Quote:
Originally Posted by MR2
Murder is immoral, but the death penalty is not murder. Murder is the unlawful taking of life.
|
Technically, at least under the common law definition, murder is the unlawful taking of a human life with malice aforethought. Without the "malice aforethought", it's manslaughter.
But the definition is a tautology anyway - murder and manslaughter are illegal killings because we made them illegal. As Billy L-bach said, laws are legislated morality. And where we draw the line between illegal and legal killings says where we stand as a society on there moral issues.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cbtengr
I used to be one of those guys who thought that through abortion we were saving a child from a life of poverty or not being wanted in a loving home. Were it only the poor and the ignorant getting them I might look at it differently today. There are few valid reasons in my mind that abortion should be used as a form of birth control.
|
Well, I am one of those guys whom people who think like this think should be dead, so I take this rather personally. I am the child of a single mother and grew up in poverty. If Roe v. Wade and the mindset it reflected had come around a few years earlier, I would have been killed. Maybe the world and my family would have been better off without me, but the idea that I would have been "saved" by being killed is abhorrent to me.