Posted on 02/11/2009 10:33:53 AM PST by NYer
This has been explained to you; your pretense of ignorance is intellectually dishonest.
Yes they are: but aspirin and Vics cure disease, do they not? Indeed you bring this up thread after thread, and I keep explaining the difference between medicine and artificial birth control thread after thread. Ask me the same question and you will get the same answer, no matter how many times you try.
No, they do not. You Fail Biology Forever, and have no standing to pretend to have a valid opinion on the subject.
That's a rather damning admission. You admit that you're just like a transient living on a heat grate, who said yesterday that his problems are caused by CIA beams aimed at his skull, says today that his problems are caused by CIA beams aimed at his skull, and will continue to say tomorrow that his problems are caused by CIA beams aimed at his skull.
Why do you think people take these medicines?
I understand that they treat secondary effects, but they are taken to alleviate headache and cold. Headache and cold are diseases. Fertility is not.
Because the natural functioning of their bodies is, at the moment, a burden and an inconvenience. You have declared that to be morally unacceptable. I am simply requiring you to be consistent in your stated position.
this doesn’t alter the fact that flu and headache are dsieases and fertility is not.
For instance, your argument, such as it is, requires you to either define hunger as a "disease" or accept the preposterous conclusion that consuming non-caloric sweeteners in place of sugar is a form of, as you put it, "self-mutilation".
Hunger is not a disease. So?
I already told you — “so” that means that you are forced to denounce Nutra-Sweet as immoral.
If you think you have an analogy, please explain it. The fact is, you don’t, and as you try, you will see your mistake.
You seem to lack a grounding in basic logic. What I have is an equivalence (several items which do the same thing — i.e. modify the natural functioning of the body for the convenience of the owner), not an analogy.
Here’s why your analogy, or whatever you call it, doesn’t work:
If you take a hunger-canceling pill (contracepted intercourse) when a dinner (natural intercourse) is available to you, you are engaging in self destructive behavior, which is immoral.
If you use contraception (sugar pill) when you are unable to conceive anyway (no dinner), it is no big deal, other than it is stupid.
The issue is using artificial sweetener in place of sugar, in order to avoid undesirable physiological results of consuming the latter. Please try to keep up with the class.
I don’t understand why you are attempting to equate malfunctions of the body with fertility. Certainly, a runny nose or a sore throat are “natural” responses to many viral and/or bacterial infections, but simply because they are “natural responses”, they are more accurately described as “natural defenses”. “defenses” against the infection.
Fertility, and the “natural responses” to it are not “natural defenses” against anything. So to equate taking a birth control pill to control one’s fertility with taking an aspirin to control a runny nose seems to be a flawed analogy. The two biological processes are inherently different; the fact that they are both “natural” is irrelevant. Again, one is a natural defense, the other is not.
Even setting aside that problem, you completely fail to address the artificial sweetener example. Fat is certainly a "natural response" to calorie consumption, but even your convoluted argument has no way of redefining it as a "natural defense" against anything.
I don’t understand your resistance here. The position is clear: No one is saying a woman can’t take something to aleviate the symptoms that come along with natural fertility cycles (I single out women here since men suffer no such symptoms with their fertility), just that to take contraceptives for that purpose is wrong since it interferes with the process of reproduction. This is the Catholic perspective of course.
The only issue one can have against the Catholic position is to say, “Well why is contraception ITSELF bad?”, because we aren’t saying alleviating symptoms or results of certain biological functions is bad. For the answer to the truly relevant question of, “Well, why is contraception ITSELF bad?”, I’d refer anyone to the OP of this thread.
Any other discussion is irrelevant. Fertility is not a disease. It’s not something harmful to the human body, in of itself. It’s not fat. It’s not a sore throat. It’s not cancer. It’s not myopia. It’s not sunburn. It’s not anything negative. It’s simply erroneous and faulty logic to equate it with something destructive to humanity as a whole; in fact I’d submit it’s rather laughable to do so. Without fertility, the human race would not exist! That’s basic common sense.
I submit, with all due respect, it is you who is engaging in circular reasoning by assuming your proposition (any biological function that has negative consequences one should be free to treat any way one wishes) in your proof (fertility can have negative physical consequences for a woman, therefore to limit chemical contraceptives is to limit all physical treatments).
Either that, or you are making the preposterous claim that somehow, fertility itself is “bad”. Not the symptoms/affects of fertility, but the actual production of the egg/sperm itself. Which *is* preposterous for reasons that should be obvious.
Your 208 spoke of hunger, so I presumed you imagined a pill that cancels hunger. So how is your analogy different if we substitute “sugar” for “dinner”? You supply the answer: sugar has an undesirable physiological effect, and the dinner has not. So is sugar a good or a bad in your scenario?
The issue is that you are claiming that artificial sweeteners are morally corrupt. Please try to keep up with the class.
Obviously, whether fertility is good or bad at a given moment depends on the judgment of the individual involved.
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