The late Steven J. Gould said that the real danger to science was not religion, but junk science. Although he may be right, junk science has become the tool of religion and in one way or another junk religion has been raiding the scrap yards of science to cobble together one monstrosity after another. Although many of the theses put together out of pieces of other things seem pretty slick until you think about it for a while, others are obviously the product of sloppy welding and worn out parts.
This is too big a topic to explore to its limits and too weak a metaphor to stretch too far, but our emotions and our reason are under continual assault from one logical and factual chimera after another, banged together by the Religious Right and it’s militant arm, the United States Government. Conventional wisdom, that vast junkyard of superstition, half truth and comfortable assumptions, is both the source and destination of much of the arguments designed to form your opinions and make you resistant to other opinions, or to the facts themselves.
Why is the fogghorn blowing again? Now that the billboards blown down by last year’s hurricanes have been rebuilt, we have to look at those large, baby pink signs informing us that not only does “life” begin at conception, but that embryos have heartbeats at six weeks, brainwaves at whatever stage, etc. etc. It’s designed to make you anti-abortion at an emotional level. It makes me see a lie and two non-sequiturs posing as an argument. That’s junk science.
Both egg cell and sperm cells are alive before conception, both zygotes are already the result of cell division, so what begins and what is the result of continuous process? A chicken embryo has a heartbeat and brain waves probably sooner than a human fetus – it thus does not follow from any of these proclamations that a fertilized egg, a clump of cells or indeed fetus with a rudimentary heart and nerve cluster is a “Baby” nor, more importantly, possessed at the moment with some ineffable property that can’t be seen or measured or detected in any way, yet somehow makes it fully human. Like most emotionally supported arguments, it asks you to see things in binary fashion, and without much fuss and bother concerning the details. The idea that humanity is something that grows over time from the purely protozoan to full humanity is not considered. The distinction between human tissue and humanity is not addressed. There may be arguments against abortion, but this jalopy just won’t run.
Every philosophy conceals a philosophy as Nietzsche said (Jenseits von Gut und Böse Nr. 289) and the “culture of Life” really disguises the attempt to legislate not a respect for life but a mystical, religious belief in souls that live in single celled organisms – perhaps the result of a tiny, invisible God riding a tiny sperm cell, waving his cowboy hat and yelling “yahoo” like Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove. That’s junk theology as well as junk science.
12 comments:
What he said, what he said!
I wish I had the ability to formulate a sensible argument as well as you do. The scary part is that the people who design the billboards you describe and who propagate the junk science you point out are fully aware that they're dissembling, but they don't seem to care. The greater good and all that...
You know, I haven't heard a single religious argument (except some concerns by the Catholic hierarchy at the highest levels) that would ban in vitro fertilization, the process by which the "extra" blastocysts which would be used for stem cell research are created. So, is it not a moral issue if these fertilized eggs are flushed down the toilet? It only becomes an issue when instead, they would be used in efforts to cure disease? Why is that?
Talk about your non-sequiturs.
(BTW, the image from Dr. Strangelove is great! hehe)
Was it Wahoo or Yahoo he yelled? I don't remember. But don't you wonder if all those frozen embryos have souls in them that will thaw out in hell unless they "believe?"
I don't think God's ways are nearly as mysterious as Pat Robertson's.
Maybe life begins at conception but mine ended at junior's birth. I have been transformed into a 24/7/365 servant of the little prince.
I spent way too much time on Google trying to find out if it was "Yahoo" or "Wahoo." And in my mind, they both sound right. Guess it's time to rent that movie again... it's been quite a few years.
the difference between a chicken embryo and a human embryo is the potential for human life. For some people it's not a matter of religious conviction at all but human decency. Nothing but a human is going to grow from a human embryo. I'm not going to tell anyone they can't get an abortion though. But I can sure feel nothing but contempt for those who do.
That's not actually true - evey cell in your body has the same potential, so how does a soul enter some cheek cell when we clone it into a person? Potential is not the fulfillment of potential.
A human embryo is either going to spontaneously abort, be artificially aborted or be born as a human, it won't potentially turn into a chicken for your dining pleasure. I really don't understand how some people can be so blasé about human life.
I don't understand how some people can miss the point when they're impaled on it - The is a difference between something that can become and something that is
Get it?
right, it's only a group of cells until YOU decide it can become a baby...my bad. I don't think I'm the one missing the point.
Anyone who tries to speak for God makes God foolish. That your fallacy is not apparent to you is not my fault, it's your fault. It's not your "bad," it's your fault and I think, a deliberate fault.
I don't expect you to question your cliche notions or your cliche language but for the benefit of others, let me repeat, what somthing will become if left alone is not what it is. Preventing something from growing into something else is not killing that something else because you can't kill something that never existed. A fertilized egg has no human attributes - it's only a blueprint. Nor will that blueprint be built without the sacrificial cooperation of a host body. How Godlike you are in demanding such a sacrifice of others.
If you will review my first post you will see I said I would never do away with abortion, which to my notion makes me pro-choice. So you see I'm not demanding anything of anybody except myself. Because I would never choose to have an abortion and feel contempt for those who do is my opinion, which I think you would understand, if you can get beyond your intolerance for somebody who doesn't think the way you do. I never mentioned God until this moment, but as long as we're stereotyping, how very stereotypically leftist of you to try and put words in my mouth.
All I did was to point out your non-linear reasoning and street-brat English. Those are individual attributes, not stereo-anythings. I said you were playing God - why is that a stereotype You're the one in a frenzy, how am I being intolerant, or is tolerance supposed to mean capitulation? Or is it that you've run out of argument but not of emotion?
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