Unthinkable Wings

No. Eritis sicut Deus is what the Snake promised Eve, or have you forgotten? The pseuds on The Tablet certainly have. They also have forgotten the baptismal promise to renounce Satan, his empty promises, and his lies.

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Actually, although I'm not entirely sure what I think of the experiments in question (I think the question, in what sense are these cells human is legitimate and difficult to answers), I'm somewhat uneasy about the author's 'slippery slope as a means of progress'. 'Progress', in general, is a word that fills me with suspicion except when used very literally ("'I have seen them both in an egg', said Caspian"). But we can't escape the necessity of thinking and choosing - whether to our damnation or our salvation, humanity ate the apple a long time ago.

I do think, though, that it's somewhat uncharitable to accuse the Tablet's editors of forgetting their baptism because they published an opinion piece.

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Heck no, I don't accuse them of forgetting their baptismal promises because of one opinion piece. I accuse them of forgetting their baptismal promises because of 10,000 opinion pieces and twenty or thirty years of utterly consistent "product".

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Actually, um, they're really not empty promises. This will probably be/is a therapeutically successful technique. I really don't like it when people, especially Christians, facilely dismiss the efficacy, potential or otherwise, of these technologies because they are told they're not supposed to like them. That's arrogant and stupid in itself.

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"probably". Yeah, right.

And even so:
One thing is certain: according to doctors I heard from, the Nazi experiments in the death camps came up with really useful material. And I still say that they were right to hang the doctors concerned (those they could find). Morality is not based on success.

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sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com

I have real difficulties with the term 'playing God' in these scenarios, probably because my view of God is less interventionist than the mainstream Christian view. Yes, in a wider sense, God decides who lives and who dies, but I'm not sure of (probably because I'm not comfortable with) an idea of God sitting on a cloud pointing a finger and thinking 'ooh, I'll give her AIDS and him cancer, and I'll heal him but not her and, oh, she was bound with a heart defect, so what I'll do is take a transplant and give her a new heart*' and I so the term 'playing God' seems almost meaningless.

I haven't quite got my head 'round "Eve's" sin in wanting to become like God, because in the genesis myth it certainly sounds as though the way she wanted to be like God was 'knowing the difference between good and evil' and it led to self-awareness (knowing that they were naked).

If we take line, I would say that humans have to 'play God', because we have to decide what's good and evil and, often, we have to decide for ourselves, because it's not really clear. (What does the Bible say about hybrid embryos? Not much, I expect. Though perhaps it's like mixed fibres in clothes?)

*somehow I doubt that's what Ezekiel and Jeremiah meant when they said God would put a new heart and spirit in his people.

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It's a misleading term, I think.

. Yes, in a wider sense, God decides who lives and who dies, but I'm not sure of (probably because I'm not comfortable with) an idea of God sitting on a cloud pointing a finger and thinking 'ooh, I'll give her AIDS and him cancer, and I'll heal him but not her and, oh, she was bound with a heart defect, so what I'll do is take a transplant and give her a new heart*'

That, actually, is why the author's argument that lots of embryos don't go to term, ergo God cares more about adults than embryos made me uneasy (regardless of the rest of the article). I don't think she's thought through the implications of it: you can't measure God's love in terms of days.

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Because of course, God cares for success. If you are luckier, happier or taller, God cares more for you. That is the inevitable corollary of the notion that God cares more for a foetus that goes to term than for one that does not make it. I am frankly astonished that such elementary heresies, that a ten-year-old could refute with ease, are seriously being proposed, let alone discussed. Do we all have nothing better to do?

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I agree with you entirely on this point; but it seems to me to be separate from the experiments on human egg cells that the article is defending, since as far as I understand it, the cells used are not the same as embryos.

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According to Muslim theology, the Fall happened not by the action of man, but because the angel Iblis (Satan) refused to worship Adam when God told him to. Now of course I am not Muslim, and I do not treat the Quran as revelation, but in this case the starting point is very useful. Man, according to scripture, has been blessed twice: once, when God decreed that it should be made "in Our likeness", that is, that it would be the thing most like God among created things; and secondly, when God took up into Himself the being of Man by Himself becoming incarnate in the Son of Man. The physical being of Man is not something that is irrelevant to this, either. And that being the case, to seriously alter the physical being of Man is to mess with the blessing of God, and to think that one knows better than God when God became incarnate. Incidentally, it also abolishes the distinction between man and the lower animals. It is clear that the creatures that propose this abomination regard man, and by implication themselves, as no different from a flatfish or a snail. And to be frank, I am inclined to look, not on man, but on them, in the same light. Those who call for dehumanization have a way of finding that it comes.

