is universal.
2. The same holds for believing that it is always wrong to take another life yet having no problems with taking some lives. For example, I think abortion is murder, but I'm completely in favor of it.
3. I can consider atheism is a belief system because it requires the atheist to be certain about something that is unprovable, and that, in my view, requires faith.
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Abortion really is a tricky moral and philosophical dilemma and you don't have to be a right wing wacko to think so.
Starting with the supposition that human life has value and should be protected and nurtured whenever possible, if for no other reason than: my life is important and precious to me and I extend that to other humans. The question for me has always been when is the genetic material that makes up a child....human, surely a spermatozoa isn't (*ahem* or some of us would have committed genocide) but at 8 months along I think the child is unmistakably human. But then it does at 7 months too...it becomes a slippery slope. I'm not settled on the matter but I'm living with (in my own mind) once there is any possibility of the child living outside of the womb it is a human life and should be protected.
Don't get me started on the more complex animals, meat eating is becoming a hard position to defend for me.
On the atheism I don't believe it is a "belief system" in the way you are parsing it that smacks of a false equivalency. By belief system you are really just using a stand in for religion and religions require one to have faith which is belief with little to no factual testable evidence (such as God did it and no man can know God). Atheism rather is the rejection of the fantastic where there is no provable or plausible evidence. So can you PROVE to me there is no giant invisible jellybean at the center of the universe that controls all lottery numbers? Maybe but I can always come up with an excuse for why its not apparent in the data, most rational folks would dismiss the idea and go with the more simple answer that lottery numbers are a function of chance.
So atheism is seeing hoof prints and thinking horse instead of zebra.