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Originally Posted by Chris
You throw terms like "borderline psychopathic" around far too freely. It simply shows a severe lack of awareness of your own culture's history and development. You can't, at a stroke, classify whole swathes of the past and present population of these islands as "borderline psychopathic" just because you find their behaviour distasteful.
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I don't 'throw it around' too easily. However an inability to empathise with an animals suffering is an apt time to use it. A lack of empathy is a classic trait of psychopathy. I put borderline because it applies to an animal and not a human. I am not classifying them as borderline psychopathic either, just the act of not empathising, I don't know how they feel when they see the fox in pain.
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And you say you're not simply reading your own feelings on to animals while at the same time saying you want to "relate to suffering they may feel" .... "may" being the operative word here. You don't know, so what feelings are you assuming to be at play? Can you put yourself into the mind of a fox, or can you in fact only ever hope to put yourself in the mind of a person trying to imagine what it might be like to be a fox? No amount of method acting is going to get you close to understanding what being an animal is like, not least because animals lack a sense of self which would enable them even to decide for themselves how they feel.
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I don't know what being a fox is like but we can tell when an animal is in distress and in pain. We feel those sensations as well. We share some of our base experiences with animals such as fear and pain. They can't think or rationalise it but they certainly do feel it. It's those experiences that allow us to emphasise with other species. Even more so when we get to the more intelligent animals.
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The read-across to the gay marriage debate is, I believe, the opposite of what you have suggested. Marriage as an institution predates our culture and our legislature. Until the 18th century you could be married without relying on any statute at all: the phrase "common law wife/husband" is only now beginning to fall out of common parlance, despite it having been legislated away centuries ago.
All over the world, throughout history, human societies have recognised a lifetime pairing between one man and one woman. In a small part of the world, at one particular moment in history, a few states with a common, largely post-religious, materialist philosophical outlook, have sought not simply to extend a legal privilege - reform to the civil partnerships laws could have achieved that - but to legislate against an ancient belief, still current in most of the world, regarding what marriage, fundamentally, is. If you think that is not what is proposed, then bookmark this thread and we'll take up the discussion the first time Stonewall finds a test case to take to the ECHR.
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I don't want to digress too much either. Still from my point of view you're suggesting the Government continues to block what two people do that doesn't involve yourself. Not everyone believes a marriage should be between a man and a woman and should instead be between two individuals. We believe the definition should be updated.
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I should make a point about your conflating arbitrary morality and religious belief. Again, that's a myopic position to hold; the judgments of right and wrong that an individual makes for himself are simply not on the same philosophical plane as the external, absolute truth claimed by any of the world's major religions, whether or not you believe in the God that stands behind them. Even taken as mere philosophies of life, they have been around for millennia and have survived the rise and fall of empires , and will survive the fall of ours. Arbitrary morality, it isn't.
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Why is a morality derived from a belief in a deity/philosophy any more valid than one derived from an internal sense of right and wrong? We have empathy and a conscience that helps inform that morality and if you're an atheist (like me!) you believe that religious teachings of right and wrong come from man's internal sense of morality anyway.
It's getting a big abstract here anyway. I think the gay marriage thing is not too different to the fox hunting thing: Should a Government ban things that you're morally against if it causes no harm to others? Although there are probably extremes you could take thatargument too.