[extropy-chat] Bioethics Essay- Why Therapeutic Cloning is a Blessing and Not Murder

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Dirk Bruere <dirk at neopax.com> wrote:
> Well, the first point you should recognise is that most Xians believe
> a soul exists in a fertilised egg (no matter how fertilised) and it
> is this which defines it as a Human, and that taking it apart is
> killing it. I do not see any way around this.

Actually, most christians *don't* believe this. Most believe that it is
indeterminate. Therefore I would suggest you take a scientific approach
in the ideaspace they are used to. For example, there have been claims
that a human body loses x amount of mass at the moment of death, and
fundamentalist-leaning christians tend to believe that this is the
'mass of the soul'. If you scientifically treated these observations as
a working but unproven hypothesis, and compared the mass lost by a dead
body at time of death to the mass of a blastocyst, I think it clearly
demonstrates that there is insufficient mass in the blastocyst to
accomodate a soul, there is therefore no room at the inn.... So you can
conclude that until the embryo weighs at least the amount of mass
observed to be lost by a dying human body, then it should be impossible
for it to contain a soul, and therefore research on an embryo before it
reaches this mass should be no different than picking a scab off a
wound or clipping one's toenails.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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