The existence of the soul is proven in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol by carefully weighing a dying person on an extremely sensitive scale under tightly controlled conditions and finding that shortly after the moment of death, the he loses a tiny amount of weight.

PDog,

See my response to Marjorie above. I am not justifying abortion. I am saying that the people who argue as if they were empathizing with first-trimester fetuses are fantasizing. An adult, conscious, self-aware person cannot empathize with an entity that has no consciousness or self-consciousness. If an immortal soul exists from the moment of conception, then a person exists, and abortion is the killing of a person.

Marjorie,

No, I don’t think so. If the Church is correct in strongly implying (but not stating outright) that an immortal soul is created and infused at the moment of conception, then the embryo is a person, and I would have no objections to the prohibitions against abortion and stem-cell research. My argument here has been that I do not find emotional appeals about the suffering of aborted babies to be convincing arguments against abortion (as long as the abortions are performed early in the pregnancy).

I was interested in getting your take on the classic response to your justification for abortion. It goes a little something like this: although an unborn human is not concious or does not feel, it has the potential for conciousness and feelings much like a sleeping (or comatose) born human. A sleeping person does not have feelings but given time (8 hours or whenever the person wakes up) it would.

I also don’t understand how an unborn human’s circumstances would not warrant born humans speaking up for them. Being unborn and very young make unborn humans just as vulnerable as the handicap.

In response to Reddog’s first post I would argue that killing people is most often very convenient for the people doing the killing. If Israeli’s killed all of the Palestinians in their territory they would no longer have a security problem. And visa versa for the Palestinians. It would be a very convenient for the group doing the killing, but it would not be right.

Marjorie,

No. I believe you misunderstand my point. Empathy, sympathy, and human decency move us to speak up for those like the sick, the elderly, and the disabled whose circumstances and afflictions prevent them from speaking up for themselves. However, the fertilized egg and the early embryo cannot express their desires and feelings because they do not have any. An argument against stem-cell research, or drugs that may prevent implantation, or abortion early in pregnancy cannot reasonably be made based on sympathy or empathy for the unborn. Suppose I try to argue against stem-cell research by saying, “Imagine how you would feel if you were an embryo created in a fertility lab, and they you didn’t get implanted, and your biological parents donated you to stem-cell research. And then a scientist put you in a test tube, and pulled you apart with sharp instruments to get your stem cells.” It would be nonsense.

Arguments based on sympathy and empathy for the suffering of the sick, the elderly, and the disabled make perfect sense to me. Arguments based on sympathy and empathy for entities that have no feelings and no capacity to value themselves make no sense to me. This is not to say there are no arguments against abortion. My point is that it is illegitimate to try to get people to “feel the pain” of fertilized eggs or early embryos are fantasies, because fertilized eggs and embryos do not feel physical pain and do not value themselves because they are incapable of even the most rudimentary self-awareness.

I think that’s what Catholic is, do you disagree?

I think that what being Catholic should entail is a commitment to truth rather than sentimentality or emotionalism. Arguments against abortion based on the “innocence” of the unborn and their pain and suffering are bogus.

So I am delighted be proven wrong and to enthustastically endorse his comments of September 25th at 11:05 am. We humans too easily slip into binary, tribal thinking…although we seem to notice this trait only in others, so prone are we to be strangers to ourselves.

It is often a stretch to even imagine without disdain how a sane, moral person could frame our core moral beliefs in a radically different manner than we do. Even the ´thought´ that our frame of reference might be open to question, a la ´you make a good point/hadn´t thought about it that way´…can be threatening and rarely finds its way into compoxes, for example. Much as it greives my progressive sensibilities to say so, conservatives don´t own this affliction though many would have you believe it exists only on the Right.

David is spot on regarding the seamless garment, a proposition that finds virtually no support support among the Catholic Right and distressingly little but formalistic support among the Catholic Left.

Aside: David´s comments are entirely consistent with the research of esteemed University of Virginia social psychology professor Jon Haidt. How I wish I could interest a Vox Nova commentator in diving into his very fruitful work and then offering us a chance to grapple it. Hint, hint.

“It is difficult for me to mourn the loss of the unborn because I don’t believe they experience suffering or loss. The obvious answer is that they lose their life, but how does it make sense to speak of an entity losing something it cannot value?”

Cogntive value by a human, like you or me, is the measure of someone’s life? If you value me, I’m “in” but if we can’t find someone willing to “value” an unborn, a disabled person, an elder in need, … they have no speak-up, be-heard value of themselves, they become disposable? Really? Is this the social measure you’d adopt?

It’s not Catholic. Point blank, sorry to offend, but it’s not Catholic. Catholic means we value you, whether you can speak up for yourself or not. Whether are tiny and dependent or aged and dependent … we will speak up for you.

I think that’s what Catholic is, do you disagree?

I wrote a paper once about the basic theological and moral presuppositions of left and right and what draws certain concerns into the orbit of one or the other, so I do have some sympathy for your bit about ‘gut reactions’ and the necessity of understanding what leads to them. (It is published in the Globethics.net volume Overcoming Fundamentalism, a rather obscure place. I am a little harsh on Mr. Weigel in it, I am afraid.)

As to your last paragraph, I am doing my best to be an example of having my religious positions determine my politics. The attacks I get from right and left have me feeling a bit confirmed in that, but I am not, perhaps, the best judge of such things.