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An Analysis of the
Religious Assumptions Underlying 

Human Cloning 

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Are scientist's about to clone

 a human being?   or   a human body? 

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What's the difference?

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Editor's Note

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The following section will be much clearer and much more meaningful if you first read the pages titled:  The Three Basic Religious Assumptions. 

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u   Another Religion-based Controversy

u   The Unanswerable Questions

u   Answerable Questions

u   Are Scientists Cloning a Human Being or a Human Body

u   Converting Religious Beliefs into Secular Law

u   Cloning Examined in the Light of the three  Religious Assumptions

u   Allowing and/or Supporting Cloning Research

u   Restricting and/or Inhibiting Cloning Research

u   Expendable Humans

u   The Inevitable

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Another Religion-based Controversy:  

The cloning controversy, like the controversies surrounding  Abortion,°  Evolution,°  and  Capital  Punishment,°   is pushing  us deep into a quagmire  filled with totally unanswerable religious questions.   Conjecture, personal opinion, superstition, religious dogma, speculation, and ignorance, has dominated human thinking and human behavior for centuries.  Scientific knowledge is now challenging humanity's antiquated beliefs, and the technology that comes with it is forcing us to examine our selves and our beliefs about reality in ways we have simply ignored in the past.

No matter what your ethical and religious opinions are about human cloning, your beliefs are simply beliefs.  In order to accept whatever you have chosen to believe, you had to take what, in religious terms, is called "The Leap of Faith."   And in case you hadn't noticed, not everyone has jumped in the same direction.

There are two major camps in this controversy -- the ant-cloning, anti-abortion, anti-sex, anti-evolution, fundamentalist Christians and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy on one side and almost everyone else who cares about this issue on the other side.  

The page below will take you beneath the surface arguments regarding human cloning and invite you to examine the core issues underlying this controversy.

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The Unanswerable Questions:  

Are we our physical bodies?  Are we eternal Divine Beings who simply inhabit human bodies?   Is there a distinction between the soul and the body?  Are humans created by God at conception/birth?  Are we eternal beings who always were and always will be?  Are we gods in physical form?  

Why are we here on Earth?  What is the purpose of human life and what relationship does cloning have to that purpose?  

Does "cloning" or "not-cloning," in and of itself, have any inherent significance,°  or is this controversy just another way that humans create beliefs and then imbue their beliefs with great significance?  

In the process of cloning, at what point are we dealing with human cells and at what point are we dealing with a fellow human being?  How do we know the difference?  

Who makes these determinations?  Who has the right to determine the rules of conduct for everybody else in this matter?  Are others obliged to follow those rules?

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The Answerable Questions:

There are also a series of questions that will eventually be answered once human cloning is actually accomplished.   As the cloned human bodies mature,  several questions will be answered, either verbally or by behavior:

What will a cloned human be like?  How much will he or she physically resemble the clone-cell donor?  Who shall be the legal parent/ parents/ guardians of the cloned body/being/person?   How much will he or she be like the clone-cell donor in intelligence, temperament, personality, etc?  What are the pros and cons of cloning of a human body.   

Many fear that the cloned human will be identical to the clone-cell donor right down to sharing the same consciousness -- like one person having two bodies.  This seems highly unlikely; however, when cloning is actually done, we will have an answer this question.

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The In Between Questions:

If the clone-cell donor is Jewish, will the resultant body be Jewish?   If the DNA is from a Jewish donor and the rest of the cell from a Christian and the scientist who puts them together is Hindu, is the resultant person Jewish, Christian, or Hindu?

If I disapprove of cloning, what gives me the right to force my beliefs onto others by using government sanctioned intimidation and threat of violence to prohibit scientists from cloning human body cells?  

Will criminalizing the cloning of human embryonic cells stop human cloning from happening?  History show us that criminalizing a human behavior does not stop that behavior.  It simply shifts the activity into a clandestine mode and drastically raises the price.  Regarding human cloning, researchers are simply moving controversial research to locations outside the legal jurisdiction of the United Sates government.

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What's the difference between cloning a human body 
       and cloning a human being?

Obviously the scientists are cloning human body cells.  Of that there is no question.  BUT. . .    Are they cloning human beings?  Even when they have cloned a complete human body will they have actually cloned a human being?   Or will they have simply made a human body which an eternal divine being will entered into and used to experience life on Earth ?   In order to answer these questions, one must first answer all the unanswerable questions mentioned above, plus many more like them.°    

The people most strongly opposed to human cloning (the fundamentalist Christians) adamantly adhere to following seven beliefs.   Are these beliefs actually true?  Is there any evidence to support or refute them?

1)   Every time a human egg and sperm unite, God steps in and, by an act of instantaneous, supernatural, transcendental magic, transforms that egg into an eternal, everlasting life-spirit called a human being.

2)   At every conception, a brand new being is created who did not exist before the egg and sperm united.

3)   The newly created being will live forever.

4)   The egg, itself is a complete, separate, independent human being to be accorded full human rights.

5)   The newly created being is that egg? (i.e. that the egg and the human being are one and the same).

6)   After the death of the physical body that being will again be magically transformed by God, this time into an everlasting spirit who will, (if he/she was baptized) reside in heaven or hell forever based on what he/she did while on Earth.

7)   Doing anything to interrupt the life of that egg is an act of murder.

Actually you can easily answer the above seven questions (as some have already done) by simply declaring their answer to be the answer.   Well now that you've answered the simple question, here's the tough one:

How do they know that their self-declared answer is right one and that everyone else's answer is wrong?

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