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Status of Humans 2024
The Alabama Supreme Court, pretty much without even trying, has greatly roiled the political waters of America with its decision concluding that human embryos are human embryos, eg, human beings.
They got the science right. But that is not allowed in America today. Science is what leftists say it is, nothing more and nothing less. So the unmitigated chutzpah of the Alabama SC is far beyond the pale for our modern/postmodern society.
The reaction of several IVF clinics, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, an auspicious and pre-eminent medical training facility, was, to say the least, over the top, as they suspended their IVF treatments. Other fertility clinics, thinking more clearly, and less politically, haven’t done so.
The case that was decided by the Alabama Supreme Court involved an unauthorized intrusion into an unsecured embryo storage facility in a fertility clinic in Mobile that resulted in stored frozen embryos being removed and dropped on the floor and thus destroyed.
Many people involved in fertility treatments panicked, thinking that if the unauthorized , unintended destruction of embryos was a violation of law, then many of the processes involved in fertility would be as well. Certainly there may be potential legal jeopardy, particularly if some pro life activists legally targeted those fertility treatment centers. Which would be a turnabout in lawfare that has been waged principally by the left, the woke.
Republicans were instantly accused of responsibility for this disastrous curtailment of humane infertility treatments. This assault on privacy rights. This attack on women. So of course the politicians had to make definitive statements about all of this. Nikki Haley supported the decision (as appropriately she should have) before affirming that she also supported IVF and fertility treatments (which are not contradictory positions). Trump came out guns blazing in support of IVF and fertility treatment. So of course the left would say this was only to produce more White babies. After all, if Trump supports it, it must be bad, or from an ulterior motive (and we Deplorables are accused of concocting conspiracy theories).
Democrats will be campaigning on the evil of Republicans depriving women of fertility treatment. Some wokesters (the spell checker keeps trying to change that to “Jokesters”–perhaps I shouldn’t have corrected the corrector) accused Republicans of supporting IVF just to have more White babies. And the insanity plays on…
All of this of course completely misses the point. The question is:
What is the Status of Humans?
As regards Human embryos, per our current jurisprudence and policies, this particular cohort of humans, human embryos, are property. Commodities. Owned by someone. No legal rights. No status as anything that might be called a Human Being. A collection of cells. A fungible entity. To be discarded at convenience, on a whim, cavalierly, with no consideration of what an embryo is: an utterly unique human being, a DNA complement that has never before existed in the history of the Universe, and will never again exist in the history of the Universe. Something utterly unique and individual, of almost unlimited potential. An integral part of the future of humanity.
Once upon a time, America fought a war to establish the idea that no human being could be property. Yet almost from the moment that idea was established, the effort began to reverse it. Ultimately, that status of property was assigned to preborn humans. How else to allow abortion up to and beyond the moment of delivery, as Obama insisted? So, Roe v Wade established the human fetus, and thus the human embryo, as property. Not human. Bound for destruction at a whim, without consequences (at least legally). A constitutional right possessed exclusively by the prospective mother to destroy a human life at her discretion. That was called “privacy.” “Reproductive rights.” “Women’s healthcare.” Certainly not fetal healthcare.
Prior to Roe v Wade, in Texas a fetus was defined under law as a human being. After Roe, that was not the case. It was property.
The status of embryos as property was firmly re established in 2010 when Obama discarded George W Bush’s limitations on embryonic stem cell research on human embryos. Obama allowed the use of embryos for stem cell research, which could only be done by destroying the embryo. Francis Collins, the NIH director at the time, foisted on the nation by George W. Bush as an Evangelical who would honor the nation’s traditions of life. His prestige was enormous, as he had spearheaded the Human Genome Project (somewhat discombobulated by Craig Venter who with private drug company funded research was leaping ahead of the staid government funded HGP. So Collins had to accelerate his work to avoid the drug companies from patenting the human genome for proprietary purposes–which was a consideration, as the University of Utah had patented the BRCA1 gene discovered by Mark Skolnick’s team at the U of U; Skolnik, with the patent licensed to his company, Myriad Genetics, made that into a multi hundred million dollar company on the revenues generated by that patent–which, fortunately, was ultimately invalidated by the Supreme Court, with the majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas 20 years after the fact).
