Posted on 08/25/2006 6:42:35 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Lawyers love to talk about the slippery slope, how you bend the rules a little or do something a little wrong and it leads inevitably to worse. But sometimes the slope turns into a precipice and you find yourself looking into the abyss. Use of fetal tissue for cosmetic purposes - especially fetal tissue conceived only for that purpose - is such precipitous plunge.
The scientific and medical community knew it would happen eventually but didn't know how soon. False hope for stem cells is cruel enough - but using stem cells from fetuses created for monetary gain to use for cosmetic purposes seems to us to cross the moral line.
In a News of the Day announcement on August 17, 2001, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons discussed a new abuse of stem cells.
Exclusive clinics in various worldwide locations are offering face lifts and cosmetic procedures using tissues from aborted fetuses and stem cells from human embryos. The cells are said to rejuvenate the skin.
The optimum age of the fetus is 8 to 12 weeks. Reportedly, women in poor nations are paid up to $200 to carry a baby until the appropriate time for "harvesting" the cells.
U.K. stem-cell researcher Colin Blakemore told the London Daily Mail that the therapies are "highly experimental" and could damage the reputation of legitimate researchers.
It seems distasteful, but thousands of women have already done it and it is organized by a seemingly respectable British clinic and carried out in Rotterdam, Holland, where rules regarding stem-cell therapies are less strict.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Is a baby a baby or a fetus?.. My fetus, I mean my sister (almost 50+ years old now) was a 7th month premmie..
My only point is that no one knows. For every aborted fetus, there are far more that are natural miscarriages of one sort or another. It doesn't make sense to me that, in an intelligently designed universe, for billions of zygotes to be sentient human beings. I also admit, I really don't think anything much can be done about it.
I understand the quandry. Such concerns extend well beyond the issue of abortion. How much scriptural researh have you done on the subject? What is your take on God's reply to Job, for example?
For my part, I think I have some understanding of why (for example) the illness of leukodystrophy exists, and I know based on God's statements that He knows in advance who will have it and who will not, but I don't know how or why He chooses or allows between the two. Some come up against an "untimely" death or obvious suffering and conclude God is either evil or non existant. I have concluded that He loves us, and that there are bigger and more transcendent issues than death. But that death, given its gravity to those that are in this world, is a very striking way to teach some of those matters. Even this view is stunted, but it is what I have for now.
Everyone is free to conclude differently; that is their God given right, even to the point of rejecting or disbelieving Him or His existence. But if one is going to debate, one should do it logically, using the facts and informaton at one's disposal together rather than in contridiction.
PS - I think there is a world of difference between a sentient human being and the impartation of a soul; they are not necessarily one and the same. In the other thread you used the term sentient soul - I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by that.
"King". The sun god of the Canaanites (Ammonites?) in old Palestine and sometimes associated with the Sumerian Baal, although Moloch (or Molekh) was entirely malevolent. In the 8th-6th century BCE, firstborn children were sacrificed to him by the Israelites in the Valleye of Hinnom, south-east of Jerusalem (see also Gehenna). These sacrifices to the sun god were made to renew the strength of the sun fire. This ritual was probably borrowed from surrounding nations, and was also popular in ancient Carthage.
Moloch was represented as a huge bronze statue with the head of a bull. The statue was hollow, and inside there burned a fire which colored the Moloch a glowing red. Children were placed on the hands of the statue. Through an ingenious system the hands were raised to the mouth (as if Moloch were eating) and the children fell into the fire where they were consumed by the flames. The people gathered before the Moloch were dancing on the sounds of flutes and tambourines to drown out the screams of the victims.
Source - http://www.pantheon.org/articles/m/moloch.html
And some wonder at Islams death cultish bent.. Same people, same mentality...
Check around - I think you will be surprised at what group is most noted for using this "statue". The battle is not against flesh and blood.
Indeed..
+
Just a few years ago people would never believe such horrors, now some are plastering the effects on their faces.
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The Vedas state that the soul enters with via the sperm, so when it unites with the egg, the soul's energy causes growth. That without the soul, there is no growth.
Bad one. List, if you want.
Pure EVIL! And we wonder why no one wants to fight the terrorists. They are just as evil!
I would encourage posters to ask themselves, is it 'when does the soul enter the body', or is it 'when does the spirit enter the body'?... We humans are spirits that have a body.
I would answer my own question by pointing to Genesis and the record of human soul being transformed into a living soul by the Breath of God transforming a nephesh (soul of life) into a neshama (living spirit). So if the human soul is present at conception --and it most definitely is because cell division and directed differentiation into organs for an organism are proof of a living organism-- then the human spirit is also present while the protective placental encapsulation and then the body of organs for life in air world are built.
Abuses such as these should strongly encourage the nation and world to rethink and re-debate the controversial new world of stem-cell research.
I've been listening to the news about the reportedly "pro-life friendly" new procedure to harvest one cell from human embryos so that the procedure does not indeed kill the human being from which it is harvested without consent. I ask, where do these human embryos come from? Where are they located that one cell (unique to that person, for his or her DNA is within) may be extracted? What is done to that person after the harvester of that unique human being is done his taking?
Drs. Michael A. Glueck & Robert J. Cihak rightly name this the precipice, for we are so far from the original evil of playing at being gods over birth that no one seems to question any longer that man has a right to extract from the womb, multiply outside the womb, and make use of human embryos, and now only argues the ethic of how it will be done (see article above, for example).
I've even heard the news that the much-touted and FDA-approved "morning after pill" is useful to (and I quote) "prevent the risk of pregnancy." Very few even raise an eyebrow at such wording these days; it is accepted on principle that pregnancy is a risk to be avoided, and likewise that if, when, and even how we reproduce, and what we choose to do with "the products of conception" is now completely man's prerogative.
No one in the mainstream media - indeed, in government - is willing, however, to discuss the risks of abortion at any stage of a human being's development, or the risk of playing at mini-godhood under the watchful eye of The One True God and Author of Life.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
O nation! O America! How far thou hast fallen! So far and so fast that you don't even feel the loss of the solid ground, only the thrill of the g-forces.
"I can see a day when every fertility clinic embryo has a cell removed and banked for future tissue use or organ replacement," said Ronald M. Green, an ethicist at Dartmouth.
The odd thing is, every society seems to have just ONE grave injustice:
* Southerner's supported slavery under States Rights yet generally oppose abortion.
* Germany, under the Third Reich, murdered millions, incl. probably relatives of the author, yet maintains strict abortion law compared to U.S.
* Islam is a religion of violence, yet is just toward the unborn.
* America, on the other hand, has chosen the fetus as the object of its agression, and has built its modern (post-1965) popular culture on that premise - specifically the premise of zero relationship between sex and children.
* One more: The Dutch provided a a safe haven for Jewish fugitives, as they have done in times past for other persecuted groups. Yet that nation leads the way not only in the devaluation of prenatal life (cosmetic fetal tissue, "wrongful birth" suits, and regular old elective abortion) but in all life that society considers among Hitler's "useless eaters".
Someone may prove me wrong, but I cannot think of a single society that has embodied the worse of all of these forms of aggression toward many groups at once. It is instead highly selective in each case...
Ping.
Many traditions say the soul enters the body with the first breath, and leaves with the last breath. In Genesis God breathed life. Jesus breathed his last breath and then "gave up the ghost".
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