How many Christians are here?

I am a Christian. However, I don't attend church, because I'm not very social. On the other hand I keep God close to my heart. I am a sinner, and my heart is full of regrets. I feel that every day I find a new way to spit on all I have been given and I just can't turn back some things. So I feel the need for salvation. I believe Jesus came to earth to show us the dangers of ``amor sui', and is our savior. I certainly accept him as my savior.

Is anyone else here a Christian? I imagine most of you are atheists, agnostics or of other religions. This is ok with me, as I understand it is what is fashionable amongst young people these days. However, I'm always happy when I meet a fellow Christian in an unexpected place :)

>>38
That seems like a built-in appeal to authority, which makes me even more wary of it. Is there a different message you believe it contains? Additionally: I paraphrased directly from the primary Taoist source to support my assertion. Is there evidence I was wrong?

>>39
Yes, that's right, I live in Canada. I know adopted people going to med school, (well, one, anyway), and leading happy lives. I understand our conditions are better than most places, but I suspect that few people anywhere would choose death over their lives: if they do choose death, they are always able to kill themselves. I don't believe killing someone to spare them the potential moral responsibility for suicide is a healthy parenting choice.

>>40
The issue for me is that their existential value as humans (as opposed to economic value, which is not by my belief system a morally correct measure to apply to human life) is still quite high. Again, I'm referring to the developed world, but the chance of a foetus making it to term without killing its mother is extremely high - miscarriages occur in about 1/4 of pregnancies, and maternal mortality is very rare - so by that standard a newly-conceived foetus has about 75% the humanity of a newborn baby. Using years of human life as a unit of measure, the math on the "parasitism" argument is now easy to do, given a conservative average lifespan of 75 years:

0.75 * 75y - 0.75y = 55.5y

So using years of human life as a measure of value, even assuming the 9 months are "lost" for the mother, the human race is vastly ahead. I'm disregarding child-rearing years, because I can safely assume in my country that the unaborted child has at least equal odds to a "normal" child of finding a family whose parents will consider its presence to be a benefit.

I will disregard your description of the age and physical characteristics of the foetus because I do not perceive their relevance. Please correct me if they are in fact relevant to the question.

Note that in a region with a saturated human population, this argument is not so clear. In such a case, I would still prefer use of contraception or even sterilization over murder in order to control the population. And if we are to resort to murder, why should it be babies getting murdered? Why not old people, who are economically useless? Why not the sick or disabled? The chronically unemployed? These are not choices I think we should force ourselves to make by refusing contraception.

The underlying assumptions of these arguments are that human life is precious and that it is of equal value between individuals. That's where the Christian faith comes in - these are two statements strongly affirmed in the bible. I believe it to be valuable because it provides general assumptions that make a difficult issue like the abortion debate easily soluble by rational analysis. Of course in practice the world functions more selfishly, but here we are discussing an ideal system ;)