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Re: Re:costs and benefits
SC ( 10/31/2003, 05:51:55 )The phrase "playing God" is used by people regardless of religion. I've heard atheists who sound like some religious people when they talk about cloning. You also write well and, in this latest post, have shown a bit of a poetic flair, which disguises your age to some degree. I didn't intend to insult your religion or your age, and until now, I've really been incapable of doing so, because I didn't know what they were.If you really want to do what you could do if you knew you could not fail, that's wonderful, but the post I replied to didn't allow me to see that. It came across to me as the post of someone who didn't follow your philosophy at all, because it was concerned almost entirely with ways people could fail. I confronted you about it, and now some of the brighter aspects of your personality seem to be emerging. I'm sorry if I did so in a way that was painful, but I was hurt reading your message too, and if pain is going to decrease, my experience is that it has to be understood and confronted. Yes, I'm going on very limited information in writing to you, but I'm doing the best I can.I don't hold it against you that you have emotions, particularly when you've just suffered the loss of someone close to you, but if there's a potential link between your opinions and the loss you've suffered, and other people don't know that, you're cutting yourself off from other people who could help you (and vice versa) because they have been through the same sorts of things you have. I've been posting on this board for a very short time, but the vast majority of words I've ended up writing have been to people who just lost somebody. The remainer of the words, for all I know, might have been in response to people who just lost somebody but didn't say so!I'm not a trained psychologist, and I won't pretend to know any of the details of your particular situation, but I think any relative of someone who has not just died, but to some degree, chosen to die, has a lot of difficult emotions to deal with. People can feel angry at a loved one who has died, because they didn't want the loved one to go away, and they can't help feeling hurt for at least a while. This is true even if there was nothing the loved one could do to keep from dying. I would expect that it would be even harder when the loved one chooses to die, at least initially. People could feel rejected and angry even while knowing that they had to respect their loved one's wishes. Under such circumstances, if a lifesaving technology were available and rejected, I think it's understandable that people feeling such things would see the loved one's ability to choose as the enemy, and lash out at the technology that made it possible. Someone might think, "So other people can cure their diseases and live as long as they want. What good is that to me? It's not going to bring back the one I lost!"In the long run, though, I would prefer the sense of closure that could come from knowing that someone I had loved had lived and died with choice and with dignity. I also want the chance to make my own life choices in a society where public policy has not been determined by people who are overwhelmed by grief, fear, and so on. Once again, your opinions on public policy may not have anything to do with grief, but people who post messages against cloning seem to be overcome by some negative emotion, and bereavement seems to come up often enough that I think it must be affecting at least some of them.
This Message is being posted for educational purposes, as well as for comment and criticism, by the visitors to the HumanCloning.org Foundation website (www.HumanCloning.org ).
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