From: kriz@skat.usc.edu (KRIZ)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Cath. Christianity 101 - Church on artificial insemination, etc
Date: 17 Aug 1992 20:32:36 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: skat.usc.edu

In article <1992Aug17.051155.22278@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
>In article <l8r8bnINNbld@skat.usc.edu> kriz@skat.usc.edu (KRIZ) writes:
||:In article <1992Aug15.071616.21175@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
||::In article <l8os3iINNojo@skat.usc.edu|| kriz@skat.usc.edu (KRIZ) write
||:::Recently Loren posted that an objection of the Church to artificial
||:::insemination was that it involved masturbation on the part of the
||:::male.
||
||:::Actually, the primary difficulty the church has with artificial
||:::insemination is that it places the creation of human life under
||:::domination of technology.
||
||::	I almost cannot believe that I am reading this argument, since
||::it is posted by a true-blue computer geek (well, I'm a true-blue
||::computer geek, also).
||
||::	Someone who wears clothes, eats cooked food, lives inside of
||::structures built for that purpose, moves around in vehicles driven by
||::internal-combustion engines or electric motors, and sends messages
||::across computer networks cannot complain too much about dependence on
||::technology :-)
||
||:Actually it has long puzzled me that while technological solutions
||:to everything from nuclear safety to missile defense to protection
||:against insect pests are relentlessly questioned, most of the people
||
||	There is a heck of a lot of technology that goes unquestioned,
||and the "questioned" technology is really more feared than seriously
||questioned.
||
||:doing the questioning put almost totally blind faith in technological
||:solutions to issues involving human sexuality and human life. 
||
||	Blind faith?
||
||	Or is it because the technology can _work_?

It's blind faith ... and lots of propaganda.

||:People will ridicule a scientist for suggesting that a nuclear
||:containment shield (over a reactor) can protect their community
||:from radiation in the case of a nuclear accident.  But condoms
||
||	My own feeling about this is that a heck of a lot of people
||are worrywarts. But I also think that the nuclear industry has not
||been doing its share of effort.
||
||:are "impregnable"
||
||	Most of the time, that is :-)
||
||	And condoms are a lot easier to test than nuclear reactors or
||SDI systems, so one can have more confidence in their reliability.

They also fail more often than nuclear reactors.  

||	Would any nuclear reactor operator want to melt down the core
||of their reactor just to see how well the containment shell holds up?
||Or even do a near-meltdown to see how fast it can be shut down?

You can test condoms all you want.  You can teach even five year olds
how to put one on.  You can have them rain from the sky CONTINUOUSLY
and condoms will *still* fail people ... LOTS of people.

Why?  Because people don't think streight during a sexual encounter.
If someone were to argue that the problem with drunk driving is not
that people "drink and (later) drive" but that people just don't 
know how to drive drunk ... and propose drivers' education classes
in which they'd tank you with vodka and teach you how to drive while
being utterly blotto ... they'd put that person away.  But that
is the logic of the whole "safe sex" dogma.

If condoms had worked well before ... there would have been no
need to develop the pill or IUD as more passive methods of artificial 
birth control. 

||:People find no problems with arguments that SDI is hopelessly 
||:unfeasible, but to suggest EVEN THE POSSIBILITY that AIDS once
||
||	I do :-)
||
||	SDI is a good idea in principle, but it would require a REALLY
||massive system of MANY components that would have to work RELIABLY the
||FIRST time around, or else there will be a big embarrassment. Let's
||say we and the Russkies (we're talking Cold War times, now) get into a
||big confrontation because Israel and Iraq have just nuked each other,
||and some Russkie gets the idea of nuking our missiles before we nuke
||them... The defense system works, catching most of the Russkies'
||warheads, but one of them makes it past the numerous kill vehicles
||sent its way and lands on the Pentagon. Although most of our top
||officials had been hiding out in caves in West Virginia or
||thereabouts, it's still a pretty big bang for DC, and a BIG
||embarrassment.

Of course it costs phenomenal amounts of money, will never be able
to guarantee absolute success and cause opponents to plan ways
to circumvent the whole system.  

||:contracted may by the HIV's very nature (that it attacks the
||:very cells on which the human immune system depends to defend
||:itself from disease) be virtually incurable ... is to commit
||:heresy.
||
||	Like how?
||
||	There is no cure for smallpox, yet it is essentially extinct
||outside of a couple labs. How? By giving people a vaccine that arouses
||their immune systems against the virus. When the real thing arrives,
||their immune systems can then destroy it before it multiplies too
||much. The same applies to other diseases that can only multiply inside
||of human beings. Most STD's, like syphilis and gonorrhea, are like
||that, and would probably be banished by now if it wasn't for the
||moralists who seem to think that they are nice to have around to
||punish people for their sins.

