Archive for conception

Abortion Anxiety

Posted in Atheist, belief, Bible, biological traits, faith, humanity, medical, nature, random, religion, science, thoughts with tags , , , , , , , on October 29, 2009 by chouck017894

Thoughts in regard to news that an extreme fringe group of anti-abortionists is trying to drum up cash for legal defense of Scott Roeder, killer of Dr. George Tiller who tried to provide for women seeking safe abortion.

Ask most anti-abortion supporters where in the Bible it is stated that inducing abortion is forbidden and they dutifully allude to three or four selected biblical verses, especially the sixth Commandment forbidding killing.  Other verses cited are in regard to the conceiving of one special person such as a man who is allegedly meant to be a “prophet” or who is to become king.  Because God is referred to as having worked in the womb of some certain woman for God’s special purpose, none of the verses used as authority declare or even imply that God is the active participant in every conception.

A favorite bit of anti-abortion propaganda is a phrase in the first chapter of the book of Jeremiah, verse 5, that goes; “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee…”  If these Bible pickers would just read the rest of the passage, the words there do not support their argument.  The phrase held in such fanatic respect was allegedly spoken to Jeremiah personally, to whom God also allegedly said, “…before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet of nations.”  The soliloquy continues through verse 10 and elaborates on Jeremiah’s call as “prophet.”  So, unless everyone is to play the role of “prophet” to nations it cannot be said of them, “…before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.”

Another favorite bit of cherry picking the Bible is Psalms 139:13-16, supposedly composed by King David, that alludes, “…thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.”  And, “My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.  Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”  So, once again, only one particular pregnancy was personally activated and it does not support the claim that every conception is God-ordained.

The third popular selection of holy word ferreted out by anti-abortionists comes from Luke 1:39-41 that describes the unlikelihood of a fetus (who was to become John the Baptist) carried in Elisabeth’s body leaping in his mother’s womb when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, greeted her.  That passage is taken by anti-abortionists to imply that all gestating fetuses are sentient persons; but once again the account is in regard only to a “prophet” allegedly ordained by God. 

Religious dogma too often celebrates ignorance, such as the untruth that self-aware physical personhood begins at conception.  A fertilized egg—a zygote—within a woman’s abdomen becomes active with 23 chromosomes from her egg and 23 chromosomes from a man’s sperm.  The resultant single cell that evolves then contains all the DNA to initiate a cellular glob, but that cellular mass has only the potential to evolve into a physical independent being.  The unproven assertion that a cognizant human exists is not a scientific or holy fact.

During the gestation period, a simple cell amoeba becomes activated by drawing upon nutrients and oxygen supplied by the carrier, which then converts (evolves) into biological energy which causes cells to divide, multiply and grow.  The developing energy-substance, although containing all 46 chromosomes for a potential human being, is not yet endowed with consciousness of self.  It is still simply a growing amoeba, meaning that it is without consciousness of personhood.  This is the indifferent method as described in Genesis by which all life in nature was programmed to renew itself.

Although a zygote, the fertilized egg, does contain all 46 chromosomes that can involve and evolve as a potential human, it is alive only as a mass of cells that are multiplying as an energy substance which continues to lack any consciousness of self.  That energy-mass will react to stimulus around itself just as “dead” tissue can be made to jerk by electrical stimulation, but it does not and cannot exist except by drawing all necessary life stimulants from its carrier.  Until the developing mass can breathe and take nourishment with a smattering of consciousness, it remains only a potential person.

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The Stringy Coil of Life

Posted in culture, life, Middle Ages,, nature, prehistory, random, religion, science with tags , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2009 by chouck017894

In the distant past, around 300 million years ago, the determinants of life consisted of identical chromosomes carried within an ancestral mammal-like creature.  Then some energy infusion caused the identical chromosomes to mutate and diverge as the X and Y chromosomes.  These were to set the destiny for life-form variations.  In other words, the sex method of creature reproduction evolved.  In biblical myth this is Eve being carved out of the side of Adam.  There is nothing sacred initiated with this mutation of the long, stringy masses of genes that convey heredity information.

