How come all religions are critiqued except for Buddhism?

What was considered "ascetic" in 400 BCE India goes far beyond what we would think of as an austere lifestyle today. There were śramana who ripped their hair out, crawled everywhere on all fours and ate their food off the ground, went naked in all weathers (Jains and many sadhus still do this), mutilated their genitals, etc. The life of a bhikku was still not much for creature comfort: to go homeless, sleep only where invited, sleep under a tree if no one invited you, eat only what was given to you, own only a bowl, your robes, and a razor.

No, just extreme self-inflicted suffering and starvation, think the kind of stuff fakirs and flagellants do. Even when he dropped the practices, on the very verge of death, he still lived, ministered and died as a renouncer.

Presumably because you don't read books on the topic like Zen at War and Buddhist Warfare and your village isn't being attacked by Buddhists.

I think the problem is that a system of sedentary monaticism (as opposed to homeless mendicants) makes it impossible to avoid the Sangha involving itself in the political sphere, which is how you get things like Zen abbots cheerleading for Japanese imperialism.

>As [buzzword] I critique it daily. It's [buzzword] ideology.
>Maybe it's because it's irrelevant to the west unlike Islam which we must defeat through lord [buzzword] [buzzword] magic

Homeless mendicants would still require people to give them food and shelter (extremes of cold and heat, etc.), materials with which repair robes, copy scriptures, etc. if anything they'd be even more involved with the aristocrats giving them the most stuff.

Religious buildings are a historical inevitability if the religion is to survive, let alone expand.

>that's why everyone agrees with it
Mainly because they, like you and OP, can't even bother to do a bit more research without generalizing entire schools with different conceptions of reality into the same single entity.

Buddhism has differing schools of logic where the spectrum can range from idealist to realist. They have a long history of logical discourses in Sanskrit. Even Zen can range from 'mystical-realists' like Dogen to full on esotericists. If you want to know about any of these things, just go pick up a book like this one:

archive.org/details/BuddhistLogicVol.IFTh.Stcherbatsky

Most morons in the west like it because they don't think there's a god in Buddhism, so it somehow fits their view of a peaceful and secular spirituality, then don't read any further and have no idea about all the superstitious spirit world bullshit.

Hitchen's critiques Buddhism well, there's a whole chapter dedicated to eastern religion in God is not Great

vividness.live/2015/09/26/buddhist-morality-is-medieval/

Why does buddhism attracts old women and their husbands and not staceys ?

It believes in both souls and reincarnation.
It is philosophically justifiable have a belief in one of either, but not both.
If there is a quantity of living souls that can exist in all things living, being cycled by reincarnation, then the amount of living things should remain fixed.
This is not the case.

If buddhism is bullshit, then meditation is also bullshit?

That's pretty much what I said, dude. I don't know who has the best claim to Buddhist truth, but to western people, they all seem to have pretty equal claim to the truth.

In, say, Christianity, if you don't believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and one person in the trinity, you are wrong. In Islam, if you don't believe that there is one god and Muhammad is his messenger, you are wrong.

Prayer, chanting, etc, is pretty common across religions. Christianity has meditative practices (lectio divina, prayer rope, rosary, ignatian contemplation), Islam has meditative practices (dhikr), hinduism has beads very much like Buddhism. I don't think Buddhist meditation does anything that prayer traditions of other religions can't also do.

It doesn't interfere with my life in any negative way, so I don't give a fuck about them. The other religions can't stop being authoritarian cunts all the time.

This is the answer.

Menopause vs materialism.

Name one way in which the other religions interfere in your life.

And don't say abortion (which is murder by any scientific metric and can be reasoned as wrong outside of religion).

People like you act as if religion is a tool of oppression. Yeah, Christians are so oppressive that they relinquished every power they ever had to secular democracy (which was a Christian invention and pushed by the reformed tradition in particular). What kind of authoritarians willingly give up power.

>What kind of authoritarians willingly give up power.
They weren't willing

I actually don't have much of a problem with modern secular Christianity. I think you guys believe in absolute horseshit, but at least your existence limits the advance of the towelheads.

