Creedal Obamians
There is no moral concern regarding cloning human beings since human embryos, which develop into a baby, are "only a handful of cells," argued President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.
"If scientists will be using and cloning embryos only at a very early stage when they are just a handful of cells (say, before they are four days old), there is no good reason for a ban (on cloning)," wrote Sunstein,
It seems to me to be in the Obama administration at any level you must recite the Obama Creed. "I believe in tissues all tiny. Not created by God and that embryos are only potentials...."
Gee and Catholics get a bad rap for science.
"It is silly to think that 'potential' is enough for moral concern. [reference]
So when does a embryo go from potential to actual human person?Of course that is the follow up question that will never get asked. No mention that scientifically a embryo of only 1 cell is a new genome. Nothing more is needed either than the environment and nutrition for the embryo to further develop along the exact same path that all of us followed. Something that only has potential needs an outside factor to fulfill that potential. Something with only potential can not give that factor to itself. So I guess this new Czar believes in some magic substance that transforms the embryo into a human at some point. The act of growing could not transform a potential human to an actual human. So he talks about something being "silly" yet he has not given any serious thought to the implication of what he is saying.
Father Frank Pavone has often talked about that when he talks science to someone about abortion they try to talk back philosophy. Considering the science of embryology and what it reveals this is not surprising.
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And what happens to those "few cells" in cloning? Do they give up their "non-life" in favor of the cloned cells? Are those cloned cells now life, or can we just throw them away if they are inconvenient? What if they double in number before we get them to the trash can?
It never ends. From the beginning of life to its end, there seem to be fewer and fewer "groups of cells" defined as human (or worthy of being treated as human).
I like to think if they ever clone politicians, they reappear as their true face like in a SciFi movie or something...Alien 3 perhaps?
I seem to recall Obama saying that making a call like he did here on the nature of embryonic tissue and the use thereof was above his pay grade. Was he just being coy about the magical powers of wisdom he received at the Inauguration, or does he have someone in the Cabinet we really should know about?
A handful of cells, eh? By the time it's a handful of cells, there's no denying what's in your hand. She couldn't have chosen a better image for exposing the lie she's trying to pass.
It's about 45 years since I had to take bio is HS.
Since then 'they' learned so much we could not have known way back then.
Like: when a human ovum is fertilized it evolves from being a handful of cells (not human) to a guppy (not human) to a fetus (not human) to a baby - if the mother, her one-night-stand-love-of-her-life, and big/or brother don't want to kill her/him.
I liked bio better in 1963.
Didn't any of these people ever read Horton Hears a Who? "A person's a person, no matter how small."