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From The American Atheist Volume 36 No. 2
http://www.AmericanAtheist.org/

Judæo-Christianity:
Reality-Challenged Religion

[Frank Zindler]
Frank R. Zindler
Judæo-Christianity, America’s established religion, once again is being attacked by reality - on both sides of its hyphen. Unfortunately, the Higher Superstition is so removed from reality that it may not even notice that there is a problem. As usual, we Atheists are probably the only ones aware of the absurd condition into which the credulous have been thrust by the material world.

On the Judæo side of the hyphen:
The Associated Press reported from Jerusalem on 17 January 1998 that Melody, thought to have been the first “red heifer” born on sacred soil in two millennia, is not going to be the harbinger either of the Jewish Messiah or of the restoration of Solomon’s temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (in a spot now occupied by an important mosque). Truth to tell, it seems that Rabbi Shmaria Shore (the cow’s owner) discovered some white hairs growing on the heifer’s tail. Oi weh! The white hairs can’t, of course, be simply signs of old age since a heifer, by definition, is a virgin cow and cows don’t usually stay virgins into old age. (Of course, Ultra-Orthodox Jews might find some reason to keep such a cow unmarried until some auspicious but late occasion when the bovina inviolata would be burned to produce the ashes needed for purification of Jews prior to their entry into the Jerusalem Temple.) However this may be, it appears that even a few white hairs are enough to spoil the Heap-Big Medicine of an incinerated red heifer.

Whether or not the white hairs of an old dowager cow would also trash the ashes is a question Ultra-Orthodox theologians need urgently to consider. Just where does the magic reside? Does the purification ash need to be the residue of melanin pigments themselves? Or would oxidized residues of genes coding for the production of the pigments be equally magical? Since neither the pure pigments nor their genes contain any elements capable of producing ash anyway, why insist that the heifer have qualities that don’t affect the ashes she can produce?

On the Christian side of the hyphen:
Right-to-Single-Celled-Lifers, the pope, and religiously backward people all over the globe maintain that a fertilized egg, or zygote, is a unique person - replete with a soul and the potential for taking a trip either to heaven or hell (or perhaps to limbo, if the single-celled person happens to be Roman Catholic). There are some surprising consequences of that belief, however. What happens when a fertilized egg (supposedly containing a single soul) splits into two separate cells, each of which becomes a separate fetus? Do we have one person and one soulless zombie? And what of identical quintuplets (five babies from one egg)? Fillet of soul?

But there’s a bigger problem. It is possible to take two fertilized eggs - each supposedly replete with a soul - and fuse them into a single composite organism. We can thus produce a baby with four parents. Even though it is only one person, it must have two souls if the religionists are correct! This is now a reality. Doctors in Scotland have just reported the birth of a human child which is a “chimera,” the result of fusion of two separate zygotes produced by in vitro fertilization. Although the doctors did not fuse the zygotes in the test tube, the fusion appears to have occurred after they were implanted in the uterus of the woman who later bore the child. That the child is indeed a chimera is proved by the fact that it is a genuine hermaphrodite, being both male and female simultaneously. About half of its cells have two X chromosomes and are genetically female. The other half of the cells have one X and one Y chromosome and are thus male. Clearly, the child (which in general looks like a male) is the result of fusion of a male zygote with a female zygote.

Theologically, this child must be a living nightmare for religionists who believe in the existence of that ectoplasmic entity called the soul. Does it have two souls? Will it have to be baptized twice - once for each soul? And what shall be done when the child grows up to become a sexually active being? If it behaves like a male, will its XX cells be guilty of sin when the body of which they are a part has intercourse with a female? If it behaves like a female, will the XY cells be sinning if it has sex with a male? And what about the resurrection? Will the sinning 50% of the body go to hell? Will only half a body go to heaven? Or will the entire chimera go to hell by reason of its very existence being “unnatural”? Inquiring minds want to know!

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