But here are some examples about christianity from the top of my head anyway:
>religion classes in schools, sometimes even creationism and 'intelligent design'
>anti gay marriage
>atheists aren't allowed to hold office in 7 US states
>censorship (mostly formerly)
>outlawing same sex relationships (formerly)
>can't shop on sundays in germany
>cunts knocking on my door all the time to convert me
>religions don't have to pay taxes
>abortion (yes I said it. They will do it anyway, even if it is banned with horrible results. A lump of cells without brain functions is not a human, etc. etc.)

You guys really don't seem to know what you're talking about.

The guy who wrote this has not read any of the Pali Canon.

>souls and reincarnation.
It believes in neither. It doesn't believe in an essence.
>reincarnation
It believes in rebirth, not reincarnation

>remain fixed
No, because it believes in different worlds and world-systems that eventually die and are then reborn.

You don't know shit.

>religion classes in schools, sometimes even creationism and 'intelligent design'

What schools? I don't think that's even allowed. Unless it's a Christian school.

>anti gay marriage

Gay marriage doesn't make ontological sense. It wasn't even an issue until about 40 years ago and the first gay marriage activists were attacked by gay rights orgs for trying to normalize homosexuality. From a government standpoint, it's retarded. They can't have children, so any value that marriage has traditionally had for government is non-existent. It's a stupid institution and no one wants it to exist for any reason other than some vague notion of equality (he has it, so I should too). Sociologically speaking, gays don't even make good parents.

>atheists aren't allowed to hold office in 7 US states

That sounds like bullshit, but I'll accept it because I can't be bothered researching it.

>censorship (mostly formerly)
>can't shop on sundays in germany

Sure, seem kind of petty, but sure. Good thing we have hardcore porn widely available now. It's totally been a great success and not at all psychologically damaging.

>outlawing same sex relationships (formerly)

It was considered both anti-social and a disorder regardless of religion. Even if you believe that religion created the whole stigma surrounding homosexuality, you'd have to explain why these human creators of the bible arbitrarily decided to include homosexuality in their list of sins. They had pretty good reasons for the others like murder and theft. You can't just act like homosexuality was totally cool and uncontroversial before most major religions decided it wasn't anymore.

>cunts knocking on my door all the time to convert me

That's not authoritarian. Maybe don't answer the door next time? Man, you atheists are pussies.

>religions don't have to pay taxes

They literally do nothing but preach religion and fund charities. If they ever explicitly became a business, they'd lose tax exempt status.

>abortion (yes I said it. They will do it anyway, even if it is banned with horrible results. A lump of cells without brain functions is not a human, etc. etc.)

Science disagrees.

Yeah, I guess when Calvinists advocated liberal democracy in protestant states it was because of all that coercion. Oh wait, that's a lie.

Why can't new souls come into existence?

how is meme a buzzword?

There are no souls in buddhism
shithole of a thread op
kill yourself

because millennials have the attention span of a fly.

> They can't have children, so any value that marriage has traditionally had for government is non-existent. It's a stupid institution and no one wants it to exist for any reason other than some vague notion of equality (he has it, so I should too)
Yeah, sure is useless to be have visiting rights when your loved one is in the hospital or being able to share your property with your spouse. Tax benefits, insurance discounts... I could go on. There are a heap of legal and economic benefits to marriage, in addition to the emotional ones.

I stand corrected.
Still, reading up some, buddhism sees giving up the passions as liberation. But is desire for freedom not a passion in itself?
So where does this Buddhist desire of giving up one's passions come from, if not from yet another passion?
To me that screams defeatism. Apathy born from hurt.

>What schools?
Mandatory in austria, finnland, germany, uk

>Gay marriage doesn't make ontological sense
Straight couples get the benefits of the institution without having to get children, which leads the reproduction argument ad absurdum. Infertile can still marriage even though they can't reproduce naturally. And gay couples can adopt children and fulfill the same function.

>Sociologically speaking, gays don't even make good parents.
Source for that?

>porn is bad for you, let's ban it
Authoritarian argument right there

> You can't just act like homosexuality was totally cool and uncontroversial before most major religions decided it wasn't anymore.
It was cool in ancient greece and rome. Abrahamic religions took over and it became taboo and outlawed.

>That's not authoritarian.
Yeah, annoys me anyway

>They literally do nothing but preach religion and fund charities. If they ever explicitly became a business, they'd lose tax exempt status.
They own property and speculate on the markets like a company. In theory they do what you have described, in practice they are companies designed to maximize profits and they lobby whenever they can.

