Everybody has their beliefs about the ongoing debates regarding health care, the wars in the Middle East, and the job Barack Obama is doing as president. People cling strongly to these beliefs, arguing them passionately in town hall meetings. Some of their beliefs are rational and valid. Others are not. There are people who believe ardently that President Obama is a socialist seeking to make America a completely socialist country. There are people who believe just as ardently that he is not a natural born citizen and his election to the White House is henceforth not legitimate. These people, the Birthers, believe the same way the Truthers believe that the September 11th attacks were ochastrated by the government. Creationists follow the same logic, believing ardently that their beliefs about the creation of the world is valid and that evolution is some vast conspiracy orchastrated by anti-Christian forces. They all believe in their heart of hearts that they are right and what they believe is true. But they're all wrong in one critical assumption. They believe that their belief alone is proof enough, even when there are countless facts that disprove them. Thus they cling to their belief, ignoring sound rational arguments to the contrary.

But why do they believe? There are plenty of ways to verify their claims. Many like creationism and the 9/11 conspiracy theories have indeed been disproven. Why won't they listen to rational arguments? The answer lies in the very nature of belief itself. Human beings are innately programmed to believe certain things without proof. It's part of our evolutionary heritiage. Richard Dawkins wrote extensively about it in his book "The God Delusion." Human beings have the capacity for reason, but they cannot employ that facet in every situation. If they are told "don't approach a hungry crocadile" it would take considerable time and energy to prove that rationally. It's much easier for someone to be told by parents or authority figures and have them believe it without proof. It saves energy, it saves time, and it enhances survival. Therefore, it is a trait that evolution has favored.

But like so many other evolutionary traits, there are drawbacks. This feature that allows human beings to believe without proof is also what breeds irrational thinking such as stereotypes, racism, and religious dogma. It is further encouraged when the capacity for human beings to know is limited. For much of human history, people didn't know what the stars were, how life began, or why things happened the way they did. That need to know is another vital survival skill because without in depth knowledge of their surroundings, people falter and become vulnerable. Beliefs, whether they are about conspiracy theories or religion, are convenient explanations. They save people the time and energy from actually investigating themselves. It's vital since not everybody has the resources to investigate. Not everyone can go down to Ground Zero and analyze the wreckage to verify the claims of the 9/11 Truthers. Not everyone can go to Hawaii either and verify Barack Obama's birth certificate. Belief is the only option and it is very convenient and often makes people feel better because it makes them feel like they know something.

It is how religion and superstition propogate. It is how conspiracy theories keep going even when they've been debunked. People cling to belief because it's easier. It's convenient. And it makes them feel good. It also saves them from the anxious feelings they get when they say to themselves "I don't know." It is a part of human nature and one that can only be countered with solid reason. Society has changed so much since the days of the Stone Age, yet people still cling to mythology from the Bronze Age and mythology of the modern era. They may believe they are right and thus vindicated, but the hard truth is that reality is never as ideal as people want it to be. The world isn't fair and it isn't always as magical as people would like it to be. Belief is fine, but pushing belief as truth is not. In a free society, claims can only stand on the merits that support them. And belief, while convenient and comforting, is not enough.

It's remarkable how often religious zealots play the victim. And who could blame them? It's easy to play the victim. It saves people the trouble of actually having to defend their position with rational arguments. Whenever some other group comes along, secular or religious, and says something they don't like, they rush to classify it as an issue of religious bigotry. As if any opposing viewpoint or differing opinion is somehow an insult to their way of thinking. It isn't just irrational. It's downright childish.

But that doesn't stop men like Ken Conner from writing articles that accuse scientists of all people of religious bigotry.

Science Theists Need Not Apply

The cores of Conner's article centers around Dr. Francis Collins, who President Obama picked to head the National Institutes of Health. Collins is a controversial figure because he's not just a scientist, he's a devout evangelical Christian who often tries to integrate his work as a scientist with his beliefs as a Christian. He's written various books such as "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief." He was also featured in the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" which presented a dubious case that the scientific community was anti-god and anti-Christian.

