Posted by
Dave Perkins on Friday, March 20, 2009 4:22:04 PM
A friend tricked me over the weekend... invited me to the lake for a weekend of fishing, then when we had eaten dinner and begun watching TV he whipped out "Religulous" and loaded the player. The other guys there wanted to see it, so I was stuck. :-)
Don't get me wrong, I can defend myself. In fact, my friend kept ending our discussion of it (to escape, mind you) by saying I should have my own talk show. :-)
Been there, done that. Maybe some day I'll feel like trying radio again, but thirty years of broadcasting and station ownership were enough for this go-round.
During the movie, which was largely about how smart Bill Maher is, and of course about how much SMARTER he is than anybody else in the movie, I did notice one thing---
He made a statement to one of his victims/subjects along the lines of 'a little bundle of cells isn't a human being'.
I challenge Mr. Maher to define what IS a human being. He won't. He will simply insist that something "without a brain, without arms or legs, without eyes and ears" etc is NOT a human being.
Now I know, as a 'religulous' man, that humanity is a characteristic given to each new person by God, invented by the creative mind of God before our own physical existence begins, and thus that we must consider any fertilized and dividing egg to be human because that is the defining moment at which physical 'existence' comes. Before fertilization, no person, just an egg and a sperm. After they meet, we see something NEW that sets off on its OWN path, eventually to be born, to grow up, to become an adult, to grow old and to die, and along the way perhaps to offer its own egg or sperm for that process to begin again.
But for Mr. Maher's sake, let's do the scientific thing. Let's ask precisely what it is about each person that gives them that 'thing' we call humanity, personhood, human-being-ness or whatever clever word the clever Bill might offer.
And that answer, strictly speaking, is DNA.
Each human being has a double helix of 'coding' that is responsible for every moment of change, every physical characteristic, every stage in the growth process of each person. We are software whose instructions are followed by the hardware of our bodies. Bill Maher and other supersmart guys should be able to get a handle on that.
Any scientist would agree that DNA is the one thing that makes each person unique, but also defines each as a person rather than a chimp or frog or bacteria.
Without questions of spirituality or religion (just as the megasmart Bill Maher would have it), we are considering only the physical, and we are asking 'at what point is it human?'
And I suggest to him that he's wrong, that the little bundle of cells IS in fact human.
You see, that little bundle of cells has unique DNA that is not its mother and not its father, but is him, uniquely him. It is the code that instructs his development. Inside his unique double helix is everything about what he will be at every stage of his life. Redhead or blond? Blue eyes or brown? Male or female? Six foot five or five foot six? Efficient metabolism or prone to weight gain? Millions of instructions that govern every physical trait, every change, even to (as some doctors believe) the general time of his death, through cellular telomeric degradation. It's all in there.
It's in the code.
and Mr. Maher? THE CODE IS THERE FROM THE MOMENT THE EGG IS FERTILIZED.
When it splits from one cell into two, the code is already at work, instructing each cell as to its next step.
So, Mr. Maher, you are dead wrong even from the 'nonreligulous' scientific viewpoint:
A bundle of cells IS a human being. PRECISELY that.
And if you disagree, then it's incumbent on you to say at what point the bundle of cells DOES become human, and what change causes that. Because you're always careful to dismiss the assertions of others, to say what it's NOT, and yet you never defend your knowledge of this subject by saying what a human being IS.
Bill Maher. Coward. Control freak. Bully. But.... not a true intellectual. He is an ideologue, a narcissist, and an immature person.
But a true intellectual always keeps asking, always seeks truth. Maher uses people who sometimes ARE true idiots and sometimes are simply caught by surprise, and makes them look stupid to make himself look smart. It is embarrassingly transparent to any real intellectual. But Maher, predictably, is far from embarrassed; he's comfortable, genial, basking in his own good opinion of himself.