Posts by crownboy

94

Saddam's Sons Confirmed Dead

by DevonMcBride in

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cnn is reporting that saddam's sons, oudai and qusay are confirmed to be dead.

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Well, assuming there will be very solid confirmation for this, it is indeed quite good that these two have been stopped. The fact that some sources have said that these two were actually worse than their father says a lot.

dubla, while I am not an anti-death penalty person, why do you think that their being killed is so much more worse than if they were to have spent the next 50 years of their sad pathetic lives behind bars with no real freedom, and then died? IMO, both cases would be just as bad (I just don't view the death penalty as being a priori a bad, inhumane or evil thing, so if they had been tried and hanged, it would have made no real difference to me than if they had been tried and gotten life in prison).

27

Florida Plastic Surgery Ruling

by Yerusalyim in

jw
friends

the florida supreme court has ruled that as long as they can pay for it, children as young as 12 can receive elective plastic surgery without parental consent.

sound far fetched?

not really, considering that the florida courts have indeed ruled that 12 year olds can get an abortion without parental consent.

crownboy

Well, Yerusalyim, I already mentioned the reason why I was against the very young having plastic surgery (health reasons). Do you think that even if a parent did give consent for a child to get plastic surgery that the supremecy of parental consent ought to be the only thing that factors into allowing the procedure to happen? If the Hare Krishna's were not a dangerous cult that literally could cause you bodily harm, I would definitely disagree with a parent tiranically deciding that their child should not have the freedom to choose their religion (or to flip it again: if you decided that your child should be allowed to be a Hare Krishna, would that make it OK, since you've given the all important parental consent?)

Of course, you do make a valid point about where a line should be drawn, and it's certainly not my intent to imply that a parent has no right to tell their kid what to do (e.g.: help out around the house, do homework, TV regulation), but the right of the parent to tell the kid what to do only extends so far as it does not bring harm to the child (so if for some impossibly odd reason making a child do his homework would cause him some sort of irreparable harm, then I don't think the parent should have the right to make their child do it). In the case of a parental consent for abortion, for some kids letting the parents know about it could bring harm to them.

But as I stated in a previous post, the abortion case extends over to yet another principle, namely whether or not a parent has the right to override a child's reproductive rights, and in the process potentially adversely affect the child's life well beyond the time they'll be with their parents. Should a parent have that much power over not only a child's adolescence, but also the child's adulthood? Should the parent be able to single-handedly overrule a child's legal right to abortion? For me, the answer is clearly no (if the parent was not able to convince their child of the reasonableness of their anti-abortion attitudes for the preceeding 11-17 years, then they should have tried harder ). Not when so much is at stake in the life of a child.

27

Florida Plastic Surgery Ruling

by Yerusalyim in

jw
friends

the florida supreme court has ruled that as long as they can pay for it, children as young as 12 can receive elective plastic surgery without parental consent.

sound far fetched?

not really, considering that the florida courts have indeed ruled that 12 year olds can get an abortion without parental consent.

crownboy

What next, twelve year olds can get married without parental consent too?

Even if the parents did consent, should they be able to get married then as well?

I don't think "parental consent" in and of itself should really be the only factor controlling situations like marriage, abortion, etc. We probably wouldn't let 12 year olds get married to each other, or let a 12 year old get married to a 30 year old, but an abortion and the situations under which a teens privacy would be essential towards their making a sound decision are a little different. Even in the hypothetical situation with the 12 year olds marriage, both the parent and the child would agree on something that the 12 year old will utimately be solely affected by. There's no real cohersion there. However, for it to be the equivalent of the abortion scenario, the parents agreement with a 12 year olds marriage would mean that the child had to be married even if the child objected.

In the Florida law, the parent(s) would have veto power over the child's reproductive rights regardless of what the child thought, and frankly parents ought not have that kind of power over their kids. They are the kid's guardians, not their masters. The parent/ child relationship is necessarily unfair to the parent (at least before kids reach adulthood), with the parent putting in more towards the relationship than the child can. The parent must feed, clothe, teach the child,etc., while also respecting the child's right as a human being, even though they can't do for the parent what the parent is doing for them (yet). Just because a parent did all the aforementioned things does not mean they now have absolute control over the kid, even deciding whether or not the child will take on the life long responsibility of parenthood. If these abortions should be stopped, they should be based on something more than the parents "right" to tell the kid what to do, but so far I haven't seen that the supporters of the law had more to go by than some concept of ultimate parental power (or in reality, an anti-abortion agenda). Very young kids aren't allowed to marry, yes, but it's not based on the principle that the persons who gave birth to them thinks it's a bad idea. If we could come up with situtions in which 12 year olds getting married would be of extreme good to their development as persons, and to society in general, I don't think a parents objection should be what stood in the way of a marriage (but obviously, such a scenario would be hard to find, if not impossible).