Unbeknownst to most people, Collins selected as his second in command of the Human Genome project an avid Eugenicist, Alan Guttmacher, who continued to be a fan of the absolutely depraved ideas of Francis Galton, the British originator of a racist Eugenics that advocated the breeding of improved humans, as the breeding of so many sheep or dogs or horses, or cattle, or poultry, or plants, had been used to improve these organisms. Galton had an ecstatic view of the human race as a flock of prized sheep grazing peacefully on a well-tended moor. A sort of Utopia, or heaven, achieved by human means via selective breeding. Gottmacher of course was all in on abortion as part of that Eugenics effort; his name sake uncle, Alan F. Guttmacher, an official of both the American Eugenics society and Planned Parenthood, had formed the Guttmacher Institute to promote and track abortion.
So much for Collins as an Evangelical defender of human life and freedom. Raising many questions about the whole purpose of the Human Genome Project, that greatest of scientific triumphs of our time. Certainly Yuval Harari (“Homo Deus”) is not the voice we should be listening to on these ideas.
To sort of (but not really) allay the opposition of us deplorables to such an extension of research using human embryos, Obama had the NIH director write a set of ethical guidelines for the donation of embryos for research purposes. The donors could not be solicited by the doctors creating the embryos for IVF treatments, rather, the persons owning the embryos (mother, parents, interested party, whoever) had to voluntarily donate the embryos for no pecuniary reason or receive any financial incentive (researchers got them for free) or coercive pressure. And etc. The problem, of course was that all of those “ethical” guidelines firmly established the embryo as property. Which is why I characterize “Medical Ethics” as the foremost oxymoron of our time.
We now know that Francis Colins is one of the great dissemblers of modern science. He was last seen colluding with Fauci to purposely smear the top three epidemiologists in the world (Batacharya at Stanford, Kuldorf at Harvard, Gupta at Oxford) as fringe incompetents because they authored a set of principles (the Great Barrington Declaration) to deal with COVID that differed radically from the government edicts and asinine policies imposed by Fauci, Birx, and Redfield. The exposure of that depraved collision resulted in Collins’ retirement as the head of NIH. Never before has a director of the NIH committed such an atrocity as did Collins. His name will live in infamy.
Subsequently, partly because of the controversy of embryonic stem cell research, science moved on–to even greater depravity. Instead of obtaining embryos from fertility centers, and harvesting stem cells from them, researches began obtaining fetal tissue from abortion clinics. The money (research and otherwise) went to tissue culture of embryonic and fetal tissues. Which more or less obviated the need for embryonic stem cells. There is a reason that Deleiden has been prosecuted so vigorously; it is because he exposed the truth of the morbid but lucrative fetal tissue collection process, for fun and profit, by Planned Parenthood. All under the rubrical umbrella of Women’s Healthcare.
The NIH under Collins also had “ethical” guidelines for procuring fetal tissues from aborted infants, that involved arms length processes and no financial gain to the clinics or the researchers, with “informed consent” of the donors of the tissue. Those NIH guidelines were being violated egregiously. No one at the NIH cared. Or did anything about it. Instead Deleiden was prosecuted.
At the time, I wrote an email to the president of my professional association, the Endocrine Society, Dr. Henry Kronenberg, head of Endocrinology at Harvard (yes, that Harvard, until recently presided over by the august scholar Claudine Gay) enquiring about any Endocrine Society efforts to assure that “ethical” guidelines were being followed by members of the Endocrine Society. He did not deign to respond to my email. When he had assumed the Presidency of that august body, he had given a speech in which he promised to always be available to members, and always answer emails from members. Not exactly true to his word.
I enquired of the Endocrine Society directly and got a pro forma response that the Endocrine Society encouraged its members to follow NIH guidelines. Since the NIH wasn’t concerned about its own guidelines, this was obviously a meaningless response.
With the overturning of Roe (although Buck v. Bell remains in place, allowing at a federal level the forced sterilization of the ‘unfit”), states can again redefine the status of humans, rather than have it forced on them from above. And Alabama has done just that, in full accord with Science. Rarely in the last century or more has any court so correctly and precisely grounded an opinion on the most advanced of our Science, no matter how hard the left screams, and no matter how hard Republicans try to avoid blame for political survival.
Trump and Haley and all Republicans should be hailing the fact that the Alabama court decided that humans are humans and have human rights, including those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and particularly the great right enunciated in the Declaration of Independence: the Right to Life. Embryos are Human! Who would have guessed in this late age of depravity, unseriousness, and pseudoscience, that a court of law in the United States would announce a decision based so firmly in reality. I suspect the Supreme Court of Alabama can even tell us what a woman is, a feat that the most elevated of our jurists otherwise cannot do.