Loren, we really have no choice but to try to find a cure for AIDS, just
like we have to find a way of disposing all the nuclear waste we are 
accumulating.  We simply have to.  People are suffering (or will suffer)
if we don't.  But it does behoove us to ask people to act responsibly.
We really don't need nukes.  And we really don't need to screw around
as much as we do (and the proof of that is how AIDS *did* indeed put
a real damper on things once it came to fore).

||:People find no problem in suggesting to others a chaste habit
||:in management of one's resources ... recycle, use less water,
||:use less heat, carpool, etc ... but suggest to someone to
||:abstain from sex or to simply be monogamous ... and the answer 
||:is IDENTICAL in nature to those ridiculed by conservationists
||:in other contexts.
||
||	I don't consider conservation a form of chastity. It's just
||like trying to make something last as long as possible. I wouldn't try
||too hard it it was too difficult, however.

Great.

||	Safe sex is a legitimate thing to promote. I think that people
||have a right to sexual enjoyment, in or out of marriage, and I don't
||think that one should needlessly deny oneself that. I don't think I'd
||want to masturbate in public, but I don't want to cut myself off
||(whether figuratively or literally) from that option either. Besides,
||masturbation is safe sex, and why complain about safe sex?

You have a "right" to set yourself on fire I suppose too.  But you'd
debase yourself if you did.

||	And plenty of unmarried relationships are monogamous over time
||scales of at least several months.

Now the kid born into that would be appreciative.  Oh, but that 
presupposes killing the kid before it is born.

||	And plenty of married relationships are not monogamous.
||Consider all the men who think it OK to cheat on their wives. And
||whom the Church has been unable to stop.

Yup people cheat.  That doesn't make cheating OK and never will.

||:Chastity (Conservation) won't work.  What we need is better
||:artificial birth control, a cure for AIDS, abortion on demand.  
||
||	Why not???
||
||	And why this objection to abortion on demand? Is the only
||abortion to be permitted an abortion on command?
||
||	Examples of abortion-on-command:
||
||	Aristotle, who recommended that a city's leaders can order
||abortion to prevent overpopulation before there is "life and
||sensation". (BTW, he's the main inspiration for the Church's official
||philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas)

Aristotle had some good ideas and some quite lousy ones. Jefferson, et al
leaned on him too by the way...

But it has been the constant Tradition of the Church (St. Thomas Aquinas
included) to condemn abortion as well as infanticide.

Aristotle also argued that a slave did not have a soul. The Catholic
Church condemned slavery almost immediately after the slave trade 
between Africa, the Americas and Europe began.  Further NEVER did
the Catholic Church deny the presence of a soul in any human being,
Greek, Jew, ... Native American or African.

||	China, which uses abortion as a means of population control

Great moral example there Loren.  Talk about invading the bed-room.

||	The Bible, Numbers 5, which states that a priest is to give a
||potion of bitter herbs to a woman suspected of being unfaithful. What
||happens if she is guilty looks like some of the side effects of an
||abortion. (Yes, there it is, the Bible)

In the OT they used to stone people too.  

||:(What we need is more nukes, more strip mining, more off-shore
||:drilling, a rapid deployment force to defend and kill for
||:"our" oil overseas).
||
||	Questions best asked of that klutz in the White House and his
||admirers :-)

Perhaps but the "solution" proposed is again of the hedonist mentality.

||:Indeed, I don't think there is an organization in the world
||:has has seen this obvious similarity ... other than the 
||:Church.
||
||	It aint' no similarity.
||
||	Putting on condoms is like putting on seat belts in cars and
||using public transportation.

Huh?  I don't get the public transportation allusion at all.

Regarding the seatbelt ... would one necessarily remember to 
wear the seat belt if one was drunk?  And I'd question what
one were strapping one self to ... a car or a roman candle.

||:Pope John Paul II in his 1989 statement on the environment
||:declared it to be fundamentally a moral issue.  We do not
||:have a right to unrestrained progress if it mortgages future
||:generations of human beings in the process.
||
||	Now he tells us :-)
||
||	I wonder what's his opinion of James Watt ("Why worry about
||protecting the environment? Jesus Christ will be making his Second
||Coming any day now.")

