How can anything be “more” alive? What an absurd concept. If this idea were accurate then the opposite would have to be true..

Can something be more dead then something else…?

I knew you’d hate the idea Phreedm, because it does smack down the whole “we are all equal in the eye of God” thing. But there’s a lot on which we disagree.

When you delve in deeper and deeper, you are absolutely right that there is no magical line between “alive” and “not alive”, everything disappears into chemical reactions. We don’t value life for itself, we value certain traits of the living. When those traits are absent or diminished, the value we place on this life disappears or is reduced. And this is all just and good.

I do feel compelled to respond to this, though:

The whole concept that “all life is sacred” has caused the abortion debate, the vegetarian movement (besides health reasons)…

I strongly disagree and think you’re misinformed or indulging in some strange stereotyping. I’m sure there are some extreme vegans who think all life is sacred, and some real whackjobs that take this to the extreme of killing humans to save the lives of experimental animals. But vegetarians are as diverse as atheists and there many reasons to choose to be vegetarian that have nothing to do with “sacred” or health. For a start, there is the environmental cost of meat production, an important reason and hugely underrated. But since you understand that “life” exists on a continuum, you’d see that other animals are alive and suffer, so it’s easy to build a moral reason without any “sacred” BS.

Yeah, it sounds like this is a diversion, but it isn’t. Once you understand that what we value in life and what we think is good to preserve exists in varying amounts in humans, you understand that it also exists in varying quantities in other animals. While you may morally justify killing another man when threatened, you couldn’t justify killing him for convenience. Similarly, you can justify killing an animal if necessary for your health and welfare, but not for your convenience, which is really what you’re doing when you eat meat. Those that try to justify it, often end drawing an arbitrary line in the sand saying “these lives are valuable and worth saving and great cost, these have absolutely no value at all.” You undermine your own argument.

How would we measure this? Could we actually quantify “life”?

What it means to be alive seems less important to me than what is important about the living.