Language of Life T-shirt Design Contest
Human life does not begin at birth. Hopefully we can all agree on that by now.
But the English language hasn’t caught up to the science. We’ve written before about the problem with phrases like “born leader,” “a sucker born every minute,” etc. We decided it’s time to expand that conversation with the ultimate conversation-starter: a cool t-shirt!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create an awesome t-shirt graphic that embraces the language of life. Some possibilities:
- Conceived to be wild
- Conceived this way
- Pro-life, conceived and raised
- I was conceived for this
If we like your design, we’ll sell it on our Zazzle store, and give you a free one. And if you create our favorite design, you’ll win free admission to the Students for Life of America conference on Friday, January 22, 2015! (SPL president Kelsey Hazzard got a free ticket, but won’t be able to use it because she runs the SPL sponsor booth at the conference. So we’re shamelessly re-gifting.)
Entries are due by midnight on Friday, July 11. Send them to info@secularprolife.org. We look forward to seeing your creative side!
And now for a little housekeeping:
1) Please send your art to us in a decent format. Giant pixels do not work on a t-shirt.
2) Don’t even think about using somebody else’s stuff. Copyright violations are bad.
"So we're shamelessly re-gifting"
Well, to be honest, I don't see any reason for their to be shame in re-gifting. So, I guess I'm happy that you're shameless about it.
We can agree that our lifes does not begin with the moment of birth, but moment of conception is even more ridiculous.
So when will you be contacting our country's medical schools asking them to stop using embryology textbooks with "ridiculous" science in it?
This is no solid piece of scientific knowledge. If you actually studied biology you would know that. Boundaries between individuals or species are very blurry. That's intrinsic property of life. It is chaotic. Unlike machines life has no parts with clear function which can be taken apart and catalogized. Biologist try to do that anyway since nobody know any better. Concepts of individuals and species are invented by biologist and imposed on nature to make better sence of it. They haven't been discovered as scientific facts as you seem to think. There is a famous book about this called "The Selfish Gene".
Life doesn't begin. It began. At the beginning. Live sperm and live egg are needed to recreate.
You just said egg and sperm are living things. How can life begin at the moment of conception if it was alive before?
The egg and sperm become a whole new entity complete with its own separate and unique DNA. From this point forward it is a new life. The live egg and live sperm no longer exist and yet are not dead.
"Before this, there was no distinct individual organism."
This is untrue. Every single cell our bodies are composed of is an individual organism, eggs and sperm cells included. It's actually much easier to make a distinction between single cell organisms than between multicellural organisms.
We are speaking here about the human reproductive cycle. Cycles have no beginnings. Conception is just an arbitrary point.
So are you saying that a human being is not really an individual organism, but trillions of individual organisms?
Human body is both trillions of organisms and one big multicellular organism as a whole, but neither of those things is what I consider to be me, a human being. I am product of function of that organism. As long as organism is working properly I exist. It takes time for the organism to grow and develop that kind of function.
Do you really define yourself as something other than your physical, multicellular body? Can functions really be a smart ass unintentionally? Why do products feel the need to even communicate on this level (philosophically), let alone joke, insult another, etc. Why do we search for/desire truth? Do we control the organism or does it control.us? Your world view seems to create more questions than it answers and seems like drug-fkd mumbo jumbo – in my organisms' functional products (aka personal opinion).
Give me an actual example of such question then. Of those two examples you gave me first is completely unrelated to the problem, thought I can answer it if you really want me to, and answer to the second one is quite obvious. We are dependant on our organisms which results in certain limitations to our free will but other than that we are in control.
A comatose patient is also inanimate.
That's not true. Only person in vegetative state lack any awareness and reaction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma#Signs_and_symptoms
n medicine, a coma (from the Greek κῶμα koma,
meaning "deep sleep") is a state of unconsciousness lasting more than
six hours, in which a person: cannot be awakened; fails to respond
normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound; lacks a normal sleep-wake
cycle; and, does not initiate voluntary actions.[1] A person in a state of coma is described as being comatose.
A comatose person exhibits a complete absence of wakefulness and is unable to consciously feel, speak, hear, or move.
Sounds pretty inanimate to me….
"… fails to respond NORMALLY to painful stimuli … is unable to CONSCIOUSLY feel, speak, hear, or move."
They might still respond with some unconscious mumbling and movement.
If you read that paragraph from wiki you would know there is such thing as Glasgow coma scale. Person who scores 8 or less is considered to be comatose.
And…even zygotes react to biological stimuli….what's your point?
DNA usually distinguishes one organism from another. It distinguishes the zygote from the mother.
Then identical twins would be a single organism.
Identical twins have other distinguishing traits – like their own fingerprints…
I don't see how 2 human beings having the same DNA would justify killing an unborn child but not a born child.
You are moving the goal posts. If you add requirement of fingerprints then it should be ok to abort pregnancy before fingerprints are developed.
I didn't add the requirement.. They are still human beings before they have individual fingerprints. They shouldn't be killed.
The DNA distinguishes the zygote from it's mother. In the case of twins (which happen later in age), the DNA distinguishes the embryos from their mother. Whether there is one or many organisms in her womb – point it there is another human being/s in there not just the mother's cells.
DNA molecule is an inanimate object. Thanks to its unique properties it can grow and self repair to the certain degree in the same way crystals do but besides that it's just a mechanical part of a molecular machine. It can't do anything else.