A fetus is not a complete life form, it still needs outside nutrients to complete itself. It needs to develop muscle, tissue, and bone to complete itself. It needs to develop organs, blood, neurons. It needs to develop limbs. It is a fetus and not a fully human child until all this is done.

That is what the point of the blog was - conception is only a step on the way to the human. An important one, but still only a step and a human baby does not come about until many steps are completed.

You keep arguing the end result. If a man and woman are thinking about having children then the only kind of child that can result from such thoughts is human. Does that mean THINKING about sex gives the ...

A fetus is not a complete life form, it still needs outside nutrients to complete itself. It needs to develop muscle, tissue, and bone to complete itself. It needs to develop organs, blood, neurons. It needs to develop limbs. It is a fetus and not a fully human child until all this is done.

That is what the point of the blog was - conception is only a step on the way to the human. An important one, but still only a step and a human baby does not come about until many steps are completed.

You keep arguing the end result. If a man and woman are thinking about having children then the only kind of child that can result from such thoughts is human. Does that mean THINKING about sex gives the possible baby HUMAN STATUS even before copulation has begun?

A full grown human still needs nutrients from outside it to constantly rebuild itself.

Limbs, eh? So that means that people who lose all their limbs are no longer human, right?

Your arguments are failing to make the grade. A foetus still qualifies as a human being, unless you are willing to make ridiculous leaps of logic.

The issue is, once you've had sex and conception has occurred, something very dramatic has happened. Nothing you can do can reverse that. You can abort the child, destroying that person from reaching their potential. That's not a reversal; that's a bailout. In the end, I just want people to start taking responsibility for their actions. Sex is more than just a recreatio...

A full grown human still needs nutrients from outside it to constantly rebuild itself.

Limbs, eh? So that means that people who lose all their limbs are no longer human, right?

Your arguments are failing to make the grade. A foetus still qualifies as a human being, unless you are willing to make ridiculous leaps of logic.

The issue is, once you've had sex and conception has occurred, something very dramatic has happened. Nothing you can do can reverse that. You can abort the child, destroying that person from reaching their potential. That's not a reversal; that's a bailout. In the end, I just want people to start taking responsibility for their actions. Sex is more than just a recreational activity. It's the act of human procreation, and it behoves us to not go around engendering children we're not inclined to take responsibility for. Use contraception, period. Then, if contraception fail, come talk to us about the possibilities of abortion (because it at least shows that you tried to take responsibility)

I disagree, his questions where answered. He first tried to use the "it can't be anything else" argument - which utterly fails because the initially conceived zygote has the potential to be a human. Potential means a possibility to become - not already is.

Next he tries the DNA argument, but every cell in the body has DNA. That argument fails.

Darkeforce makes my own argument when he next says "You can abort the child, destroying that person from reaching their potential." (emphasis mine) The fetus is a potential human. If left in the proper environment and allowed to grow it will become human. It will REACH a definition of human, but until then it is not quite human.
...

I disagree, his questions where answered. He first tried to use the "it can't be anything else" argument - which utterly fails because the initially conceived zygote has the potential to be a human. Potential means a possibility to become - not already is.

Next he tries the DNA argument, but every cell in the body has DNA. That argument fails.

Darkeforce makes my own argument when he next says "You can abort the child, destroying that person from reaching their potential." (emphasis mine) The fetus is a potential human. If left in the proper environment and allowed to grow it will become human. It will REACH a definition of human, but until then it is not quite human.

After that he just dissolves into idiocy by trying to twist the conversation into the realm of absurd. He sets up strawman arguments about the feeding tube and location.

The argument hasn't failed. It is the people who take the stance against it that fail. Time after time their concerns (murder) are shown to be misplaced (its not murder) but they refuse to admit that what they have chosen to believe is wrong. Rather than take any new information and apply it to their beliefs, they spend their times creating novel and intricate arguments against new and opposing information in order to protect and maintain their beliefs.

I do not believe coexistence is viable in the long run on issues like these. People who do not come to belief through proof do so through fanaticism. I question the sanity of people who continually choose to believe for the sake of belief in direct opposition of evidence, proof, and rationality.

I do not argue a black and white determination - I had thought I'd stated that before but it must have been in some other forum. I would argue a mixture of factual understanding and common sense, even when such sense does not appear to be very common.

You cannot "be" prior to "being". If you are making then you are not "made". To have "potential" is a possibility rather than an actuality.

The question is as simple as "when does the human mind become complex enough to begin human thoughts?" Certainly not at conception, so I guess that is a black and white statement.

We can reach an understanding if we study the facts and the processing that lead to birth. We will certainly never understa...

I do not argue a black and white determination - I had thought I'd stated that before but it must have been in some other forum. I would argue a mixture of factual understanding and common sense, even when such sense does not appear to be very common.

You cannot "be" prior to "being". If you are making then you are not "made". To have "potential" is a possibility rather than an actuality.

The question is as simple as "when does the human mind become complex enough to begin human thoughts?" Certainly not at conception, so I guess that is a black and white statement.

We can reach an understanding if we study the facts and the processing that lead to birth. We will certainly never understand it if we just say "god did it" and label conception as the magic time in which we all become human. That is the point I was trying to make.

The problem with religion is that it doesn't want to debate the point. They are not interested in either facts and evidence or philosophy and ontology. They are interested only in arbitrary lines based on ignorance and mysticism.