> What is a "normal, healthy human being"?

There are lots of cases where we can objectively, scientifically prove that people are unhealthy. For example, a doctor can prove that your leg is broken, and this would count as being unhealthy. Some things in life are actually objective, and many areas of health are included.
Emotional damage is not as simple to prove as a broken leg, but mental health professionals have scientific, objective methods for identifying and treating these problems. Why do you think that all differences are inherently equally healthy?

I reread my post and realized it was a bit overly rude, so I thank you for responding calmly.

I'd like to explain why the age issue is important. I don't know if slashdot has a way of pulling up stories from the mid 1990s, but back then I was a teenager posting on slashdot, my arguments, opinions, and points were identical to the way yours currently are. I thought I had the whole world figured out, as I was a smarter than average kid. Everything is subjective, you make your own reality by manipulating your own mind, copyright is evil, freedom trumps all, etc.
I argued about this on slashdot every day for years, and had a blast doing it.

Since that time, (I'm now 31) my life experiences have shown me the reality of many things. I now consider every one of those opinions I once had to be fatally flawed, because they lead to trouble when I try to apply them in my life and when I see them applied in other people's lives. Now, you may have your opinions for reasons unrelated to age. Perhaps you are a 45 year old software engineer with slightly extreme opinions. It just so happens that your opinions match those that me and my friends had at age 14, and we all grew out of it.

Often young people don't like to be told "you'll understand when you are older", even though that is the most appropriate answer.
Therefore the best response is to brush you off like a kid trying to provoke the adults, because that's what I see happening.
So since you insist you are not a child, just come out and state your age, and give the reasons for your opinions, and a rational discussion might be possible.

Now I fully expect a 45 year old to reply to this pointing out how young and naive I am, but that I won't understand till I'm older :)
Now I'm not a mind reader and my thoughts on this could be one hundred percent wrong. However, there is a great deal of evidence to back up my point, so the burden is on you to show that you have logical reasons for your opinions beyond being merely young and naive. Every time you are accused of being young, you say "how can you be so sure"? To me that is an admission of guilt. If you were not a child, you would probably just come out and say so.

I'm confused... Yes I agree these things are at least pretty subjective. What I dont get is: why do you care?
All of life is subjective. The only objective things are facts, which we can only know through our senses. And since our senses can lie, we don't know for certain that the way we see reality matches the way reality really is. Our sense are subjective. All we know is what we sense. EVERYTHING IS SUBJECTIVE, for all intense and purposes.

I'm not trying to attack you or insult you, I am genuinely trying to understand why you go around to slashdot articles randomly tagging comments with stuff like "what you just said is subjective, so your argument is invalid." I mean, if a clinically insane person went around saying that aliens had implanted radio antennae in the fillings of his teeth, this is subjective. Obviously this did not truly happen in an objective sense. But the pattern of your previous posts leads me to conclude that you would have the insane person euthanized for being subjective, rather than do the compassionate thing and try to understand why his subjective worldview is so bizarre, and work with him to clear up his delusion

I genuinely enjoy reading your posts, and I have for the past several months. I enjoy them because they appear to be calculated to be as offensive as humanly possible, as well as the polar opposite of logic, common sense, and basic decency. I wonder, when you go to a post about people who kill themselves because they were bullied, why is it that your reponse is to blame the victim for being sensitive (a condition he may have no control over)? Your stated reponse is that you value freedom of speech more than human life. I sincerely hope that I am grossly misunderstanding your posts, because if taken at face value, you are a preciously intelligent 14 year old who thinks his intelligence makes up for the lack of decades of life experience. Of course, this is speculation, so I'm probably wrong. But the fact that you never had an ISP prior to broadband is a dead giveaway that you are a young child with big ideas, unless you watched all your friends use BBSs and then dialup while you sat around with no internet.

And the person who manufactured the drug, and the person who sold it to you.... they have zero responsibility if you have a bad reaction to the drug and end up hurting someone?

I don't get why this seems noteworthy or odd to you. THe open source community is our friends, but businesses are the enemy. Of course we want to steal from the enemy, but we would prefer that the enemy not steal from us. This is just basic logic and human nature.