This notion is not only completely false, it's rediculous. Collins isn't criticized for his religious beliefs. Nor is he criticized for his work. He is a target because he is violating one of the most important aspects of science. He is trying to thrust the supernatural world of god, satan, angels, and miracles into the strictly rational process that is science. It is a major fallacy that any rational minded scientist is quick to point out. It's called 'violation of the philosophy of science.' It is a tenant as old as science itself. One cannot appeal to the supernatural or the spiritual when making a scientific claim. That is because science is inherently rational. It requires evidence, testable hyopothesis, and logic to prove points. To put any kind of god into the mix be it the Christian god or the Aztec god is to negate the very tenants of what makes science work.

Conner doesn't understand this and neither does Collins. They rely on emotional appeals that pain the scientists as cold, uncaring, and prejudice. They will gladly point out that some of the greatest minds of all time like Plato, Aristotle, and Newton were all devout believers. This is true, but never at any point did these men use the supernatural in their work. They never appealed to god or spirits of any kind to present justification for their claims. In science, one's personal beliefs are completely irrelevant. It does not matter of a scientist is a devout believer in god or is a worshipper of the sun. What matters is the claims they make and the evidence they use to back it up. It is the evidence that trumps personal beliefs. It doesn't matter where it came from or who it came from. If it can be verified and vindicated, it is worth just as much as any work from a devout believer.

Conner will also argue without god, science lacks ethics. But this is a completely false assumption. It assumes people need god to make good moral decisions. This is a complete misnomer considering people have had god for years and used it to justify violence, prejudice, racisim, slavery, murder, and genocide. Conner and Collins try and make it seem as though without religion, science is somehow evil. But science is not evil. It can't be evil. Only people can be evil. Science by it's own definition is objective and unbias. It is the human beings who use it.

When it comes to the debate between religion and science, the issue is clear. Science is inherently rational and based on evidence, logic, and reason. Religion is inherently irrational and based on faith, superstition, and the supernatural. One cannot be used in the context of the other without destroying the premise of the other. Men like Conner and Collins are destroying their credibility by trying to have their cake and eat it to. There's nothing bioted, prejudice, or bias about it. It's irrational, illogical, and flat out wrong. Plain and simple.

The article was wrong then and now, a generation later, it is even more off the mark.

The vast majority of women who want to marry actually do, although they're no longer in a rush to do it. Does that mean women and men are less interested in marriage than in the past?

No! Americans love marriage compared to people in other industrialized countries. While Americans get hitched at a rate of 7.5 per every 1,000 inhabitants in a given year, the French and Germans marry at a rate of 4.5 to 4.9 per 1,000, Swedes 4.0 to 4.4, Belgians 2.8 to 3.9.

Yet as American sex lives have changed, not coincidentally, calls to “save marriage” have grown. That seems to indicate some confusion about the purpose of marriage and the role of sex within it.

Like the old Newsweek article, some traditionalists fret that Americans are falling out of the marriage habit. “Marriage has fallen by the wayside,” declares the National Marriage Project in its most recent report from 2007. The Project, a research organization based at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., blames “secular individualism” and tolerance of “alternative lifestyles” for marriage's perceived unfashionable status.

While such statements seem to fly in the face of the recent government data, the Project bases them on the divorce rate (about 45 percent of all marriages), the number of adults who are not married (roughly 50 percent of people older than age 18 are unmarried at any one time because of divorce, a spousal death, or by choice) and relaxed attitudes toward phenomena like out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation. It argues that “the institution of marriage needs to be promoted by all levels of society, particularly the families, the schools, the churches, the non-profit sector, and the government.”

When discussing the debate over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, many misguided moral crusaders will cry fowl by claiming schools and universities are not hearing out alternative views. The most common alternative view they push is creationism/intelligent design (they're really the same thing). But these religiously motivated theories had been disproven long ago because they could never hold up under peer review and could not explain anywhere near the phenomenon that evolution explained. Since it is drawn from the annuls of bronze age mythology, it can't be tested or verified. It can't even be taken seriously. Only evolution has been able to explain the vast biodiversity of life on Earth. That is why no alternative is taught. But that doesn't mean there weren't any.

