Why are people scared of cloning in a secular society?

Question

If life has no meaning, do clones just creep us out or do we think there's something unethical about it? Doesn't add up?

Answer 1

First of all, it's been my experience that most of the opposition to cloning comes from the religious sector of society. Many feel that it is somehow "playing god". (I wonder if these same people felt that it was "playing god" when we eliminated smallpox.)

Second, where do you get that life has no meaning in a secular society? Life, if anything, has more meaning when it's not burdened by religious tyrannies. Secular societies also tend to be more culturally diverse and to have broader worldviews, which can only add to the value of life.

Of course there are some on the left who oppose cloning too. Most of that opposition seems to be either the creepiness factor, or, as is the case with the left's fear of genetically modified foods, simple ignorance of the processes involved.

From a strictly _scientific_ point of view, I am opposed to _human_ cloning, but only because the process is still being fine-tuned and as such is too risky for humans. I'm all for cloning animals though; if some farmer manages to create a really fantastic specimin of cattle, why shouldn't society be able to benefit from having more of it? And humans have actually been cloning various plants for centuries--every time you cut off a shoot from a plant or tree, what grows is a genetic twin of the original.

There's nothing inherently unethical about cloning in general, but I think it would be unethical to try to clone a human before we become more advanced at cloning other (non-human) animals.

Answer 2

First of all, to say that society is secular is something of a stretch. The vast majority of the world believes in some kind of supernatural "higher power". The secularism is simply our distinction between our religions and our laws (and even this is not a distinction made in many countries).

Secondly, secularism is NOT the view that life has no meaning. That is called Nihilism, and it is by no means the prevailing view.

As far as cloning is concerned, a lot of people oppose it because they're confused about what a clone is. A clone is a second person with the same genetic code as an existing person. This occurs often in nature, in the form of identical twins. However, a lot of people think that a clone is some kind of copy of a person, not just an identical twin with their own identity.

There is also, among both religious and non-religious people, a high level of respect for natural means of reproduction. While we do have artifical methods of causing pregnancy, all of these methods still include a man's sperm being used to fertilize a woman's egg. We are not comfortable taking these essential parts out of the reproductive equation, because to do so seems like a way of overstepping our bounds, and meddling with nature in a stronger way than we feel justified in doing. This is the same reason why a lot of people oppose genetically engineering children- we would rather take a real person's sperm and egg and take our chances on the kind of child we will get than genetically engineer human beings. We have a deep rooted respect for nature (despite our constant abuse of it) that prevents us from liking the idea of toying with it at this level.

Answer 3

Secular... a non-secular government might discover a thank you to restrict South Park and proceed letting the actual physique of Terri Schiavo sit down up and drool so that they might experience righteous. that could make television boring and we ought to might desire to pass to prayer circles... and the bars might probably serve kool-help and characteristic crappy Christian rock playing all of the time whilst weird and wonderful finding those with genuine diverse areas of their hair say issues like "it incredibly is somewhat neat! God bless our neato society!" please God, do under no circumstances permit this ensue

Answer 4

There has always been one great fear and the power structure has tried to dissuade the production of clones because of it. THE CLONE ARMY.

Answer 5

b/c some people view it as humans playing god... i don't agree with it but everyone's entitled to their own opinion, i suppose!