Do you know what the word sociopath means? By definition, a sociopath is someone who doesn't care about other people.
If you aren't upset at the thought of your whole species dying off, then it sure sounds like you don't care about if other people live or die, and thus you are a sociopath.

Why do you believe this?
You yourself have stated that people who believe in absolute morals typically believe that god dictated those morals. Do you believe that god said that lying is not wrong? I don't think you do, because I'm pretty sure you've stated that you don't believe in god.

Personally, it appears that you don't believe that lying is right. I think you are just playing devil's advocate.

I'll restate the question, because I really am curious about your honest answer.

What possible argument is there that lying is not wrong? Saying it is not wrong "just because" is not an argument, I want to know your reasoning.
Alternatively, you could find me one person who honestly believes that lying is not wrong.

Under what possible moral system would it be considered good to kick someone when they are down, just for a laugh? Just because you don't care about hurting other people doesn't mean we are wrong to deride you for it.

I think you win an argument by convincing your opponent that you are right and they are wrong. Hopefully this correlates with truth and facts, but if you are arguing opinions, then it might not.

What exactly is an "absolute fact of the universe", and how does it differ from a plain-old ordinary everyday fact?

Perhaps there are ways to desensitize yourself, but I would argue that you ought to be very careful with this. Certainly it is good to have a somewhat thick skin so that you aren't driven to a tearful, trembling mess if someone gently teases you. But if you shutoff your emotions completely, and are therefore unable to feel anything, neither good feelings nor bad feelings, then what is the point of being alive? To coldly calculate logic, in a machine-like manner, rather than be the warm, feeling creatures we generally naturally are?

I'm afraid I dont follow your logic. The liar was someone who you had good reason to trust, and maybe you even investigated to determine whether or not he was telling the truth, but for whatever reason your investigation yielded the wrong answer. All logic pointed to the notion that he was telling the truth. How are you at fault for believing him, rather than him being at fault for deceiving you?

> Yes. I don't believe in absolute morals (nor do I believe that many people believing something makes the belief
  > true). I suppose absolute morals could exist, but I have thus far seen no convincing evidence to prove it.

I won't try to change your mind, but I will try to state my opinions on these matters.
I believe that absolute morals exist, although I do not believe in them myself, but what I mean by that is that some people believe in absolute morals, so those morals are real and true and absolute as far as they are concerned, even though other people might disagree. This is moral relativism, so I'd figure you might agree with this.

Regarding convincing evidence to prove absolute morals, I think looking for such evidence is missing the point. Science does not have a concept of absolute truth, just experiments and theories and observations. Some things, such as religion and morals, are based on faith, not on experiments or science. When someone has faith in something, they don't need proof. Their beliefs are still real to them, and might make them happy and make them lead healthier more productive lives.

Of course, this is just my opinion, and I'm an agnostic, so take this for what you will.

Finally, regarding the issue of whether most people believing something makes it true, I disagree with you. Most people agreeing on something is what makes it true, by definition. If most people say that apples are red, then apples are red. But what about the colorblind person who sees apples as green? Does that mean that we are all wrong, and he is right, and apples are green after all? No, it means that his vision is broken.

Even in science, when a scientist submits a paper to be published, there is no magic "is this true" test. Rather, a panel of expert reviews vote, and the majority opinion decides what is considered true.

In other words, there is no such thing as absolute truth, there is just observations and opinions. But the way the english language works, when enough people agree that something is true, we say that it is in fact true. This is imprecise and probably repugnant to your ultra-logical mindset, but it is the way the world works.

So some people have priorities that say that they should have innocent people killed. Fair enough, I'm sure there is at least one person out there who feels that way.

But I don't understand where you are coming from when you classify such priorities as "merely different" rather than "absolutely evil according to almost everybody on earth."

Would you care to enlighten me by explaining your way of thinking?

While I haven't asked every person on earth, based on what I do know, most people on earth agree that it is wrong. If most people agree it is wrong, then wouldn't you call that universal, or close to it?