One alternative that most religious zealots never even mention is the evolutionary theory of Jean Baptiste Lemarck. His theory, which is similar to Darwin's, hypothesized that individuals of a species could gain attributes in their lifetime that would favor their survivability and hence pass them to their offspring. He called this 'aquired characteristics.' For example, if a man worked as a blacksmith most of his life and developed big, strong arms then under Lemarck's theory he would pass the trait of big strong arms to his offspring.

History of Jean Baptiste Lemarck (1744-1829)

This theory, which came before Darwin, was tested by science and eventually disproven by Mendal genetics. Darwin later got it right when he hypothesized that populations evolved, but not individuals. Lemarck was discredited, which is part of why he is rarely mentioned in science today. But what also goes unnoticed is how his work would later influence the debate over evolution.

One of the major arguments anti-evolution crusaders often make is that evolution is a slippery slope. Teaching it leads to some kind of degradation of morality. Their favorite tactics is to associate it with the likes of Hitler and Stalin, claiming they were fervent evolutionary supporters. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Stalin, who used many cruel reasons to justify his slaughter, was NOT a supporter of evolution. He and many others in the communist party believed in Lemarck. Soviet psuedo-scientist Tromfim Lysenko denounced evolution and Mendelian genetics as a capitalist myth. Stalin took this and in his propaganda promoted Lemarck, believing that using acquired characteristics and the proper conditioning of individuals in their totalitarian state they could create a new race he called homo soviticus (the ideal communist). Those that actually pushed evolution or 'Darwinism' as they called it were sent to the gulags. These ideas were later adopted by another Lemarck supporter, Mao Zedong for the same reason. So those that say they were ardent Darwinists do not check their facts.

Lemarck and Communism

Lysenkoism and Stalinist Russia

Hitler was another tyrant who liked the appeal of Lemarck's work. It fell much more in line with his radical ideology on racial superiority. Many erroneously say he favored Social Darwinism (a perversion of real evolution anyhow), but his ideas of conditioning his people and exterminating undesireables is much more in line with Lemarck.

Hitler and Lemarck

Now just because these tyrants favored Lemarck does not mean Lemarck deserves to be associated with them. It just shows that those attempting to discredit Darwin and evolution are not checking their facts. Even if evolution were used as justification by madmen and despots, that wouldn't make it any less true. But it isn't and it's ridiculuous to assert otherwise by linking it to undesirable figures in history. Lemarck like creationism/intelligent design have both been disproven by science. That is why evolution is accepted.

Does religion make people good or bad? It seems to be a question that has become far more pertinent in the age of global terrorism. Some argue certain religions make people more malevolent than others. A quick Google search on Islam will yield many websites arguing that it is a religion of violence. Other sites will say the same about Christianity, Judism, Hinduism, or pretty much any 'ism' for that matter. But little of this propaganda has any substance behind it. To answer the question as to whether religion makes someone good or bad, it's important to understand the factors.

First off, what determines how religious or non-religious someone is? Believers of many different faiths will give all sorts of answers. Some may say it is a tradition in their family. Some may say they had a genuine religious experience that drew them to a certain faith. Some may say their faith helps make them a better person. These are all interesting components to the argument, but it isn't evidence one way or another because it's purely anecdotal. To get a better idea of what determines one's religion, it's important to get a broader picture. As it turns out, evidence indicates that there's no godly forces driving people to particular religions. It's culture mostly that determines what religion someone follows.

Religious Affiliation and Cultural Inheritance: Study of Twins

In these studies, the environment one comes up in determines a great deal what they believe. So if someone is born into a Christian community in Texas, chances are they'll be a Christian. If someone is born in a strong Muslim community in the Middle East, chances are they'll be a Muslim. If they're born into a community that is strongly Jewish, chances are they'll be Jewish. There's nothing spiritually radical about it. It's simple social dynamics.

So if religion is mostly determined by environment or culture, what does that mean for a person's morality? The next point to consider in this question involves just how religious someone is. Regardless of what religion they're brought up in, how seriously they take it is important to consider when making a reasonable discussion. If religion is supposed to make someone more moral, than those who attend church services or religious rituals should have a strong correlation with crime. But research does not support this. According to empirical research, attending religious services has no effect on deviance.

Does Religion Effect Criminality?