Not particularly high I figure :-)

Castro apparently wrote a book on "his impressions of the Bible"
too.  Figure they'd both do well at the "Henry VIII School of 
Theology"

||::...Second, REGARDLESS OF HOW the male's 
||:::sperm fertilizes the woman's ovum, if the two are not spouses,
||:::the Church will ALWAYS consider the act or procedure performed 
||:::to be contrary to moral law.
||
||::	Why's that?
||
||::	I would consider it against "moral law" _only_ if artificial
||::insemination or IVF took place without both sides agreeing for the
||::procedure to take place.
||
||:And what of the kid?  The kid has no right to expect a stable
||:union between his/her parents?  Granted kids don't get that
||
||	Does it have to be biological parents?

||:much anymore ... but don't they have a right to expect that?
||:Or is the kid just a commodity ... and accessory to a house,
||:a swing set, its parent(s)'s ego(s)?
||
||	You never know about some parents :-)

You're right.  Damn [TM] right.

||::	The Vatican is awfully prissy about reproduction, it seems to
||::me.
||
||::	And has God told the bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) that it's a
||::no-no to have all the non-reproductive sex that they have?
||
||::	Male dolphins will sometimes mate with other male dolphins;
||::does God ever complain?
||
||:Yup Loren, we're nothing but a bunch of protoplasm that takes itself
||:too seriously.  And if we're nothing but a bunch of protoplasm, why 
||:get so upset about things like genocide.  What difference is there 
||:between Auchschwitz and a standard meat-packing plant... or even a 
||:wheat farm?  Would it be better if the Nazis ate their human victims
||
||	That's because of a certain difference between sentience and
||nonsentience. Chimpanzees and dolphins come awfully close, cows are a
||bit farther off, and wheat plants are even farther. And that is not
||even to mention bread mold, let alone smallpox viruses :-)

||	And there is a difference between animals and plants that get
||sympathy and those that don't. Dolphins and whales get a lot of it,
||while mice and rats don't. Redwood trees get a lot, while crabgrass
||doesn't.

But neither of those standards can be legitimately used to judge the
value of either plant/animal life to say nothing of human beings.
All sorts of fungi and vermin are not "pretty" or "intelligent"
but are absolutely indispensable to the environment.  

And no matter how "cute" or "intelligent" a dolphin is, I'd hope that
even someone with an advanced case of MS or down-syndrome would be
considered altogether in a different catagory than the dolphin.

You can get into some really spooky eugenics there if you did not.

||:instead of "merely" killing them? Is that their "only crime"?  How "dare" 
||:we condemn Claus Barbie for doing what a wheat farmer does every year?  
||:He was just harvesting a "different sort of crop" ...
||
||	Cute perspective :-)
||
||:HUMAN BEINGS ARE DIFFERENT ALL OTHER FORMS OF LIFE.  WHY?  BECAUSE THEY
||:ARE CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD (Gen 1:26).  If we don't begin there,
||:we are doomed.... to reduce ourselves to ||||nothingness<<.
||
||	Here is perhaps the last word of that, from a contemporary
||named Xenophanes:
||
||	Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are
||a shame and disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and
||deceivings of one another ... Mortals deem that gods are begotten as
||they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form ... yes,
||and if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could paint with their
||hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the
||forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies
||in the image of their several kinds .,. The Ethiopians make their gods
||black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red
||hair.

And so once again we are nothing but a bunch of protoplasm.  The
burn victim has to hope that he/she doesn't have to be put up
against a harp seal.

||::	And since I'm not "man", I can do whatever I want to :-)
||
||	Well, to tell the truth, I just checked a Bible (Today's
||English Version), and I find that it referred to God creating "human
||beings", to "resemble" and "be like" him. As Xenophanes showed,
||however, it is really the other way around :-)

Loren, are you just stupid or being dishonest.  Go even to a King
James Version and you'll find the verse says:

	God created man in his image, MALE AND FEMALE he created
	THEM [Gen. 1:27]

That is one thing that is so amazing ... even in the OLDEST texts
that verse truth reads like that.

Contrast that with the U.S. Declaration of Independence where
the founders said: All MEN are created equal...