>abortion
>Science disagrees.
It's not a scientific question. You think murder is bad because it's in scripture. I believe murder is bad because conscious minds with intellects capable of creating beauty are worth protecting. And of course I don't want to get killed myself so I don't kill others.

A lump of cells without brain function as in the first trimester of pregnancy is not worth protecting, there is no person there, no mind. A chopped off hand on life supply is also scientifically speaking a human being with human cells, but you wouldn't cry about turning off the life supply for it. So you are talking about potential to be a human?

If you bend the definition of murder to include the killing 'potential humans' then you have to also forbid contraception and mourn all of the fertilized eggs that die off naturally all the time in women's wombs. And the thousands over thousands of eggs that get artificially fertilized by scientists for research every day.

>The six realms of rebirth include Deva (heavenly), Asura (demigod), Manusya (human), Tiryak (animals), Preta (ghosts), and Naraka (resident of hell).[4][6][note 1] This rebirth, state Buddhism traditions, is determined by karma, with good realms favored by Kushala (good karma), while a rebirth in evil realms is a consequence of Akushala (bad karma).
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but since rebirth seems tied to an individual's actions, how is it not tied to that individual itself?
And if it is, how is that not a soul? Seems paradoxical to deny souls but to believe individual actions influence a rebirth (of what, if not the individual?).

How is this thread Veeky Forums?

Neck youself , user.

rebirth is for normies

there are two possibilities to read the word ''past life''.
-there is the rebirth interpretation like you said [and rebirth is the most retarded way to name it, become it is more birth than re-birth]
-the taking of experience as personal
which means that whatever you experience in daily life [people call this reality], your dreams and what you experience in deep jhana as ''past life'' is something that is not personal [because not permanent, uncontrollable, therefore stupid to take this seriously once you want to be happy]
it is true that some people live things in jhana which are ''like daily life'' and you live ''again'' ''previous'' experiences, but they are not personal. the whole point of this observation is to stop taking personally what you feel and think . THese past lives are not yours, just like your dreams are not yours, just like your daily reality is not yours

you do not need the whole mechanism about the rebirth to see the dhamma. THe second interpretation is always true and it is the one which counts.
There is no way to tell whether rebirth exist. perhaps yes, perhaps no.
BUT
without the faith in rebirth, there is no incentive for anybody below stream entry to take the dhamma. Most people who have not seen the dhamma totally loves their lives and even think that the dhamma is stupid.
At stream entry, what drives you to nibanna is the lack of permanence to be happy in what you think and feel.

So once more, before stream entry, you can care about rebirths, after stream entry you no longer care about this.
Also, once you deal with rebirths, nobody but the buddha knows how karma works [and it is not like I kill ants so I will be reborn ugly or I give food to hobos so I will be rich next life] and he even said that there is no point thinking about it [which is true as soon as you have right view [either by faith or at stream entry] because the dhamma expressed thru rebirth is the stopping of rebirths]

Just because you subscribe to that definition of Christianity doesn't mean that everyone does and even among churches that do follow the nicean creed they have a long history of denying that the other churches are Christian.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontrinitarianism

Rebirth does exist. If you take absolute physicalism as true, that there is nothing special about an arrangement of cells that is us, than "rebirth" will be a consequence. But by rebirth I mean more about transformation, one become many. many become one, we are each other. we are the things we eat. And so on. It is not that one can trace a path back in our previous lives but that we all come from the same thing and return to the same thing. This belief can explain the act of reproduction. Would you consider two virus cells to be the same? The existence of twins born form the same eggs. We were all once only a sperm and egg. All the cells in our body are replaced repeatedly. Reproduction occurs. If we went to china look at the people then go back in time ten thousand years we will still find the same people. Time is conquered through reproduction.

>without the faith in rebirth, there is no incentive for anybody below stream entry to take the dhamma

Sounds a bit like how Christian mystics seek the negation of self in favour of mystical union with God while outwardly preaching about heaven and hell to convince the exoteric masses to act properly.

>Sounds a bit like how Christian mystics seek the negation of self in favour of mystical union with God while outwardly preaching about heaven and hell to convince the exoteric masses to act properly.
Those are not mutually exclusive. In Orthodox Christianity hell is living in the presence of God where you have not been cleansed by him, so the presence of such purity burns.