Again, community and culture played a large part. In communites like Mormon or tight nit religious communities in smaller more isolated areas, low levels of deviance were associated with strong social pressures and peer groups that dissuaded such activities. This is further supported by the religious affiliation of the prison population. If one religion led to more deviance than others, then it should reflect in theose in jail. But it doesn't. According to the Justice Department, the religious affiliation of inmates has no particular leanings towards one faith or another.

Prison Incarceration and Religious Affiliation

So if religion doesn't have an effect on one's morality, what does? Is there any research indicating one factor over another? As it turns out, crime rates do have a negative correlation with something: education. Various studies into crime rates have shown that the more educated a population is, the less crime there is. In America, this is well documented:

Education and Public Safety

Education as Crime Prevention

So with this knowledge in mind, what is more reasonable to promote? Religion or education? Religion, it seems, does not offer a correlative effect between how deviant a person is. Education does offer a correlative effect. So logically, education wins out. This is not to say religion has no benefits. But those promoted social demigods has no merit. It offers a much more reasonable explanation when one considers why countries in Western Europe and Japan have such a low rate of deviance. Their education level is far greater compared to that of America, which has a very inefficient government-run heavily unionized system that does not provide adaquet resources for students.

There was one other effect education had that may explain why some don't want to promote it over religion. It turns out that as one becomes more educated, they become less religious.

Education and Religion

So regardless of what one thinks about the merits of religion, it does not seem to make someone more moral and less deviant. There are other factors to consider such as socio-economic status, which often goes along with the environmental aspect that often determines religious leanings. But the research is clear. Good education makes for good people. Religion can be part of the process, but it does not pull the same weight.

Over two years ago, ABC's John Stossel did a 20/20 special on education called "Stupid in America." The title was thought to be a little extreme, but it was later revealed to be entirely appropriate when dealing with education policy in America. But it isn't just referring to the students who continually rank lower than the rest of the Western world on standardized tests. More so, "Stupid in America" reflects the failure and outright arrogance of the system itself.

Stupid In America

But as hard hitting an assessment this program is, it is only recently that some of the dirty secrets of public schooling has come to light. This past week, the Associated Press did a story on the infamous 'rubber rooms' first described in the 20/20 special. In these rooms, troubled teachers are placed in rooms where they just sit around and do nothing all day and still collect their full salary. Why are they there? The reasons vary. Some are there due to insubordination on the job while others are there for serious offences like sexually harassing students. While such behavior would earn a quick firing in any other job, it doesn't work that way in a public government run school system that is heavily unionized. Because of union contracts, these teachers CAN'T be fired so in order to keep them from the students, the system just puts them away and keeps paying them until they can go through all the messy bureaucracy it takes to fire them.

700 Teachers Paid To Do Nothing

This is government programs at their worst. Never in the private sector would something like this be allowed. Any company that put troubled employess in these situations and kept paying them would go out of business in short order. It is only through a government run system where taxpayer dollars flow freely through endless bureaucracy that these egregious practices can propogate.

But despite this story and the two-year-old special done on 20/20, there is no serious talk to change the system. Barack Obama has talked about making education affordable and available to all people, but he has offered no substantive solutions on doing so. He has not talked about allowing private schooling to grow (even though he sends his own kids to private school) and he has not talked about taking on the teachers unions. In other words, these rubber rooms will be here to stay.

Now as someone with public school still fresh in my memory, I can attest how lousy it is. I was lucky to attend a fairly nice school in a good community, but it still felt like a government run internment center for teenagers and youths. I never got the sense that people wanted to be there, let alone enjoyed being there. But the worst part was the feeling of powerlessness and the total lack of choice. Nobody was allowed to really take control of their educational pursuit. Everybody had to jump through the same hoops. It was only when I got to the more open environments of college and the workplace that I learned so much more. To this day I see much of my public school career as mostly a waste of time.

In a free society where the government is limited by law, these sorts of endeavors are an affront to freedom. The government should not be in the business of education. It is in the business of protecting rights. Time and again the system's failures are exposed. But government continues to drag its feet, avoiding any real change in favor of bureaucrats.

It has often been said that it is impossible for a society to have freedom of religion without freedom from religion. Therefore, it is the responsibility of a free secular state to actively avoid religious discourse in public places. This seems contrary to the notion of free speech, another pillar of the free society that the free secular state is responsible for protecting. So at which point does one intersect with the other? Where do the lines form?