But anyway.  Loren believe what you want ... and head for your doom.
Just don't drag the others with you.

||	And do you mean that animals have no rights? That it's OK to
||set a cat's tail on fire? Or do other mean things?
||
||	Well, no one has ever claimed that smallpox viruses have the
||right to grow in their natural hosts :-), so I suppose that there are
||limits :-):-)

I didn't say that ... Indeed, neither does JP II (Statement on the
Environment).  But the human being is the crown.

||:::Fourth, the Church does not recognize the parents ||||RIGHT<< to
||:::have a child:
||
||:::   The suffering of spouses who cannot have children or who
||:::   are afraid of bringing a handicapped child into the world is
||:::   a suffering that everyone must understand and properly 
||:::   evaluate.
||
||::	Do those old men _practice_ crying their crocodile tears?
||
||:They're trying to put down a teaching to defend humanity from
||:being reduced to the whims of the "possible" -- dogmen, farms
||                                                 ^^^^^^
||                                                 What?
||:of human embryos fertilized in a lab solely to harvest chemicals
||:or tissues from them -- talk about the *ultimate* human servitude.
||
||	But they wouldn't experience anything :-)

There are beggars in Europe and the Third World which purposefully
beat their infants to be brain damaged (seriously) to use them as a
means of sympathy income.  These kids don't "experience much" either
but WHAT A HORRIFIC CRIME that would be.

||	The most efficient "farms" would be tissues, anyway, and no
||one's been claiming that each body cell is a human being. At least not
||yet :-)

Ah but there are things that can't be extracted from older tissues 
that could conceivably be extracted from embryos -- human growth 
hormone for instance.  It has been suggested that bits of human
fetuses could be used to "treat" parkinson's disease, etc.

||::... Nevertheless, marriage does not confer
||:::   upon the spouses the right to have a child, but only the
||:::   right to perform those natural acts which are *per se*
||:::   ordered to procreation.
||
||::	Talk about heartlessness.
||
||:So Loren, where does the "right" to have a child end?  Again, what
||:if the parents/parent decided that they wanted a child to be part
||:dog or part horse perhaps with scales (to fulfill some sick notion
||:of "self-expression")?  Oh the kid might not like having a hoof.
||
||	To tell the truth, I wish I wasn't going bald or that I didn't
||have to wear glasses. I wish I had started off with some better genes.
||
||	Hooves might actually be convenient to walk on, actually. :-)
||
||:(but Johnny we just wanted you to be big and strong ... the evil
||:doctor screwed up ... don't worry though that's what lawyers are
||:for ... we'll get a big settlement and then all will be ok.  Oh,
||:but you still don't like being different from the other kids ...
||:well that's what a psychologist is for.  We'll set ya up with a
||:good shrink so that after enough therapy or perhaps a good set of
||:personality altering drugs you'll come to "accept" indeed "love" 
||:what we did to you).
||
||	And I wonder if there will also be a comparable market for
||drugs that destroy the sex drive so one can successfully live
||celibate, and even have Josephite marriages (that is, celibate ones).
||Interested?

Actually, I don't think the Church would go for that because it would
affect one's free will.
||
||::	It wouldn't matter to me if the sperm and egg cell that
||::produced that zygote that grew to become me were united in a Petri
||::dish.
||
||:Just be sure you enter a womb afterwards.
||
||	Well, it would only be a couple of cells back then. And are
||individual body cells fully human?

If they are of unique person yes.  And then you get into questions
of "twin fission" (cloning) and it REALLY confusing.

To me once again, the image of packing 10,000 IVF human embryos
into a 1/2 inch "column" letting them "grow" and extracting their 
"contents" with a "solvent" with a of a "chromatography apparatus"
is absolutely horrifying, to say nothing of "growing" a few embryos
into the shape of a flat-round filter or "membrane" in a similar
apparatus and "feeding" and "extracting" it by means of a process
"stream"  This stuff is horrifying because I really can see how
this could be all done ... and soon.

||::...He cannot be desired or conceived as a 
||:::   product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques;
||:::   that would be equivalent to reducing him to an object of 
||:::   scientific technology.
||
||::	Those old men are sounding like big babies. They need to do
||::some growing up.
||
||:Sounds like you don't know and don't want to know what you are talking
||:about.
||
||	Like what?
||
||	I don't think of myself as an "object of technology" when I
||listen to music played back from a compact disk, create this message
||on a computer, ride my bicycle, ride a BART train, live inside a
||house, heat a TV dinner in a microwave oven, wear clothes, sleep on a
||bed, read a book, or do any of a whole lot of things that involve some
||kind of technology.
||
||	Why should bringing a sperm and an egg together be any
||different?

