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Quote by: Pale RIder First off, we aren't discussing science fiction...we are talking actual human beings...
Second, I asked the question for a reason and you answered exactly as I guessed that you would...you said that you were born human...what species do you suppose that you were before you were born?
It is like this starboy...you can trace the line of your life back to a singular moment in time...prior to that moment you did not exist...after that moment, the line of your life has stretched out, unbroken, to this very moment...
You been alive since the moment of your conception...we are either alive or we are dead...life is the quality that separates living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter...life is characterized by functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism. You have met this criteria and have been alive since the moment of your conception...
You also have been a human from the moment of your conception...You are not one whit more human today than you were 1 second after you were concieved...and if you live to be 150, you will not become more human by virtue of your age.. Our age in no way determines how human we are...it only determines how old of a human we are...
At your conception + 1 second, you looked and behaved exactly as a human being is supposed to look at that stage of your development...and at 2 weeks, you looked exactly as a human being is supposed to look at that stage of your development...and the day after you were born you looked as you were supposed to look and the day you got your drivers licence you looked as you were supposed to look...
Our bodies are undergoing constant change from the moment of our conception till the moment of our death...The change is is only change....the change in no way makes us more or less human...the change just makes us different....
At no point in your life were you like a red blood cell or a skin cell...you have been you...a living, growing, developing human being from the very beginning..Now if you are suggesting that you haven't been alive since your conception...since your life began, or that you haven't always been a human then I would ask for you to explain exactly what you were....If you indeed have always been a living human, then exactly the same is true for every other living human on this planet...born and unborn... |
The exact same thing can be said for a tomato seed. So you would gladly take it from the waiter and call it a tomato.
And by your argument as long as any of my cells is alive then I will still be alive. Even when I am dead? I am sure that my family will be glad to keep me around the house in a Petri dish and as long as they keep the cell culture going dear old dad is not dead. Do you think Social Security will still keep up the payments? Talk about the burden of the baby boomers on the system. Actually you may be onto something. A fool proof method on how to get rid of all the magical thinkers. We kill them all but keep their cell lines going and by their own argument they are not dead! So no murder no foul. Great idea!
You are completely ignoring one very important aspect about a living human being. A human is more than just the sum of its cells. A human being can be killed and yet every cell in their body can still be alive and functioning. What makes a human a human is not the sum of the cells but the particular interaction of the cells. It doesn't matter if there are human cells that collectively look like a human, if the do not work like a human then they are not human. There comes a time for all humans when the cells in their body for whatever reason stop working as a human being. Most of the cells are still alive but the human is dead. This is a fact of life. The opposite also holds. There come a time when a collection of cells in the womb becomes more than just a collection of cells and becomes a human. One cell just doesn't cut it. I don't care if it is a supercell. It is just a cell. A tomato seed is not a tomato. Everyone knows that you grow tomatoes from tomato seeds but only idiots think that they are tomatoes.
Starboy