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to seriously alter the physical being of Man

But how do we define that? Are organ transplants bad? Artificial kidneys? And where is the line between human tissue and a human being?

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About the sin of Man (not Eve): the point is that the Snake was offering what Eve already had. That is the way of the Devil at all times - to offer what is not his to give or yours to receive. Man had already been made "like Ourselves", the nearest created thing to God; the Snake's offer only resulted in Man knowing evil - because they realized they had committed it. I know a number of people who are actually unable to understand certain sins; they are simply outside their moral compass - they have no knowledge of good and evil in the matter of, say, gambling, or ambition, because the temptation has never touched them. Perhas it cannot. But we all have fallen with Eve, in that we all know at least something of what evil and rebellion are.

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To begin with I think the use of the term "embryo" is misleading, because it's not actually an embryo, at least not by my understanding; it's a human egg cell that has undergone what somatic cell nuclear transfer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_cloning. This process does not involve killing a child by any stretch of the imagination.

That being said, though, the Catholic Church probably is not totally kosher with this, Humanae Vitae and all that. Should they be? I don't really know that they should; not to sound callous but I think we need to have an influential social institution that sticks to its guns on matters that pertain to human dignity. And (this is the callous part) it's not like the Vatican can really do anything about their objection. (I realize the piece is talking about the Anglican church, but it's a similar objection, I think :p)

As to humans playing God all the time, I would absolutely agree with that. I think an interpretation of the fallen state is that we have in us some aspect of the Satanic, and in humans the Satanic usually translates to unconscious arrogance. So I don't know that this is any more playing God than any bunch of other stuff we do. (I was thinking about it, and even something like a Westerner sponsoring a child in Africa could be said to be playing God, right? And, like sponsoring a child in Africa, there are good reasons to pursue SCNT. This is not defiance of God for the sake of defiance. I don't think the utilitarian argument can be easily dismissed; it is very persuasive. It's difficult to argue to the contrary especially in this day and age.)

Sorry for rambling :)

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To begin with I think the use of the term "embryo" is misleading, because it's not actually an embryo, at least not by my understanding; it's a human egg cell that has undergone what somatic cell nuclear transfer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_cloning. This process does not involve killing a child by any stretch of the imagination.

Yes, that was what I thought; though the 'is this permissable?' question is not exactly the same as 'is this killing a child.'

That said, the more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to agree with your final paragraph. The question of Humanae Vitae etc is not quite the same from the Anglican perspective, because we don't have quite the same attitude to the church as an institution/ authority... I do agree that it's necessary to have authoritative instances that call for caution and reflection, but - if I were Catholic I'd feel uneasy about going against the teachings of the church and remaining a member of it. Though that's easy for me to say, because I'm not.

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In answer to the closing paragraph:

And that excuses it?

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Sorry, what are the antecedents of "it" and "that"?

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Satan in daily life. Just because evil exists, does it cease to be evil?

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My point was that moral ambiguities exist.

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My point is that most of them are excuses. And not only excuses, but feeble excuses. To use a beautiful Italian expression, they are "hiding behind a finger".

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Accepting the possibility of saving many human lives and not having to sacrifice any to do it is not "hiding behind a finger." Eggs, not embryos, are being used. The argument against SCNT (which I think is primarily the Catholic church's, that it's not a universal Christian argument) is not that it destroys life but that it may affect human dignity to use ova. That's a complex theological argument which I'm not sure I fully understand.

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It is not complex - I just made it upthread in answer to

tree_and_leaf. Have a look. (The one that begins "According to Muslim theology...")

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"And that being the case, to seriously alter the physical being of Man..."

But that's my point--that's really not happening here. At least not that I can see. I mean the sperm and ovum separately do not constitute "the physical being of Man." I can see that there could be an argument to be made, but again it's not as straightforward as the argument against embryonic stem cell research.

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