Because if done by IVF it allows the scientist (or engineer) to 
manipulate the constitution of the person in unheard of ways ...
in ways that he/she has no right to do.

||::	Do parents of a child conceived _in vitro_ hate their
||::children? I've never heard of any such thing.
||
||:That's if there will always be identifyable parents.  In vitro
||:fertilization doesn't need them ... just nominally their sperm
||:and egg cells... perhaps at some point, not even that ... just
||:biological splinters of them.
||
||	Why should that make any difference?

I just pointed out how it would become possible to manufacture 
embryos for solely for industrial production purposes.

||::...No one may subject the coming of a child
||:::   into the world to the conditions of technical efficiency which 
||:::   are to be evaluated to standards of control and domination.
||
||::	What's wrong with producing children free from defective
||::genes?
||
||:What can legitimately be labeled a defective gene?  What of those
||:children who are born with such genetic defects (conceived "the
||:old fashioned way")?  Are they to be dehumanized even more than
||:they are now?  
||
||	Would _you_ like to be born with some genetic defect that
||could have been removed? Like hemophilia, Tay-Sachs disease,
||Huntingdon's disease, color blindness, and a host of others.

What about "curing" homosexuality -- or depression in this manner?
That will have to wait for another Instruction from the CDF.  But 
my guess would be that the Church would oppose such personality 
altering procedures ... because they would alter one's free-will

It may be a strange right -- to be depressed.  But somehow if one
is "made" to "not be depressed" would seem like a gross trampling
of one's human rights.

One would also constantly wonder ... what else about me was 
manipulated by my laboratory creator?  That is a horrible
anxiety to be oppressed by.

||	But beyond that, I will concede a certain gray area.
||
||::	[Embryos at the blastocyst stage fully human...]
||
||::	A strange absurdity. I fail to see much difference between a
||::blastocyst and a scraping of skin, except for where they are headed,
||::development-wise.
||
||:You'd make a very good slave owner a century ago.  Blacks?  They're
||:"property".  Right?
||
||	Well, black people are people just like white people, and to
||compare a fully grown human being to a blastocyst is lunacy. A
||blastocyst is what a fertilized egg cell (zygote) becomes after it has
||divided the first couple of times or so. After a while, it stops being
||a solid sphere and starts becoming a hollow ball. Even at this stage,
||all the cells are undifferentiated; one can cut up an embryo at this
||stage and produce two or more viable embryos.
||
||	Furthermore, do identical twins have two souls or one? After
||all, they both came from a single zygote.

That's a question for God to answer.  We would naturally assume that
they have each a soul of their own.  We would destroy one of the
twins under the argument that "well the other one is still alive
so who cares?"

||::	[Complaint about their destruction...]
||
||::	Some sizable fraction, about 2/3, don't implant under
||::"natural" conditions, and the non-implanted ones die. Should every
||::woman examine her menstrual blood under a microscope to look for
||::un-implanted blastocysts and have a funeral for each one that she
||::finds? Tossing it into a garbage can is no way to treat a dead human
||::being, as I'm sure you will all agree.
||
||:Could you imagine a nuclear scientist justifying the failure to protect
||:people from radiation at a nuclear power plant because "people can
||:get cancer naturally anyway"?
||
||	That's actually an interesting question -- how much is one
||willing to suffer? People seem amazingly willing to practice Russian
||Roulette on the highways, yet they get uptight about nuclear reactors.

||:Somehow that people get cancer "naturally" does not remove the guilt
||:of intentionally causing innocents to get cancer by not taking proper
||:precautions with regard to nuclear power, pesticides, etc. 
||
||	That was not what I was asking about. If a blastocyst is a
||human being, and every one that does not implant dies, then we have a
||heck of a lot of deaths. And what do we do with the dead blastocysts?
||Tossing one into the trash can along with the rest of the
||menstrual-blood-soaked tampon does not sound like proper treatment of
||a dead body. One should mourn this child and bury it in the proper
||fashion. One would probably not need a big coffin for a blastocyst,
||however; just a pinhead-sized one :-)
||
||	The whole "right-to-life" movement has a very cavalier
||approach to all these unfortunate dead blastocysts.

Again, in the case of the human embryo which does not implant 
on the mother's womb and flows out of the body in the menstral 
stream, the whole process is "an act of God" [TM].  Only God
knows of its existance, through its whole existance only God
is in communion with it.

