I used to be against abortions up until I realized how many people I'd be OK without.
I guess we have a problem with a lot of folks today having more materialist beliefs and fewer spiritual aspirations. I think the issue here is love more than value. Christians believe God made us. One of my favorite songs has a line "He loved me ere I knew HIm" as a praisefor a God who loves otherwise worthlessj people.
I am a Mormon, of sorts. A lot of Mormons would make me out as pretty damned worthless. But I understand their religion while they do not.
Marxists have a religion too. They believe in an ideal of human progress that will, inevitably and through endless revolutionary phases, reach some sort of ideal of social justice or whatever. Some of the features of Marxism don't really line out with a positive value on humans who are not useful to the process.
Mormons are not like Christians or Marxists. Few Mormons understand their philosophical basis. Joseph Smith did not believe in a Biblical creation of man by an Absolute Creator who spoke and created us out of nothing. He came to teach that we are an eternal essence of nature, an "intelligence" sort of cognitive branch of the General Equation of Relativity. That we have existed along with God in an eternal back story somehow. We have self-existing value that cannot be destroyed. Existence on non-material terms, so to speak, if materialism is circumscribed by what we think we can examine with science as we know it.
It could be argued that this view also, like Marxism, does not line out a positive value for humans who are not useful to the process.
But the briefly sketched ideas of Joseph Smith beg for further development, which is my hobby more or less. But the founding precepts are basically that "intelligence", poorly defined, must embrace notions of caring and observing, learning...... of seeking..... of making purposed efforts to examine and transform the world around us somehow, for the better.
In this view, Life is not an accident, but the jproduct of organized cognition and action upon the inanimate stuff around us, which we have purpsed to use for some perceived benefit to ourselves and our peers.
God is then more of a Leader in a revolutionj to transform the universe to a better condition.
The presumptions of Mormonism are that we have intrinsic value, and innate "rights". The essence of intelligence is choice and capacity to make effective actions we want to make.
An Authoritarian world view that devalues humans or other Life is the antithesis of Christ.
God loved us, and gave us the advantages he could offer from His point of view. He gave us a place in a the universe of physical Life, an existence in another order of things we couldn't have reached directly on our own. You could say He invented a Wheel, and then gave us a spin on it. Kinda fun. Never knew how fun it could be.
Other more or less Christian beliefs don't have the same end-game scenario, either. Nothing gets absolutely destroyed. Like clay on the potters' wheel, if things don't turn out right, it's back to where we used to be. Some people call that hell, I wonder. Is it some kindof trip through a black hole into another world? Essentially, still an intelligence with the same value we could imagine God placed on us when he took us in.
Is it worth learning what principles we could live by to be with God in His further developments.
Taking this all to another level of argument, I say whether God exists or not, I have the same conscience, the same responsibility for my actions, the same purpose for my life and whatever existence I will ever have. If I have imagined a God who is good, I have polaced my values so that I should seek those things anyway.
The critical choice theory here is that we can make choices, and that there can be consequences to those choices. Maybe it has meaning, maybe not. Maybe someone else will care, maybe not. I reject the theories that I am powerless, or valueless, or meaningless. I respect all the living creatures I know or can imagine. Life has meaning. All Life exhibits some level of intelligence, some level of interest or purpose, and has intrinsic value. I imagine it has taken a whole damn lot of work to create it, even the least of creatures, even a virus.
Coherence to a presumed master plan of progress is not a good value, All living things have innate value, and "rights". The idea of clearing the ground to make way for a "better" or more valued life is really unnecessary, we just need to make aj place for what we want.
Life is always limited by circumstances, resources, conditions, forces of Nature. It will always be necessary to make a place for Life. Gather resources, transform the environment. That's what real Progress is. New worlds.
It's free tuition. At the Master's feet.
God loved us ere we knew Him, all my love is to Him.