The hard part follows that pronouncement. That hard part does not mean jettisoning IVF or fertility treatments. It means defining and delimiting what is acceptable and what is not, once the most important grounding decisions have been made correctly: That Human Embryos are Human.
Now we can argue about how careful fertility centers have to be with creating and implanting embryos. About who should qualify for treatment. Society has an interest in the circumstances of its most vulnerable citizens and it is not unreasonable for society to have a say in the utilization of advanced technology that is at the beating heart of life, of human life. What is ethically acceptable? Those decisions are not necessarily the prerogative of the doctors alone. Otherwise you wind up with Mengeles. Or Gosnells. The decision of the University of Alabama to pause IVF is an admission that they may not be exercising sufficient caution with embryos, with due respect for those embryos and their rights. The Alabama Supreme Court decision may prompt them to achieve a higher level of care for those embryos. They are, indeed, handling something truly transcendent. The statement of the University to me reeks of an arrogance that says, we are the ones with the knowledge and expertise, which you, the Court, should not be questioning. Their position is, it is our ball, so we make the rules, and if we are not allowed to make the rules, we are going to take our ball and go home. About as childish as it is possible to be. Obviously, the physicians and administrators don’t like being in a position of having to respond to another authority. They believe themselves to be an authority unto themselves, rather than the broader society. That is not a reasonable position for a public university to assume. It is like Terry McAuliffe insisting that the schools alone decide what is best for the children and the parents can butt out. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
And what to do with all those excess embryos? I would modestly propose an embryo bank, or banks, and the preservation of those excess embryos. Successful pregnancies with normal children have resulted from embryos frozen for 25 years or more. Preserving those embryos may be a hedge against some nightmarish nuclear holocaust in which most of the race has been rendered sterile from radiation exposure, and those embryos may be a bridge to a preserved humanity.
Or one could advocate for improved methods that reduce the number of embryos implanted at an IVF attempt. Methods may improve. Success may require fewer embryos. What about genetic disease, like Huntington’s Chorea? Preimplantation screening can distinguish affected from unaffected embryos, allowing the implantation of unaffected embryos. Then what to do with the affected embryos? Some societal decisions on such circumstances are not untoward. Can such affected embryos be allowed to be used for research purposes? Like all those Catholic urchins in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, sold off for medical experiments? Say, experiments with CRISPR methods on correcting genetic disorders? Such as the recently approved Casgevy for Sickle Cell Disease, using CRISPR technology.
But assigning Human Status to embryos in itself is not sufficient to transform the moral degradation of the modern world. Understanding the nature of Human Beings will also be necessary. So long have we endured under a dark cloud of diminution of the Status of Humans that we are hardly able to understand our own nature.
Humans are Transcendent beings. This fact is utterly denied by modernity. The reason why Allan Bloom said that Martin Heiddeger was the most influential human being of the 20th Century is because Heiddeger was the most successful in demanding that Human Transcendence be denied. That any discussion of Human Transcendence not be allowed. When Husserl, his teacher, seemed to consider again an interest in human transcendence, Heiddeger blocked him, not least by personally signing Husserl’s removal from the University as a Jew (Heiddeger was the philosopher to the Nazi regime).
Richard Rorty in America, the late 20th Century dean of so-called American Pragmatist Philosophers, was the foremost acolyte of Heidegger in America and established his influence here. And the Left has completely bought into the idea of the non-transcendence of Humans.
With the removal of Roe, at least some states are starting to return to the ancient faith of the transcendence of Humans.
The foremost of modern thinkers have demonstrated human transcendence (Kurt Godel mathematically proved human transcendence, and Schrödinger showed that Humans consciousness was integral to Quantum processes in the physical world, eg, that Mind, Human Consciousness, directly interacts with Quantum physical events). These discoveries and insights have been suppressed by scientists and philosophers alike, to our severe detriment, while base ideas of human fungibility and incapacity have dominated in all areas.
The Alabama Court is on the cusp of a revolution in our concept of what is human. Or more of a return to a reality that has been intentionally suppressed by materialist delusions that have been imposed upon us. May their effort prosper and grow.
Published in General
Well, Contrarian, allow me to be contrary:
Dead bodies still have living cells for some time after death. Human organs that are transplanted can massively outlive the person that is their source. We do not consider them people. They are only citizens when the Democrats need votes. You can even have a largely intact body considered dead, because the brain is permanently destroyed. At that point, the only other option is for them to run for political office.
I think we should define life beginning by the opposite of life ending – the presence of vital signs. This is a clear break point that everyone understands. If you have vital signs, you are alive.
