B. They are wrong about blood's life-giving power, i.e., "Life requires blood."
Dr. M.R. DeHaan:
Life, that mysterious something which scientists have never yet been able to define or fathom, is said by God to be in the blood of the flesh, so that there can be no life without the blood...
The Word of God is a living Word, wholly distinct from all other books for just one reason, namely, that it contains blood circulating through every page and in every verse...
Without the blood the Bible would be like any other book and of no more value, for the Bible plainly teaches that the life is in the blood...
Remember that the life is in the blood, and so if man must die it is because there is death in the blood...
Then man sinned... and HE DIED ...Since life is in the blood, when man died, something happened to the blood...
Since life is in the blood, all flesh is lifeless without blood.(45)
Dr. Jack Hyles:
It [the Bible] says He breathed into man the what? Breath of life. All right. What did Leviticus 17:11a say life is? "For the life of the flesh is in the &ldots;" what? Blood. So when Adam and Eve received the breath of life--that very moment when God breathed that breath of life into them he had to put blood in their bodies. Why? Because the life of the flesh is in the blood. So what did God do? He breathed into Adam the breath of life, but the Bible says the breath of life is caused by the blood so God put blood into their bodies and breathed into them the breath of life because the life of the flesh is in the blood.
...when Adam and Eve sinned, what happened to their blood? Death came to it. Sin affected the blood of Adam and Eve. Why? Because the life of the flesh is in the blood. If their blood was exactly the same blood that they had before they sinned, then they never would have died, but death came into their blood. It had to or they wouldn't have died!
...If something could be done to my blood to take the curse of sin out, my body would live forever.(46)
These people say that man lives because life is in his blood, and dies because death is in his blood. According to them, a living man has both death and life in his blood. Yet, we have several times taken the blood of a corpse and placed it into a man's body to keep him alive.(47), (48)
How can a man be kept alive with the "lifeless" blood of a corpse? If there were yet life in the corpse's blood, the corpse would still be alive. If there is not life in the corpse's blood, no one could live on it. Which can the Blood Indoctrinators choose? Perhaps people do not live due to a thing called "Life" in their blood. Perhaps the Bible only means that it is the action of the blood that supports the life of the body. That would explain how a dead man's blood could still keep us alive. Blood is the life of the flesh, but this does not mean there is something supernatural that gives blood this power.
If this is so, then it may be possible to sustain the life of the body without blood. As it turns out, we can live for a time without having blood.
The author was flipping through a modern chemistry text and saw an interesting paragraph on fluorine compounds:
Inconceivable as it may seem, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that animals (including humans) can survive after having had their blood largely, or even totally, replaced by such compounds dissolved in a salt solution. For example, "bloodless" rats, with their blood replaced by perfluorotri-n-butylamine, can live up to 5 hours in an atmosphere containing 50 percent oxygen...(49)
While the author does not claim that humans are simply animals, that doesn't change the facts of the case. Several humans have lived after their blood was removed. Some people had their blood drained out, and left out under special conditions, and then replaced an hour later. Some had it temporarily replaced with a blood substitute. In any event, there was no blood in their body, and they still lived. Yet, the Blood Indoctrinators insist that life exists only in blood. Although artificial blood would not yet make a good permanent replacement, the fact that we can live even a minute without our blood, or a known "elixir of life", shows that we do not live because of something unique, called "life," in our blood.
Nor is the above article the only record of bloodless life found by the author. In 1984, the author saw pictures of bloodless rats featured in a science journal. In 1990, he found the technical proceedings from a meeting of the AABB, in which the healthiness of bloodless rats was discussed.(50) One stunning photograph in that book showed two rats, one with artificial blood and one with natural blood, in a test chamber after an experiment. The chamber had been filled with a 50-50 mixture of carbon monoxide and oxygen, and the reactions of the rats in the chamber were observed. The rat with natural blood was dead within five minutes of breathing the toxic atmosphere. The rat with artificial blood was still walking in the chamber, next to the dead rat, and still breathing the normally-lethal atmosphere. This experiment demonstrated the ability of artificial blood to completely take over the oxygen-carrying function of blood, since any natural blood in the rats was rendered useless by the carbon monoxide. There was nothing in the artificial blood except what man put in it, and Life was not on the list of ingredients. The "phlogiston theory" of blood is disproved.
