If you stop obeying God you go all wrong
The Bishop of Lichfield explains about embryos.
It’s a very important part of our society and a very important part of the Christian faith that you should have respect for human embryos.
Is it? How does that play out in real life? Where in our society do we see respect for human embryos being performed or exemplified? What does it look like? What does it make happen? Do embryos enroll in school? Do they get promotions? Do they take part in athletic competitions? Do they win prizes? Do they run for office? In what situations do people get an opportunity to show respect for them, and what is it that the respect respects?
And in what sense is that respect a very important part of the Christian faith? Where does that come from? Where is it written? How long has it been the case? What is it based on? Anything? Did Jesus say anything about it? Did (even) Paul? Did Augustine? Tertullian? Aquinas? Luther?
To be blunt, I don’t think that is a very important part of the Christian faith, I think it’s a recently invented rule that some Christians have made an enormous fetish of for the simple reason that there is nothing much else they can make a fetish of because they’ve been superseded. We don’t need Christianity in order to work for human rights or equality or animal rights or justice or peace or benevolence. There is little room left for Christians to exercise moral scrupulosity, so they have to find little neglected corners that are neglected because they are in fact bogus. So the poor sad underemployed Christians trundle around finding embryos and cells to protect, since real people with real needs can be protected by atheists just as well as by theists. It’s sad for them. Soon they’ll be making ethical fusses about molecules and atoms.
If you stop obeying God you start to limit the rights of human beings and this is a case in point.
Oh really. Whereas people who do obey God never limit the rights of human beings, as we see every day. Well done, bishop.
You know what? I think you got it spot on here, OB. There is a need for the religious, and maybe especially Christianity, to differentiate themselves from the secular society that too often surrounds them, that is often more moral, more open and more tolerant than they are.
So they are creating, out of thin air and old texts, new rights and morals they can claim as exclusively their own.
Witness the pope’s new deadly sins…
http://www.christian.org.uk/issues/2007/hte_bill/index.htm
I agree with Arnaud, but did you notice something else. All the Anglican bishops are carving out the same niche already occuped by the romam catholics. Can that just be a coincidence?
And, in response to Ophelia, are they not already making an issue out of molecules? This is molecular biology, after all. They’re not going to cross human’s with pigs or chickens. They’re gonig to splice human genes into animal genomes, to be able to study the human genome in animal subjects instead of human. That’s the way I understand it. Is that wrong?
Do they alreay have it up on the Church of England website? I haven’t looked, but the assistance in dying matter was there in living colour. All that officials were saying, all that lowly church members could do to bring a stop to such a monstrous advance in human compassion.
Revd John P Richardson say: “Dr Mengele, I presume?” http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/
Eric, yes, quite right – of course I meant all the other molecules. Soon they’ll be making ethical fusses about dust, scurf, ashes, pollen, lint.
“Soon they’ll be making ethical fusses about dust, scurf, ashes, pollen, lint.”
I can’t help but be reminded of that bon mot a few months back about “a god who fits in the sock drawer”. I guess god is getting lost in the dryer now.
The claim that there should be respect for human embryos is consistent with the Catholic belief that human life begins at conception. The natural question that arises for me is when does a human embryo become a human? At what point do we consider it more than just a group of cells but rather a human with rights?
I’m somewhat partial to what is written in the Babylonian Talmud which grants a newborn the status of a human once the “greater part” (i.e. head) has exited the womb. The distinction is made in the Talmud to provide guidelines as to whose life takes precedence when there is a pregnancy at risk. Until the baby is born, it is the mother’s life. It is a bit more complex than this, I can provide more details and references upon request.
Aside from these two religious positions (conception and birth) I’ve seen a few other suggestions: first heartbeat, first brainwave, viable outside the womb, etc.
What are your thoughts? This strikes me as an important political and philosophical question. Perhaps human status should be conferred once the person has enrolled in school, taken part in an athletic competition, won a prize, or ran for office.
Hmm. Though a philosopher by trade, I think I’ll ignore Jeff’s philosophical question not out of any insult to Jeff, but simply because I think OB’s motivational question is more to the point: Abortion as a religio-political football is strictly an artifact of the latter half of the 20th century, and anyone who thinks that is strictly for medical-technological reasons is sorely misled. The modern conservative religious obsession with the fetus and embryo is definitely about more than the mere fact that we now have more ways of manipulating them: After all, where are the massive Christian protests against fertility technology?
Believe it or not, clues lie in the Bible. In the Old Testament, accidentally or deliberately causing a pregnant woman to miscarry was treated as a property crime against the father, not any kind of grave sin. (In the New Testament, it is simply not treated in any way whatsoever.) In fact, all the Old Testament laws having to do with women, marriage, and sexuality are structured by a common theme and aim – to exert and maintain men’s collective control over the sexual behavior of women and thereby guarantee the paternity of her children.
But let’s face it: Controlling human sexuality is a hard sell, so over the centuries the Church – and subsequently the many post-Reformation churches – had to become more and more extreme in their demonization of the human body and sexuality. It’s an easily identifiable and undeniable trend in Christian theology which only began to be seriously countered by minority “liberal” sects in the 20th century.
Everything about fetus/embryo- fetishizing politics simply SCREAMS of backlash against human sexual independence from religious tools of social control. Our bodies are bad, and sex is especially bad, and bad actions should have bad consequences – especially for women, because it was always about control of women in the first place. At a very visceral level, people who adhere to these sorts of views see every unwanted pregnancy (and STD) as divine punishment for being a filthy disgusting sexual creature – and so anything that prevents or ends pregnancy (or STDs) is deeply repellent and obviously sinful. It thwarts divine punishment, evades divinely mandated consequences, and is in all ways inherently sinful.
