The Real You Can't Be Cloned

With the recent successful cloning of a six-year-old ewe in Scotland, and of monkey embryos in the United States, ethical questions concerning the possible cloning of humans have been raised.

Are we the sum total of our organic parts? If so, the expression "You're all wet!" would be very appropriate, as the human body is made up mostly of water. But spiritual identity-the eternal nature of each of us-is not made up of organic parts and cannot be cloned genetically. Our individual expression of God is preserved in the Mind that is God, and it is safe there. Nothing can alter this identity, improve upon it, or duplicate it.

In response to the ethical questions raised, tight moral and legal regulations on cloning have been urged. And it has been suggested that people need to be educated to think more about the nature of identity. There's much evidence that humankind has been emerging into a recognition that flesh and blood are not all there is to identity. Interest in spirituality and in healing through prayer hints at a growing desire to understand ourselves as something more than physical.

Long ago, Jesus Christ presented the spiritual, eternal nature that is true of each of us. According to John, he said of himself, "Before Abraham was, I am" (8:58). Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people, had been dead for almost two thousand years. Jesus was referring to his own nature as eternal. He recognized identity as spiritual, as in and of God. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy helps its readers understand the Bible's messages about the nature of God and His creation. It defines God by the synonym Life, as well as by Mind, Principle, Soul, Spirit, Truth, and Love. And it says, "The divine Mind maintains all identities, from a blade of grass to a star, as distinct and eternal" (p. 70).

Healing was integral to Jesus' mission on earth. He healed all kinds of physical maladies by spiritual means alone. Christian Science, the Science behind the healing and teaching of Jesus, was discovered by Mrs. Eddy in 1866, and it brought spiritual healing to this age. Many thousands of documented cases of healing have been related (supported by careful verification) in the Christian Science magazines over the past century. These all attest to our spiritual identity as forever intact.

Interest in genetics and cloning has resulted in large part from the noble desire to improve human life, to take the best to be found in animal and vegetable matter and perpetuate it for the good of the race. But Christian Science gives rise to a germane question for consideration: is cloning the way to go about improving the quality of human life? Whatever is made up of matter is necessarily limited in scope and nature, while that which is of God-that is, spiritual-is real and eternal.

The quality of our lives improves most assuredly under that regimen which strengthens our understanding of God-and therefore of ourselves. This involves thought. Healing and the general uplifting of the race are the inevitable result of spiritual understanding.

Those who study Christian Science learn that we all are essentially spiritual-the likeness of God; His offspring; the image of Love. Never are we more or less than God's individual expression. This can't be cloned.

The Christian Science textbook helps us further understand spiritual identity as never dependent on genes and chromosomes, as never determined by DNA: "God expresses in man the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis. Mind manifests all that exists in the infinitude of Truth. We know no more of man as the true divine image and likeness, than we know of God" (Science and Health, p. 258).

Your identity is perfect now, complete in God. This identity could never be cloned. There is no necessity for it to be. You exist eternally as God's individual spiritual expression.