I do think embryos should be treated more respectfully. When medical students begin anatomy class, they dissect a cadaver, but first they perform rituals of shrouding and washing the body. It’s an acknowledgement that this was a person like us once. Similarly, an embryo could become a person, if properly implanted.
Vital signs are signs of life. A one-hour embryo is a completed, and living, organism. At that young age we don’t look for the same signs of life as we do in an older one. But it’s the same thing we’re looking for, and the same thing we’re finding.
There is much to criticize Heidegger severely for, his association with National Socialism not the least. The conceptual philosophy torturously expressed in Being and Time became the foundations of French Existentialism, and therefore contemporary Postmodernism. That was far, far worse. (@SaintAugustine please correct me if I’m wrong here.)
However, in the middle of World War II, Heidegger turned his attention to questions regarding the philosophy of technology, i.e., “what makes a technology good or evil?” His conclusion (perhaps oversimplified) was that any technology (the object or its application) that reduced human beings to the level of being an economic commodity was itself evil.
I come not to praise Martin Heidegger here, but to note that IVF and all related technologies that start from the assumption that humans are nothing more than property to be bought, sold, or disposed of at the whim of either the mother or the state more than meets the criteria for being evil technologies.
I linked to a short article on the Alabama court decision at the Ricochet Catholics group. One of the comments on the article sums up my position on this:
QUOTE
Humans have the unique ability to rationalize whatever they choose to do. A couple that cannot conceive a child seeks extraordinary means (IVF) to have a child. A couple that conceives “accidentally” seeks to murder the child. In vitro fertilization subverts the natural law just as much as killing a conceived human being. In both cases, humans rationalize their “right” to play God.
UNQUOTE
https://catholicvote.org/theocracy-reactions-to-alabama-supreme-court-ruling-that-frozen-ivf-embryos-are-human-pour-in/
I think that it is how such technology is used that makes it good or evil. The technology is neither, it is the uses it is put to that makes the difference. Electricity can electrocute a person, and high voltage fences could be used to kill people. We have used electricity to execute people in the past. And yet, my Father-in-Law recently had a procedure called a cardioversion where a.doctor used the same paddles/pads that are used by an AED to shock his heart back into rhythm. Firearms have a checked history of use by both good and evil people. This is where Heidegger, again, is wrong IMO. Good and evil exist in the actions of humans, not in the tools they use. A hammer can build a house, or kill a person. That doesn’t make the hammer good or evil, but rather the person that created or killed.
David, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I agree with the distinction you make here as regards a device like a firearm.
However, technologies like IVF start from the point of view that humans are ultimately nothing more than physical machines; organic, perhaps, but just machines nonetheless. Hence, manipulating them as one might an automobile assembly line is no more or less ethical or moral than making the distinction between a hand crafted Ferrari and a mass produced Fiat. Both are automobiles, and both are commodities of trade and commerce and profit. So, too is the entire IVF and abortion industry.
There are a number of technologies in re the development of humans that can offer us massive benefits. One example is the artificial womb (currently stalled in a morass of approvals for reasons that, to me, seem only to stop the creation of technology that would question the reason for many if not most abortions). But that same technology has massive implications if some ethicist or govt flunky decides that humans raised in such a way are not humans, or not as human, as our current way of gestation. There was a fine movie called GATTACA that looked at that from the other side. When everyone is genetically designed, what happens to the random humans who must be inferior. Cloning technology has the potential to offer massive benefits to humanity. The ability to clone say a new kidney, or heart, or lung, or even a limb would revolutionize our ability to live longer and healthier lives, but before we grow, just a kidney, we likely will have to grow an entire human. It’s fairly easy to see the ethical complications that will arise. If a clone isn’t human, then what is to stop a person creating one as an organ bank? On the other hand, that development will lead to an ability to clone a specific organ. Combine cloning/IVF with artificial wombs and an ability to create a human without the two parents even being involved becomes a possibility. Sufficiently developed, why would a woman choose to go through pregnancy? Science Fiction is rife with such stories and questions.
BTW, we may not have to develop full cloning to clone organs. Scientists currently are developing the technology to clone muscles or food animals. This is called cultured meat and has some fascinating possibilities for humanity. We may be able to skip the clone a person process to learn how to grow a new pancreas, but somewhere, someone will do it. Someone will realize that once they find a physical specimen they want (themselves as one example), the creation of an army of them is just a matter of brewing them up in a lab and then raising them. Is that property? There have been lots of SciFi stories about how THAT goes wrong.