(Edited to add: thanks razor blade )

22

A Question for Those Who Converted to Atheism

by Piph in

i've been thinking and wondering a lot lately about the existance of god.

i haven't had much chance to talk to atheists before, and i was just wondering what was it that convinced you that there wasn't a god?

i'm not asking whether there's proof of god or not...i'm just curious about personal feelings and experiences, if you don't mind sharing.

crownboy

Frankly being an athiest, I am not afraid to die at all. I came to the conclusion that if we know animals don't go to heaven or hell, why should we think we are so superior that something awaits us. We're all just walking compost. Not a happy thought, but far easier for me to grasp.

Well, I wouldn't quite put it in those words, but a similiar thought .

Actually, once I realized that due to a lack of any real evidence for an afterlife that I couldn't continue to convince myself of it, I never really was scared about it or anything. A lot of folks who become non-theist say that this was a hard concept for them to get rid of, or many theist wonder how an atheist can live not believing in an afterlife. However, in actuality, it was harder for me to admit to myself that the JW religion was BS than to drop the afterlife concept. Not looking foward to an afterlife only makes this life that much more important, so while I'm sure I probably won't be 100% thrilled when the Grim Reaper knocks at my door, knowing that I lived my life as good as I could, perhaps enriching the lives of others along the way will still be a very rewarding thing. Besides, if you are dead you cannot possibly know that you are in that state.

22

A Question for Those Who Converted to Atheism

by Piph in

i've been thinking and wondering a lot lately about the existance of god.

i haven't had much chance to talk to atheists before, and i was just wondering what was it that convinced you that there wasn't a god?

i'm not asking whether there's proof of god or not...i'm just curious about personal feelings and experiences, if you don't mind sharing.

crownboy

Well, I'm not exactly an atheist, more of an agnostic (but atheistic to a lot of god concepts, including the ever popular bible one).

The reason I more or less lack belief in god is precisely because I realized I could not really proove his existence. I realized that I don't usually give "the benefit of the doubt" to other concepts that have not been proven (tooth fairy), so why should I do the same for YHWH or any potential deity? I think also that a lot of people, in addition to thinking they have logical proofs of god, have some sort of "spiritual connection" to their "heavenly father". For me, however, god was always primarily an intellectual connection, and not an emotional one. Sure I felt some "love" for him, and appreciated all he supposedly did for me, but this was mainly premised by the fact that I thought there was really solid evidence for his existence. Indirect stuff like "look at all those pretty and orderly stars up there, a god must exist!" never did it for me. Due to a lack of education on the subject, I believed that what I was taught about the bible was true. We really were created 6,000 years ago just as the bible says, with mounds of proof to back it up, I thought. There's great extra biblical documenation of what Jesus did as described in the bible, I thought. All those prophecies that have been claimed to be fortold and fullfilled by the bible really did come to pass, I thought. With such a sureness of mind on whether God existed (and all the colorings of the "problem of evil" and other things about god's nature that I accepted), it was easy for me to worship god.

Once I realized all these things weren't true, and that things like the "problem of evil" don't logically disappear by passing the buck to us humans, there was nothing left there for me. I couldn't pull myself to believe in something's existence that I had no real evidence for. If and when a god clearly and objectively reveals itself (god would know what it takes to do this, being all knowing and all ), then I'll believe for sure, untill then I suspend judgement. But somehow I do suspect that even if a goddess does exist, she really wouldn't care if we worshipped her anyway, and assuming she's rational, she'd understand why.

27

Florida Plastic Surgery Ruling

by Yerusalyim in

jw
friends

the florida supreme court has ruled that as long as they can pay for it, children as young as 12 can receive elective plastic surgery without parental consent.

sound far fetched?

not really, considering that the florida courts have indeed ruled that 12 year olds can get an abortion without parental consent.

crownboy

Oh, I forgot about the plastic surgery one. I guess StinkyPantz and I are of like mind here (didn't see the post since I was writing the reply), since I largely disagree with the plastic surgery for teens. It's not so much about not getting parental consent, as it is about the health of a child. I would make it so, that even if a parent did consent to such surgery, that the kid go through some sort of physcological and physical test, to ensure that the surgery should be happening. Carrying a child to term that will totally affect the rest of your life (at the whim of your parents, nontheless), and getting surgery for bigger boobs to attract Jimmy from the 10th grade (whose baby your parents will force you to carry ), deal with two separate situations.

