Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

Every one could hear him shouting, God’s booming voice was unmistakable, “Jesus Christ!” Jesus appeared out of nowhere, “you need me, Dad?” The Lord God was in heaven’s media center looking at about a dozen screens.   Each one was showing a different location of HeavenBook.   God stood holding a set of earphones in his left hand.   The screen in front of him showed HeavenBook Arkansas.   God addressed Jesus:   sorry, no, I don’t need you right now.   I was just ranting about something really stupid that a woman down on earth said to her friend who has cancer.   She said God does not give you more than you can handle.     As if! Can somebody tell these people, that I don’t “give” anyone cancer.   That I am not responsible for the bad stuff that happens to people.   Jesus (JC):   But you did create all of creation, didn’t you? LG:   Sure, I got the ball rolling, but the universe runs itself.   I set the rules but then it runs like clockwork. JC:   So you don’t pay attention to it all? LG

A short riff about “human being”. This is also about abortion.   The other day, I heard respected conservative lawyer, David French explain why he opposes the right to abortion and his basis is more or less that from conception (or soon after) the clump of cells are a human being (or person - the difference is meaningless here) and we can’t kill a human (without a good reason?).   But if so, the concept of human being is so broad as to be useless here. Of course David is a lawyer and lawyers use debaters word games all the time.   They use a word, get agreement concerning something, then they take a different instance of that word - pretend it is the same and play a game of gotcha.   They never go back and ask if they should revise either their definitions or their premises.   Here is what happens with abortion.   The anti abortion advocate gets us to agree that we should not kill a human being.   That to kill a human being is murder.   Of course we all agree (we will leave out a discu