Your quote Col, not mine…no acknowledgement from me.

You agree ‘completely and totally’, choose which footie club you support…electing your own office bearers…locally anyway.

1. The Catholic Church doesn’t force you to ‘join’. Your paranoia re-surfaces.

2 Your ‘main players’ are the NRL, you have NO say in their deliberations…any more than you choose the agenda of the main players in the abortion ‘industry’ – the money-makers.
3 I choose which ‘club’ I support-join…I too have made my choice - joyfully. Mine welcomes all as equals and the leader is a dutiful servant to all.
4 Your club threatens our community by demanding assassinations of some of my club and community members so there are less people to share community facilities and you can control the local council through your club.
5 My club respects EVERYONE and shares the facilities and our food with some of the players that your club rejects and wants to kill.
6 Your club gives a façade of ‘reasonableness’ but has a history of brutally killing these innocents, saying they are of lesser importance than your club members; they may use food and space your members want to party with; they have to pay for the ‘good times’ you enjoy; your club has no tolerance for these innocents or those who care for them, etc.
7 Your club has very different rules to mine and changes them at will to suit the evolving agenda of your club members, no matter how brutal or irresponsible that agenda becomes.

Thank you MIW for your kind remarks.

Despite differences with the CatholicChurch and to Yabby’s chagrin, LAB sees abortion from another perspective and logically concludes it’s wrong…along with many other Christians, non-Christians, etc…

LAB argues that terrorists regard some as ‘lesser humans’ seeing their deaths as collateral damage, therefore justifying their murder – and yes , as you say, similar attitudes – ‘… facilitate government policy which begins to value less importantly ‘ the marginalized in society…including the unborn.

Col, your hypocrisy knows no bounds…killing babies is a cruel use of power, i.e., tyranny…will you resist it too?

ALB, the evidence shows that morality is grounded in biology. Social species evolved to generally not kill those of their own tribes etc,
for obvious reasons, unless their very survival is threatened, say by overcrowding.

Care for the weaker happens in societies which have the resources to do so. In the West, where abortion is common, we care for our old, weak, mentally ill etc. In the Congo, which is largely Catholic,
human life has little value, as they fight over resources to survive.

The problem with your objective morality theory is that it gives ultimate and complete power to those who claim to be in touch with the source, over those that believe them.

Take our Meg here. She believes in the infallibility of her pope, so in effect what he says is god. So what she promotes on here is endless Catholic dogma, just like her pope said.

If Meg's main concern was those little children that were aborted,Meg would logically support couples who have enough kids, to have hers or his tubes snipped. The result would be less abortions and one would think that would make her happy. But nope, she doesent, as her pope doesent. That kind of blind faith in other peoples claims to objective morality gives them huge control over her.

In the 30 year Christian wars of Europe, where alone in one day, 20000 protestants were killed in Paris, it was all about whose interpretation should be the accepted one regards objective morality. The protestants claimed it wasn't the pope, for religion had become big business, as the Catholics sold indulgences, even for those who had already died

‘Social species evolved to generally not kill … their own …,
for obvious reasons, unless … survival is threatened…by overcrowding.’

…’obvious reasons’,…then Yabby attempts to justify killing using ‘overcrowding’…hypocrisy-hot air…either way, your rational presents no logic whatsoever.

You claim ‘societies that can afford to do so’ care for the weak: ‘In the West, where abortion is common, we care for our old, weak, mentally ill etc. In the Congo, which is largely Catholic, human life has little value, as they fight over resources to survive.’

Ask the (Australian) mentally ill and elderly, who die without being missed for six months, or live on our city streets…wrong again, Yabby.

In poorer countries where corrupt governments control food sources and therefore people, human life is valued poorly by governments. Move amongst the people (Catholic or otherwise) and it’s a very different story, Yabby. They care for their young, elderly and weak…they share what little they have. They exude joy in the midst of seemingly insurmountable difficulty.

Greed by corrupt governments and corporate transnationals who control them through the farce of globalization is the real cause of world hunger, not overcrowding.

Get your facts right, Yabby.

RE: infallibility of the Pope…only when speaking with that authority.

RE: controlling lives by sterilization…shades of Hitler again, Yabby. Teach people about their body and its functions so they can responsibly and naturally manage their reproductive lives…BEST option.

Your assertion - sterilizing those who’ve had ‘enough kids’ will lead to less abortions is statistically untrue…those who have abortions often have no children.

Neither the Pope, nor anyone else, including you, Yabby…has ‘control’ over me…I exercise my free will on every decision.

That my decisions and beliefs are dissimilar to yours, despite your attempts at intimidation, etc. is an indication I am willing and able to decide and implement my own decisions and support my own beliefs.

If my beliefs and values are those of the Catholic Church, that only means that I have come to the conclusion that those beliefs are right and good – something many of you find particularly distressing…while arguing individual’s ‘choices’. Hypocrisy?

