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

[The Avantguardian]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.

Excellent suggestion. I thought of something similar
when I was writing it, but I was afraid christians
would dismiss as hoaky. But you are right, christians
hunger for science to grant them legitimacy. It may
prove to be just the thing. Especially since the
original experiment has never been verified or
falsified.  

The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson


		
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