Is Life Sacred?

 

NO

 

and i refuse to elaborate until some one makes the arguement for Lifes Sacridity (no way in hell thats a word...)

Objectively, life isn't sacred, but if a bugs life is in danger, and a person's life is in danger, and you are in the position to save one of them, and you save the bugs life, I'll slap you with a frozen dog roll.

My life is sacred to me, but in the grand scheme of things, it's completely insignificant. Of course, personally, I rate the "sacredness" (or whatever) of life according to the size of the brain, just so I can rationalize being a vegetarian and killing flies whenever they annoy me. I hate flies, and I curse them all. Damn them all to hell!!

Yes, I believe that life is, generally, sacred. By sacred I mean that it is precious. I know sacred can also have associations with fairytale belief and such. But I don't use it that way.

In my opinion life is sacred because we, generally, think.

With some exceptions I believe that anyone that takes the life of another should forfit their own. It is the only way to effectively guarantee that, that person will never take another persons life. Life without the possibility of parole is an illusion.

 

There are a couple ambiguities in the question whether life is sacred. I'll assume for the term 'sacred' we don't mean in the religious sense -- that is, made significant by an external and inscrutable factor -- but that it is fundamentally important. The second problem is looking at it 'from an evolutionary' sense. On the one hand we have a subjective idea like the significance of a thing, and an objective observation like evolutionary theory. Nothing could be sacred to evolutionary theory at all, or to any other merely descriptive view. It's not normative, it merely is. This only leaves the subject and its perspective to speak about the importance of life. Is life fundamental, and the violation of which fundamentally bad?

Sit in the pot, turn on the heat, and see whether your hands reach up for the edges.

 

Well it depends on what situation we got.

I wouldn't take anyones life if there were no good reason for that.

I would gladly kill criminals and so help the community (Dexter is a great series)

I would gladly kill for the progress of science or the benefit of mankind (Can't find a situation which could need that)

I would gladly die for the progress of science or the benefit of mankind

 

And so on, it all depends on whether the life is worth more or less than the other option.

 

I wouldn't necessarily call life "sacred", but I think it's really special.  It sort of underpins everything else. 

I think the fear theists have when we tell the truth about nature is that they falsely think that means we want a lawless society where murdering your neighbor for their wallet is moral.

Self preservation is an evolutionary trait of biological life.

Life is not sacred in that babies are a natural and abundant occurrence  just like pollen spores can produce vegetation.

Having said that, the reason humans falsely call life sacred is because we have the evolutionary trait of genes developing into  replication. And when a threat comes to that replication it manifests itself into the psychological fear of facing one's own mortality(the end of that replication).

 

BUT, the reality in the cosmic sense is that life is not sacred. Even if we don't cause our own destruction as a species, the planet will change to a point, by some cause, to no longer support human life.

In layman's terms carbon base life on this planet is a blip in the history of time and our species will be a blip too. When we face our mortality instead of crossing our fingers and stop using rabbit's feet thinking, then we will find answers.

The pathetic part of humanity is that because we treat life as some magical thing, instead of a biological reality, we stop thinking about ways to extend the ride of the species and default to superstition and gap arguments.

Theists reading this should not falsely accuse us of being blood drinkers or cootie spreaders  and stupid shit like that. We are merely saying that the human species would do better for it's future if it weren't so self centered and narcissistic.

Humans are NOT the center of the universe and we will die as a species just like the T-Rex.

If humans were the center of the universe, then why are cock roaches a much older species and why do scientist project their survival long after the demise of the human species?

And we know of things in the cosmos that in a blink of an eye could wipe out all biological life on this planet. Life is not special, it is merely an natural event amongst many natural events. THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE DON'T VALUE OUR OWN INDIVIDUAL SURVIVAL. It just means we are not self centered.

But somehow, superstitious myth loving fear mongers want to equate an observation of nature, as somehow being void of emotion or empathy.

I do think when atheists say, "Life is not sacred" it needs to come with some clarification so that idiot morons don't go, "SEE SEE SEE, those godless heathens think anything goes and we can be lawless and kill and rape  ect ect ect".

The difference between the atheist and theist is we don't assign life to a magical bearded man in the sky vs a man with a pitchfork. Life was not caused by Superman vs Kriptonite.

 

 

I think life is important. But sacred, no. We think it wrong to kill because we can put ourselves into the positions of others and recognise other people as human beings like us. I am a non-cognitivist, which means that there is no natural moral law or moral properties, but I am also a Utilitarian, and I think it is important to aim at creating the greatest happiness, this means not killing each other most of the time.

I do not believe an embryo has a life, nor a foetus. I do not believe creating hybrid human/cow cells is mutilating life and indeed actually saves lives. It really fucking annoys me when Christards, especially Catholics bang on about the sanctity of life because they don't actually have a fucking clue. What about actual living people suffering from illnesses which could be cured by experimenting on a few tiny cells. I hate how they think they can influence a government (Labour, UK) which openly admits "We don't do God!" and is actually, in this respect trying to make people's lives better.

