361–370 of 731 posts
You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
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>But to claim something is "abomination" based on your own personal recoil from it isn't very useful as a moral framework. I said that something could possibly be an abomination, that being a human being with pig guts installed in place of their human guts. Is that my own personal recoil? I don't know 100% it seems to me that there's room to discuss how a "chimeric" transplant could symbolically be that. My entire pu…
> I don't know 100% it seems to me that there's room to discuss how a "chimeric" transplant could symbolically be that. Anything that tampers with nature taking its course on its own could be an abomination. Like putting blood from another being into an infant and hooking them up to crazy machines and causing pain to the infant to save their life. Of course, any failure to save someone's life which is readily saved c…
You've made a good point about how some of the other posters are feeling. I have difficulty coming up with another word I could have used to communicate what I meant that could have had a different effect. Even without using a strong word, people can be eager and are sometimes trained to perceive the slightest denigration against their choices. Given that my faith is generally seen in the present context with a high degree of disdain and contempt, I've grown pretty callous to needing to endure being treated with uncivility, particularly online, in order to speak. The only remedy for it I find is to cultivate a forgiveness of other people for their speech, even if I feel a need to challenge their speech's contents.
>But I do think that once you reach beyond, to say that readily available care that has become routinely used to extend life (like a pacemaker) might be far outside of God's will and that this is a reasonable reason to reject it in itself-- and we can hardly ask God what He wants-- I think the argument becomes dubious.
I believe that monk made the right decision for himself, and for someone else it may be correct to get the pacemaker, maybe they aren't personally ready to go, maybe they have an opportunity to take care of others. Understanding exactly what is and is not God's will in a general way, and also in particular situations requires a level of intense participation I'm not able to just go out and do right here and now. I can see what you mean, to say it seems dubious. If I were saying we could never know, it would be equivalent to saying "we're all blind, and feeling with our hands is wrong, you've got to just do nothing forever or you'll die". I do think an understanding of His will is accessible to us on a step by step basis, where we can see in front of ourselves only a few "meters", and cannot rationally construct entire argument chains that give us a perfect road map for 37 moves into the future.
>Most strict dietary laws would allow one to eat the item, or have it put into your body, to survive. The systems with these doctrines largely have exceptions for literally millennia, because we understand that people being able to choose to live trumps artificial restrictions. (Indeed, some reach further to say that extending ones life in violation of these laws is not just permissible, but a duty).
Yes, other comment chains in this section do a very good job explaining this.
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> Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that." A dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Is this a quote from something? Because I'm certain pigs have personality. I'm even somewhat confident they have as much personality as dogs.
I completely agree with you, and left a job in part because they tested on animals.
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it’s just a lifetime of conditioning really
I also remember reading about a criminal defence attorney who did not handle cases involving sex crimes. Apparently he was fine with defending murder suspects, but not suspects charged with even street groping. Or Gerard Spong's statement of being willing to defend anyone charged with anything, except Dési Bouterse; there are certainly worse military dictators on the planet.
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Pigs are really common in biomedical testing. They are physically a similar size and weight to humans. They also reach maturity in about 6 months. Much cheaper to raise than primates, and more likely to get approval for testing. My friends in biomed grad school named one of theirs cyber pig because it has about 30 different experiments ran on it before it was killed, and afterwards it was portioned out for further te…
Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature. Weirder how it can be said without a sympathetic or concerned response. I hope we can someday move beyond seeing animals as a mere resource.
On one hand we have the vegans who deny their very biological nature in order to fulfill the precept: "thou shall not kill." Vegans don't eat meat eat even though the human body is clearly a machine designed to eat meat. Why deny nature?
On the other hand we have carnivores who try to justify the fact that they are clearly killing another living creature that has feelings, emotions and intelligence not too far away from humans. How can you justify the mass slaughter and experimentation on pigs but not on humans? Experiments on the Jews during the holocaust could very much save more lives than testing these things on pigs as pigs are but a crude model of the human body.
Personally, I don't try to reconcile my morality. I know there's a moral part of my brain evolved to make sense of the prehistoric world where pigs didn't have feelings and the only people that mattered were those that were in my tribe. It's only in modern times that we now live in a global tribe where science and resources allow us to worry about the emotions of a pig. So what am I? I'm an evil motherfucker who eats the flesh of an innocent pig who didn't have to die...
Either way we're just humans on a ball of dust encircling a tiny spark that's going to go super nova anyway. Who cares. Math is suppose to make sense. Morality is not.
You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
> Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that." A dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
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Pigs are really common in biomedical testing. They are physically a similar size and weight to humans. They also reach maturity in about 6 months. Much cheaper to raise than primates, and more likely to get approval for testing. My friends in biomed grad school named one of theirs cyber pig because it has about 30 different experiments ran on it before it was killed, and afterwards it was portioned out for further te…
Bit of a tangent: I read the article to my wife and she mentioned that there is an episode of Grey's Anatomy where they wanted to perform a transplant of a pig's bowels but the Jewish (or Muslim?) lady refused. Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr
10,000 Christians per year (excluding Congo's civil war, hence the article's title), it seems: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24864587
And Muslims in China don't fare particularly well, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#China_2
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Until scarcity is solved everything is a resource.
this reads like a line out of a dystopic neal stephenson novel or some or douglas adams quote about a comically primitive species of alien doesn’t it have that sort of ring to it? is existence not more than sets of problems and solutions?
And had some alien told Arthur he was a barbarian for eating meat, he would have quipped something back like, "look, it's all shandies and licorice until the locusts arrive and then it's a rather short trip to the butchery to find out whose aunt goes best with brown sauce.'
Zaphod though.. he might have seen it your way, "That pig was a cool cat, man." Trillian was pragmatic like Ford.
Marvin would definitely been sympathetic on the surface, but insufferably narcissistic underneath. " You think you've got it bad? A brain the size of a planet but they wouldnt eat me if I cooked and served myself with mint jelly. Life. Don't talk to me about life".
... sorry
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John Wycliffe (1340 AD): "How should God approve that you rob Peter and give this robbery to Paul in the name of Christ?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_rob_Peter_to_pay_Paul
Yeah, except we are not talking about two people. We are talking about killing a pig to save a human, potentially thousands of humans.
It may be a simple choice for some, but it won’t be for others.
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From what I heard, the pig lived a relativity good life. It was well cared for by the large animal veterinary school on campus. Had more space and better food than any factory raised pig. All experiments passed an ethics review. The pig was anesthetized before any procedure. The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials. Modern medicine wou…
Thanks for your clarification. It's good to read that the pig was well cared and experiments passed ethics reviews. To be fair your original comment was lacking this information, hence when I first read it felt (unintentionally as we can see now) a bit cold-hearted to me as well.
https://www.purdue.edu/research/regulatory-affairs/animal-re...