The answer is simple. There are no lines.

Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are the same thing. They are two sides of the same coin. The freedom to express one's religion in any way they see fit is no different than the freedom of one's right to speak out. The same rights and responsibilities apply. So long as it is peaceful, not obstructing the life, liberty, and property of another individual, it is entirely protected by the free society. But some do not make this distinction. Some consider religious expression to be it's own category of expression and thus the state needs special powers to police it. This has led to an erosion of the ideals of freedom espoused by the founding fathers.

Take for instances the famous court cases McCollum vs. Board of Education Dist. 71 that banned religious instruction in public schools or the Engel v. Vitale case that banned prayer in public schools. These cases all used the same reasoning to ban religious displays. It violated the establishment clause of the constitution which states that the government cannot support any one religion over the other no matter how dominant it may be. It's a good principle for a secular state, but in these cases it was pushed beyond the limits into the realm of censorship. There's no way around it. By banning discussion of religion in schools, that is censorship. It may offend atheists at times, but in this country there is no right not to be offended.

Take a step back from these cases and approach them reasonably. Was the government acting through force? Did beauracrats on local, state, or federal levels impose the teaching of religion or prayer in the schools directly? Or was it something that was decided by the school itself or the local parents? If it is the case that the government is directly forcing schools to teach or condone specific religious themes over another, then that is unconstitutional. But in many of these cases, it was the schools themselves and the communities that wanted these religious themes in their schools. And why shouldn't they be allowed? So long as nobody is forcing them and it is done peacefully, what right do the courts have to force them to stop? In the strictest constitutional sense, they don't.

So what about the atheists or the non-believers like myself that go to these schools? Well so long as the schools do not force prayer and teaching on the students, there should not be a problem. If school officials were doing this to atheists as a form of harassment, that would be a violation of rights and the courts do have a right to punish those who do this. But to make a vast, broad judgment that bans these practices across the board is an abuse of power and an affront to the free society.

But it isn't just non-believers who abuse these privlidges. Religous groups are just as guilty. The best case has to do with creationism. Take cases like Edwards v. Aguillard that overruled a law in Louisiana forcing schools to teach creationism alongside evolution. The key aspect of the law was force. Schools had to push creationism by law. And not just any creationism like that of Native American or Hindu stories. They had to push the strict interpretation of Genesis in a science classroom. This was a clear case of the government using force to favor one religous group over another. As such, it is unconstitutional because it abuses the powers of the state. It was later verified again in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in 2003 that banned the teaching of intelligent design for the same reasons.

Now how is this not censorship? It's simple when one takes context into account. Creationism was being pushed in science classes as an alternative viewpoint of the truth. But in a free society, certain ideas cannot be propped up by the government just because certain groups really believe in them. Creationism and Intelligent Design failed in the marketplace of idea. They were proven to be false by science and as such, they were dropped from science classrooms. But certain religous groups didn't like that. So to make up for the fact that their dogma was not verified by science, they got the government to force it upon the people. That use of force is a clear violation of liberty, religous and non-religious alike. Now if creation stories were taught in a religious class or in literature, that's a different story because that's a different context. So long as the state doesn't force this upon students as truth, then it is perfectly fine in a school.

The Founding Fathers were for freedom and religous liberty equally. The idea of a free society harkoning back to the enlightenment was that free expression and the free exchange of ideas allows ideas and beliefs to stand on their own merits. So if certain ideas like creationism do not stand enough on their merits, they are rejected. As such, the government cannot prop certain ideas up over others. When it comes to religious, the key is for the state to stay out of the affairs of the chruch and allow religious groups to thrive on their own merits. If one is more dominant than others, let them be dominent so long as they can persuade their people that they are a good group to be a part of. And if they wish to leave that group, let them. So long as force is not involved, the freedom to practice any religious or no religion at all is warrented in a free society.

As an atheist, most assume I am for eliminating religion from society. I'm not. I am an ardent believer in allowing people to follow their own spiritual path. If some wish to be Christians, that's okay. If some wish to be Muslim, that's okay too. If some wish to worship Satan, that's just as valid. So long as none of these groups harass me or force me to take part in their customs, I'm okay with it. The free society comes before my own spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. I am and always have been for a free society where the state does not interfere with the church and people and communities are allowed to follow their own path.

