Pat Oliphant for August 25, 2010

If you accept that a soul starts when sperm meets egg, you can follow the logic that this research is wrong.

What I don’t get is that these fertility clinics have thousands of these blastocysts that they’re destroying anyway - flushing down the toilet - because people don’t want to pay their freezer bills anymore.

If you agree with the logic above, how does it make more sense to flush them down a toilet than use them in research?

I think your on to something,

meetinthemiddle - and since the majority of fertilized eggs in fact fail to embed in the uterine wall and therefore are naturally or spontaneously aborted (that’s the technical term, I understand), what do these people think of that?

Meetinthemiddle and motivemagus: good comments.

And I hear no complaining from the right about “activist judges.”

I think there was major overreaching and inappropriate activism on the part of the judge. Stem cell research will provide major therapeutic breakthroughs as time progresses.

Nevertheless I see very little comment that the clause, upon which he based his opinion, was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. But some blame where it belongs. He owned a veto pen.

“when the 5 month old fetus John recognized Him” ????? That’s one of the funniest things I’ve heard yet in this bizarre argument.

“meetinthemiddle - and since the majority of fertilized eggs in fact fail to embed in the uterine wall and therefore are naturally or spontaneously aborted (that’s the technical term, I understand), what do these people think of that?”

I believe one state tried to make it a law that a miscarriage was illegal, natural or otherwise.

Yes, Jade, several attempts have been made to make miscarry a crime. Ban tampons!

A human embryo is NOT statistically more likely to become a person than a stain.

As they’re now substituting DNA to create cloned critters, the accepted notion of an egg or embryo being any specific species is getting quite clouded.

We’ve had a number of world leaders who raise the question of whether even ADULTS have a “soul”, let alone embryos.

The court did not decide based on ethics. It was based on a specific law that Obama decided did not apply. He was wrong.

Life is hard for a blastocyst, with the potential to become a doctor, lawyer or Pope, but currently a waste byproduct of someone’s attempt to concieve “naturally.” My psychic powers tell me they’d rather sign the organ doner card than go in the dumpster.

RichardSRussell – thank you for the best laugh I’ve had in a long time. Or as the young ones say, ROTFLMFAO. (What’s the “F” stand for? No, don’t answer.)

There is so much neat work going on in neuroscience now – it is just so fascinating what is being discovered about the brain and how it works, I’m a total amateur, of course, but gosh I just admire this work so much. Anyone who wants to talk about souls and psyches and such – if you don’t read about neuroscience you’re just missing the greatest game in town. I’m not saying you’ll stop believing in the soul – how can I predict? – but you’ll learn something fascinating about how sensing and moving and thinking and feeling actually happen.

Religious discourse is non-falsifiable. That’s one meaning of Jesus’ injunction not to put God to the test. So religious discourse doesn’t advance. It’s as true or as false now as it ever was. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad, but there it is. Scientific discourse is falsifiable – the point of doing an experiment is to put nature to the test. So scientific discourse does advance. Again, that may be good and it may be bad, but that’s how it works.

If you think that religious discourse is sufficient, you’re never going to learn all the neat stuff that science can tell you. If you want to learn more about nature, then science is the way to go. If you don’t care to learn more about nature, hey, it’s your choice.

By the standards the religious anti-science people are proposing, I’d avoid getting a dermal or even scrubbing too hard – you’re rubbing off (rubbing out?) potential human lives. Tweeze a hair? If you pull out the root, you’re pulling out a cell with your DNA in it. Potential human life. By the way, charlie, some religions do not believe the soul enters the body until later in development. And you do know that no Gospel was written until a century after the facts, right?

The legislation of religious beliefs, hyper-partisanship and special interest groups. The three main culprits holding back our nation.

A part of my thinks that if we got rid of Tax-Exemption a lot of our problems would be mitigated by reality of April 15th.

Just remember there is more money to be made treating a disease than there is to cure it.

Maybe we should privitize that too and put it beyond regulation. Profits before piety?

I just love it when blood stained christians tell me about the sanctity of life…then sit down to a nice rare steak or scrambled eggs…oh right there’s a biblical caveat about that.

There is no sanctity in a foxhole or a slaughterhouse bub.

Does “eternal” require no beginning & no end? The foul line starts at home base, but goes to infinity. If the universe had a beginning & will have an end, it is still eternally now to those in the middle. It was now last time you checked. It’ll be now next time, too. Now clean up you’re own messes & more nows will be good ones. I hope they let me get back in line for another ride when this one’s over.

I guess we can outsource stem cell research like everything else.

Historically, some societies have stated that “life” begins at the quickening of the fetus. I suppose there’s justification for that. Some have stated that “life” begins when the first breath is drawn (citing the precedent of Adam). I suppose there’s some justification for that. Some have stated that the soul enters the body at some specified time after birth. I don’t know the justification for that, but when infant mortality is very high, it’s comforting not to mourn as many “lost souls” (it also allowed for exposure of unwanted newborns not to be considered “murder”).

