From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 01:17:51 MDT
Actually, many of the religious folks on earth who believe in
souls (not all do), believe that souls are eternal
individualized portions of God-stuff and that some of them are
attracted to living a human life now and again. So, in that
viewpoint, there is no JIT soul creation when fertilization
takes place. Most of the mentioned groups also believe
something like that there is a special energy when conception
occurs that attracts a soul interest in such an incarnation.
Damien Broderick wrote:
> I saw Sen. Orrin Hatch on American early morning TV (we get it late at nite
> in Oz), after he'd been briefed comprehensively by `40 Nobel Laureates',
> explaining to Katie that it was okay to mine purpose-created blastocysts
> for stem cells because they had not been fertilized. I believe someone
> mentioned this sort of bizarre misunderstanding here a little while back.
> He didn't seem to grasp that these blastocysts were, so to speak,
> *pre-fertilized*. But then I started to wonder at the implied theology
> behind his claim. Could it be that Xians and others sharing this view have
> some kind of implicit model in which (pace John Grigg) `souls' are whupped
> up and implanted by God *only at the moment when sperm and ova successfully
> bond into a diploid structure?* And if that wonderful sperm doesn't make
> its heroic manly journey, either inside the vagina or less mysteriously in
> a Petri dish, there's no soul creation event? Surely this has been hashed
> out in early hysteria over in vitro babies (not the mention monozygotic
> twins), but maybe there's a residue resurfacing now?
>
> Damien Broderick
>
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