If sin is in the blood, and we could live forever if we had sinless blood, then we would live forever if we eliminated all our blood and replaced it with a blood substitute. We could kill the cells in our bodies that produce blood, flush out our bodies with artificial blood, and live hours or days or years without a drop of natural blood in our bodies. That would permanently remove both our blood and the supposed sin in it. We have the technology to do that. But we would still die eventually, because death and life and sin are not substances, but are descriptions of activities. Dr. DeHaan says that scientists cannot "define nor fathom" what life is. That's because life is not in the scientists' realm; it is a metaphor, the realm of philosophers. It takes more than perfect blood to bestow life on an individual.
We cannot eliminate sin simply by eliminating our blood, because sin is not in blood. We do not eliminate life simply by eliminating blood, because life is not in blood. They are metaphorical and cannot have any power on us of themselves. There is no sin in blood, and we don't die or live based on the moral qualities of our blood. Blood does not have inherent moral qualities. There is no substance called, "Life." The idea that is being preached by Dr. Hyles, Curtis Hutson, Bob Gray of Texas and many others is Gnosticism.
Doctor Harold Sightler, in his sermon, "Three Facts About the Blood," made a profound statement on this.
If your blood is healthy and normal, you don't have to worry about infection, nor about dying. Unless you are killed some other way, you are not going to die if your blood is healthy.(51) (author's emphasis)
Imagine that! "Unless you are killed some other way, you are not going to die if your blood is healthy!" That is not wrong, because it says nothing. He might as well say, "Unless you are killed some other way, you are not going to die if you don't get in an aircraft crash." A person will never die if he avoids aircraft &ldots; unless he dies some other way. Neither will a person die if his blood is healthy &ldots; unless he dies some other way. The Blood Doctrine is filled with--and supported by--such logical nonsense.
It should not be necessary to point out that one can die with healthy, normal, circulating blood. The author was a volunteer fireman/emergency responder; he saw people with healthy, normal circulating blood die. The first dead man the author ever touched was full of blood that was still healthy and alive and even warm. If that young man had not bounced on his head across a freeway at 90 mph, his healthy, living blood might have done him some good. There are also infections that do not cause a change in the blood, such as pneumonia and some forms of tuberculosis. One can even have healthy blood and cancer at the same time!
There is another interesting implication in the Blood Indoctrinator's reasoning. Blood Indoctrinators are largely anti-abortionists (as is the author). They belong to a group that claims that human life begins at conception. However, they also require blood to be in the body before there can be life in the body. The breath of life is only in the blood, you see. Yet, there is no blood in the human body for more than two weeks after its conception! This is illustrated in the following figures. Figure 1 illustrates the relative sizes of some human cells, including the sperm and egg cells. It should be obvious that not even a single blood cell could fit in the volume of a sperm cell; remember, though, blood isn't made from just a single cell, but many cells together. Figure 2 describes the process of formation and growth of the human from the time of its conception. Again, it should be obvious that during the time when the developing human body consists of only a few identical cells, there can't be any blood present within it, because blood is composed of many types of cells. Figures 3 and 4 graph the time of development for types of cells critical to blood formation. Figure 4 is a common chart found in several technical medical texts; I scanned this chart from Dr. Maxwell M. Wintrobe's, Clinical Hematology(52).
The human body, including the blood that will be in that body, begins with the sex cells of the parents. The sex cells do not contain any tissues, not even blood. The blood, like all the other tissues, will be manufactured by the new body, based on the information supplied by the chromosomes in that new body. It will be almost three weeks (19 days) after conception before the most primitive blood cells form. The chromosomes are the blueprint for the construction of the new human body, including the blood. They are supplied by the sex cells of the parents; that is the role that the sex cells play.
Figure 1. Relative Sizes of Human Cells
Figure 2. The Time of Bloodless Human Life
Figure 3. Age When Blood Forms
Figure 4. Locations and Times of Blood Component Formation
Figure 5. Blood Cell Differentiation History
The male sex cell is called the sperm cell, and it contains half of the chromosomes (23) that are in an ordinary human cell. The other half of the chromosomes must be supplied for a normal human to form, and they are supplied by the female sex cell, called the egg cell. The uniting of the sperm and the egg produces a single cell with 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. Therefore, at conception the human body consists of a single cell with half of its chromosomes from the father and half from the mother.