I’m not saying that anyone actually makes these ARGUMENTS in anything resembling the steps I outlined above, at least not in the political arena (although they certainly say so to their flock from the pulpit). Rather, I’ve described the emotional psychology – and accounted for the effectiveness of the emotional manipulation of the religious public using that psychology. My evidence? Their own words and their own political alliances.
First, note that – on the whole – the same groups which are opposed to abortion and any research involving human embryos (or, now, animal embryos with a smattering of human genes used to model human disease) are also generally opposed to free or easily accessible birth control and comprehensive sex education. They oppose the HPV vaccine for girls because it “encourages promiscuity.” They push for abstinence-only sex education here in the States where their agenda is prominent enough to get it, and would do so in a heartbeat in the UK if they had the political clout. The U.S. teen pregnancy rate has actually started to rise for the first time in decades, and these yahoos decry it as a sign of our increasingly immoral culture rather than as a natural consequence of teenage hormones and their own harmful, regressive, reactionary public policies.
Second, if it’s so unholy and blasphemous to ever make an embryo in any but a natural way or to ever discard an embryo, why aren’t any of these people campaigning against in vitro fertilization? Aren’t the excess fertilized eggs created in IVF procedures just as sacred and holy? Oh, *very* occasionally a given organization or bishop or what have you will make a stab at consistency on this point for the sake of argument, but they never go to the press on behalf of those tens of thousands of freezer-stored or simply discarded embryos and gabble on about respect for them and so on.
Three, they’re all homophobes, too. If homophobia isn’t all about exerting control over human sexuality and the inherent sinfulness of sex for the sake of sex rather than reproduction, nothing is.
If it weren’t for religiously motivated demonization of human sexuality, rooted primarily in the desire to control women’s sexuality in particular (an honest observer will note that men are always let off the hook in practice, if not in rhetoric), abortion and embryo research would simply be a political non-issues. Abortion is wrong not because of the sacredness of fetuses, but because God commanded that the daughters of Eve would suffer in childbirth: Pregnancy is a consequence of sex, and to avoid or negate that consequence thwarts God’s will.
If such a God actually existed, I would gladly tell Him to go fuck Himself. In His notable absence, I’ll save the sentiment for His true believers.
G. why do you do this I would tell God to go f himself stuff, I was intending to pay you a huge complement for a well argued case(as always a little overstated)judging by your own writing you probably have a near guenious i.q yet you so often do stuff like that.
Also G. a lot of the sort of behavior you describe is common male behavior but you hang the whole lot on christianity, men have tried to control womens reproduction from the begining of time.
Richard, not that I give a rat’s ass about your feelings regarding insults against non-existent beings, but I am puzzled by your heated response. Did you actually READ this post? It is quite clear that my insult was aimed very specifically at the kind of God who declares human sexuality as inherently evil and would punish all women for all time for the disobedience of one woman (Eve, whom He presumably made to be as she was, disobedience and all).
So what would you say to a God who actually satisfied the descriptions given by these people, a God who instructs us to hate the bodies and the sexuality He gave us, a God who clearly loathes the female half of the species He supposedly created in His image? If God existed and He was actually the kind of tyrannical nutjob that conservative religious adherents seem to not only believe but require Him to be, such a God would deserve our contempt and resentment rather than worship and respect.
Since no God exists, of that description or any other, I reserve my contempt for those who invent such evil gods – and who demand that all of us live by their invented God’s invented rules whether we believe or not. People who invent more consistently pleasant gods – the sorts of gods that don’t demand stupid, hateful actions from them – are fine in my book. As I’ve said before, if you’re going to invent an imaginary friend, you might at least try inventing a likable imaginary friend.
G. now I am puzzled how is saying you are a guenious and made a well argued case a heated responce,I just offered a minor critique of what I thought was an otherwise exelent piece?
If a God like that existed I think I would take the fith!
If you ask me, I think G’s expression of contempt is entirely justified. Why mince words?
Oh, right, forcing people to mince their words is the entire point of the “respect us! respect us! respeeeeeeeeeeeeeecccct us!” campaign.
d.z.d you think it makes sence to insult someone that stropy?
I dont knom whether God exists or not it just seems unecesary to use profanity when discusing him or her or it, it has nothing to do with respect just manners.
“It’s a very important part […] of the Christian faith that you should have respect for human embryos.”
Yes! I remember that line from Leviticus very well. And did not Christ himself say, “blessed are the zygotes”?
This discussion shines a light, once again, on one of the biggest embarrassments to the believers’ position which is that their gods variously gave specific instructions about how to kill goats, wipe your arse, eat shellfish (or not) etc, etc, but didn’t bother to address important ethical conerns like the status of emryos, the use of nuclear weapons, genetic modifcation of crops etc. Why not? What could he have been thinking of?
Hybrid creatures round on Catholic Church http://ollysonions.blogspot.com/2008/03/hybrid-creatures-round-on-catholic.html
“the use of nuclear weapons”
Scientology does at least feature nukes. All hail Xenu!
Guenious? The property of those who are like guenions? That is to say, a species
of mostly arboreal African Monkey.
Is it a hybrid ?
G.T Shame that Christ has fools like that speaking on his behalf, he did nothing to deserve stupidity like that! good responce to that kind of crap.
Hardcore, G! Dissing a non-existent being, in such tough, uncompromising terms. Grrrrrrrrr. The testosterone must be flowing. That’s him telt!