From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu May 23 2002 - 03:32:17 MDT
On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 04:36:25PM +1000, Damien Broderick wrote:
> .... 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?*
Yes, that's pretty much it, exactly.
Used to be Catholic doctrine that the holy spirit breathed the soul into
a foetus at 12 weeks, but the Pope changed his mind around 1850. This,
incidentally, was the extremely conservative Pope who reasserted the
doctrine of papal infallability and used his position to whack on the evil
liberals who tried to hold democratic revolutions all over Europe in 1848.
In Judaic law, the soul entered the baby with the first breath -- anything
before that time wasn't fully human.
I don't know of any religions that have a soul entering the child some time
_after_ birth, but it wouldn't surprise me too much; these things are pretty
arbitrary.
> 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?
Here's a fun thought; if I remember correctly, about 40-50% of fertilized
blastocytes never make it through to term -- they fail to implant or they
spontaneously abort at some point in the proceedings. Why don't the fundies
yell their heads off over this entirely natural process, seeing as how it
kills an order of magnitude more "potential humans" each year than medical
abortion?
-- Charlie
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