It's an age-old mantra. You can't prove a negative. Reasonable people engaging in reasonable debates understand this. Irrational people engaging in baseless propaganda do not. Unfortunately, it's the irrational people in power throughout government and religion that abandon reason and spew nonsense to the masses with no basis in fact. This is all well and good in a free society. The problem is, uneducated and uninformed people believe it can lead to destructive policies.

First off, the idea of proving a negative isn't so clear cut. While the mantra is true for the most part, in a strictly philosophical sense it is in fact possible to prove a negative. But it is only possible when the claim is falsifiable. For instance, if someone asks a random person to prove that there isn't a rat in their left pocket, the person can prove that by reaching into their pocket and showing that there is nothing there. The claim stated was falsifiable, meaning it could be disproved.

Proving a negative with reason: Evolving Thought

Other claims made in this context are a lot more complicated and more often then not, they are impossible to prove. Many of the claims come across every day and are used as arguments. These include questions such as:

You can't prove Obama's stimulus package didn't help the economy.

You can't prove banks and customers didn't know the loans they were giving out were bogus.

You can't prove the drug war didn't contribute to the violence in Mexico.

You can't prove that god doesn't exist.

You can't prove that Jesus Christ wasn't the son of god.

You can't prove creationism didn't happen.

You can't prove homosexuality isn't a choice.

You can't prove gay marriage won't harm society.

You can't prove abortion isn't murder.

Every one of these claims has the same fallacy. Proving something isn't present just isn't reasonable. This is because proving negatives require that the entire domain of the argument is understandable, measurable, and verifiable. It must fit the test of falsification. But the breadth of these matters is beyond falsification because it is impossible to verify facts with esoteric and intangible factors.

That is why rational people making rational arguments ask that those making the claim prove it. Their mantra is positive claims require positive evidence (evidence that something is present). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Making the claim that a certain bill from the president did improve the economy can be verified by quantitatively measuring the changes of the economy in conjunction with the changes of the bill and verifying that there was a causal relationship. That is purely reasonable. The problem is, most people in the news and in politics don't do this. Obama famously said "We can't afford to do nothing." It is a negative claim that isn't verifiable, but most people didn't understand that and nothing could be done to stop it.

The same issues emerge in religion. Believers often put the burden of proof on the non-believers, saying they are the ones who have to prove their invisible deity doesn't exist. But the same fallacy applies. Richard Dawkins made the same argument by claiming you can't prove there isn't a teapot orbiting the sun. That is why reasonable people say unless you can prove there is a teapot there, then they don't believe it. It is the believers that are making the claim that there is a deity present, but they offer proof of it. They rely on other fallacies like anecdotal evidence, emotional appeals, and religious texts they allege were divinely inspired. None of this is proof. That is why it is assumed on faith. In a strictly reasonable context, it is impossible to prove any deity. One can only have faith that the deity is there. But too often people equate faith with truth or fact. It isn't. It is an unprovable claim that too many people avoid and pass off as truth and those who do not understand reason are prone to accept it.

Fearmongering, propaganda, and moral panics all emerge from irrational rhetoric. Religion and government use it all the time and so does the media because in many ways, it's easier than checking facts. In a free society people are free to believe, behave, and carry themselves as they wish so long as they do not impose on others. But to defend these freedoms, there needs to be rational policy with reasonable people. So long as religion and government stand in the way, the free society will constantly be challenged. And reason is the best weapon against nonsense.

A lot has been said about the abortion debate in wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Pro-life and pro-choice advocates alike have latched onto it as a means to serve their agenda. Pro-choice groups condemn the pro-lifers for fostering men like Scott Roeder who use violence to spread their beliefs. It is in a sense the epitome of hypocracy. Roeder hated Tiller because he thought he was a murderer, so he became a murderer himself. It runs completely opposite of the very term 'pro-life.' But that's a term Roeder didn't take seriously. But Pro-life groups aren't dissuaded. They have continually brushed off men like Roeder as "A fruit and a lunitic" so says the head of Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization. The same people who brush it off use Roeder as a warning to say "See! This is what happens when you let something like abortion to propagate!" Of course, neither side offers anything pragmatic to the argument.

