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ZenrageTheKeeper -> RE: How Long Do You Wish to Live? (12/26/2005 9:43:22 AM)
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Life must take life in order to live. Whether it is plant, animal, insect, microscopic or human. We, in our own societal roles, may be excused from the actual taking of life, but it is no less neccesary regardless of how visually removed from the act we are.
As such, the longer the life, the more life taken. The longer your existence and the more value you place upon your continued existence, the less you will care for the lives you require to take. That is the essence of self-preservation. The line is drawn (and redrawn often) and it becomes a question of my life or yours. The organic food I eat today is an animal or plant you can not eat tomorrow. The animal you refuse to eat today may eat the salad you intend to eat a year from now.
Then there exists the time and resource limits that require the quality of life to continue. The more that exists on a higher level of consumption, the more resources they are required to take and the less resources there are for others. Life then becomes a competition - people must compete to take the lives that are neccesary for their own individual survival. However, we must also recognize caution, because if we take too many lives recklessly or the lives that are neccesary for our continued survival, as a species, we risk exterminating ourselves in the long run. Ergo, life becomes a controlled competition. A socialism of existence, if you will.
Now as we bring in the silliness of religion:
If you choose to believe that murder, in any form, is a sin, then the noblest act a pregnant woman can take is having an abortion since to prevent that life to exist beyond the womb prevents any future taking of life. Likewise a person taking his own life allows others to access the lives neccesary for that individual to continue existing. The resources that become available are then given to those that may live because of that noble act.
If you choose to believe abortion is a sin, then you need to relax your ideals on any notion that all life is sacred as that life, because after exiting the womb the autonomous life will require to take other life to survive. The value of life then becomes a rating game, subjective by individual or region, and those lives beneath notice become irrelevant. Then you must eventually acknowledge that life within a fetus may not hold the same level of value that someone else may place upon it. Then abortions become less sinful by default as it is only a superficial value structure that places any value to the fetus in the first place.
If you choose to believe that suicide is a sin, then you must prevent any person from doing anything that might place yourself in mortal danger. This includes, but is not limited to: no joining armed militias, no sex, no interaction with any microscopic life, no interaction with any macroscopic life because that might be carrying microsopic life. By intentionally putting yourself in a potential path of death, then you are indeed taking your own life into your own hands regardless of the consequences. Now some people would surely say that if you are put into mortal danger by the hands of another, then that can not be your own fault. Unfortunately the truth is, you chose to be there. You chose to ignore the improbability that a single interaction on that moment, on that spot, could lead to your own death. It was by your own conscious and subconscious choices that you were where the blade was coming down or the trigger was pulled in front of you or the ice on the bridge was when you were driving by. If you do not have control of all the actions within any given situation or interaction, regardless of the improbability involved, then you are being suicidal by default. However, if you do not put yourself in danger long enough to interact with others, or to eat something that may have a contagion on it, or even breathe the air with a thousand microscopic entities circulating upon it, then you are again taking your own life. So instead we subjectively ignore the improbabilities that we see as insignificant and try to lead as healthy a life as possible until we wish to engage in those activities that put ourselves in mortal danger in disregard of the certainty of our demise - which is inevitable regardless of our choices. The conclusion here then is that looking down upon suicide is really stupid as long as we allow others to have their own free will.
All that said, seeing as how the value of life is strictly subjective, I have no ethical dilemma with becoming immortal and remaining alive and conscious forever.
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