Now that biologists in Oregon have reported using cloning to produce a monkey embryo and extract stem cells, it looks more plausible than before that a human embryo will be cloned and that, some day, a cloned human will be born. But not necessarily on this side of the Pacific.
American and European researchers have made most of the progress so far in biotechnology. Yet they still face one very large obstacle ”” God, as defined by some Western religions.
While critics on the right and the left fret about the morality of stem-cell research and genetic engineering, prominent Western scientists have been going to Asia, like the geneticists Nancy Jenkins and Neal Copeland, who left the National Cancer Institute and moved last year to Singapore.
Asia offers researchers new labs, fewer restrictions and a different view of divinity and the afterlife. In South Korea, when Hwang Woo Suk reported creating human embryonic stem cells through cloning, he did not apologize for offending religious taboos. He justified cloning by citing his Buddhist belief in recycling life through reincarnation.
When Dr. Hwang’s claim was exposed as a fraud, his research was supported by the head of South Korea’s largest Buddhist order, the Rev. Ji Kwan. The monk said research with embryos was in accord with Buddha’s precepts and urged Korean scientists not to be guided by Western ethics.
Sure, you can do evil and call it good.
[blockquote] Asia offers researchers new labs, fewer restrictions and a different view of divinity and the afterlife. In South Korea, when Hwang Woo Suk reported creating human embryonic stem cells through cloning, he did not apologize for offending religious taboos. He justified cloning by citing his Buddhist belief in recycling life through reincarnation.[/blockquote]
Asian religion can justify the most extreme cruelty. Why help anyone? Not at all, because they are working off the sins of a past lifetime. Read the article carefully.
[i] Asian [/i] clones? Man, they really will look alike.
This is another example of why what we believe matters. It is impossible to look at the squalor of India and not realize that Hinduism has a great deal to do with it. A high-caste woman I met made it explicit. Whatever is good for them, she said, is because they were good in past lives, and whatever is bad is also karma. It’s all their own fault, either way. Buddhism, the spiritualized development from Hinduism, has the same fatalist view of human life. And even Islam, which does not believe in reincarnation, nevertheless has a fatalist view of the will of Allah, which humans can neither control nor understand. Things are bad? Allah wills it. Submit.
Thank God for the new breakthroughs with stem cells from skin cells. These ghouls toying with embryos will now have no excuses to claim they are trying to help people.