The Cost of Superstition

Frank R. Zindler

A familiar bumper-sticker declares, “If you think education is expensive, consider the price of ignorance.” It might better refer to the cost of superstition, since superstition is the main source of the ignorance for which education should be the cure. Readers will be well aware of the fact that it was the superstition known as Christianity that killed the science of Greece and Rome, creating the Dark Ages and thwarting for a thousand years or more all attempts of science to be reborn. Whenever a person dies of cancer, the Catholic Church must bear the blame: for centuries it forbade the dissection of the human body and did everything in its power to block the development of scientific medicine.

The baleful influence of superstition did not end with the dawning of the Renaissance. It works overtime yet today to bar human progress — to maintain or even increase the misery of travelers on this spaceship we call Earth. The superstition industry is big business - perhaps the biggest one there is — and its cost is immense.

Consider the human price we pay because so many people believe in the superstition of souls - undetectable, ectoplasmic, immortal entities thought to make a living body a person. This is the superstition which, held with the fanatical fervor that only religion can engender, has led people to assassinate and maim doctors, nurses, and others who provide abortion services. If it were not believed that a single cell — the fertilized egg or zygote — had a soul and was therefore a person on par with the mother who harbors it, who could consider the destruction of a single cell murder?

But the terrorist acts of Right-to-Single-Celled-Lifers are only the most visible cost of the soul superstition. The real cost is probably incalculable because it is the cost of opportunities lost, the cost of discovering and applying truth later than necessary.

Because most members of Congress believe in the soul superstition, they long ago banned the use of federal funding for research on human embryos or tissues derived from them. By Congressional fiat, every embryo or fetus that is aborted or stillborn must die in vain. Humanity must learn nothing from such brief exercises in metabolism. Living persons who can think and suffer must not be helped by tissues that might or might not have become human beings: actuality must not profit from potentiality. Give those hollow blastocysts a decent Christian burial! They’re human beings and in need of baptism! The progress they could promote in medical science is not to be considered. Souls take precedence over science.

Recently, several breakthroughs in medical research once again have focused attention on embryo research and its supposed moral dimensions. Without the use of federal moneys, researchers belatedly have learned how to isolate human "stem cells" from left-over blastocysts produced by in vitro fertilization (such as might be carried out in a fertility clinic) and from the germinal tissues of early aborted embryos. Cultured in the laboratory, these cells form “immortal” cell lines that not only can reproduce themselves indefinitely, they are capable of differentiating into any tissue of the human body. Potentially, they could be used to replace lost brain cells, heart muscle, kidney tubules, etc. But, being only a small number of cell divisions away from fertilized eggs, these embryonic stem cells are just as likely as identical quintuplets to contain souls!

Perhaps to avoid the controversy certain to arise from using stem cells stemming from abortion or “unnatural” fertilization, other scientists have succeeded in producing the equivalent of stem cells from ordinary cells of the human body - for example, oral epithelial cells of the sort you scrape off your gums whenever you brush your teeth with vigor. Then, just as in cloning à la Dolly, such cells are fused with an unfertilized egg from which the nucleus has been removed. In this case, however, the donor cell is human and the unfertilized egg is that of a cow! The cow cytoplasm “rejuvenates” the human nucleus. The hybrid cell, when cultured, forms stem cells which — like those taken from human embryos, are potentially able to produce “spare parts” to replace tissues and organs lost due to ravages of age or disease.

When President Clinton - an acknowledged authority in the area of morals and ethics - heard about the miscegenation of species, he was “deeply troubled.” As Moralist-in-Chief and believing in human souls — but not believing in bovine spirits - he immediately ordered the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to consider the implication of research that gives the lie to the notion that humans somehow are a “special creation.” Of course, human cells were fused with mouse - and even chicken cells — more than twenty years ago, and religionists still haven’t gotten the message. Now, however, when something good or useful might result from such “chimeric” life forms we can expect the voices of superstition to demand a halt to medical progress. Once again, like King Canute, they will bid the advancing wave of science to stay and come no further. Unfortunately, they will also try to stem the rising tide with legislative prohibitions.