The battle in Congress over human-animal chimera experiments highlights the gulf between communists and Democrats and Republicans on the distinctions and boundaries between humans, animals and God.

A Chinese-led research team injected human stem cells into monkey embryos and let the chimeric creature grow for 19 days before killing it. As avowed atheists, Chinese Communists do not believe that God created each of us human beings in His image, with inestimable worth incomparable to the animals He created, each “after their kind.”

Americans have long subscribed to the understanding of unalienable human rights as conferred upon us by our Creator. So when Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma offered an amendment to ban U.S. funding for human-animal chimeric research, one would have expected bipartisan, unanimous support for drawing a distinct moral boundary between animals and humans. 

Yet every single Democrat present voted down the amendment.

In the absence of faith, we are tempted to fill what Blaise Pascal described as a “God-shaped vacuum” by imagining ourselves as autonomous deities. We make our own rules and determine our own destiny—or so we imagine.

Scientists who are not deluded by a god complex note that creating chimeras and hybrids will enable diseases to cross species lines, bypassing normal barriers and resistance, imperiling both the individual and the species. Further, transferring genes encoding disease may cause novel virulence, or create new diseases, gravely threatening the host species and public health.

The ancients, who unlike some modernists believed that divine authority lay outside of themselves, cast chimeras as monstrous creatures to be feared and avoided. We should take the same view and ban the abominable.