Word: notionalism
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...course, nonexistent. We feel no empathy for embryos in this context and see no need to assign to them any conception of death or dying. Yet, in a parallel context, such as if a rape victim is given a drug to prevent embryo implantation, people suddenly introduce the notion of “killing” a child. What causes this leap of logic...
...possibility is that people consider abortion to be under human control, while natural termination of embryos is deemed unavoidable. However, this notion is seriously flawed. If an embryo does in fact have standing as a living being, then the natural conclusion is that the wanton destruction of life caused by procreation must be ceased immediately. After all, one cannot make exceptions to murder just because they are “necessary.” On what moral grounds can we destroy three inarguably unique human beings, on average, in order to make one? This “take life...
James Poniewozik's essay"Postapocalypse Now" [Oct. 23] was an interesting look at pop culture's fixation on doomsday fantasies, but what we should take from the current visions of mass destruction is not the notion that we're getting too comfortable with Armageddon but the realization that fears of Armageddon have always been with us. Our time is little different from all the eras in which people believed the end of the world was imminent. Yet here we are in a world that somehow has not come to an end, resurrecting ancient symbols to describe our modern doomsday...
Stranger Than Fiction has a surer aim at getting through the brain to the heart. Zack Helm's script imagines a decent, solitary fellow named Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), then springs the notion that he may well be a fiction--a character in a work in progress by reclusive novelist Karen (Kay) Eiffel (Emma Thompson). And when Kay figures out how to kill off the character, Harold will...
TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science...