Pic related is the actual hierarchy of worlds plus their world systems

>So, correct me if I'm wrong, but since rebirth seems tied to an individual's actions, how is it not tied to that individual itself?
And if it is, how is that not a soul? Seems paradoxical to deny souls but to believe individual actions influence a rebirth (of what, if not the individual?).

When ppl think about buddhism, they always seem stuck on what you just mentioned which is why the question is redundantly explained over and over again at the introductions of buddhist texts by translators and authors of the buddhist schools.

It isn't a contradiction.
just read the intro to walshe's "the long discourse of the buddha".

I guess this is as good a thread as any to ask this.

I just finished reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I really liked it, I don't even really know why but I did. I feel like I would like to learn more about Buddhism, but I don't know anything about it really. Any recs for books about Buddhism or similar schools of thought? Also what does Veeky Forums think of Siddhartha?

ITT: christcuck gets rekt

>Also, once you deal with rebirths, nobody but the buddha knows how karma works [and it is not like I kill ants so I will be reborn ugly or I give food to hobos so I will be rich next life] and he even said that there is no point thinking about it [which is true as soon as you have right view
Sounds a lot like conveniently denying the parts of your religion that don't make sense.
"Oh, don't think about that paradoxical stuff, doesn't matter anyway if you let go of your passions"
Sorry, not for me. Also, if Buddha had no earthly desires left "after stream", why'd he bother to keep on living and talk to others?

The second is true, but for buddhism, so is the first. The buddha was not a materialist. In the scriptural discourses, you can see that he clearly had a competition with both the eternalists and the annihilationists. One of his biggest "rivals" was a proto-materialist. The buddha went against concepts of an eternity and the self and materialism.

The point was not just to break the bondage of your experiences but to break the bondage of samsara, the cycle of birth and death itself.

Nibbana is the supreme stage. You can only access a pre-nibbana in this life. After you die, you fully access it.

just read a book on buddhism by the sangha,.

fucking god, it isn't contradictory, just read a book. it doesn't even matter if you like it or not.

>Also, if Buddha had no earthly desires left "after stream", why'd he bother to keep on living and talk to others?

just, stop.

Because it's noncontroversial and is more personal an ideology than most religious faith, owing largely to the abscence of memetic propagation directives

The introduction just says I need to have seen Nibana to understand why it isn't a paradox.
I mean, I get that it's saying there was no ego to begin with, but then exactly what is going away by seeing Nibana? The illusion of the ego? What stops us from naming this "illusion" of an ego an actual ego? Especially since consciousness of it is concerned.
For a buddhist, you're pretty antsy.
I thought so, but the more I learn in this thread the more I'm starting to think it's like all organized religion.

This thread is full of /pol/ contrarians who wish to do anything possible to subvert any group ideology

I'm not a buddhist. this is by zizek: bigthink.com/postcards-from-zizek/slavoj-zizek-on-buddhism-and-the-self

>it's like all organized religion.
it is, why would you expect something different?

that part of buddhism can be seen as dialectical

>Get the fuck out.
If you can't detect simple irony I'm afraid reddit may be more you speed

Not at all, I despise /pol/, and I'm a deist myself.
But I'm also a sceptical person.
Don't get me wrong, there's truth in buddhism like there's truth in anything, but like all organized religion it seems to fall into the trap of decreeing contradictory edicts to give people something "deeper" to indulge into.

The reason homosexuality is discouraged is because it's evolutionary regressive. A gay population dies out quickly, and the only reason we have sexual attraction is to reproduce. Gay people are mentally damaged because they are attracted to something they can't reproduce with.

Buddhism is... self-destructive
:3

upvoted

Only for members of the Elect until the Elect started dying out. And you're also neglecting the fact that the Protestants only came to America to flee other Authoritarian Christians. The Salem Witch Trials also happened due to the Theocracy in New England.

If they're going to die out anyway, why not just let them die out on their own. It's not as if preventing them from having gay sex will make them straight.

For something that evolutionarily disadvantageous, you would think it would have died out a lot sooner. Hint.

I'm sure that what you posted there is a good way to add thoughtful arguments to the discussion.
I'll never understand your kind.

homosexuality is nature's population control

it has similiarities with christianity but people in the west are still too pissy about their parents making them go to church when they were kids so they criticise one and laud the other.

And what he responded to was any better?

>In Orthodox Christianity hell is living in the presence of God where you have not been cleansed by him, so the presence of such purity burns.
source?