The logical deduction from that last fact is that at conception, there are no organs or tissues, such as the blood or the heart. Human blood consists of three major types of cells; erythrocytes (red blood cells), leukocytes (white blood cells) and thrombocytes (platelets). Within those categories are sub-types of cells: for example, granulocytes, monocytes and lymphocytes are cells classified as leukocytes. Even those sub-types can be sub-divided into more types of cells. A quick count shows that if the new human body had one cell of only the types mentioned so far, there would need to be five cells in the new human body. As there is only one cell immediately after conception, it is obvious that there is no blood in that new body.
The combination of the egg and sperm forms a very large cell called the zygote. Immediately after the sperm and the egg unite into a single unit, it begins to divide into smaller cells. After three days the single cell has become a solid ball of 16 cells, called a morula. The overall mass has not increased, even though the number of cells has. The solid morula begins to form a hollow center, at which time the morula becomes a blastula. The blastula is almost a symmetrical, hollow ball, except for a cluster of cells on one side. That group of cells is called the inner cell mass. It will eventually become the fetus, while the rest of the blastula will become part of the placenta.
These cells are identical to each other. In fact, experiments have indicated that any of those cells could be induced into becoming any of the types of cells in the human body. They can be moved to any position in the blastula without causing abnormalities. In fact, if some of the cells are separated from the blastula, they can form a second blastula; that makes identical twins. It has been a mystery for many decades as to why one cell, identical to all the others, will become a liver or stomach cell, while another will become a bone or blood cell. Once a cell converts from the generic state into a specific type of cell, through a process called "differentiation," they are no longer interchangeable.
While the embryonic body has been undergoing these changes, it has been gradually moving down one of the mother's fallopian tubes towards the uterus. The uterus has been preparing at the same time to receive the blastula. For a few days, the blastula floats freely in the uterus, but toward the end of the first week it sticks to the uterine wall. By this time it has greatly increased in mass and its cell number measures in the hundreds. Obviously, the logic given earlier, showing that blood could not be in the zygote, no longer applies. However, empirical evidence shows that there is still no hint of blood in the new body.
After the blastula sticks to the uterine wall, it etches its way deeper into the surface of the uterus, cutting across capillaries; this is the first contact with blood made by the new human body. Soon the embryo is in a pool of his mother's blood, which helps keep him alive until his heart can develop and begin pumping blood. The membrane that will allow the child to receive nourishment from his mother's bloodstream without allowing the entry of the mother's blood into the child begins to form at this stage. Until then, the mother and child are in direct contact with the same blood.
Soon after the blastula has burrowed into the uterine wall, it begins to develop a yolk sac. The yolk sac forms from some of the cells of the inner cell mass. Special cells appear inside this sac, forming clusters called islands. These cells are able to reproduce themselves as well as give rise to all the types of blood cells in a human. They are called (with some variation) totipotent stem cells. The totipotent stem cell had been hypothesized for decades, but an announcement of its discovery was made in November of 1991 by SyStemix Inc. Like the cells in the early blastula, they are identical, but they will differentiate into narrower categories of cells, called (again, with some variation) pluripotent stem cells. These will then differentiate into specific families of blood cells. See Figure 5 for a schematic representation of this process. This is the origin of human blood; first yolk sac, then stem cells, then blood cells. The human yolk sac does not form until after the blastula has implanted itself into the uterine wall.
Even though all of the cells that make up human blood come from the stem cells, they do not all appear at the same time. As mentioned, the first blood cells to form are the stem cells or hemocytoblasts, also known as the colony-forming unit (CFU). The first stem cells form colonies when the new body is two weeks old.(52) Erythrocytes (red blood cells), the cells that most people have in mind when they talk about blood, begin forming at 19 days.(53) For the rest of the pregnancy, and even after birth, the embryonic blood is still maturing into what we think of as blood. This was illustrated in Figures 3 and 4.
These are commonly-available facts, at least in schools with even a modest medical program. There is nothing resembling blood in the human body for about two weeks after conception. Yet, Fundamentalists are embarrassingly careless about what they say about inheritance and blood formation. For example, Sword of the LORD reported on an informational exhibit presented by Alternatives to Abortion Ministries. The Sword printed, without comment, the following quote from a mother of three who had visited the exhibit:
I didn't know their hearts were beating on their own from the moment of conception &ldots; I would have felt differently about my babies from the beginning if I had known that fact when I was pregnant...A woman considering an abortion would have to realize she'd be murdering her baby if she heard that fact.(54)
It is impossible for a person's heart to beat from the moment of his conception; he doesn't have a heart at conception! At conception, the human body is composed of only a single cell; it has no organs whatsoever--no heart, no lungs, no nerves, no intestines and no blood. It takes several weeks for those organs to form. For the Blood Indoctrinators to remain consistent, they must either abandon the idea that life begins at conception, or that life requires blood. They only hurt their credibility by dogmatically clinging to both.
