No. Now that I know what is in vaccines, and how they effect people, and considering the facts that vaccines injured me by causing my Asperger's, I consider vaccines to be against my religion. I am a Christian. I believe products that cause harm to my body are not for me. Have you even asked what you are putting in your body? I am not saying vaccines are the only cause of my autism as genetics does play a factor, but I don't want animal blood, animal brains, mercury, and aborted baby cells in my body, and I have that right.
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As for your arguments against,
@YeshuaBought, there is no evidence whatsoever showing that vaccines cause anything on the autism spectrum, including Asperger's. You can believe all you want that they caused them, but unlike what @asgr asserts, there has been extensive research showing that there is no link here. That research has also shown that there is a very small portion of the population that would see negative effects from vaccination, though that portion is almost nothing compared to the population harmed by these diseases. I have asked what is in vaccines, and I've done extensive research into each of the ingredients to make sure that I understand what potential dangers each pose. It's not substantial, and, contrary to your assertions, they do not include "animal blood, animal brains, mercury, and aborted baby cells". Vaccines are purified from infected tissue, which can include animal tissues, but the vaccine itself is purified away from those tissues. Similarly, while some cell lines that are used for producing vaccines were, at one point, derived from embryos, they have been propagated in the lab for decades (i.e. they aren't using fresh embryos every single time), which means they're pretty distinct from the cells that were originally used to start those lines. Vaccines produced in them are also separated from the tissues in the process, so you aren't getting cells injected into your body. As for mercury, vaccines used to be stored in a solution containing mercury, but that is no longer the case.
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That said, "It is against my religion" is not a valid argument. I could just as well say, "I worship the Lord of the Death, Kelemvor. He dictates that I kill a person once a day. You cannot arrest me for it, because it would be against my religion!"
Arguing in support of a legal ruling based on the principle of fundamental rights and liberties is logical, as it follows the axiom proclaiming those rights and liberties. Arguing in support of a legal ruling based on your individual beliefs, however, is shallow and demonstrates lack of tolerance towards other beliefs.
@whiteflame has a logical reasoning as well based on a certain set of axioms, but I do not agree with those axioms. The government's role should not be to prevent people's deaths; it should be to create the environment in which people can prevent their deaths. Otherwise there is a very short road to justifying totalitarianism, where the most drastic measures are taken in the name of saving lives. This has happened many times in human history, and I think we should learn by now that this mentality does not work well in practice. Nothing should trump individual liberties, in my opinion, and especially the idea of the collective good should not trump them.
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I understand the notion that too much government can lead to totalitarianism, but it seems like your argument functions based on the slippery slope fallacy. A government should both recognize and respond to the fact that many widely-studied diseases present a clear and present threat to its people via the spread of those diseases, and vaccines function as the best available means of addressing the problem. That sets a clear standard for what should define a circumstance in which a government can take action. The government has taken numerous actions along this mentality, and there's no reason why this fundamentally alters the calculus they've made on previous issues. And, frankly, the notion that individual liberties should always outweigh has always been a strange one to me, particularly in instances like this. Individual liberty is harmed by the spread of disease as well, since no one is given the option of getting an illness. Preserving health and liberty go hand in hand.
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The government cannot prevent any deaths from diseases from occurring no matter what it does. What it can do, however, is to let people be the masters of their own fate - by letting private organizations compete for the best cure for the disease, and letting the individuals choose whether to take the cure or not. That is the best it can do, and that is what it should do, in my view.
The slippery slope notion is hardly a fallacy. We are talking about the policies based on the general mentality; specifically, what is more important: the individual, or the collective. When the society makes a choice in favor of the latter, other similar policies will necessarily follow, as history has shown repeatedly.
The notion of individual liberty does not mean some kind of guarantee of a personal well-being. It simply means the freedom to do whatever you want, as long as other people's liberties are not affected. Stretching it to claiming that not doing something violates other people's freedoms would not be reasonable.
Individual liberty means that I can go to a forest and be killed by a wolf. It does not mean that the government can prohibit me from going into a forest, because it can lead to my death, and because the wolf that killed me can get hungry for blood and attack other people in my village. The latter would be violation of my individual liberty.
Liberty is not about guaranteeing the outcome. It is about guaranteeing the freedom to try to affect the outcome. If that freedom is not guaranteed, and if the government decides to suppress it in the name of protecting other people's freedoms - then we have stepped on the road the end of which tends to be very dark.
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@YeshuaBought
I would say that that right should end at the same point so many rights do: when that liberty causes substantial harm to others around you. Your decision to not get vaccinated puts everyone you interact with who is not vaccinated at risk of acquiring clearly preventable diseases, many of which are potentially deadly. And no, I wouldn’t say that there’s anything hypocritical about being pro-choice and pro-mandatory vaccinations. The decision to get an abortion only physically affects you and your potential offspring. The decision not to get vaccinated affects a great deal of the people you interact with on a daily basis.