When it comes to an emotional issue like abortion, there is little room for common ground. Pro-life and Pro-choice groups are notoriously stubborn, using whatever reason they can to justify their beliefs. Pro-lifers use religion, which is also hypocritical because the god of the bible is NOT pro-life. In the chapter of Exodus god murders every first born in Egypt and they were not fetuses. They were already alive. So it's rediculous to assert that pro-life is endorsed by god. Pro-choice groups use the notion of personal freedom, in as such that women own their bodies. But they negate to mention that a fetus isn't 'their' body. It's the body of another being, one that may not be fully developed but still a being. And they'll avoid that notion at all costs.

On issues like this when neither side shows any signs of using logic, it's often helpful to look at it from a different perspective. Take someone like famous comedian George Carlin, who never claimed to be an expert in any field, but makes a valid point in one of his famous HBO skits. He focuses on consistency. He asks questions like "Why is it that pro-life groups are so concerned about a fetus before it's born, but not afterwards?" He also calls Pro-lifers out by asking "If you're so concerned about these single mothers, why aren't you volunteering your wombs to have these kids?" It's put in a humorous context, but there is an underlying point here. Pro-lifers are so focused on calling out the evils of abortion, but they don't offer any alternatives. They only favor people being abstinent or putting the child up for adoption. But as research has shown along with human nature, this is not possible nor is it pragmatic.

The Pro-choice crowd makes similar emotional appeals, linking abortion to feminism. It's true that most of the people in power making these decisions on abortion are men, who will never be faced with this issue. These men are driven by ideology and partisen politics, not reason or logic. They will heed emotional appeals from women claiming this is an afront to women's rights. But this is deflecting the argument, saying anybody who is against abortion is against women. This is simply not true. It makes the same stereotypes as the Pro-lifers.

So how does one wade through the emotional appeals and find a reasonable context for abortion? Well the argument comes down to when is having an abortion killing a human life? It can't come at conception because not every fertilized egg gets implanted. To call that an abortion would be unreasonable because any woman who ever had that happen would be guilty of it. Then there's the argument that as soon as the fetus is viable outside the womb, it is a person. But this has some problems too. In the realm of medical science, advances are making it possible for infants to survive outside the womb after shorter and shorter periods of gestation. Some scientists foresee a day when they have the means to save a child no matter what stage it's at during a pregnancy. It's called ectogenesis and it would severely affect the nature of the abortion debate if fetus viability is a consideration. It would have a lot of cultural impacts too because it could negate the very need for a woman to go through pregnancy to have a child. But that's another issue. For more information on ectogenesis, check out the following link:

Ectogenesis

So what criteria would be most reasonable for this issue? Going back to Geroge Carlin, consistancy is the key. So if reason is going to look at where life begins, it should also consider where life ends. All medical professionals agree. A person is declared dead after brain activity ceases. One can revive a heart, but not a brain. Some cells may still be alive in a body, but without brain activity is is dead. So if that's how death is measured, logic would assume that life should be measured the same way. So when a fetus develops brain activity, it should be considered a person. This happens later than Pro-lifers would like and earlier than Pro-choice advocates would like. According to research, a fetus develops brain activity around the 8th week or 2nd month of pregnancy. And higher functions like consciousness don't develop until around the 13th week.

Stages of Development

With this in mind, abortion would not be murder if it occurs before this time. Luckily, most abortions occur well before it. According to research done by the Guttmacher Institute 89 percent of abortions occur before the 12th week of gestation. 61.3 percent occur before the 8th week.

Facts About Abortion

So the vast majority of abortions would still be allowable by this standard. But all those afterwards would face strict limits because it would then legally be dealing with another person.

It is neither a compromise nor a solution. It is simply approaching the abortion issue from outside the fervent emotional pleas of advocacy groups. It is possible to use reason for debates such as abortion. When emotion is injected, people like George Tiller face grave harm and people like Scott Roeder take their views to extremes. It is difficult at times to distance one's self from emotion. But when it comes to policy and justice in a free society, reason offers the best hope.