Compare the weeks-long process of human blood formation with the account given by Dr. DeHaan:
...think of the egg of a hen. An unfertilized egg is simply an ovum on a much larger scale than the human ovum. You may incubate this unfertilized hen's egg, but it will never develop &ldots; But let that egg be fertilized by the introduction of the male sperm and incubation will bring to light the presence of LIFE IN AN EMBRYO. After a few hours it visibly develops. In a little while red streaks occur, denoting the presence of BLOOD. And life is in the blood according to Scripture...(55) (author's emphasis)
A woman's egg cell is quite different from a hen's egg cell. The major difference, in this case, is that avian eggs have a proportionally-large quantity of yolk already in the egg, whereas mammalian eggs have almost none. Before blood can form, there must be a yolk sac. Birds have a two-week head start on humans because of this. However, the Blood Indoctrinators, who did no research on this matter beyond what Dr. DeHaan claims, do not know these things. This is how they produce much of their sermon material; they find someone's sermons and illustrations to copy, and never check the facts. The author is condemned because he did check the facts, and found that the Blood Indoctrinators are wrong.
These Blood Indoctrinators don't have a shred of proof for their claims, yet they use them to support their doctrine. Doctors DeHaan and Hyles inferred these things, taking the Scriptures to a ridiculous extreme. How does Dr. Hyles know that he would live forever if his blood were "sinless"? What does that mean, anyway? What is sinless blood? Sin is an action, not a thing; it can't be in blood! Sinful and sinless blood exists only in the creative minds of Blood Indoctrinators.
Here is what Bro. Hyles and Dr. DeHaan said about the breath of God:
So when Adam and Eve received the breath of life--that very moment when God breathed that breath of life into them he had to put blood in their bodies.(56)
The breath of God put something in man that made him ALIVE. That something was blood. It must have been. It could be nothing else: for we have already shown that the life of the flesh is in the blood and so when life was added by the breath of God, He imparted blood to that lump of clay...(57)
This is quite different from the simple belief that God made blood in Adam's body at the same time and in the same way that He made the rest of the body. Some Blood Indoctrinators claim that blood is the vessel that contains the breath of life (i.e., blood contains a special substance that is Life), while others seem to think that the breath of life is blood. Obviously, these people consider there to be an irreplaceable something that is magical or supernatural in blood. Dr. DeHaan even said that although Adam's body was made of the ground, human blood is a special, separate gift from God.(58)
Despite Dr. DeHaan's claim that blood had to be in man's body before man could be alive, Bro. Hyles tells us that "His [Jesus'] resurrection body didn't have any blood in it. Neither will yours."(59) This contradiction of principles shows that even Blood Indoctrinators have the evidence that we do not have to have blood to be alive. A Blood Indoctrinator may protest that Christ's resurrected body was not made of flesh, to which one could respond that the Bible is not made of flesh, either, but they claim that it must have a flow of blood in it to be alive.
The Blood Indoctrinators claim that medical science has made certain claims. This book has shown that the claims of the Blood Indoctrinators is not supported by medical science. Furthermore, the Blood Indoctrinator's claims never were supported by medical science. The Blood Indoctrinators have deceived many people by their use of science. When the author has proven to them that they misused science, they have retorted that science cannot disprove the Bible. Some have told the author that they think this point is unimportant. However, if it's important enough for Fundamentalists to use science from the pulpit when supporting their claims (the quotes on the Blood Indoctrinator's supposed medical authority came from the Blood Indoctrinator's sermons), then it is important enough to object to basic scientific errors in what they are saying. It is wrong to use an illustration when the illustration is in error. Science may be wrong about blood, or it may be irrelevant to Christ's blood, but at least its claims should be fairly reported.
A more disturbing point is that these men distorted science apparently to prove an old, heretical belief. What these men preach is not new, as they would tell you. However, they would try to convince you that their odd beliefs are Biblical, when, in fact, they are cultic.
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