You are welcome to comment or ask a further question by clicking here.lick here to add your text. |
Do you really believe that a pre-embryonic black dot is a human being and that to destroy it is murder? Think of the potential for cures, if early stem cell research is approved and funded. I do not "believe" that a human zygote or blastocyst is a human being. I know it. What makes us know such a person, or any other person? What is it that makes us know we and billions of other organisms are persons, with an eternal destiny? Common sense and the proper use of our intellectiscopes (powers to see wisely). People look at other people--not to mention themselves--so readily as "objects." Human beings--even adults--are so easily taken to be objects or high-class "things" by our mindless gaze. We look at one another from the outside to such an extent that we think the known object (or person) must "look like" what it is--according to our lazy gaze. "If I cannot see it with my eyeballs to be what I call a tree or a human or a rabbit, then it isn't one." "Me and my ego-centirc eyeballs" is a pervading attitude in many people's approach to life. Even scientists, philosophers, and theologians are inclined to say that a tiny human embryo or fetus is "potential life," or a "potential person," not an actual one. They confuse living beings, and the way they come to be, with non-living things, and how the latter come to be. There really is no such thing as "a potential life" or a "potential person," only "an actual life or an actual person with great potential." Every living being comes to be, and to be the essential kind of reality that it is, all at once. There is nothing gradual about the way a living individual comes about in this world. When the sperm and ovum of rabbits or humans interact, together they cause a whole new individual (or more than one, if twins, e.g.) to come to be all at once. From that point the new individual--as the zygote--begins growing: differentiating itself from within all the way to adulthood. Nothing new is added from the outside. The new individual begins by ingesting nutrients from the cytoplasm left over from the mother's ovum and continues various forms of nutritional intake for the rest of this individual's life. Not so with the coming to be of mountains and mole hills and all manner of inorganic development. Nor is it so with artifacts: things made by people, such as statues, furniture, automobiles, and the rest. These non-living realities come to be part by part, gradually acquiring their "whole" being. These "beings" are not beings of LIFE. They do not "be from within themselves." They "be from without themselves," so to say. There is, of course, a minimal interiority to natural inorganic substances, such as molecules of water, nitrogen, carbon, etc. But they are not alive, except in a figurative sense. Inorganic elements are either pro-life entities that readily serve the processes of life--as food, water, medication, air, et al.--or they are anti-life entities that may tend to destroy life--as poisons like arsenic, sulphur, excessive radiation--or they are massively indifferent. All non-living things come to be "from without" and not "from within." All living beings come to be "from within" and not "from without." The whole living individual being is either there or not there. There is no middle ground on the question of whether the whole individual exists. You cannot have a "part" human being or a "part" rabbit or even a "part" cabbage in existence. It's either cabbage or corn or rabbit or human as a whole or it is not. This whole individual of a given essence may be existing in a damaged condition, but it is wholly there as "this kind of living being and not any other kind." The individual living being might be--and at first necessarily is--existing in a very simple condition, relative to later growth. But it is, it is a whole, and it is this individual of a particular kind of being and not any other. From zygote onward, the new individual being does not, and cannot, become anything other than what it already is--a whole new rabbit or whole new human or whatever. It only becomes more and more what it already is. Pieces of lumber, however, can become chairs and tables and combos of both and can dis-become what they "are" and become something "else." That seems to be the case with all that is not LIFE. What many folks do is to project their own failure to see the difference between living and non-living processes onto the development of life right in front of them. They treat living things and even spiritual organisms (human persons) as though they were things without realizing the immense difference from "look alike" processes of building and manufacture. Tragically, even the best scientific minds can be so absorbed by what they truly see with their microscopes that they forget to "look through" their intellectiscopes as well. They see what they see with their eyes, but they fail to see what they could see with their souls. They fail to draw on their own readily available soul-ar power (soular energy) to see the interiority of what they are "looking at." They keep themselves captives of eyeball vision and project their own tragic self-identity as "things" onto whomever and whatever they are observing. How could anybody expect a person--of whatever intellectual sophistication--to see the substantial form or structure of any being, if they do not even know their own potential to do so and how to use their own ability to see such? The tiny human zygote that they are looking at has the natural potential at that very moment to read and write, to love and to commit self to God, just as any adult does. This tiny one-celled person lacks the functional potential for these glorious activities, but not the natural potential. In contrast, the rabbit zygote has neither the natural nor the functional potential to read and write, to love and to commit to God. The inability, and even unwillingness, to see the natural potential in any being--whatever the functional potential might be at the time--is more than tragic. It is a massively sinful condition, in which we all share to greater or lesser degrees. Paraplegics and others who rightly hope for cures from scientific research can be just as blind as anyone else when "looking at" the tiny human blastocyst as a candidate for stem cell "research": a potential victim of their inordinate desire for a healthier condition of living. The human zygote or embryo is just as much a human person--a spiritual organism--as you or I, though less developed. (The sperm and ovum were causes of the zygote; they did not "become" it, as our lazy gazes would have it. They are "part-body" cells in contrast to the zygote being a "whole-body" cell. And they died together in the causal interaction we call conception. Through their causal death, the new human being came to exist.) But it is not only a question of who is more developed--the embryo or the adult. The big issue here is the mis-development of human reasoners who overlook who is a person and when, for the sake of their utilitarian, pragmatic purposes. They dehumanize tiny persons by false definition, and feel free to kill. Dr. Mengele, call your answering service. You've got many calls on the line. ...for now, being-with-you, Robert For further details, read about the "Beginning of a Person" by clicking the item on the home page: When Does a Person Begin? |
You are welcome to comment or ask a further question by clicking here.lick here to add your text. |
