death penalty and abortion should be illegal

18th century Okay, I really don't want to go into the 18th century because, besides being time-consuming, I consider it irrelevant to my point. My point was that the death penalty could only be justified if you find a time and place where people had no other form of punishment that would be effective in deterring crime (or, to be technical, it could be justified only if the person sentencing the prisoner to death reasonably indeed believed that there was no alternative punishment). The argument does not depend on the 18th century itself, I merely tried to use it as analogous to that "time and place" with no alternatives in order to explain my point. You want me to show "proof that there were no other alternative forms of punishment [in the 18th century]" and we could branch off and talk about that, but the debate is about the death penalty today, as opposed to the death penalty in the 18th century. I would rather not waltz away from the topic of the debate. In addition, I am going after the abortion part of the debate. If I can prove you wrong on abortion, I can prove you wrong on the whole thing, by the definition of the word 'and'. This is why (and I just realized) it is dangerous to use 'and' on the debate topic, since it gives people more angles of attack. :) Bible This is going to be tough because I personally am not convinced that I should believe that God exists, and/or that I should just follow the Bible as my guideline to life based on faith alone. You would have to convince me to believe in God & the Bible in order for me to accept Biblical text as being empirically true. Since I do not take the Bible for granted, I will not be able to accept assertions coming from Biblical text alone as evidence to support your point. Nevertheless, I can still work with the assertions that you do not justify with a system outside of logic. "nowhere in the bible does it mention how abortion under ANY circumstance is justified and therefore i feel that the issue of animals and babies should be kept separate." I am unclear as to how or why you reached that conclusion from the premise given. "it is purely a question of whether you think it is moral or not." Although you do not provide clear justification for this comment, I strongly disagree. I think that it is perfectly acceptable to consider the problem in a purely practical and logical way. "animals slaughtered ONLY for the use of food is acceptable under my standards because it was acceptable under God's standards." If you convince me that God exists, I will happily take this assertion for granted. As much as I want to, I cannot. From a secular standpoint, however, back then, people did not have the means to be healthy with a vegetarian diet. However, we know it is possible today, and this makes animal slaughtering not necessary. Sperm "which is why i do not feel it's necessary for me to "please" myself with my hand or have sex with someone i do not intend on marrying and spending the rest of my life with." Well, the argument you set forth in the 1st round could be used to support the point that perhaps you are meant to fertilize all the spermatozoa you produce, because in your lifespan, you might have produced a prodigious spermatozoid. I could even be more bold, and declare that you are meant to produce as many spermatozoa as possible (and fertilize as many of them as possible) because the sperm you did not ejaculate could possibly occupy the space of another, prodigious, spermatozoid, that could have been produced in the future, but was not because that spermatozoid that was occupying space in your testes inhibited them (your testes) from producing that prodigious spermatozoid that would accomplish that incredible achievement. "What if the baby that wasn't born because you did not masturbate on April 9th 2053, and thus was not produced by your testes the next day -- and therefore did not have a chance at fertilization -- would've been the next Gauss?" You may wonder and ask hypothetical "what if" questions all you want. As I hope you see, however, we can't really do anything about them. Adoption I guess we both agree that the problem gets more complicated. This is why leaving babies at a firehouse is not a solution. Extraneous Bible Comments This part is extraneous to the debate, since your argument depends on the existence of God, which has yet to be proven. However I would like to make a vain attempt at convincing you that abortion should be legal from a biblical standpoint, even if the existence of God has not yet been proven. The King James version of the Bible says in Genesis 9:4 "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat." It also says in Leviticus 17:11 "For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul." From these two quotes, we can understand that blood is what makes life. However, the first heartbeat does not begin until the 18th day of gestation. You can see that a pro-life website at http://www.prolife.com... confirms this. Thus, can't abortion up to the 18th day be reconciled with your religious beliefs?