"Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine"
About this Quote
Coupland’s line lands like a grin in the middle of a biotech ethics panel. It takes the grand, thunderous premise often used to shut down scientific debate - God’s authorship of life - and flips it into a permissive loophole. If creation is divine IP, then cloning isn’t sacrilege; it’s just reproduction with better tools. The joke works because it mimics a certain everyday logic: the same people who invoke God to police boundaries also live comfortably amid copying machines, mass production, and digital duplication. Coupland is baiting that contradiction.
The subtext is less “cloning is fine” than “our moral arguments are often copy-pasted.” Religious language gets deployed as a kind of cultural kill switch: end the conversation by appealing upward. Coupland replies with a deadpan syllogism that keeps the God premise intact while sabotaging its conclusion. It’s satire as judo.
Context matters: Coupland comes out of late-20th-century North American consumer culture, a world of brands, replicas, and identity as an assemblage. His fiction is obsessed with how modern life turns people into versions of people - franchised selves, curated personalities, “originals” that are already composites. So the cloning quip isn’t only about lab science; it’s about the broader anxiety that authenticity is evaporating, and we’re improvising moral stories to keep up.
The sting is that the quote treats the sacred as a warranty, not a mystery. If God made it once, the argument goes, why would He care about the production run? That’s Coupland’s point: modernity has a talent for turning awe into policy.
The subtext is less “cloning is fine” than “our moral arguments are often copy-pasted.” Religious language gets deployed as a kind of cultural kill switch: end the conversation by appealing upward. Coupland replies with a deadpan syllogism that keeps the God premise intact while sabotaging its conclusion. It’s satire as judo.
Context matters: Coupland comes out of late-20th-century North American consumer culture, a world of brands, replicas, and identity as an assemblage. His fiction is obsessed with how modern life turns people into versions of people - franchised selves, curated personalities, “originals” that are already composites. So the cloning quip isn’t only about lab science; it’s about the broader anxiety that authenticity is evaporating, and we’re improvising moral stories to keep up.
The sting is that the quote treats the sacred as a warranty, not a mystery. If God made it once, the argument goes, why would He care about the production run? That’s Coupland’s point: modernity has a talent for turning awe into policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Doug
Add to List
