Shoot me: I forgot to post Jesus and Mo yesterday. The strip’s latest episode, called “Nada,”
Note that what scientists really did was create “embryo-like structures”: up to the point of gastrulation (invagination), at which point the experiment was stopped on ethical grounds. The cells didn’t produce 14-day human embryos, but structures that resembled bits of such embryos. But Jesus gets it wrong—and then fails to find any moral guidelines in Scripture for growing embryos in the lab.
(Random member of Southern Baptist Convention): “Weyulll sooprize sooprize sooprize! There ain’t nuthin’ in the holy scriptures from two thousand years ago ’bout mankind try’n to play Gawd with his meddlin’ medical research! Wait! I betcha we could git Reverend Billy-Bob to find somethin’ in the Book of Revelashuns that will straighten everbuddy out!”
I guess they need a Twelfth Commandment? (The eleventh is already taken, of course…)
I was curious about particulars, and found that the answer is basically
“yes, many times over”.
Which “Eleventh”? Most of those cited are variants of the Zeroth – “Thou Shalt Not Get Caught”.
Wasn’t this (or at least similar) done in 1993 by researchers at Washington University?
Quite a few puzzlements, here.
If gastrulation did occur, would that mean really and truly it was a life?
If it was a life, would god be compelled to infect it with a soul, thereby showing he lacks free will?
Could god allow it to exist without giving it a soul?
If it doesn’t get a soul, why the soul-searching about what constitutes life?
Most of the religious who care about such trivia put the point of ensoulification (speelung?) at conception, because if they put it at the “first breath”, there’s a whole nine months where they don’t have grounds for interfering in other people’s sex lives. Which they can’t permit.
I think the point of gastrulation is that developmental deformities that post-date that point can, sometimes, survive to birth and then suffer for three-score years and ten; whereas all deformities that develop before gastrulation (or which prevent gastrulation), result in embryos that miscarry in very short order.