From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon May 13 2002 - 00:02:30 MDT
YP Fun wrote:
>> His arguement is no different than
>> conception in regards to abortion.
At 10:17 PM 5/12/02 -0700, samantha wrote:
>Utterly false. And I won't get into the abortion idiocy again.
Understandably, but there's always some, um, fun to be had, playing with
the abortion idiocy.
I often draw to the attention of those convincing that a human with a soul
is created by our Good Lord Above the moment a sperm burrows under an
ovum's zona pellucida, pause for breath, that dividing blastocyst cells can
remerge, split into twins or quads, remerge again, and come out 9 months
later as either one kid, two, four... What does our Good Lord Above do with
the redundant souls? No doubt the transcendental answer is: no, silly, God
Almighty *knows in advance* how the stochastic case is going to turn out,
and hence restricts Itself to creating all and only the required stock of
souls. I wonder if this Blessed Being, Which is of course all-merciful as
well as all-knowing, might forealso see an abortion in the fated future of
a given proto-embryo and hence decline to ensoul it? Possibly this thrifty
providence would also apply to Lee's doomed babies, which would therefore
actually be disposable zombies rather than real people. Maybe it applies to
all Silesians as well. There's ample scope here for some meaty
Predestinarian Obstetrics.
But before I go and set up a profitable website on this fascinating new
discipline: does anyone here happen to know just *when* an embryo loses the
ability to merge with its erstwhile twin/s, monozygotic or dizygotic?
(There are viable chimeras, after all, individuals with two spliced
genomes, some with a nifty blend of XX and XY.) That might constitute a
convenient *minimal* time chop for allowable abortions even among
believers, unless they bizarrely adopt my *reductio ad absurdum*
explanation of divine providence (...not a cell shall fall without our
Heavenly Father...).
Damien Broderick
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