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Sunday, May 20, 2012

I had to share this

Michael Flynn: Getting Personal --

"Other respondents in the discussion added all sorts of irrelevancies:

[for instance] Even a newborn infant isn't a person. They can't communicate, and in their first few months of life they can't even recognize themselves in a mirror.

What reacting to a mirror reflection has to do with personhood is never made clear. Does this mean a blind man is not a person?

What of those who cannot communicate, being blind, deaf, and dumb? Or who cannot communicate because they are unable to frame a logical argument, as so many on the Internet?
"

4 comments:

Drew said...

I sort of agree that calling babies "persons" can seem like a little bit of a stretch (although legally, they definitely are). That's why I think it is better to view abortion in terms of degrading humanity, rather than killing persons. For example, it definitely seems like a stretch to call a fetus a "person" if it has not even developed a brain yet. But killing it would still degrade humanity, which is the image of God.

AstridsSoapbox said...

I'm sure Helen Keller would have loved this conversation! Smiles - A.

Ilíon said...

Drew, after your body dies, and until you are re-embodied in the glorified Resurrection body, you will have no brain. Will you cease to be a human person, and then become one again?

I linked to this news item in a comment to Mr Flynn's recent post (and wrote about it at the time). Did Mrs Thomas cease to be a person and then (accidentally and against the intentions of the "doctors") become a person all over again, and the same peron, no less? Or, was she a person, the same exact person, the whole time?

Ilíon said...

"I'm sure Helen Keller would have loved this conversation!"

Hmmm ... perhaps if someone had shared such converstaion with her, she might have begun to see the deadly error nestled in the bosom of the socialism she espoused.

But yes, as the world's most famous person unable to communicate, her example ought to have give the kiddies pause.

And, while I did see hee example, as I'm sure Mr Flynn did, as fatal to the materialistic "argument" presented, it was expecially the last quoted sentence I wasnted to share.