@neptuneblue,
neptuneblue wrote:
Telling multiple people they "don't understand" religion shows the only one who doesn't understand it is YOU.
It's a very interesting phenomenon when people both insist that the other is wrong and then they try to prove they're right by majority instead of reaching an understanding about their mutually differing POVs.
Ideally, even if we disagree about something, we should be able to understand each others' POVs and then know why we disagree with each other. E.g. you think a fetus is not a person yet and that they don't really feel anything when they are aborted. If I understand this is your POV, I can understand why you don't see it as unethical treatment of the fetus to abort it, because it's not much different from having your appendix removed, in your view. That also explains why you would only see it as an issue for the pregnant woman whether to have the fetus surgically removed or not, because in your view the issue of pregnancy and prospective childbearing are not yet truly immanent. They are more like a hypothetical possibility of what could happen if the fetus doesn't spontaneously abort/miscarry.
Now, I disagree with your view despite understanding it, but if you want to undermine my position, you can just insist that I don't really understand your POV, so then you can start claiming that a majority of people understand your view and not mine and therefore the majority can just dismiss the dissenting opinion of the minority.
Hopefully you realize that that is exactly what happened before the Civil War regarding slavery. Many people had the POV that slavery was a natural economic institution and that if the majority shared that POV, then it was fine to keep slavery legal. The Kansas-Nebraska act actually enshrined this majority-rules POV into law and people fought for majorities at the state level, and the fight got particularly bloody in states like Kansas where there was close to a majority in favor of both sides.
So I think that it is undemocratic and dangerous to just try to win by majority. I think you have to give adequate consideration to the dissenting views of the minority. In the case of abortion, this view is that the fetus has rights and should not be aborted by arbitrary decision of the woman, man, government, or anyone else. In short, the view is that fetuses should be protected as having a certain right to life, unlike pets/animals who can be euthanized at will by current laws. If you understand and respect this POV, then it is possible to move forward toward a more consensus approach to policy, but if you just write off the fetal-rights POV as being irrational, then you are back to suppressing minority dissent in order to force the will of the majority on those who dissent.
