Should Christians have an opinion about cloned beef?
This has been a red-hot topic recently with the FDA ruling that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe. The FDA spent 6 years studying the meat, muscle tissue, and milk from cloned animals and determined they are "as safe as food we eat every day." There is currently no provision to label cloned meat/milk, so we could begin consuming this food without knowing it.
Does that bother you? Should it?
The FDA was focused on safety...some scientists and consumer groups say cloned beef is unethical. Is there Scriptural support for one position vs. another?
Does that bother you? Should it?
The FDA was focused on safety...some scientists and consumer groups say cloned beef is unethical. Is there Scriptural support for one position vs. another?
posted by Matthew at 9:52 PM
4 Comments:
I think most of all i object to the attitudes of most of the scientists in the articles that anyone that opposes the unyielding progress of technology is immediately labeled a Luddite whose opinion no longer counts or matters. Since when has science or more accurately labeled modernism screamed so arrogantly? It would seem that part of our role as cultivator's of creation is to ensure its diversity, uniqueness, and sustainability long-term which doesn't seem as clear as the purely consumeristic motives of production. But then again would this be a step towards ending world hunger, etc? We might be back to another ends/means talk..
Before we get to ends/means, the question I keep asking myself is: "How much should we inject ourselves into God's natural order?" Is there a difference between medicine, genetically modified food, cloned beef or cloned humans? Are any or all of them acceptable extensions of the role God gave us in Creation?
Matt,
In response to your question of natural order and cloning, I will pose two more questions.
1. How can we be sure that cloned humans would be 'made in the image of God?' I'm one that believes the 'image' of God is a spiritual-ness, not physical.
2. How can we be sure that cloned animals and humans are not part of God's planned, natural evolution of life?
Obviously, these are nearly impossible to answer, if not totally impossible, but I thought they'd make good discussion.
I came across something that might be relevant to the discussion that came from a review of the film Gattaca which essentially is a remake of Huxley's Brave New World. Essentially dealing with the assumption that if we can "improve" humans, animals, etc why shouldn't we..
"Traditionally the goal of medicine from a Christian perspective has been redemptive. Disease isn’t simply a biological problem; it is a moral one, the result of sin. So for the same reason we preach the gospel, we also fight the Asian Bird Flu epidemic, recognizing in it yet another facet of the curse sin has brought on the world. In secular circles this is described as “therapeutic”—i.e., ‘relating to the treatment of disease’—rather than “redemptive”, but the concept is similar. However you say it, under the old paradigm the goal of medicine was to fix what is broken.
Three factors are changing this goal: technology, social pressures, and the loss of a Christian theological framework. Technology long ago gave made us capable of more than merely repairing what is broken. We’ve had the power to dispose of the deformed— e.g., the amnio-centesis test enables us to detect Downs Syndrome in an unborn child and to dispose of him via abortion before birth —and the unwanted—e.g., in India the same test is used to detect and dispose of fetuses whose only fault is that they are girls—since the 1970s. And we’ve used it.
Our society’s heroes embody our values. We idolize the attractive, the athletic, and the intelligent and reward them with riches and positions of power and responsibility. So each year parents spend billions of dollars on cosmetic surgery, coaches, and tutors for their children in hopes of enhancing these qualities in them. In market terms this constitutes a demand looking for what biotechnology promises to supply. In medicine this creates the demand for a new paradigm. We want it to do more than merely repair what’s broken. We want it to make us better. The final argument in the minds of many against the old medical paradigm is that it is both artificial and unsatisfying. Artificial in that we have no idea of what “wholeness” looks like. Unsatisfying, because even physical near-perfection isn’t enough. It’s here, I think, that we feel the loss of a biblical framework most keenly."
It seems difficult then to pre-dict things like Tuskegee, Mengele, etc in our own time then...
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