Morality??

   Feeling love and caring for others should be  one of the greatest sources of our own happiness, it entails a very deep concern for the happiness and suffering of those we love. Our own search for happiness, therefore, provides a rationale for self-sacrifice and self-denial. There is no question that there are times when making enormous sacrifices for the good of others is essential for one's own deeper well-being. Nothing has to be believed on insufficient evidence for people to form bonds of this sort. At various points in the Gospels, Jesus clearly tells us that love can transform human life. We need not believe that he was born of a virgin or will be returning to earth as a superhero to take these teachings to heart.

One of the most pernicious and divisive effects of religion is that it tends to separate concepts of  morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. In point of fact, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral—that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians evidence more concern and expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why some are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why many can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. They believe that their religious concerns about sex have something to do with morality. And yet, efforts to limit and define the sexual behavior of consenting adults are rarely geared toward the relief of human suffering. In fact, relieving suffering seems to rank rather low on the list of priorities. The principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery contributes daily and in huge measure to the surplus of human misery.

Consider human papillomavirus (HPV),  the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States. HPV infects over half the American population and causes nearly five thousand women to die each year from cervical cancer; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that more than two hundred thousand die worldwide. We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be both safe and effective. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the six thousand women who received it as part of a clinical trial, yet Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging teens to abstain from having sex. But we know, beyond any doubt, that teaching abstinence alone is not a good way to curb teen pregnancy or the spread of sexually transmitted disease. In fact, kids who are taught abstinence alone are less likely to use contraceptives when they do have sex, as many of them inevitably will. One study found that teen "virginity pledges" postpone intercourse for eighteen months on average—while, in the meantime, these virgin teens were more likely than their peers to engage in oral and anal sex. American teenagers engage in about as much sex as teenagers in the rest of the developed world, but American girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant, to have a baby, or to get an abortion. Young Americans are also far more likely to be infected by HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rate of gonorrhea among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their peers in the Netherlands and France. The fact that 30 percent of our sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than $200 million a year) surely has something to do with this.

The problem is that many monotheistic believers are not principally concerned about teen pregnancy and the spread of disease. That is, they are not worried about the suffering caused by sex; they're  worried about sex. Reginald Finger, an Evangelical member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recently announced that he would consider opposing an HIV vaccine—thereby condemning millions of men and women to die unnecessarily from AIDS each year—because such a vaccine would encourage premarital sex by making it less risky. This is one of many points on which religious beliefs become genuinely lethal.

    Qualms about embryonic stem-cell research are similarly obscene. Here are the facts: stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer therapeutic break-throughs for every disease or injury process that human beings suffer—for the simple reason that embryonic stem cells can become any tissue in the human body. This research may also be essential for our understanding of cancer, along with a wide variety of developmental disorders. Given these facts, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the promise of stem-cell research. It is true, of course, that research on embryonic stem cells entails the destruction of three-day-old human embryos. This is what worries you.

Consider the details. A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell's potential is devoid of merit.

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? If this and similar issues are troubling, then don't have an abortion and don't ever, ever, benefit from any medical advances "stemming" from stem cell research.

The nice thing about living in a free society is that we all should have the right to do or not do what we find morally acceptable or repugnant. The problem is that there are those who would impose their framework of morality upon us all because they have all the answers and feel duty bound to force us to do as they say. The human toll of this thinking has spawned the Inquisition, the Crusades, The 911 attacks, lynchings across the South, The genocidal attempts of Columbus, Hitler, Milosovic, et al.

     In summary, the next time you want to legislate your version of morality to the entire body politic, consider that those whose beliefs differ from yours have as much right to disbelieve (and more proof) than you do.