correlated with brain activity. I briefly mentioned a compromise solution to explain consciousness that lies between materialism and supernaturalism -- property dualism -- and left a link for further information, but it looks like it was all for nothing! Here we go with "death is an illusion" again! Well, try this one on for size: the idea that our personal identity comes from an enduring self, may be the illusion! There is growing evidence from cognitive neuroscience to support an idea proposed by philosopher David Hume, called bundle theory, that a person is simply a collection of mental states at a particular time, which are connected together through short-term memory to create the illusion that our identity is continuous. It may be just a coincidence, but in Buddhist philosophy, the self - referred to as "Anatta" is constantly changing, and the belief that it is continuous, is an illusion. http://www.buddhanet.net/nutshell09.htm

Who said anything about a paradise for choice, or whatever ridiculous term you want to concoct? You're still dodging the issue that "pro life" policies of the Republican Party and many state and local governments to try to restrict or impede all abortions has only succeeded in delaying the procedure, and raising the number of late term abortions. I don't find anything funny about it! But just as I figured, you tossed out the "killing babies" slogan just to be offensive, and not because you actually believe that abortion is killing babies. Using a phrase like that just for rhetorical purposes, is an insult to all of the real pro life supporters who actually mean it when they say aborting fetuses and embryos is killing babies. It's the height of bad taste to use this sort of issue as a political football in the U.S. vs. Canada flame war!

You're the one who needs to go to school if you're going to argue political terminology! Look up the origins of the German slang term "Nazi" and maybe you'll get the picture. The identifying traits of fascism are the promotion of extreme nationalist and racist doctrines of superiority, governed by an autocratic state. The economic policies of fascist governments would fall in the category of socialist economics since they nationalized many industries, set up planned economies and opposed laissez-faire capitalism. They opposed the banking and finance industries, calling them "finance capitalism." The only differences in economic policy between the fascists and the communists was that the fascists allowed private property and private business interests, although both were under severe restrictions, and had to be put in service of the state if and when it was needed. If it wasn't for the fact that the fascist parties in Germany, Italy and Spain, were all racial and ethnic supremacists, it would have been virtually impossible to distinguish them from the communists, who claimed egalitarianism as one of their prized virtues.

Most of what you point out are meaningless flame attacks that do not deal with issues, but are just to look for ways to attack Canadians and Canada -- which I might add, does nothing to restore the international credibility that the U.S. has lost under your beloved George Bush's reign as president! I already pointed out twice that ethical issues become more contentious in the later stages of pregnancy when abortion is performed; obviously that's why the Quebec government wants to seriously reduce the number of late abortions. Will it work? I don't know. But since, as you pointed out earlier, there are U.S. states willing to perform third trimester abortions, then their values are the ones that are questionable, since so many U.S. laws delay abortion and needlessly raise the number of third trimester abortions -- the point that you keep trying to dodge! "Abortion paradise!" What the hell is abortion paradise supposed to mean? And if you are a prolife advocate who believes that life begins at conception -- put up or shut up! At what stage does an abortion become "killing a baby?" Be a man dammit! Let's hear some of your arguments instead of the constant sniping from the sidelines!

I don't know the Quebec abortion regulations, but if they are going overboard with restrictions on third trimester abortions, it's going to cause more trouble than its worth. Most women don't want to wait till the 11th hour to have an abortion if they have an opportunity to get it done earlier. But the application of abortion laws in the U.S. are far more uneven than in Canada. Many states throw up roadblocks to try to make it difficult for women to have abortions at any stage. The states that have informed consent laws, mandatory waiting periods and parental notification laws lead to more third trimester abortions where the fetus is developing enough to start raising ethical concerns.

