Quote Originally Posted by LX_Emergency View Post
One of the reasonings of the original question was that if it doesn't harm you, why should you have a problem with it? Then I gave an example of something that doesn't harm a person but could possibly harm them in the future.
That is an excellent point.

As a corollary, there is also a gray area of being harmed by something.

If you wore the worlds ugliest socks in the world tomorrow, it wouldn't effect me in the slightest degree. Not even by the most complex chain of cause and effect.

If you hopped on a plain tomorrow, and flew all the way to little Monmouth, OR - USA and performed a ritual sacrifice in my living room, that would have a HUGE effect on me.

The problem is that so often when these topics are debated, everybody views it as black and white. Either it has a huge meaningful effect directly on your life, or it shouldn't matter to you at all. But, it's a long way from wearing ugly socks on a different continent to performing a sacrifice in my living room, and somewhere in the middle, it get's pretty seriously ambiguous as to whether it's any of my business or not.

So many debates are a matter of gray area these days.

The abortion debate is a perfect example. Everyone in the civilized world (excluding crazy people) agrees that it is wrong to senselessly murder a child. The difficulty comes in because not everybody agrees on when an egg cell stops being partial genetic material, and starts being a child. AND, not everyone agrees on the definitions of "senseless" or "murder."

I know people who believe that the morning after pill is senseless murder, and other's who believe that it's perfectly reasonable, compassionate even, to abort a 5 month fetus because an amnio shows a 50% chance of a bad birth defect.

(I mention this particular debate because it's a good example of what I'm talking about, and it was mentioned in the opening post)