Lastly @OmegaPaladin asks the question that if dead bodies still.have living cells, then how can a fertilized embryo be special. The difference IMO is the potential that is present. My daughter, my wife, and I had a morbid hypothetical in the car recently. About 2 weeks ago a 12 year old hit my car while I was driving. Luckily no one was hurt outside my car. But we saw an older man on a bike and my wife was jokingly telling me to be extra careful and not hit another kid (then we saw he was older, perhaps our age), and my wife said that wouldn’t be as bad. My 23 year old then started a discussion on if it’s worse to hit an elderly person, a middle aged person, or a kid (sort of the trolley problem). We finally agreed that the kid has more potential and thus it would be “worse” than those that were older. Thus, the still living cells in a dead human have no potential, but an embryo has the ultimate potential.
I agree with the “potential” view.
I also see a difference in that an embryo in its natural environment (a mother’s womb) will naturally grow while any remaining living cells in a dead body will naturally die. The natural outcome of an embryo is growth and life. The natural outcome of cells in a dead body is death and decay.
[Yes, I know that many naturally occurring embryos die naturally without the mother even knowing about it, but we’re not talking about those.]
[I don’t know much about biology, but I do know that an embryo in its natural environment, even at its tiniest stage, has (usually) everything to grow into what we will eventually recognize as a human body. Do “living cells” remaining in a dead body have everything to be able to grow back into what we would recognize as a complete human body? Or are they “skin cells” that could be only skin cells, or “intestine cells” that could be only intestines, etc.?]
[The question of what to do with the “excess” embryos typically created during IVF processes and kept outside the mother’s womb gives me considerable pause about the ethics of IVF in general.]
An egg, before it is fertilized, is in a stable state, not doing much. The moment a sperm contacts the egg, that changes dramatically. First, there is a flash of green light, from the release of sequestered Zinc ions in the cell. Then the metabolism of the cell changes radically. The Cytoplasm becomes a cauldron of activity, and the cell begins dividing. Into 2, then four, then 8, then 16, then 32, cells, and on and on. Very early on, cells begin moving within the embryo, to sites that will become different tissues and organs. From very early on, cells that don’t appear differentiated at that point can be shown to be committed to certain locations and organs and tissue layers. Then the whole process becomes one of rapid development and differentiation, to form tissue layers and structures, and within 8 weeks the organism is fully formed. A stunning embryological process that is of mind-boggling complexity and order forming out of a single cell. If that doesn’t represent life, nothing does. Nor can we even begin to explain the process as yet. The process can only inspire reverent awe once one is cognizant of it. Unless of course one is a materialist scientist who presumes this is all just biology and of no great significance otherwise.
My experience with gross anatomy in the first semester of medical school was different than you describe. There was no shrouding or washing. There were bodies wrapped in plastic, saturated with formaldehyde. We were simply assigned as students 4 to a cadaver and told to start dissecting. Very straightforward. No identifying information on the individual. No medical history. No personal history. None was allowed. These were cadavers to be dissected, not individuals to be honored for the donation of their bodies.
The only time anything became personal regarding the cadavers for me, unfortunately, was when a small groups of students met with professors and and their families in their homes, n to more or less de-stress from the rigors of the first semester of medical school and try to introduce a little bit of a personal connection between students and faculty. I was assigned to a psychiatrist professor by the name of O’Connor, an Irishman who was an expert in addiction medicine. We drove to his modest home in the Hollywood Hills. The home was extensively decorated with nude drawings of his wife, Fionnula Flanagan, an iconic Irish actress with extensive film, television and Broadway acting credits. The principle conversation revolved around her interest in our responses to our cadavers, most specifically if any of us had necrophilic inclinations toward said cadavers. It was needless to say a very negative experience. The attempt by the school to establish personal connections, at least in my case, didn’t work.
In the middle of WWII? When he was a member of the Nazi Party that was using slave labor to build rockets at Nordhausen and running the death camps and exterminating Jews and others? Unbelievable. This was apologetics, an attempt at denying events transpiring all around him. A deception every bit as great as anything the Nazis did. While he was actively participating in removing Jews from academia. When he was the foremost disciple of Nietzsche, and considered himself beyond good and evil. Heiddeger was writing in contrast to his actions and his espoused philosophy. No transcendence (except for the Ubermensch able to engineer the revaluation of all values, over and over, endlessly spinning, which is what Progressives are doing now, with no foundation or direction or goal, simply destroying everything before, like Soviet politburos erasing the history of the just deposed dictator, over and over and over again). Note that Heiddeger never renounced his membership in , or atrocities he committed (like expunging Husserl) under, the Nazis.
