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To: RightWhale
It is clear that our representatives won't give any thought to religious reasons in these matters, therefore they must be provided with ethical or even aesthetical reasons

Thank you for your response. Now I understand what you are saying, and I agree with you.

One of the approaches that I take, and I don't know if you would agree with it or not, but I simply point out some of the provisions of the Nuremberg Code, which is not a religious document, and which prohibits experimentation upon human beings without their consent, and which experimentation is likely to result in harm to them or their death. Perhaps it might be convincing enough for some legislators to realize that NAZI doctors were hung for doing such things to people, and to ask how much more evil then is the deliberate creation of human beings for such purposes!

The horrible practices we are discussing rest on the premise that the powerful can covet and by brute force take and use the bodies of other human beings, which do not belong to the scientists or anyone else in the first place, and simply exploit those beings for their own selfish purposes.

If future accountability and justice are not enough to deter the proponents of such practices, perhaps a little enlightened self-interst might cause them to realize that if people are allowed to draw arbitrary lines between who has human dignity and who does not, it will prove to be a very dangerous boomerang. The lines will be simply be drawn at the will of the stronger. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man pointed out that every power won by man over nature is a power of some men over other men. If past experience is any guide I do not have much hope that the human race will take the right path.

Cordially,

21 posted on 02/18/2004 7:53:34 AM PST by Diamond
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To: Diamond
Proponents of therapeutic cloning often retreat to the old homunculus argument concerning which stage of development of the embryo is considered a manlike stage or just proto-human. Proponents of both abortion and cloning want to draw the line that you referred to. I would like to see this "drawing of a line" examined in itself--not where to draw the line, which is begging the question.
22 posted on 02/18/2004 9:55:07 AM PST by RightWhale (Repeal the law of the excluded middle)
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