I've got an anthology of pali discourses introduced by Bhikku Bodhi on my shelf, anything I should read beforehand?

Actually, yes.

The philosophical aspect of Buddhism can be much more easily extricated from the spiritual aspect.

Okay. I'll say this once because no one has. Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion. It was originally developed as a school of thought.
So, this question is redundant.
Why do people agree with it?
Because it's an atheistic school of thought. And when I say "atheistic", it's in the orthodox sense of traditional Indian schools of thought.

wtf...
this thread reveals the West's inability thus far to access and understand Eastern thought.
Nobody knows wtf they're talking about

On that thought, I found this interesting: aeon.co/essays/the-logic-of-buddhist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth

I think that Westerners get so confused or irritated with Buddhism is because it runs on tetralemna logic which was the logic of Classic Indian thought.

>Worthless man, it would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a poisonous snake than into a woman's vagina. It would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a black viper than into a woman's vagina. It would be better that your penis be stuck into a pit of burning embers, blazing and glowing, than into a woman's vagina

Roasties BTFO.

This, 'the middle way' doesn't mean you get to live a comfy life, it just means you don't have to stomp on your balls while fasting on a bed of coals.

How would nature be able to gauge population density?

>What's the deal with Buddhism, why does everybody agree with it?

Not books, but I fing that The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and Kubo kind of make subtle critiques to Buddhism.

>West's inability thus far to access and understand Eastern thought because it runs on tetralemna logic which was the logic of Classic Indian thought.
Even if this were true, what makes it something worth absorbing? If we take it as given that philosophy should be subservient to life, I think that the West seems to have mastered the art of picking and choosing whichever philosophies would be most useful for it at any given time. Indeed I'm sceptical if anyone alive today can even access traditional eastern philosophically authentically, since the West's global decimation of other civilisations has most likely eroded all the links going back to those. Every text needs context.

>For something that evolutionarily disadvantageous, you would think it would have died out a lot sooner. Hint.

Yes just like pretty much every genetic disease

Vajrayana tibetan buddhism and zen have hundreds of thousands practitioners in Europe and USA. It has very much to do with our lifestyle. In the other hand you can still become a monk or full time yogi if you want. Why everyone agrees? Because buddhism is simply true, it's reliable way to the highest possible state of mind which is call enlightment

It's not a religion that inspires much passion or devotion, unless you plan on becoming a monk.

>why does everyone agree with it?

Speak for years elf bro

>How come all religions are critiqued except for Buddhism?
Buddhism just isn't hateable, at least not anymore. Also westerners tend to see it as a religion they can project onto freely, like it's laws are what they say it is.

>As redpilled I critique it daily. It's cuck ideology.

Confirmed for having shallow understanding and being a generally shallow person.

...

>How come all religions are critiqued except for Buddhism?

It is critiques plenty by popular religious critics. Hitchens slammed it etc. It isn't critiqued as much for various reasons.

One is that it is a non-theist religion, two is that it is co-opted and misrepresented by far-leftists to supports their idealogies, three central figures have gone above and beyond to promote a discourse with science and is willing to be wrong, and four it asserts techniques that can be used in a secular context that are actually effective in mitigating degrees of pain and existential lack.

The Mind and Life Conference, which has been going on for decades, has really helped the image of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama and plenty of scientists share and he is so open to learning and admits he doesn't know and could be wrong very often, all while sharing some interesting insight into the modulating first-person experience. As a result a few years ago, several Gelug monasteries adopted a rather comprehensive science program created by secular Western scientists. The program is now required as part of the curriculum to be a Gelug Buddhist monk and must be passed in order to get your Buddhist degrees.

Neetz have a childish understanding of Buddhism, really of no fault of his own, because he had access to a small handful of terrible translations with no context otherwise.

He was speculating on very limited knowledge, and looking back many of his criticisms are absurd.

>not getting the sarcasm
>Reddit filename
Why are redditors so bad at percieving irony? Are they autistic?

There's a little bit of a difference between blood not clotting as well and not wanting to pass on your genes.

Hemophiliacs can still have children, gay people probably won’t.

That's because it's not genetic. Homosexuality is a mental disorder and is caused by childhood experiences/trauma, possibly an unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex. In our society it is much more common, because Western liberal society is decadent and dysfunctional.

