love my Kindle

I've finally figured out how to share passages from what I read on Kindle with my Facebook "friends." (Some of them will be my enemies if they actually bother reading what I've posted.)

Souls: This has been on my mind today regarding abortion, which has been a topic on FB ever since the holier-than-thou conservatives started trying to gut funding for Planned Parenthood. There is no soul. Recently my cousin Walt said that regardless of whether Mama went to church or prayed, she "still had a soul." That statement presupposes that one believes in souls. I don't. I believe that consciousness is a physical product of biological actions. Without physical life, without a functioning consciousness, there is nothing else, nothing "spiritual." So if I apply that to conception, this is what results. A fertilized egg does not have consciousness. It doesn't have a brain to produce the biological conditions required for consciousness. Thus, a fertilized egg has no soul.

God does not endow a fertilized egg with a soul because there is no deity. But even if there were, I recall an essay written years ago by one of my Honors Students at Mizzou. She argued that if the fertilized egg had a soul, and that fertilized egg then divided into identical twins, as sometimes happens, which twin gets the soul? Or does God (who ought to have known in advance, being omniscient and all, that he needed to provide TWO souls) suddenly pop back in and add in another soul? It would be really wasteful to provide a soul to each fertilized egg since many, many fertilized eggs never make it as far as implantation. Most sexually active women have had the experience of having their periods a few days or couple of weeks late, thinking that they simply had a late period, when in actuality, the fertilized egg failed to implant properly and thus the pregnancy never "took," so to speak. Does God pull the soul back to recycle it into another fertilized egg? If so, that alone would keep him busy night and day. No wonder he has no time to prevent wars, genocides, pandemics, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, murders, etc. He's too busy recycling unused souls. Given the world's population of 6 billion plus, he's busier now than ever before. And what are these souls made of? Does heaven possess its own little soul factory, clicking out souls like Keebler clicks out chocolate-chip cookies?

No. There is no soul. While I don't like the idea of abortion, simply because I prefer the more reasonable act of using birth control to prevent pregnancy, pregnancy does happen to women even if they don't want it to. Or, maybe they DO want it to happen, but then tests reveal that their fetus has serious health issues, such as the lack of a brain. You can give birth to a baby that lives for a few hours, maybe even a few days, but if that baby has no brain, it isn't a person. It's really nothing more than a person-shaped blob of flesh. We could make a baby shape out of hamburger meat, and it would have the equivalent soul potential.

Or maybe, as in the case of my friend Jackie, a rare blood problem means that she must never have another baby. She nearly died having Calvin, and if he hadn't been rushed to a really excellent specialized hospital for a total blood transfusion, he would have died. Her doctors have told her she must not ever get pregnant again. But she's young--mid 30s. She's not going to give up on sexual activity. She hasn't said what she and her husband have done, but I'm sure they've taken permanent steps to end reproduction. If she had lived elsewhere, without access to excellent medical care, she might have had Calvin, he would have died, she might have died, but if she hadn't, she might have tried again to have another baby.

Or what about the case that happened to the wife of a man I used to work with, and that has happened to other women I've heard about, like my cousin Micki? The fetus dies before it is viable.

I've been wondering about these new procedures that allow doctors to operate on babies before they are born. How do they administer anesthesia to these babies? Or do they?

We know that the ability to feel pain can be compromised by brain damage. It seems logical to believe that the ability to feel pain does not occur until the fetus has enough of a developed brain to have a working nervous system. I don't know when that occurs, but I would not think that a fetus would have a working nervous system before a couple of months' gestation. I need to go back and review fetal development before I make up my mind on this one. It's just something I was pondering. But let's assume that in the early weeks (maybe the first trimester?) of fetal development, there is no nervous system beyond a few basic ganglions or whatever they're called. There is no working, functioning consciousness. Thus, there is nothing like a "soul." If abortion ends the development of a collection of cells that does not yet have consciousness, then a person has not died. It's sad, yes, if you think of that fetus as a potential person. But we cannot act as if everything that is "potential" is already with us. That would not be logical. I might potentially have a third car one day, so maybe I should hire a contractor to add a third garage stall to my house. I might potentially win the lottery, so maybe I should get myself a good tax lawyer to handle all my (potential) riches.

Yes, a fertilized egg might be considered more than "potential," possibly "probable." Even so, it is probable that I will eat supper tonight, but that doesn't mean I should spend all afternoon thinking about and planning for that meal. And something might easily occur to cause me to miss eating supper.

Anyway. I love the Kindle. I'm glad I got it, even if it means that I waste a lot of time reading and posting stuff to Facebook when I ought to be doing other things.