Your ideas about “deityology” or whatever are kind of funny, but still lacking in any sort of sophistication. By saying “God x influences world y in such and such a way” you’re making an implicit assumption that God x is a separate “thing” from world y. Spirituality is the idea that you can see with your own eyes that God x is world y, and the only way to understand the importance of this is to see it for yourself. You say you’ve heard the same old BS about unity, connectedness… but you must not have been paying attention if you still think God is a separate “thing” apart from everything else, controlling things from afar like a puppeteer. Of course, this is certainly how many religious folks view the world and I think it’s dead wrong… but the philosophical leap to scientific materialism is just going to another extreme. Science examines reality based on a set of assumptions about how things work, and is only geared towards objective phenomenon. Subjective experiences are not scientific and hence trying to study a subjectively experienced phenomenon is utterly futile. Also, you can get high and call it a transcendental experience, but that doesn’t mean you understand what it means.

I am a creationist and a strong proponent of the argument that our existence today leads to a point back in time when we must have been created by a sentient being. I do not quite like to believe that the attributes of the universe we witness today as a result of random-occurring events. The main point I am trying to put out here is that the theories of either camp cannot be empirically proved to be representative of any truth. In my opinion, what separates people into both sides of the arena is pure personal experience and belief. Atheists assert that our ‘faith-based thinking’ is logically flawed and undesirable. But the truth is nobody knows if we are indeed wrong. In the same vein of argument, how is it that atheists could bring themselves to believe that the universe was indeed not created by God when there is no evidence to prove so. Are atheists not, above their arguments which I reiterate have hitherto not been proven to be valid, also putting mere ‘faith’ in their own reasoning?

Hope you could share your thoughts.

Seems awfully unfair and arbitrary to require “a desire to live and not feel pain” in order to avoid be killed. At 8 weeks plus one day, is your 1-day fetus capable of doing those things, really? And, if so, then it shouldn’t be killed at that time, but two days earlier it’d be OK to scrape it out? I think you’re trying to draw an imaginary line here, to allow yourself the wiggle room to feel OK about the killing of human beings.

You make no distinction between cells and organisms, which strikes me as disingenuous; that handy little omission allows you to conflate the destruction of human organisms with the destruction of individual cells, and therefore approve them both. On a related note, I never stated that the haploid gamete is not human, but simply that it does not represent a human organism. Again, one is a cell, the other is an organism (I’ll leave it as an excercise for you to figure out which is which). I cannot understand how you can assert that “whether something is an organism does not matter in terms of moral personhood”. Connecting the organism concept to, e.g., insects is specious reasoning; I did not say that no organism should ever be killed. The issue here is human beings, not bugs. The human organism appears at conception; unless it dies en route, it will develop into a mature human being, going through numerous developmental phases. It takes many years for all of its capabilities to develop, but you arbitrarily define 8 weeks as the point at which it becomes something different than it was before. But, biologically, that difference is just two points on a developmental continuum. At 8 weeks, any moral sense is years off. And why should the ability to respond to noxious stimuli (”pain”, although not consciously experienced by embryo or fetus, as far as anyone knows) make any difference whatsoever? What sort of a criterion is that? All animals experience pain, but you have no problem killing them.

Which reduces your argument down to the “moral personhood issue”, so let’s go with that for a moment. You emphasize “cognition and mental capabilities” as your criterion for permitting a human being to live. What cutoff point do you declare? How much cognition? How advanced the mental capabilities? An IQ of 100? 80? 50? How will you decide? And, if you do find a way to decide, then why not implement it at any age, not just in utero? Just cull the defectives wherever, whenever. Why not, if they don’t meet your standards.

I do apologize for not adding a little winking smiley face after my ‘babies as poop machines’. Maybe I should have used tags. You are correct that babies “have a wide variety of cognitive capacities”. So do puppies, chickens, and pretty much any other animal you’d care to name. But they can “even reason morally!”? Do you really mean they can make moral distinctions? As in “right” and “wrong”, whatever those terms mean? You might want to ask your girlfriend for some documentation on that one. I wonder what newborns think about abortion?

By the way, the notion that “identical” twins are truly identical is a common lay misconception. Their genetic composition is identical at the first cell division in the blastocyst stage, although, from that point on, DNA copying errors will inevitably occur, so the twins will drift apart in that way. In addition, they have different environments, which will cause subtle developmental differences. That effect is clearer to see in the case of higher-order multiple births, such as sextuplets (e.g. the one on the bottom of the pile has a disadvantage due to pressure; also, variations in the anatomy of the placenta can cause differences in oxygenation from one kid to another, etc.). With a pair of twins, the differences are there, but are often subtle.

I think you’re trying very hard to intellectualize a solution to a very basic problem - that we want to be able to kill unborn babies for the sake of convenience, but we don’t want any of those annoying guilt feelings. That requires a lot of cognitive hoop-jumping, and it’s only possible because we can’t see any part of the process (the whole first few months of development, as well as the abortion). So, it’s a bit abstract, and therefore fairly easy to think about and to justify, because no blood, no pain, no visible carcass (this, of course, is the motivation behind those who display pictures of aborted fetuses, i.e. to bring the process into view). I’m not necessarily against abortion, just conflicted, because I do see it as a struggle between the life of a quite helpless organism and the convenience of the mother, and I think we need to be more honest about what actually takes place after that speculum gets inserted, rather than pontificate about abstract notions of “moral personhood” and “cognitive capacities”. Those arguments strike me as relatively desperate (and inappropriately glib) attempts to deny that, during an abortion, a human being dies.