Secular Elation

This letter appeared in the paper a couple of days ago.

First of all, what is a soul? Where does the soul exist? When does the body acquire this soul?

People are free to their own opinions of course. I'm just sick of reading and hearing opinions that are rooted exclusively in religious reasoning.

While I do not exactly favor the full cloning of one person into another identical full person, I think the use of cloning techniques and technology is important for scientific research to battle the wretched diseases of the world.

However, this person would rather preserve what he believes are "souls" and the research against disease be damned. Hell, I'd much rather be saved from disease than to have his belief of a "soul" spared!

Koiyotnik

I can't wait until the people who condemn stem cell research actually develop some sort of ailment where it could have aided them, or even saved their lives.

They'll probably still call it evil, though, and prefer to die and be welcomed into the loving arms of their Lord and Savior than accept the devil known as science into their bodies.

Abacus

Wait until some other nation, England perhaps, begins saving people's lives through the use of theraputic cloning. I wonder how many of these so called moralists will do an abrupt 180 degree u-turn?

FoE

One can hope anyway. One day us immortal disease-free atheists will rule over those puny short-lived theists!

Bree

My mother did a 180 after her father finally died of Parkinson's disease. She was TOTALLY against stem cell research until she read an article that said that such research could help find a cure for the disease. Now she is completely FOR the research, but only because it hit too close to home.

sighhswolf

What amazed me was Oren Hatch's public position
against the president on this cloning issue.
I would not have believed for one minute that LDS
doctrine and the general authorities would have condoned cloning, or even research.
Hatch specifically stated that he would stand against Bush on these particular issues, and if the GA's of the church had been against the issue
Hatch would not have spoken about it in public.
Wolf

butswana

Make some sort of a national database, where if someone is opposed to cloning they can proactively deny themselves treatments/cures that come about through cloning research.
It'll be great watching these self-rightous grab asses shitting themselves when they try to reverse thier prior choice.

hezekiah jones

Next time they ask you when life begins tell them, "Three-and-a-half billion years ago."

Yellow3

It's something I notice frequently in ethical arguments involving medicine. It's very easy to say anything from 'stem cell research is unethical and should not be done' to 'modern medicine is ruining the gene pool by letting all these genetic disease-carriers live to pass them on', but when you start bringing the topic down from vague pronouncements about gene pools and embryos to the actual human cost of the diseases, they'll often get uncomfortable really fast. A discussion I once had on negative eugenics (denying medicine to those that are dying of genetic diseases) quickly died when I pointed out that the person was basically condoning leaving children to die, choking on their own faulty lungs because she wanted to get rid of the alleles for cystic fibrosis.

Decisions like this are always hard if you remember that there are people to consider, not just principles, and you can rarely satisfy both. A lot of people don't seem to remember the human half of the equation however.

- Jen

atheist_in_foxhole

Here's a great (but long) article on the subject:

<a href="http://www.americanatheist.org/smr97/T3/cloning.html" target="_blank">Spirits, Souls, and Clones</a>