>cites Freud
Good one
>It is much more common because Western liberal society is decadent and dysfunctional
>being gay will get you killed anywhere except the West has nothing to do with it

The most cancerous post I've read all week. Go back to the board you came from; /b/ or /pol/ or whatever. I don't care which. Just leave and take your cancer with you.

>co-opted and misrepresented by far-leftists to supports their idealogies

Name one

All those discounts and benefits are to encourage procreation. They should go too, though, seeing as marriage is no longer a guarantee of procreation and should be transferred to children. Civil unions can do everything else that you claim to need from marriage. It's been tried many times and civil unions are said to be not enough despite doing all that's needed. Simply because it's not called marriage.

There's no "right" to marriage, so any emotional or similar reasons are irrelevant. All gay people have a right to marry someone of the other sex. Marrying someone of their own sex would be something in addition to that.

>Mandatory in austria, finnland, germany, uk

Creationism is mandatory? Regardless, mandatory religious education is not authoritarian by any measure. It doesn't even violate separation of church and state truthfully. It's not ritual pushed upon them. They learn the religion that built their nation just like they learn math and language, and then they do whatever they want.

>And gay couples can adopt children and fulfill the same function.

The difference is that gay parents "fulfill the same function" poorly. All sociological data points to children being disadvantaged in single parent households and gay households.
hindawi.com/journals/drt/2016/2410392/
frc.org/issuebrief/new-study-on-homosexual-parents-tops-all-previous-research
childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/fatherhood.pdf

>Authoritarian argument right there

Telling people to bake cakes is pretty authoritarian. So is stealing in the form of tax, so is gun control, so is a million other things that the government does "for our benefit" that liberals believe to be justified. The goalposts are constantly shifting. The government doing something restrictive for what it believes to be the benefit of the people is pretty standard. I'm sure you're full of double standards. But your disdain of religion blinds you.

>It was cool in ancient greece and rome. Abrahamic religions took over and it became taboo and outlawed.

All those gay marriages in ancient Greece and Rome also make a good case...oh wait.

You have to confront some things about historic homosexuality if you're going to make these statements. Fucking boys for fun is pretty different to placing your identity in homosexuality. You also have to confront why the Jews (if their belief that homosexuality was harmful for society was their own invention) believed homosexuality to be wrong in the first place. They can't have just decided out of thin air that it was wrong. And then arbitrarily used that to "oppress" people.

>They own property and speculate on the markets like a company...

Just owning property is not reason enough if they own property on which to build churches. But I don't approve of churches profiting (which I'm not sure any do unless you mean the staff gets paid way more than they should).

also in response

>It's not a scientific question.

Yes it is. In a matter of weeks the baby is pumping its own blood through its veins. It's both a scientific and philosophical question.

>You think murder is bad because it's in scripture.

I don't make religious arguments about things like abortion. Because no religious argument needs to be made.

>I believe murder is bad because conscious minds with intellects capable of creating beauty are worth protecting. And of course I don't want to get killed myself so I don't kill others.

What about severely mentally retarded people who can barely function let alone "create beauty"? What if you believe a certain race of people to be lacking in beauty and possibly harmful, like Jewish people, for example? Okay to put them in gas chambers? It's a pretty vague notion.

>A lump of cells without brain function as in the first trimester of pregnancy is not worth protecting, there is no person there, no mind. A chopped off hand on life supply is also scientifically speaking a human being with human cells, but you wouldn't cry about turning off the life supply for it. So you are talking about potential to be a human?

It's more like a braindead person in a vegetative state who will in time escape that vegetative state. The chopped off hand analogy is ridiculous. Not in the least because you're attempting to reduce it in one step from a composite and heterogenous formed object into simply a clump of cells. It fails to recognise the full form and telos of the unborn baby. Hands also don't act on their own. They don't make intentional movements and pump blood.

>If you bend the definition of murder to include the killing 'potential humans' then you have to also forbid contraception and mourn all of the fertilized eggs that die off naturally all the time in women's wombs. And the thousands over thousands of eggs that get artificially fertilized by scientists for research every day.

Good thing I don't have a vague idea of "potential humans" then. Just a belief that you should kill living beings.

It's pretty ridiculous when people like Singer try to act as if killing animals is evil for food to the point where he won't even eat an oyster because he's unsure if it can feel pain, but abortion is fine and dandy. Now that's a mental illness.