What The Bible Teaches About Cloning

For example, as Christians:

• We can not allow others to do our thinking for us when it comes to deciding what is RIGHT and what is WRONG.

• We can not just ignore these issues we face and hope they will go away.

Through the ages of time, God’s people have had to face difficult situations in society head on. Then they had to take a stand for what they believed would please God, whether it was popular or unpopular.

Whether or not cloning should be allowed, is becoming a heated battle across this country.

Since Scottish scientists reported the cloning of a sheep named "Dolly," in 1997, new research into cloning has grown rapidly -- as has the ethical controversy surrounding the procedure.

Many religious groups are concerned about cloning, but so are many politicians.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, from Texas, also called for a ban on cloning. He told Fox News Sunday, "I think this is a nasty business, something that we should not be messing in."

WHAT IS DRIVING THE ISSUE OF CLONING?

The answer to that question would depend on who you ask, but several things can be considered.

(1) There is a group in this country that is anti-Bible. If the Bible teaches against something, you can rest assured that they are for it. If God is for it, you can also rest assured that they are against it.

(2) We have Scientists across this nation, that know that if they can persuade the general public that cloning is in the best interest of mankind, they will receive millions of dollars in grants, to allow them to do research in their labs.

Some might say that the driving force behind cloning is for the good it will do.

That is an invalid argument, because any good they speak of can only be based on unproven speculation.

Basically, you can say EVIL and MONEY are driving the issue of cloning.

WHAT IS CLONING?

One of the best ways to explain what cloning is would be to compare it to how a copy machine works.

If you see something you like and you want a copy of it, you go to the copy machine and put the original copy in the machine. Soon you will have a duplicate of the original.

As we look at cloning, we need to consider two things:

(1) SOME QUESTIONS

Cloning has raised some serious QUESTIONS that need to be answered, such as:

• Are those who promote cloning taking the work of God into their own hands? Those who promote cloning say this is not the case, but as we examine the issue of cloning, this seems to be exactly what they are doing. This is something that ungodly men have always desired to do; to play God. After all, isn’t this what the devil tried to do in heaven? Those who are servants of Satan are following the same path that he followed.

• When God creates a person, God puts a soul within each person that will live for eternity. If evil man can clone a person, the question needs to be asked, “Will that person have a soul?”

(2) SOME PROBLEMS

Cloning has raised some serious PROBLEMS that need to be addressed.

• When cloning takes place, some say that rights will be deprived, because if natural reproduction were to occur, genetic variation would occur. Cloning would deprive a person of uniqueness. They argue that identical twins are not unique from each other, but that they are new in genetic variation and unique from anything that came before them. But while we call them identical twins, they are not identical. They have many similarities, but they are not identical. If they were identical, their parents would not be able to tell them apart.

• People also wonder what mental and emotional problems would result, if a clone were to find out that he or she was cloned. That is, if a person is cloned they have no mother.

For example, Scientist Ian Wilmut, led a team of researchers at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, to see if they could be the first to clone a mammal. What they accomplished was to make, in effect, an exact duplicate of a sheep. Dolly is a "carbon copy" of another sheep. In reality she has no mother. She is her "mother's" identical twin, not her mother's daughter. What Wilmut and his team accomplished, was cloned from a cell that was not a reproductive cell.

Can you imagine how someone being born as the result of cloning, like Dolly, would be able to cope with this emotionally? She is her mother’s identical twin, not her mother’s daughter.

• We certainly need to ask ourselves, if the cloning of humans were to take place, who would be in charge of making decisions regarding who will be cloned?