AJ,

You miss the point, according to you an unborn child is not a person therefore your contention that no person has a right to use another persons body, though valid, does not apply.
My statement that the unborn have rights that are recognized by the State rests on the fact that convictions have been recorded at law for harm done to an unborn child. I am, as I said, in good company.

Historically too the fetus has been referred to as a child for some thousand of years; 'with child' is a common expression, I have yet to hear anyone use the expression 'with fetus'.

You haven't yet said where you stand on the under the chin stab o kill the child whilst the head is still inside in a breach birth?

david f,

Humanity would never have advanced without faith and risk. A farmer sows a crop in the faith and risk he will reap a harvest. An inventor develops a product in the hope the risk capital he has invested will return him an income.

Abrahan was told by the Elohim [plural gods Genesis 22: 3] to take his son Issac to the Mount and offer sacrifice. However it was the spirit of the Lord [Jehovah Genesis 22: 12]who spoke to him to not touch the lad.
This was defining moment in Abraham's conversion from polytheism to monotheism. His was a step of faith in the face of peer and paternal opposition.
You said:
"I started this string. My intention in starting this string was to point out my view that faith is not a virtue and is just another form of gullibility."

Ignorance is also gullibility

//Ignorance is also gullibility//

No it isn't. Ignorance is an absence of knowledge, and according to some people, bliss. Gullibility is the tendency to blindly accept falsehoods without applying sufficient critical analysis. Ignorance can lead to gullibility and gullibility can certainly lead to ignorance but it is a mistake to conflate the two because they aren't the same.

Josephus wrote: Humanity would never have advanced without faith and risk. A farmer sows a crop in the faith and risk he will reap a harvest. An inventor develops a product in the hope the risk capital he has invested will return him an income.

A farmer has evidence for past experience that planting seed, fertilizing, cultivating and doing the other tasks involving in raising crops will produce a yield if all goes well. The risk is that all will not go well. However, he has evidence of what has happened with past plantings. That is not faith. He is operating on probability. Faith in something like the existence of a God is something else. There is absolutely no evidence for the existence of any God. Faith is to believe in something for which there is no evidence. A farmer would not be a good farmer if he or she operated on faith.

You keep giving excuses, explanations and interpretations to explain the nasty Abraham/Isaac story. The excuses, explanations and interpretations you come up are not implicit in the story. The excuses, explanations and interpretations are attempts to make an ugly story palatable. There is no evidence for either polytheism or monotheism so it is reasonable to reject both on the grounds that there is no evidence on which to accept either.

From what we know of the historical record both monotheism and polytheism have led to atrocities. However, monotheism historically has been more intolerant than polytheism so if we have to have one of the other polytheism seems to be the better choice. Possibly humans adopted monotheism because a single deity which does not exist in reality but is the creation of the human mind resembles monarchy which was a prevalent form of government at the time that monotheism was invented.

Is Mise,

For the second time, I’m not missing the point.

<<You miss the point, according to you an unborn child is not a person therefore your contention that no person has a right to use another persons body, though valid, does not apply.>>

I’m quite happy to call a foetus a “person” with personhood. It makes no difference to my argument. And for the second time, it actually strengthens it because if a foetus isn’t a baby/human/child/person, then it would have even less of a right to use someone else’s body for its survival.

<<My statement that the unborn have rights that are recognized by the State rests on the fact that convictions have been recorded at law for harm done to an unborn child.>>

Yes, unborn PERSONS, little bundles of unborn joy that are capable of making a childless couple very happy, have the right to not be subjected to negligent and reckless behaviour that would endanger its life or increase its chances of being born with health issues by the woman who is carrying it, or a dropkick father that is trying to cause a miscarriage. If she doesn’t want the adorable little PERSON growing inside of her, then she needs to go about terminating the pregnancy in the correct way.

<<Historically too the fetus has been referred to as a child for some thousand of years; 'with child' is a common expression, I have yet to hear anyone use the expression 'with fetus'.>>

This does nothing to discredit my position, and I have even been going out of my way to refer to a foetus as a child to highlight the point.

<<You haven't yet said where you stand on the under the chin stab [t]o kill the child whilst the head is still inside in a breach birth?>>

That would be a really dumb way of going about an abortion and some penalty should be enforced for not doing it in a safe and more humane way. I still don’t see the point to this question.

AJ,

Your argument verges on the absurd for a fetus cannot use anything so is not using the mother's body but is dependent upon it.
The fetus, as you would be well aware does not possess free will so cannot make a decision.

The legal matter to which I aluded involved a man unknown to the mother doing damage to the unborn child in a public place and IIRC by accident.
The law recognized that the fetus was a lgal entity etc.
So save the humour.