Cloning is a Silly Issue

As with Prohibition and Abortion, the Stem Cells and Cloning issues are handy distractions from real issues of national import, like infrastructure, economy, and war. The War on Drugs is every bit as successful now as was Prohibition in the 1920's. Abortion is a medical procedure that blatantly favors the rights of the host over the cluster of human cells growing within. Although abortion is periodically effectively outlawed, its incidence is never significantly reduced. Oddly, to mention stem cells brings a knee-jerk retort of "Cloning!" from some quarters. Cloning is only a dangerous issue to those who don't actually know what it is. Let's suppose that the technology were developed to create a healthy baby genetically identical to an existing adult. It would be an expensive procedure, and necessarily take as long as a normal gestation. But mutations occur with every cell division, so the original cloned blastocyst would be subtly different than the donor's original blastocyst, however perfect the methodology. The clone would also be raised in a different family, so we are now slightly farther apart then identical twins raised apart. Much more significantly, the gestation would be in a different environment (womb, timing, nutrition) creating many significant physical developmental differences between donor and clone. I laugh when movie clones have all the same freckles, scars and other developmental marks as the donor. A perfect clone would resemble the donor much like a normal sibling raised separately. Why would anyone bother? Even with livestock. The genetic and health dangers of monoculture tree and vegetable farming are bad enough as a cautionary tale. Most people well enough educated to develop cloning know enough about the principles of evolution to know that duplication of a genome (however ideal it may be) in bulk is a Very Bad Idea. But cloning research is a different issue. The research has very high potential for serendipitous results. As with the accidental discoveries of antibiotics and Teflon, one can only find things by looking for something in the same area, but rarely for the thing itself. Some of the possibilities include: * Growing cloned organs in vitro or in a host. Crichton wrote Congo based on the idea of cloned organs raised in host animals. * Learning enough about gestation to create artificial wombs would be of enormous benefit to premies and other medical problems. * Knowing how to start and stop cell and organ development could well lead to regrowing limbs and teeth and other organs directly in the host. Some legislators are moving to block such research, in case it may lead to the possibility of someday making a clone. But why? Soul? Find me two theologians who completely agree on when and where a soul is created and when it enters a body. Now find me as many who agree as scientists who agree that the soul is a product of biological structure and heuristic experience, a quickly growing number.

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All that talk about life after death . . .

Highly religious people should be more willing to say goodbye to the material world, right? It turns out that devout believers cling ferociously to Earthly life. That's the finding of a new study reported by the Center for Inquiry:

[T]erminal cancer patients who reported drawing comfort from religion were significantly more likely to demand heroic care during their final week of life than those less attached to faith. Strong believers were also significantly less likely to engage in advance-care planning activities like making a living will, signing a do-not-resuscitate order, or naming a health-care proxy.

The difference between religious and non-religious was not trivial:

Only 3.6 percent of the least religious received mechanical ventilation during the final week of life, compared to 11.3 percent of the most religious.

Continue ReadingAll that talk about life after death . . .

Where the non-believers tend to live

Where do American non-believers live? On the West Coast, of course. Based on new data, however, even greater percentages of them live in New England. Here's the interactive American map. Here's an excerpt from the article by the LAT:

Since 1990, the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled, growing to 15% last year. That was the overall conclusion. But tucked inside the report are figures offering portraits of various regions.

Nonbelievers, skeptics and the unaffiliated are clustered in New England and along the Pacific, even as all 48 states surveyed have become less religious, the American Religious Identification Survey found.

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Herr Ratzinger continues the massacre

HIV/AIDS is possibly the worst health crisis to hit this planet. It's also arguably the worst thing to happen to the African continent since white people were regularly kidnapping its inhabitants and trading them like farm machinery. But the one hopeful thing about the whole situation is this: while there's no cure yet, AIDS is easily preventable. Ridiculously easily preventable. Avoiding the sharing of needles & using contraception are the two most effective ways to avoid the long, tortuous, wasting death we've all come to associate with this horrendous epidemic. And if you're not an intravenous drug user (or you studiously avoid sticking sharp, blood-stained things in your body), there's 50% of your prevention pretty much sorted already. So ... how the hell are you supposed to react when the gold-robed, paedophile-protecting dictator-for-life of the Catholic Church continues to threaten people with eternal torment for using contraception during sex (based on a very, very, um, interpretive interpretation the Bible) and instead tells people "just say no" to sex? In this story (BBC) Pope Oberstumbannfuhrer Herr Kaiser Ratzinger (I refuse to use his picked-out stagename, he's not Axl Rose for crying out loud) once again proves to the world that not only is his outlook anachronistic, unrealistic & laughable, it's also flat-out fatal. To millions upon millions of people.

Continue ReadingHerr Ratzinger continues the massacre

Population: Quiver or Quake

The writers on this blog are generally aware of the problems caused by population growth, for example here and here. But there is a movement in modern American Fundamentalist culture that puts the Catholic baby mill mentality to shame. They call it the Quiverfull Movement. The idea is basically that a woman is a quiver full of potential babies, and therefore must produce as many babies as possible. Only when she runs out of eggs may she consider another career. I first read about it at FreindlyAtheist a few days ago, with typically scathing commentary. Then another friend sent me a link to this report on Salon.com. It began a generation ago:

Since 1985, Quiverfull has been thriving in the Southern and Sunbelt states. Although the conviction of "letting God plan your family" is not an official doctrine in many churches, there are signs of its acceptance in high places; the Rev. Albert Mohler, Theological Seminary president of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, argued, for example, that deliberate childlessness was "moral rebellion" against God.
It is mainly a propaganda campaign,
Quiverfull has gained exposure through cable TV's fascination with extraordinarily large families, including the 18-child Duggar family. The Duggars, an Arkansas couple whose husband Jim Bob was a former Arkansas state representative, have appeared on several Discovery Health Channel specials about their immense brood and currently have a TLC reality show, "18 Kids and Counting," that focuses on the saccharine details of large family life.
So the principle of outbreeding your opponents is now a conscious tack of the American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. Thoughtful citizens of this world intentionally breed less. Therefore we are bound to be ever more seriously outnumbered with a couple of generations of this nonsense.

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