And you'll take the word of anyone who calls himself a scholar! nough said. You're not going to find anyone who's ever been in a life-threatening situation who agrees with you. It's okay if I fall the rest of the way down this cliff, it's just an illusion! And you still will be dead if no one can get your heart started again immediately. The length of time a person can survive after their heart stops beating varies! If someone falls through the ice on a frozen lake, they are going to survive longer than someone who's heart stopped while they were at room temperature because the freezing will slow down the body's metabolic functions. Either way, once the brain becomes starved for oxygen, neurons start to die, and if there is extensive damage, you're brain dead even if they get your heart re-started. That's just being idiotic! You have a pretty low threshold for considering someone to be alive if you consider someone alive who's in a persistent vegetative state, as long as the life support machinery can keep the cells in their body alive! Are you actually trying to make a point here or just raise idiotic objection? Oh sure, the atoms can always convert to something else, but what has that got to do with being alive? At least in the sense of cognitive awareness. Every particle will eventually disintegrate and convert into energy. Is that a serious question? It's continually scrutinized and re-evaluated. Take a look at all of the bioethic and neuroethic panels that gather to try to provide doctors with definitive guidelines for pulling someone off life support or giving the go-ahead for harvesting organs for organ donation. A doctor doesn't want to declare a patient brain dead if there is still any chance of coming out of a persistent vegetative state. That's why present guidelines regard brain death include the cerebellum and the brain-stem. But, if the heart stops beating or if respiration cannot be maintained, many organs like the heart and the liver will be damaged by lack of oxygen and of no use for organ transplant. So they can't wait too long. http://www.braindeath.org/confirm.htm http://www.theresurrector.com/index.phtml http://www.deathreference.com/Bl-Ce/Brain-Death.html So, you can have someone who is clinically alive, but in a persistent vegetative state and therefore unconscious. But determining the extent of damage is difficult until after the autopsy is performed. There may be no brainwave activity picked up by EEG machines, but there may still be a low level of activity these machines have not been able to pick up. There have been a number of patients who were thought to have been in irreversible comas, that were able to come out of it. In the Terry Schiavo case, there was alot of evidence that the cortex was destroyed, which was later confirmed by the autopsy. She was alive in the sense of having a functioning brainstem and cerebellum to maintain metabolic functions and some muscle activity, but has the "seat of consciousness" - the cerebral cortex completely destroyed, and therefore incapable of attention, thought, memory and awareness of sensory information -- all the things that make us human. There are a lot of mysteries that scientists don't fully understand, but you don't provide a valid explanation for that mystery by just making up an answer and declaring it the truth. Just leave it in the mystery file until future knowledge and understanding provides a real explanation. Your personality is a collection of mental states connected together with memory. All of the aspects of your personality can be correlated with brain activity. Neurochemicals are released which cause both positive and negative emotional reactions. And drugs containing these and similar chemicals can trigger the same reactions. If your personality was contained in an immaterial soul, why would it react to physical stimuli like drugs, alcohol etc.? Or why would your personality change as a result of a brain injury? Long before the age of neuroscience, observant examiners questioned how a soul could answer this mind/body problem. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, was aware of this problem, and dismissed the supernatural concept of a soul or spirit for that reason. He allegedly asked a dualist philosopher if his sould also got drunk on wine, when he had too much to drink? It's still a valid question today! Considering how totally dependent consciousness is on brain activity, there are only two paths to explain cognitive awareness in any meaningful sense: one is the materialist explanation, and the one I am most familiar with considers consciousness as an emergent phenomena generated by the 50 billion or so, neurons in the cerebral cortex which can each have up to 10,000 dendritic connections with other neurons nearby. This level of complexity is beyond anything that can be achieved with the most advanced computers. And since you're looking for something magical in those atoms and molecules, there are some philosophers such as David Chalmers, who can't accept the concept of reducing mental states to physical states -- that our felt sense of being alive can be generated by inert material processes, regardless of how complex they are. But Chalmers is not a dualist in the sense of believing in a soul or spirit to animate the body! Instead he is exploring the possibility that those particles not only have physical properties, but also have mental or conscious properties as well. A property dualist, or panpsychist interpretation of consciousness doesn't make any testable claims that materialist theories would not also make. In both cases, our unique human consciousness is still dependent on the hardware we have inside our heads. Even if the atoms that make up the neurons of our brains have properties of mind, they are not going to keep our memories stored after the brain has been destroyed. This would be consciousness at a simple, rudimentary level that we can't relate to since it would keep nothing of our unique personal traits. http://hedweb.com/lockwood.htm#naturalistic