On the otherhand in the case of a laboratory creation of human
embryos a scientist/technician/engineer consciously presides
over their creation ... he/she can not consciously dispose or
torture them.

||::	[Long rant about how it is wrong to perform artificial
||::insemination or IVF when the sources of the sperm and the eggs are not
||::married to each other]
||
||::	Well, there are interesting questions about paternity, but I
||::don't think it absolutely _wrong_.
||
||:So Sally, kids make fun of you because "your daddy was a test tube"
||:Let's see what's the number of the shrink again ... he'll help you
||:"not mind" that you don't have an identifiable father.
||
||	So what?
||
||	If it wasn't that, the other kids would tease her about
||something else :-)

||::	[How surrogate motherhood is wrong]
||::
||::	Tell that to the surrogate mothers of the Bible. :-)
||::
||::	Examples:
||::
||::Surrogate motherhood -- (Genesis 16:1-4) Since Abraham's wife Sarah
||::was barren, she gave Abraham her maid Hagar, to have children for her.
||::She produces a son, Ishmael. There is even surrogate fatherhood (the
||::Levirate). (Genesis 38) Onan refuses to have sex with his brother's
||::widow, and God strikes him with lightning.
||:
||:And what happens to Hagar and Ishmael?  How were their relationships
||:with Sarah, cordial?  At what point in in Biblical revelation do the
||:examples you site occur?  One could say at the point where humanity
||:was furthest from the will of God.
||
||	Does the Bible explicity say so?

That is the point from which God's people, the Hebrews begin.

||...God only sets in motion his plan
||:of salvation of humanity with Abraham (Gen. 12:3).
||
||	...who may have been a mythical character, like Achilleus or
||Theseus.

Yes may, those damn Sumerians, with those damn clay tablets, you'd
think there'd be at least ONE receipt or credit card purchase which
would show up with Abraham's name on it :-).

||
||:::  Contraception deliberately deprives the conjugal act of its
||:::openness to procreation and in this way brings about a voluntary
||:::dissociation of the ends of marriage.
||
||::So "Natural Family Planning" is just plain wrong?
||
||:By the nature of Natural Family Planning, the sexual act remains open
||:to transmission of life though the odds of conception can be certainly
||:reduced.  In addition for this method to have a chance of succeeding,
||:the partners will have to know each other (and particularly the woman's
||:cycle) very very well.  It's next to impossible to use this as an
||:option in a "wham bam thankyou mam" mode.  
||
||	I think that there are better ways for partners to get in
||touch with each other, but I won't try to stop anyone who wishes to
||practice Vatican Roulette, a.k.a. NFP. However, I will _not_ enjoy
||complaints about its low success rate.

||::	I'm sure that those old men must be burning with jealousy over
||::what modern medicine has been able to achieve -- a woman being able to
||::have children without having sex, just like what they believe about
||::Jesus Christ's mom.
||
||:Actually, they are fearing how they will have to deal with cases like
||:"sponge people" and the like.  How many human genes must an organism
||:have before it becomes "fully human"?  
||
||	"Sponge people"? What are those?
||
||	And while we're on this subject, what are "dogmen"?

Someone part sponge part human or part dog and part human.  Maybe you
can't fertilize dog and human gametes.  But what if the human (or dog)
gamete (probably the egg) were to be genetically altered?  How many 
alterations could be performed before the process could no longer work?
Who knows?  As for a sponge person ... that might be suited more for the
chemical extraction operation.


||
||:Don't be surprized if the position taken will again be on the conservative
||:end ... that those e-coli bacteria genetically engineered to produce
||:human insulin are to be considered human, even if they never will have
||:the chance to develop into a recognizable human being.
||
||	These _Escherichia coli_ bacteria are still mostly _E. coli_
||bacteria, and are still nonhuman.

||:Of course people will laugh...
||
||	For very good reason ;-)

Perhaps :-) ... but this kind of technology really decimates the foundations
of our very being.  At what point is someone human?  The Church sending
out an ENORMOUS WARNING to the rest of humanity concerning the nightmares
we seem to be plunging ourselves toward with this regard.

||::	And why are a bunch of aged celibates like them so _obsessed_
||::with marriage?
||
||:Because marriage works.  
||
||	Then why aren't _they_ married?

Because would their wives let them go on like this if they were :-)

||/Loren


My God is this long :-)

dennis
kriz@skat.usc.edu