27

Florida Plastic Surgery Ruling

by Yerusalyim in

jw
friends

the florida supreme court has ruled that as long as they can pay for it, children as young as 12 can receive elective plastic surgery without parental consent.

sound far fetched?

not really, considering that the florida courts have indeed ruled that 12 year olds can get an abortion without parental consent.

crownboy

I agree with the decision. Before I even read Reborn's most recent post, I had already concluded that certain groups of young women (those raped by their guardians, etc.) would need a law like this simply because parental notification in those cases would be detrimental to their well being. Not every pregnant teen is some media influenced, over sexed young woman who wants to "grow up too fast", and "gave it up" to some guy she barely knew in a moment of pure irresponsible teenaged erotic emotionalism, and now that girl is ashamed to confront her very concerned and good natured parents because of the dissappointment they would feel toward their daughter. But even in a case like that, the privacy rights of the teen should supercede those of the parents, since the decision to carry a child to full term is a decision that should be made by the one carrying the child, and not the parent(s) of the one carrying the child. I strongly suspect that in alot of cases the opinion a person takes on this issue has a lot to do with whether they are for or against abortion, than with "parental rights", but certainly that's not absolutely the case, because I'm sure most pro-choice parents would like to know if their teen was having an abortion, even if they were totally sympathetic to this ruling. The notification seems more like a ploy by anti-abortion groups to curtail abortions by teens, and therefore further their anti-abortion agenda, even if it means some kid has to bring her father's child to term, etc.

Of course, it would be great if teenagers didn't get pregnant and all that stuff, and hence we wouldn't have to be in this situation. That's where comprehensive sex education would come into play (i.e.: not just abstinance only). Denying the sexual nature of teens seems to be very silly to me, but obviously with sex comes the possibility of pregnancy, and unfortunately this society was not particularly set up for pregnant teens to succeed. However, we do know that comprehensive sex-ed reduces the amount of teenagers who eventually get pregnant, and hence the numbers of those who need abortions. Western Eurpean countries have great working models of this concept. Not only are teens less likely to get pregnant there, but they start having sex at a later age than American teens (most likely because sex doesn't have the air of mystery and unrealistic romanticism it does here). But somehow, I'm pretty sure the groups that opposed this ruling would be most against that kind of comprehensive sex-ed in schools .

And as a total aside, there isn't a great deal of public benefit in having kids learn the ten commandments. About half of the commandments are overtly religious (the Hindu kid realizes he is breaking commandment one ). The not cheating, stealing, killing, etc. need not be taught in a religious context, or at least acknowledge that most religions already have this in their text, or that such things were taught even before Moses came.

163

Moral absolutes

by Aztec in

i keep saying i am going to start a thread on this topic so here goes.... what, if anything, is always morally wrong?

murder, rape, incest?

how much do you think your belief, or lack thereof, in a higher power influences your opinion?.

crownboy

I would just like to throw out the idea again that just because an action may never be found to be a moral "good", does not mean that there are moral absolutes.

My thought exactly. Reborn's example brings this point out quite saliently.

Whether you think "God" made our morals, or we made them ourselves, it would still be the subjective opinion (though obviously not necessarily unwise) of some person/ being, and not absolute by nature (I read that aforementioned Socrates dialogue once. It's a classic). The only things that are absolute live in clearly pre-constructed worlds (e.g: numbers). Even physical laws aren't necessarily absolute, as they could eventually change, but obviously there is a low probability of that happening.

2

Jamie Fox Serenades Serena

by SixofNine in

jw
friends

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at the espy's : http://nomenclature3.tripod.com/jamiefox.wmv.

funny guy!

crownboy

Yeah, I saw that last night, it was damn funny .

"Can I be your tennis ball...."

(BTW, Six, how are you?)

23

Pirates! Johnny Depp

by asleif_dufansdottir in

i really liked it (i don't ask a lot in a movie...escapist entertainment's what i'm after).

i thought johnny depp rocked as the rather swishy, funny pirate captain.

orlando bloom is turning into quite the attractive young man...after that last scene, i can see him in musketeer garb.. looking forward to the league of extraordinary gentlemen (love sean connery)...heard it's not great, but like i said, escapist entertainment).

crownboy

I recently saw the movie as well, and as others have indicated, it is a very funny movie. I highly recommend it (for adults and children alike). The Johnny Depp character is by far the most interesting.