Damien Broderick wrote:
> The objection to *therapeutic* cloning is precisely (and
> erroneously) that the stem cells being tweaked *are* twins;
> that is, are innocent little wee persons being butchered.
>
> I regard this as a literally insane interpretation, but many
> people will cling to it for a long time yet. [...]
I think people have difficulty even entertaining the idea that
they grew from non-thinking non-feeling stuff. The majority
of people think that something *must* happen after death,
because otherwise it'd just be them, in the darkness,
thinking, "I'm dead, I've wasted my life" etc. Nonexistence
is difficult to comprehend at best, and if you don't know that
your thoughts are the products of interacting neurons or, for
that matter, where babies *really* come from, as I suspect the
majority of people do not, you have no reason to invoke such a
notion and are left with a soul-shaped gap in your reasoning.
BM
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