I think the medical definition these days has something to do with viability, and there’s some justification for that, but as medical technology advances the threshhold of viability is being pushed further and further back.

I don’t know where I’d draw the line myself, but it seems to me that any line drawn is going to be kind of arbitrary and not likely to be agreed upon by ANY majority, let alone a substantial plurality. But to say that a fertilized egg, or ANY cluster of undifferentiated cells, is a “human being” strikes me as patently ridiculous…

Nobody’s ever been able to define a “soul” to my satisfaction, so I can’t say for certain whether or not I have one, but there’s nothing within myself that I can identify as such. Who knows? Perhaps some people possess one and I don’t. I live, but I don’t know that I have a “life force”. It’s also self-evident to me that I have a mind, and I feel, but even though I can’t define those terms either I don’t believe they preceded my birth nor do I expect they’ll survive my bodily death.

“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”

My belief is that replicants (at least the Nexus 6 line) have “souls” as much as natural-born humans, but that like natural-born humans it takes about 4 years for them to develop the capabilities to think of anyone’s desires/needs other than their own (“empathy”). But since they only have 4-year lifespans to begin with, they tend to die just at the point where they begin to feel the stirrings of their “humanity.”

Who knows? If Tyrell Corp.’s biomechanics HAD been able to work around the accellerated-decrepitude problem (and despite Capt. Bryant’s statement to the contrary, it’s not a ‘failsafe’; Tyrell tells Roy “You were made the best that we could make you”), perhaps replicants could reach GREATER heights of empathy than non-replicants: “MORE humane THAN humane”, as it were.

Many cultures, including the bible, proclaim “personhood” begins at “quickening” when the fetus becomes active, and potentially viable outside the womb. From biology, this also appears to make more sense, though taking that first breath is about the only real proof of an independent existence.

Of course, as folks approach the end of life, does dependence take away their humanity? The way we treat many “elders” in this country, or merely anyone with needs, seems to indicate some of those loudest in protesting the “destruction of life” are least responsive to preserving it in the living.

if the judge is an ape, those scientists don’t need it to prove their point…

PIRATE227 - “Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.”

May be urban legend, but there’s that old trope about how a person loses 21 grams at the moment of death and some people posit that’s the soul.

Well, if the soul weighs 21 grams, presumably you’d need a container at least big enough to hold 21 grams. Wouldn’t that be in the 2nd trimester or so?

Sperm-meets-egg has a certain Occum’s Razor simplicity about it, but again you’re talking about hypothetical, mystical things here. Trying to be too logical about mysticism can run you in circles.

If the soul is supposed to be eternal, does that by necessity imply reincarnation? I mean how can your soul predate you otherwise?

I think the whole fertility clinic thing is a real logical soft-spot for the fundies.

“We think that God is the author of life and can end that earthly life when he wills.” How does a small army of doctors and technicians doing decidedly unnatural things count as God authoring life?

And as was mentioned earlier, they have to implant more than usual eggs because the failure rate is higher, so they end up making a lot more blastocysts than are strictly desired, so the industry is pretty much designed to commit infanticide by the fundie definition - but you almost never hear a fundie saying they should be shut down. The more kids the better.

And when they all take, you end up with octomom who immediately goes on welfare, which most fundies decry. Support the blastocyst, not the child.

The old thing about only “God” ending lives explains why those homicidal maniacs from the Old Testament wrote they were created in “God’s image”, or actually, well- vice/versa so they could justify all the killing of their neighbors, children, wives, and others they disagreed with.

Octomom may represent the best rational for banning in vitro, at least for psychotics.

An aside about reincarnation:

If reincarnation is from human to human, it implies a finite number of souls that are reused again and again. Until relatively recently, there were no more than a couple hundred million human beings alive at any given time. We’re now pushing 7 billion. Either for the bulk of human history souls would have had to wait a LONG time between incarnations (perhaps SOME ‘poor souls’ are still waiting for their FIRST incarnation), or new souls have had to be created to make up the increased demand. If new souls ARE being created, it obviates the rationale behind reincarnation in the first place. If not, and there’s an upper limit on how many souls may exist, there’s the possibility that at some point every soul in existence will be living at the same time. Perhaps we’ll reach the point where we have more people than souls to go into them all; that thought gave rise to my supposition the other day that others have souls but I’m not among them. :-)

If you include animals in the cycle of rebirth, that raises a whole bunch of OTHER questions, which I won’t go into now. Some questions are the same whether you imagine reincarnation-between-species as simply luck of the draw or as “progression”, but consider this: what would make a cow, for instance, qualify for advancement in its next incarnation? How does a virtuous cow differ from a wicked one? :-)

Throwing away is wasteful, but what of the adult cells that could be spared for more trials, research with an addition of amino acids, say?