Meg1-
You answered "What makes it human?" with my point 3 "It has human parents", although you have not directly answered the question of what this then means for the treatment of a fetus ("What does human status confer"), or the objections that I had to this point(3).

Can we deduce your answers to those questions from the rest of your post?-
"To say that other forms of life are also created from a certain point is correct, but other species do not have the same thought processes and ‘free will’..." implies the value a human foetus has is derived from its free will and thought processes.

Other species express emotion, can count and make logical decisions. Since a fetus (or undisputably a zygote) shows none of these things I can only conclude you believe either-

1)Belonging to a species that has some memebers that show these qualities is the condition that gives this value (this seems a discriminatory view, but if this is your view I will debate its points)

2)This is a necessary but insufficient source of the value of a foetus' life

Since you cite your near death experience as proof that souls exist, and cite an example of study about prayer in medical cures, I am inclined to believe that point 2 is more in line with your beliefs (but please let me know).

If thought processes and a soul are necessary, then entities such as anecephalic babies without thought processes (other than autonomic processes common to all animals) can legitimately be killed with no evil being done.

Otherwise thought processes are superfluous if a soul is a necessary and sufficient cause of a fetus having enough value that it should not be killed.

I disagree with claims of scientific evidence of a soul (and how this gives particular moral claims), but it would be fruitless to debate this if it is not your view.

I have not really offered up my views for criticism yet (although hinted at them with my first post), and will happily do so if you desire.

Have you no empathy? Papist propaganda! Is that all you have to say about what you saw?
You would only make a mockery of these butchered, seven week old, fetuses. Surely you can see that any action that results in these pictures is terrible?

The attitudes of extreme pro-abortion zealots, who have to demean life to support their cause, go way too far. They can't bear the real consequences of abortion so they have to lie and obfuscate about when life begins. And they have to demean the unborn.

It is one thing to say that abortion is a necessary evil. I can appreciate this argument to some degree. But, they won't stop there. They need to glorify the killing of the innocent and the helpless as some great exercise in women's liberty.

The original leaders of the women's suffrage movement condemned abortion. The new feminist movement broke from the movements past completely by advocating for abortion. The reason, of course, is that it had nothing to do with a feminist revolution. Instead it had everything to do with a sexual revolution that is now reaching its logical extreme: death, isolation and misery.

The modern so-called feminist suffers from total amnesia about the women’s movement that preceded her. Below is a link to few quotes from prominent and famous feminists of yesteryear condemning the evil of abortion.

http://www.feministsforlife.org/history/foremoth.htm

Extreme pro-abortion zealots, who demean the unborn, are poisoned and blinded by a ruthless ideology. Indeed they are the gruesome and macabre agents of the culture of death. And the women among them who call themselves feminists are no such thing at all. They have abandoned the ideals of the original feminists for the ideals of a sexual revolution completely at odds with women’s interests. However, these ideals of the sexual revolution are nothing new. They are an old and tired monstrosity that have helped destroy countless cultures and civilizations of the past.

Women are mistaken if they think that abortion is an ideal of women’s liberation. Abortion is the product of female enslavement.

As for the Inquisition

All during the Church's history any temporal authority exercised by the Church in fact pretty much came from civil authority. When problems arose that required the use of temporal authority, it was generally the state which carried it out and in whatever way the state wanted to, just as is done today.

A lot of Catholics lost their lives under King Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth because they were "heretics" and considered "against the state". The same was true in Germany and Switzerland under the Lutherans and the Calvinists. Execution of heretics is not a unique situation historically or culturally.

Anyone who thinks that the state carried out the will of the Church in all things the day after Constantine declared the state to be Christian is unbelievably ignorant of basic history. Some of the emperors and kings have been Christendom's biggest heretics. Go look up the Arian controversy.

Part of the reason for the death penalty for heresy was that it was also a source of civil unrest.

"Innocent III, coming to the papacy in 1198, saw in these developments [The rise of the Cathar heresy] a threat to both Church and state. He recognized some excuse for criticism of the Church, but he felt that he could hardly remain idle when the great ecclesiastical organization for which he had such lofty plans and hopes, and which seemed to him the chief bulwark against human violence, social chaos, and royal iniquity, was attacked in its very foundations, robbed of its possessions and dignity, and mocked with blasphemous travesties. The state too had committed sins and cherished corruption and
unworthy officials, but only fools wished to destroy it."

(The Age of Faith, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950, 772-773)
Written by a non-Christian humanist.

Maximum numbers executed were 2000.

http://www.tektonics.org/qt/spaninq.html

Compared with the thousands killed in the womb everyday it is morally and logically outrageous to attack the Inquisition when a far greater holocaust happening today you are vigorously defending!