Well let's see how much money the prolife politicians are willing to put up to support adoption first! IF the Republican example in the U.S. is any indication, support will be for a brief, limited time after delivery. Someone came up with a great line about the prolife Republicans: "they support the sanctity of human life, until it comes out of the womb." And there is still that matter of who should have the right to make the decision? The woman or the prolife state? I don't know your profile, but assuming that you're not a woman, you would not ever be in a situation of having to put up with a nine month pregnancy and then part with your newborn child immediately after delivery. Of course neither would I, since I am a man. Is this a decision that any man can fully understand or has the right to interfere with and make decisions about? Abortion will still go underground and be practised, just like prostitution, gambling, drugs and everything else that the authorities want to ban! In El Salvador, there have been several cases where a young woman who has internal bleeding from things like a perforated uterus, is manacled to her hospital bed to await a court-ordered forensic examination to determine if she has had an illegal abortion. The other ugly aspect of a total ban is that the abortions that are performed on the black market, are done at later stages of pregnancy where ethical issues of fetal development and fetal pain could be a factor. In societies with open abortion in the early stages, the vast majority are done early in pregnancy. Countries like the U.S. have more women seeking late term abortions than in Canada or Western Europe, because of restrictions like the unavailability of clinics in many states and the harassement from prolife demonstrators.

Angus already pointed out how ridiculous it is to assert that religion has an equal peer review process with science, so there's not much I can add except for a wise quote I heard some years ago that goes something like: you are entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own truth! If everyone ran around with these idiotic relativistic attitudes, nobody would be able to agree on anything! The "peer review" process of religion that you're talking about is not scientific peer review process. If the "peers" are a panel of creationists writing for the Discovery Institute, their conclusions are biased from the outset, because the purpose of their organization is to find anything and everything to that can be used to bolster a claim that there is evidence of supernatural intervention in the process of evolution. If the peers are fellows of some southern bible institute that insists that all members agree that the bible is the inerrant word of God, their arguments are equally biased. The only religious peer review process that comes close to being scientific, are the gatherings of accredited Biblical and textual scholars who are not obligated by any pre-conditions. The most prominent one was the Jesus Seminars, and even they could not reach a consensus on some disputed verses in the Bible, or what verses were likely to have actually been spoken by Jesus. There were also disputes over the voting process. And that's about as good as it gets in the world of theology! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar They're supposed to organizing a new series of meetings with a new voting system and with additional manuscripts that were discovered after the last one. So maybe the next one will be able to reach a better consensus of opinion. B.s.! The only avenue for fundamentalists, fake healers and promoters of pseudoscience to make their case is to attack scientific evidence where it contradicts with the magic mumbo jumbo they want to believe in and teach to others! The biggest difference in the way science works from the way religion reaches conclusions is that religion claims to know all of the relevant answers in advance by special revelation from a creator. The revelation can be a book written by God, or inspired by God, or it can be some shaman in a trance or high on peyote claiming to have mystical visions of the truth. Science starts from the ground floor, without making any knowledge claims, but instead builds its knowledge base by conducting experiments and applying empirical analysis of the results that are published and can be verified or shot down by their scientific "peers." From the basis of the handful of scientists that I've talked to, the peer review process is brutal, especially for a young researcher who doesn't have a long track record of published research behind him/ or her. I may need that question clarified, but let's just say that once the conscious portion of your brain (the cerebral cortex) is damaged to the extent that there is no brainwave activity, then you're dead! Look up the Terry Schiavo case for an example of why neuroscientists don't consider primitive brain stem and nervous system activity to be adequate to qualify the person as alive. The reason why there was controversy is because people who believe in the supernatural, believe that we have immaterial souls that animate the body. Even though this belief is widely held, there is no factual basis to prove it and it is being knocked down with each new discovery in neuroscience with new, advanced machines that can show the correlates between brain activity and consciousness.