What is a “person”?
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I offer here two candidates for the status of person, with all the moral and legal implications which that status carries, including the affirmation that the physical destruction of this entity would constitute murder from a moral and legal standpoint. See if you can guess which of these two the mainstream Christian religion accepts as a person.
Candidate #1 is an irregular microscopic spheroid consisting of between 70 and 100 undifferentiated cells. This entity has no consciousness; it has no awareness or volition of any kind, not even in the sense that an insect does. It has no brain, no nervous system, no senses, no organs whatsoever; it has none of the capacity for purposeful activity that, say, bacteria and other single-celled organisms have. Barring extraordinary and unlikely intervention with advanced technology, it will never develop into anything other than what it now is.
Candidate #2 is a middle-aged female whose IQ is somewhat below yours and mine. She cannot read or write, but she understands a great deal of spoken English and can use a vocabulary of at least a thousand words of another language which is widely-known in the United States. She is active and self-aware and has a very distinct personality. She experiences the full range of feelings typical of human beings: affection, curiosity, anger, frustration, pride, joy, sympathy, sexual lust, and so on. She has friends. She makes jokes. She paints pictures. She wants to have children.
Ready for the answer?
Candidate #1 is a blastocyst generated as a surplus by-product of an in-vitro fertilization procedure, being kept in storage at the clinic where the procedure was done. There is no prospect of it ever being implanted into a human uterus and developing into an actual fetus, but the embryonic stem cells it contains could be of immense value to medical research.
Candidate #2 is Koko the gorilla.
To fundamentalist Christianity, the blastocyst is a person and the act of destroying it to harvest the stem cells it contains constitutes murder and should be forbidden by law — because it has human DNA, just as do the cells you shed (far more than 100) every time you blow your nose or scratch your skin. Koko, an individual who thinks and feels and understands and “talks” (in American Sign Language) is essentially a thing, because she is a member of a species other than human — though more than 97% of the gorilla genome is identical to the human genome, with less than 3% of it showing any differences.
I beg to differ.
MadMike
April 11, 2010 at 9:12 am
That makes me sad Infidel. I know that the Jesus Jumpers are committed to the uncertain view that human cells somehow represent the next new baby. Your analogy made the insanity of it all very real.
Infidel753
April 11, 2010 at 12:38 pm
It’s a natural outcome of their idea that what makes a human a human is some sort of mystical essence — a “soul” — rather than a set of actual verifiable traits, many of which we share with other closely-related species.
Holte Ender
April 11, 2010 at 9:46 am
Koko the gorilla should take the fundamentalists into the classroom and give them an education. She is eminently qualified to do this because you said: . . . she understands a great deal of spoken English and can use a vocabulary of at least a thousand words . . . They could learn a lot from Koko.
Infidel753
April 11, 2010 at 12:40 pm
They certainly could, if they were willing to learn. I’ve discussed ape behavior with creationists a few times. They have a deep-seated need to cling to their belief that the difference between humans and other animals is qualitative rather than quantitative. Hearing about the mental abilities apes have sometimes seems to rattle them.
osori
April 11, 2010 at 9:58 am
Sad to say, you’re absolutely correct in your estimation. I might further add that the extermination of non-Christians in whatever form (gorilla or otherwise) has been a mainstay of expansionist and colonial policy throughout the ages.
Infidel753
April 11, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I’m convinced there is a parallel between the refusal to see the personhood of animals which are very close to humans, and the ability to de-humanize full-fledged fellow humans in a conquered-and-conqueror situation. I certainly see that in the treatment of slaves as property — like domestic animals — or the hunting of Australian aborigines for sport.
Bee
April 11, 2010 at 6:20 pm
There certainly is a close correlation. We saw the dehumanizing effects from that video that Wikileak put out from Iraq. Right wingers were trying like mad to justify it, but their b.s. fell flat. Koko is, inarguably, smarter than your average teabagger, too.
Gwedolyn H. Barry
April 11, 2010 at 10:51 am
Excellent~!!!!
Infidel753
April 11, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Thanks!!
Jerry Critter
April 11, 2010 at 12:14 pm
And don’t forget our newest person, the corporation brought to you by our activist, law-making supreme court.
Infidel753
April 11, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Far less plausible than a fellow primate, certainly.
The Lawyer
April 11, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Nice post.
Lazersedge
April 11, 2010 at 3:21 pm
You think KoKo might be converted to be a Baptist?
Infidel753
April 12, 2010 at 10:19 am
Probably not capable of that much suspension of disbelief.
Barbara
April 11, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Very interesting!
Mother Hen
April 11, 2010 at 9:15 pm
I concur that KoKo is smarter (and kinder) than most Jesus Jumping teabaggers. If I believed in souls, I would have no doubt that all primates, not just us, have them.