In the conception of physical life there is, in a sense, a reenactment in miniature of the continuous action of Creation.  In human development, when the male spermatozoon comes into contact with the female pro-nucleus, they fuse and form a new nucleus that contains both male and female elements.  This nucleus is known as the blastosphere.  The first result of fertilization is the division of the ovum.  These two parts then continue dividing and initiate protoplasm development—the energy-substance from which potential life may collect as form.  A fascinating aspect of this division is that two separate masses of protoplasm are established, each containing a nucleus and with the same energy composition but slightly unequal in size.  The segmentation of each mass of protoplasm then develops differently!

The slightly larger cellular mass is more pallid than the other, and after the two cells have subdivided three or four times the rate of cleavage in the cells of the paler mass becomes more rapid than the cells of the other protoplasm mass.  These paler cells have a tendency to spread over and enclose the cells of the other protoplasm mass, and by the ninth or tenth division an external layer of pale cells enclose the mass of slightly smaller, less numerous, more opaque cells.

This is an extremely simplified version of earliest life-form inception, but it shows that the process of fetal development follows the same principles that account for development of everything in Creation.  This energy is the likeness spoken of in Genesis 1:26, “…Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”

That “likeness” is conveyed through 92 different chemical elements and it is through chemical evolution that the multitude of compounds necessary for biological life are generated.  The ineffectual religious interpretation of this is to characterize the defining action that takes place through an amoral chemical process as the “will of God.”  (Amoral does not mean immoral: it is something more akin to indifferent.)

The “soul” and its link to matter-life has been a constant and nagging problem for theologians for over a millennium.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, reached a theological conclusion that the soul of a human “…is created and united by God to the infant body yet unborn, which union is called passive conception.”  This theological circumvention of elucidation brought the Church “fathers” considerable anguish and perplexity since its medieval time of  institution, for if God unites the soul “to an infant body yet unborn,” then how are they to account for all the infants that the church considers to be “illegitimate”?

The catch-22 to this self-mortifying quandary is that if, as the church insists, God is morally loath to fornication then how is it that he indulges himself in “passive conception” of infants shunned by the church?  This sticky theological puzzle has never been blessed with a sane answer because the religiously disoriented refuse to accept amoral biological facts.  Instead the religious business machines choose to portray this chemical action as the result of some moral being who “passively conceives” in a manner that can only be politely termed as unrestrained.

And because this theologically inspired superstition does not provide any information of just when or at what stage God supposedly unites the soul (self-awareness) to the infant body yet unborn, the church is obliged to condemn abortion of non-conscious energy-substance at any stage of its evolutionary transformation in a chemical base.  So unrealistic is this view of the biological process of life that even preventing conception is condemned!  Of course all this “revealed wisdom” was postulated in the Dark Ages by male-only think-tank members known as the clergy.

The more ancient nature-based faiths were more scientifically astute and positively pro-life than have been the hierarchical, militaristic, and tyrannical religions of the western world through the last two/three millennia.  The degraded and maligned Pagan wisdom understood properly that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and all creation principles apply at every level—even in the situations in which individual life forms begin to manifest.   As in the manifestation of other matter-forms throughout the universe, until a definable prototypal form is energized it is simply substance which holds only the potential for matter development.  Human gestation was recognized to mimic these creation principles, so if they pondered over the when or at what stage self-awareness begins to evolve they would be instructed that it is not until the fourth month that a very imprecise awareness as self  is initiated.  It is at this stage of energy involvement, as an example, that sexual polarity is tentatively determined.  Once the developing energy-mass begins to take on unquestionable sexual identity, the will of life can be said to have been taken up.  Even so, the brain, where self-awareness guides the consciousness of life, is not even fully assembled until months after the infant body takes it first breath of life.  Indeed, the brain then grows to half its adult size by the age of six months, and this accelerated brain growth happens only once in life.

See also earlier postings, God Forgot to Say, March 28,2009; The Code of Life, April 1, 2009: RNA/DNA’s Covenant with Life, April 18; What’s in a Name?, April 26.                    The bulk of the above information is taken from The Celestial Scriptures, page 396, regarding lessons of life taught using constellation figures as a subject’s focus.

 

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