We know that, despite the claims of Peg and her literal reading of the Bible, blood has no special connection to life any more than the other myriad components of the human body. "The life" is no more "in the blood" than it is in the breath, or the lymph, or the cerebro-spinal fluid, all of which are also required for human life.
There is no magic wishy-washy "life force," in the blood or otherwise. This is a decidedly primitive view of life taken from a culture with only the most basic understanding of life and the human body. It's not a reflection of some profound truth, or even a miraculous "scientific" revelation from God. It's the result of the simple observation that sufficient blood loss causes death, and the extrapolation that blood must therefore be "special." Remember, in the remaining context of the Bible, blood is treated differently than other body parts or fluids - Jesus' blood is supposed to wash away sins; God demands animal blood sacrifice in the Old Testament.
But today, we know that life is not a magical energy field, or ethereal mist contained in living things. "Life" is simply a specific and complex set of self-replicating chemical processes; interruption of those chemical processes causes death, and that interruption can be caused through myriad ways, not limited to simply removing all blood from an animal.
Putting blood into an inanimate object does not give it life.
Most living things on the planet (plants, bacteria, insects, crustaceans, etc) do not have blood at all.
Human tissue can survive without blood given a substitute nutrient substrate (which is how we grow skin grafts and cell cultures).
Even the Bible seems conflicted, because in Genesis it seems that life is in breath:
quote:
Genesis
2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
...
7:22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
We know, of course, that there is no mystical "breath of life" either - but this demonstrates that the Bible is not making a profound revelation of scientific information when it says "the life is in the blood;" rather, it is promoting a
common primitive view of what life is.
You cannot live without blood. But you also cannot live without your kidneys, or your liver, or your lungs, or your heart, or your immune system, or your lymphatic system, or your brain, or your spine, or your skeleton, or your skin, or your digestive system...
There is nothing special about blood relative to any of these other systems. The Bible is simply, flatly, incorrect, as would be expected of a text written by people with no real understanding of what constitutes life.