I was just this morning watching a documentary on the "Manhattan Project", and the group of scientists that worked on it, as soon as the final 4 minute experiment was over (that day) those involved felt a deep sadness and fear as to what they had just accomplished and the future implications of how it would affect humanity. Even right before the test some worried that the experiment would mistakenly blow up half of Chicago.

Einstein originally wrote in a letter to FDR he should get a bomb because he was sure the Germans were working on it. It turned out that the German scientists merely pondered it, but didn't take it seriously because they falsely thought it would take TONS of uranium. Some American scientists thought that too, but were over ridden by the scientists that said it would take just a few pounds.

Just like the scientists who  built the bomb, Einstein realized the horrific implications and regretted his advice and spent the rest of his life promoting the strict control of such weapons, (cat was already out of the bag).

 

I don't think we will die out as a species unless we seriously fuck up in some way (nuclear/biological war, not doing anything about global warming) or some major disaster (asteroid strike/naturally evolving super plague) at least not until solar changes take place (and even then, maybe we will have been able to colonize other systems - not too likely though.) The big difference between us and every other species that ever existed is we have civilization.

I don't give them that much credit, myself.  I feel pretty certain that by the time we have fished the sea until nothing but jellyfish are left, we'll either be in an early ice age from our greenhouse emissions or we'll have destroyed so many arable ecosystems that we'll starve ourselves down to a billion people or so.  And let's not forget the bacteria.  With another thousand years to get used to antibiotics, the bugs are going to have a field day with us.  Hell, we wasted our best bug-blaster on zits.

 

  Not to worry about that, cause we are the nitty gritty shit that always was, too always be, the ever changing ..... ONE .... we are what we are, we could call it god, but why the dogma ?  ...... ummm  yeah , so many are afraid and have been taught they are guilty for being born ..... fuck that god of abe shit ......

I know,I guess it's one of those things that makes sense to the person but is hard to explain.

I've always seen 'sacred' as a synonym for precious or moral value.
The religious/spiritual etymology has never bothered me.

I kind of like the idea of life being sacred, but I think that it should be a rule of thumb than an absolute.
Morality and values aren't so much a property of biological things so much as concepts towards our relationship to other things.
I think a good default relationship to have is one of good will, even to a living thing that cannot reciprocate.
If there's an insect stuck in my room, I will try and guide it out of a window.
Not that there's a rational reason to treat an insect that way, other than it's a good approach to living things in general.
Thing is, while it's a good default to start with, I don't see it as an absolute.
If the circumstance shows that our relationship with this being cannot be harmonious then killing it becomes a real option.
That's a big 'if' but an 'if' nonetheless.
I have no problems at all with pest control.
Not 100% sure whether I could justify my meat eating in the same way but it might be on a similar track.
I also think that war can be acceptable under the circumstances.

I'd certainly find it difficult to view the life of Taliban members as sacred.
Potentially, as humans, they're capable of becoming positive part of society and thereby as 'sacred' as the rest of us.
While they're part of an organisation that terrorises people (I mean, I could have some sympathy if armed forces were their only targets) then their loss is like the loss of cancerous cells inside a body.

 

The thing with this is, what has evolutionary theory got to do with morals and values?
Maybe as an explanation on how humans came to have morality, a history lesson in how morality develloped, but surely absolutely no influence on what morals we should have now? (I think this was a key point that Dawkins wanted to make in his selfish gene book, that a major part of human evolution was that their actions had surpassed the cruel conditions of nature.)
One of the theist's favourite strawmen, painting the atheist as some nihilist who doesn't care if the weak get's trodden on, often argues from social darwinism.

If, by "we" you mean a continued lineage from the original life on earth, independent of the descent of Homo sapien, then I agree that life will probably last until the sun burns it up.

 

To sound like everyone else on this thread, there is nothing special about any form of life regardless of how you explain its origins if you decide to do so.  If you posit a creator entity, then we are all simply a means to an end we never knew of, considered, or even wanted.  If you do not and posit an eternal universe, then we are nothing more but a small spec in a much larger cycle of destruction and creation that we will never be able to fully understand since the cycle of creation ends before we can get enough information and understanding to alter or change the cycle.  However, because our knowledge and understanding is both limited and fallible, it is all too easy to convince ourselves that life is special since, as has been pointed out in this thread, the instinct to survive no matter what the cost is ingrained in our genes, which is why every argument for the "sacredness" of life can be summed up in this sentence "It just is, for if it wasn't, you wouldn't want to continue living".

 

I'll get started on Mr. Fushion?

Now you're talking!  Let's do this!