I personally don’t like when “human life” is reduced to “the adult human experience” - life is a miraculous thing that only exists, to our knowledge, on this one speck of sand that barrels through the universe at incredible speed. I don’t know who’s going to be the next Einstein, so I find it hard to dismiss the value of any human, “potentially fully-grown” or otherwise. I am capable of it - as I said, we drop enough bombs on each other to show that we do not value all life equally, but it shouldn’t come easy to anyone. Sometimes we take life for convenience, but it deserves some degree of respect because it is, ultimately, a gift. I think there’s nothing wrong with guidelines on how life should be treated, it is in fact a moral good. It would be great if society could collectively agree when it is or is not acceptable to snuff it out, but nobody’s figured it out yet and I feel it’ll be a while longer before we do. Viability is one way of drawing a boundary, I personally like brain development as the cut-off, because as we’ve discussed earlier, we are our brains. I don’t think that’d solve the issue as people would argue *how developed* the brain must be to consider someone a distinct individual, but I feel that it’s a good moment to say “okay, that cluster of cells is beginning to resemble a full-grown human now, we should leave it alone”. Everyone will have different thoughts about this, my broader point is that all of those cut-off points are arbitrary, with science cherrypicked to make us feel better about them after the fact. Even my cutoff is like that, the path of reasoning starts before any actual science begins - I am not immune to this, it’s what makes us human. It simply “sounds right” to me. To other people heartbeat sounded right, which to me is asinine and mostly symbolic, but can I denigrate them for a different and equally arbitrary choice? I don’t know - I can only argue for my own.Technically I was Christian before I was an atheist before I was agnostic/vaguely pagan. Point I was trying to make is how Christianity holds humanity on a pedestal above, and separate from nature, but we aren't and we may never be. Without death, life has no meaning, and loss of life at the embryonic/fetal stages is common among all species. As humans we reason that out as somehow "cruel," but there needn't be malice assigned to it. In fact one could make the argument that death before consciousness is a mercy compared to death post-consciousness, especially in circumstances such as a child being born into extreme poverty and then slowly starving to death. It's humanity which can be cruel, and we project that on to the impartial chaos of nature.
I was not understanding what you specifically meant with the term "human life," and considering you acknowledge that it can refer to a single human skin cell, an embryo, or even a full-grown adult, that's still something which remains vague. In my eyes it's preferable to narrow usage of it down to a whole human which has at least demonstrated minimum viability via birth, but I won't fault you for choosing to use it in the broader sense.
My beliefs did not shift during this conversation, but I did struggle a bit to reason out how and where they were applicable to it initially.
…too sappy? I can say something rude to balance things out.