@MayCaesar
I really don’t get this argument. A government can prevent diseases from occurring by ensuring that more individuals are vaccinated. An individual who is vaccinated against a given disease can no longer get that disease. They can no longer spread that disease to others. Many communicable and preventable diseases are potentially deadly, which means that, yes, this does prevent deaths from those diseases. I don’t see how any of this is inaccurate.
You talk about “let[ting] people be the masters of their own fate”, but that seems, at best, to be an uncertain way of bringing about a similar outcome. Private organizations can compete to produce the best vaccine (note: a vaccine is not a cure) in a world where vaccines are mandated, but what makes that world different is that more people take those vaccines. We can reasonably argue about the value of lives saved and quality of life improved vs. the value of liberty lost in the decision, but there is a pretty stark and quantifiable cost to allowing people the choice to take vaccines. It’s one thing to say that that doesn’t outweigh the liberty lost, it’s quite another to say that it effectively doesn’t exist.
Regarding the slippery slope, I’m not sure how you’re establishing support for it. Policies exist in the status quo that clearly restrict individual liberties, many of which are based on a similar principle, i.e. that individuals shouldn’t be allowed to choose whether or not to engage in a given action so long as that action/inaction does proven harm to others. Things like traffic laws show that personal disagreements with certain laws do not always trump the shared responsibility of living in a society where actions have consequences. Many laws have already established that the collective outweighs individual autonomy in some instances. Why is this particular law going to dramatically alter that? How does this particular law fundamentally lead to other policies? What are those policies? Why are they bad? Remember, your argument was that this was fundamentally supporting totalitarianism. That’s not just a single policy, or even a group of policies. That’s a wholesale shift in how our government functions. So, where in history does it show that any country has mandated a change similar to what I’m suggesting, and that change has led to totalitarianism? I’d honestly love to see any examples you could provide.
I would disagree with the notion that a prohibition on not taking a specific action is fundamentally different from a prohibition on taking a specific action, and the main reason is because both are exercises of individual liberty. People are actively making the decision, whether that decision is to engage or disengage. The notion that a person’s agency is only important enough to regulate when it results in an activity that alters their current state is incredibly odd to me when it fundamentally does alter their status in society. They become a willing vector for numerous preventable, communicable diseases. The fact that they don’t have to take an action to accomplish that goal doesn’t make it any less of a choice, nor any less consequential.
The comparison to the wolf situation is… really odd. Seriously, I have no idea how it’s comparable to anything we’re talking about. We’re discussing someone becoming a vector for a potentially deadly disease and spreading that to others. Using your analogy, it would be as though someone went out into the forest, was mauled by a wolf, brought it back and started walking it around their crowded town. Except even that isn’t accurate because we’re talking about a microscopic pathogen, so the wolf would have to be invisible and the outcome of the interaction would be based on who had been able to receive wolf repellant before the person returned. That admittedly strange situation seems like something the government should aim to prevent, not to mention a loss of liberty that seems incredibly minor by comparison to the harms that would come from it.
Look, I get that there’s a personal liberty argument to be had here, and I’ve heard it argued well on many occasions. Hell, I could probably make a pretty decent argument myself. What I’m getting from you, however, is not that argument. You just keep telling me that this is leading down a dark road or that there’s something precious being lost here without telling me what’s so precious about this particular liberty. There are real questions regarding medical autonomy that I’m frankly surprised you haven’t even mentioned, particularly as it relates to the ability of parents to make decisions for their kids. We could talk about how this clashes with basic religious freedoms, and how the backlash against a decision to mandate vaccines could realistically cause more harm than the vaccines bring in benefits. And there may even be some realistic policies that could spawn from this, ones that follow a similar logic and may raise a few eyebrows. I’m not arguing that mandating vaccines is perfect policy, though I still do support it. I just don’t get the argument that it’s the start of some fresh, new hell that’s never existed before, as though society has never taken actions along anything close to the same lines, and if it ever did, we’d all be doomed. That’s as fallacious as anything I’ve ever heard on this topic.
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Though people's liberty is an important right, but so is people's health (both their own and others) as well as being an important responsibility that the government is required to cater for. As the health benefits are so large, the drawbacks to liberty are so minute and this largely concerns children who are not normally considered to be able to consent to important decisions anyway due to their limited capacity I think it's fairly obvious that mandatory vaccinations are fine.
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then what church are you apart of that “rejects the ingredients in vaccines”?
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https://twitter.com/Zombieguy19871
Taxation is always theft
http://www.atheistrepublic.com/
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Im asking because you literally factored in religious rights yourself. “I have religious and ethical objections to the ingredients in vaccines.”
So, my question is what church are you apart of that rejects vaccines?
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