Yes, this is totally depraved. We don’t even know what the mind is, or why people consciously desire one thing instead of another. With genetic intervention directed at intelligence and bliss, or other mental functions, who knows what we might be creating; perhaps people completely untethered to conscience or what we consider to be intractable human normalcy.
Involved in Existentialism, and an influence? Definitely. Foundations for postmodernism? Sure.
I wouldn’t call anyone a foundation of Existentialism except Nietzsche, maybe Kierkegaard.
I dig.
The “QCT” is a great essay.
It is always interesting to see that the same people who posit that an embryo in an embryo storage facility is the same human being that a fully formed fetus is at 9 months but then they rapidly switch away from that position when it turns out that industrial practices in facilities that they own cause a huge spike in miscarriages among the workers or local residents.
With at least one researcher in Australia now having compiled statistics that show that the current rate of miscarriage among pregnant women who had been forced to be COV-vaxxed stands above 70%, it will be interesting to find out if any pro-life people in that country will drop their holdings in pharmaceutical investments.
Ah, Trolley Problems–how I hate them.
But this video is superb:
Grave robbing is wrong, and thus a crime. So is cutting off a piece of flesh and reanimating it, or keeping it “alive” in suspended animation, or growing in a petri dish. So is creating human life outside the womb as a technical activity. So is aborting unwanted implanted zygotes in an otherwise infertile womb. God both gives fertility as a divine gift and withholds it as a divine punishment. Human-perceived “vital signs” are a folly and a spiritual and intellectual ploy.
You almost convince me to become an anti-vivisectionist.
Do you actually believe that we cannot use the presence of a pulse or brain activity to determine if someone is alive? You are also rejecting organ transplantation and basically all modern biotechnology. Your argument is perilously close to stating that sickness is divine punishment, and we should never interfere.
I KNOW we cannot. I have done CPR on pulseless people and they have lived. I have pulled the plug on literally certified brain dead people and they did not die but started breathing on their own [and started being verbally/orally responsive to questions]. [portion redacted] Vital signs and EEG form a gross indicator, that’s all.
I am sorry your anatomy class was so disrespectful. I am starting to see why you are such a contrarian. I do safety evaluations for my employer, including the anatomy class. From what I heard there, the more respectful treatment of cadavers was standard practice nowadays. Names were not used, but medical history was provided.
As for the embryo, it’s as impressive as any other cell. For example, the amazing coordination of the immune system, the incredible complexity of the nervous system, or the industrial chemical plant that is the liver all have cells that should induce awe and wonder. I’m a biochemist by training, it’s the small things that impress me. I understand biology too well for me to presume all of this is an accident.
IVF doesn’t start from the assumption that embryos are nothing more than property, but did develop under a jurisprudence that made that the case. IVF per se does not rely on a definition of embryos as property. That embryos have been categorized and treated as such has resulted from other influences that preceded IVF.
QCT is more an incoherent concoction of musings that is hardly based on the Western tradition. Technology does not cause humans to be regarded as property. Technology has been present from the beginning. Humans are very good at developing technologies. That however is not the beginning and end of what a human being is. Nor does technology as technology cause humans to be regarded as property. Slavery is a strictly human invention, and a reflection of the human potential for evil. Heidegger, after Nietzsche, had no grasp of evil, rather minimized it (as did the woman with whom he tad a torrid affair between teacher and pupil, Hannah Arendt, and her preposterous statement about the banality of evil, she who denied the legitimacy of the Eichman trial). and never had any idea of what human beings are. He had the whole issue completely wrong. And he wouldn’t accept the reality of what human beings are under any circumstance. His entire philosophy was surpassed in the first few chapters of Genesis, even if you don’t see it as a sacred text, the world of God. If you do, he is best characterized in the last line of Pope’s Essay on Man: Man is foolish; God is wise.
Maybe so, but I like it, and some of the musings are good.
Amen.
Although I might disagree to some minor degree or other regarding a few of the points you make in your response, let me state clearly – there is no argument from me on your conclusion I bolded above. I agree 100%, and I do see all of Genesis as sacred text and infallible truth.
Nanocelt TheContrarian,
Thanks for this clear and nuanced take on these issues. I appreciate you cutting through the IVF noise currently being broadcast. The background on Obama, Collins, and others is also appreciated.