re: #723 NukeAtomrod

You are confusing personality with person. While both words have the same root and are related, a personality is not a prerequisite for being a person. And it could even be argued that animals, which are not persons, display personalities.

So, let me get this straight; you agree that zygotes and embryos don’t possess personalities, but argue that chimps and apes and dolphins and dogs might have them (btw; I agree that they might). So if you’re willing to roundly, vehemently and vociferously condemn women for deciding not to carry their 1st trimester pregnancies to term, you would apparently be eager to gun down the employees of animal shelters on sight, for committing the much more heinous act of routinely euthanizing unwanted pets, who, after all, have personalities, are independent of any particular owner, and can communicate their affections and desires after a fashion. I can’t believe that a person who seemingly considers himself to be moderately intelligent would actually endeavor to straight-facedly argue that a single cell is a fucking person. Have you ever met a personalityless person - one who NEVER HAD a personality - outside your self-serving zygote-embryo definition? And by met, I don’t mean held a hand on the belly of the real person carrying it.

So, in your view, the observations of an individual scientist have no merit. I’m glad that individual scientists and inventors tend to work around your limitations. Otherwise, we’d still be living in the stone-age.

Umm, I haven’t known any inventions or innovations to occur due to obviously biased individual ‘scientists’ claiming their emotionally involved impressions are gospel truth without an iota or whit of subsequent independent, objective, dispassionate peer review and repetition under controlled conditions.

If I haven’t said so before, my condolences on the loss of your parents.

Caring for them as they died was far and away the hardest thing, emotionally, that I have ever undergone. But it is also an experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything I can conceive of. I consider myself to be extremely fortunate to have been there with both of them, holding their hands, for their passing.

Besides, they cared for me and raised me from infancy to adulthood; it was my turn to reciprocate the consideration that they, out of love, showed me. It was an honor and a blessing to be able to do so. But, as I said before, an emotionally harrowing one.