I am not disputing your point, Pamameen, but while other religions may not speak against slavery with such a loud voice, the Buddhist and Baha'i scriptures do discourage or forbid it. The Upàsakasila Sutra (written centuries after the Buddha, and a few centuries before the founding of Islam) forbids slavery. The Buddha said buying and selling slaves was a "wrong livelihood" and he forbade monks and nuns from owning or receiving slaves (this was approximately 2300 years before the American Civil War). Baha'u'llah, in the Babi-Baha'i faith tradition, explicitly condemned and abolished slavery as well, sometime in the mid-19th century.
Juan, I'm with you on all the substantial points you made in this post. We're in complete agreement. But, on one detail I think you've overstated something. Like everyone else, I don't know when a potential human developing inside the mother becomes a human person. It does seem obvious to me that the embryo is not a human person in the initial days and weeks after conception. But late in the first trimester, around the 10th to 12th weeks of the pregnancy, the possibility that the fetus is a "person" seems quite plausible to me. In many cases parents will have known about the pregnancy for nearly two months by this time, and the unborn potential human has taken on some sort of identity in the anticipating parents and family.
And by the way, a very large minority (perhaps 20-25%) of fertilized eggs don't end up as live births. I remember reading in Alison Jolly's "Lucy's Legacy" that some studies suggest huge numbers of pregnancies spontaneously fail so early in the pregnancy that the mother never suspects she has been "pregnant" at all.
Maybe instead of "But those that occur in the first trimester are obviously not deaths of human persons," we could just agree that "...those that occur in the first weeks of the first trimester are obviously not deaths of human persons."
I am not disputing your point, Pamameen, but while other religions may not speak against slavery with such a loud voice, the Buddhist and Baha'i scriptures do discourage or forbid it. The Upàsakasila Sutra (written centuries after the Buddha, and a few centuries before the founding of Islam) forbids slavery. The Buddha said buying and selling slaves was a "wrong livelihood" and he forbade monks and nuns from owning or receiving slaves (this was approximately 2300 years before the American Civil War). Baha'u'llah, in the Babi-Baha'i faith tradition, explicitly condemned and abolished slavery as well, sometime in the mid-19th century.
Juan, I'm with you on all the substantial points you made in this post. We're in complete agreement. But, on one detail I think you've overstated something. Like everyone else, I don't know when a potential human developing inside the mother becomes a human person. It does seem obvious to me that the embryo is not a human person in the initial days and weeks after conception. But late in the first trimester, around the 10th to 12th weeks of the pregnancy, the possibility that the fetus is a "person" seems quite plausible to me. In many cases parents will have known about the pregnancy for nearly two months by this time, and the unborn potential human has taken on some sort of identity in the anticipating parents and family.
And by the way, a very large minority (perhaps 20-25%) of fertilized eggs don't end up as live births. I remember reading in Alison Jolly's "Lucy's Legacy" that some studies suggest huge numbers of pregnancies spontaneously fail so early in the pregnancy that the mother never suspects she has been "pregnant" at all.
Maybe instead of "But those that occur in the first trimester are obviously not deaths of human persons," we could just agree that "...those that occur in the first weeks of the first trimester are obviously not deaths of human persons."