The Vestigial Religious Ethic and Human Cell Cloning - An Irony

Congratulations to the scientists who cloned a human embryo for theraputic purposes.

Cue the Christian and "pro-life" zealots who scream that human babies are being destroyed and the world will soon be populated by freakish clones. To understand these fools, one needs to look at the history of the concern over embryonic human life, and we need to look at the roots of how life generally is valued in our culture. This overview will illustrate a central irony brought about by the consequences of Judeo-Christian morality.

The Judeo-Christian (J-X) cosmology does not persist as strong as it has, the hierarchy of God, the angels, man, woman, animals, plants and rocks is no longer a cosmological explanation. However, this cosmic structure has remained vestigally in an attitude which I call "instrumental". This is the rapine, exploitative attitude directed towards life and the environment which is summed up in policies like GWB's Alaska oil drill. To hell with environmental issues, we need energy and cash as quickly as possible. This is the quick-fix of centralised power and vested interests.

This is the attitude that also drives the modern work ethic. This ethic has its beginnings in the Protestant West as a means of impressing God (who did after all curse Adam and his offspring to a life of toil), whereby people work harder and harder until there is nothing left but dust and dollars.

The modern consequences of the ancient J-X cosmology and the protestant work ethic allow people to consider themselves above nature (either because we are better than it in some way, or because we posses a soul) as opposed to part of it. People are higher in the hierarchy than the rest of nature (again, reinforced by the ancient Biblical ethic whereby God grants Adam "dominion" over everything else). This has also provided the ideal conditions for sexism, whereby women are equated with an irrational, cyclical and dangerous nature, equated with animals, both of which must be controlled or destroyed (and remember that women used to have no souls as far as the church was concerned).

These attitudes are part of the conditions from which technology and science have emerged to dominate nature. These beliefs have served to justify our actions against nature, its plunder and over-use, which has also resulted in vast technological growth.

Today's Western ethics and laws still hold to the ancient J-X morality outlined above, with its over-valuation of human life, the secondary place of women, and the under-valuation of non-human life. God is the foundation, reason and justification of this value system. Yet most people are only nominalistic or apathetic in their belief in God (only 7% of British people go to a church, mosque, temple or synogogue on a weekly basis). So even though this foundation is gone, the religious system of morality continues to persist like a stench after a corpse (this is the problem Nietzsche identified as "the death of God" See The Joyful Wisdom).

The irony lies in the instrumental attitude which lead to the subjection of women and nature and the elevation of human life and emergence of technology which now allows Human Cell Cloning (HCC) and other scientific manipulations/destructions of human cells (think cancer therapy, abortions, in vetro fertilisation, immunology and so forth). Because this system values human life higher than all others, its believers want to stop experimentation on people (but not animals) and sometimes include human cells among the definition of "people".

Thus Christianity has set itself up a dichotomy - the conditions for a culture that will exploit and use at will, but the moral dictate that this must not be human life, even though the use of human life (like the embryo) will benefit other human life (like the adult).

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