Ethics is a discipline tragically in decline as our culture spirals into paganism. The fact that educated, degreed medical doctors see nothing inherently wrong with surgically mutilating children and chemically castrating them is barbaric evidence. Aaron Kheriaty, MD penned a timely, disturbing essay here entitled “Zombie Bioethics”, warning that we are rapidly becoming moral zombies. To wit, he cites a recent article in the prestigious MIT Technical Review entitled “Ethically sourced ‘spare’ human bodies could revolutionize medicine.” The article goes on to describe the macabre possibility of “growing” what the article terms “bodyoids”, a subhuman born from a human mother and genetically engineered to provide spare body parts. The authors of the article admit that many will find the prospect of bodyoids disturbing, but they argue that a “potentially unlimited source” of “spare” human bodies will be immensely useful and should be pursued.”

Kheriaty provides some background,

“Long before ethicists began to contemplate living—or at least, undead—human creatures who lack all brain function, such entities were explored in science fiction and horror films. The precise name for such a creature is zombie. The concept has roots in Haitian folklore, where the term is zonbi, referring to a person who has been brought back from the dead through magical means to serve as a mindless slave. The problem with creating zombies, our stories suggest, is that they always come back to bite us. Creating them ­diminishes our humanity . . . advocates of bodyoids, which would similarly lack all brain function, do not argue that a bodyoid is dead—merely that it is not human. Bodyoids are of interest precisely because they are living and human in all scientifically relevant respects. To their credit, the Stanford authors do mention the following danger: “Perhaps the deepest [ethical] issue is that bodyoids might diminish the human status of real people who lack consciousness or sentience”—such as those in a coma or babies born without a cerebral cortex (a severely disabling condition known as anencephaly).”

God help us. Kheriaty concludes with this sobering warning, “we would endorse this macabre project only if we ourselves had become, so to speak, moral zombies.”

The church has historically divided its teaching into three areas: (1) theology (what to believe), (2) ethics (how to act), and (3) apologetics (why to believe). If we discard ethics and apologetics, we leave people only with theology without any inkling why they should believe or how theology has practical application in the real world. In essence, we remove two of the legs of a three-legged stool. The catastrophic result is inevitable. The church has a responsibility to be the moral conscience of the culture. When the church downplays ethics and fails to sound the alarm whenever the culture is walking off a moral cliff, we abrogate our God-given charter and should not be surprised at the horrific end result.