The sacred flake of skin
What was that that Dr. Mark Sawyer said?
“Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”
Yeah. Catholic clerics do something very similar and Catholic MPs follow suit. Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh:
I believe that a greater challenge than that [man, woman, marriage, children – ed] even faces us – the possibility now facing our country is that animal-human embryos be produced with the excuse that perhaps certain diseases might find a cure from these resulting embryos.
The ‘excuse.’ Mark that. The ‘excuse’ that diseases might be cured as a result of embryo research – it’s just an excuse for researchers’ unholy desire to create embryos and then torture them or eat them or have sex with them or wear them as party favours in their hats. Or perhaps not. What does the archbishop think the real reason, as opposed to the excuse, is that researchers want to do research with embryos?
It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which, more comprehensively, attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular bill. With full might of government endorsement, Gordon Brown is promoting a bill that will allow the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos…He is promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.
No; not babies; of course not babies; obviously not babies; not babies, embryos. Bad archbishop. Tell the truth, archbishop.
This bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.
Why? Why? Why? How? Why and how is this research an attack on human rights dignity and life? And what about the real, existing. sentient, conscious people who suffer from horrible diseases that could be cured with this research? Why does the archbishop worry about the insentient unconscious embryos instead of the real people with horrible diseases? He might as well worry about a fingernail clipping; it makes as much sense. Why does the archbishop worry about the wrong thing? Why does the archbishop huff and puff with moral outrage over the wrong thing? What is the matter with him? What is the matter with all of them? Why do they get it so backward, and make such a virtue of it?
But OB, of course it’s an excuse.
Nobody ever embarked on a career in science unless their motivation was to one day throw back their heads in a glare of lightning and cry, ‘ It lives, bwahahaha, IT LIVES!’
Sometihng that the esteemed cleric fails to understand is that these cells are not hybrid. All the animal DNA is removed and replaced with human DNA so they are, effectively, human cells. The only reasons for using them are that there are a lot more of them and that by doing so scientists hoped to sidestep the fuss about using stem cells from foetuses.
Why do frying pans and fires spring to mind?
The Catholic Church cannot not understand the science here. It chooses to misrepresent it in absolute terms. And the BBC chooses to give these primates loads of air time. Happy Easter.
Typical drivel from another one of those silly men in their silly hats with their silly opinions.
In fact silly is too nice; dangerous, backward, uninformed, reactionary medieval opinions is more apt. Why does society (and the BBC in particular it seems) still care about what bishops think? When so many other areas of society seem to have moved on from caring about what the churches do and regarding the priests as moral guardians, why do the media still give print and airtime to such primitive thinking? Religious leaders just don’t get it: their opinions on a wide range of subjects are actually irrelevant as long as they’re based on nothing more than fantasy and superstition.
“Why? Why? Why? How?”
I’ve had a go at explaining why here.
Oops, sorry, I meant here.
“Church leader declares crackpot ideas, gets free air time”
Where did I hear the ‘CRACKPOT’ word being by someone been before? Can somebody PZ tell me? I am so peeved.
Ought not Cardinal Keith O’Brien, (the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh) to be fervently seen by his parishioners to be breaking/baking? holy bread, this Eastertide, in order to sanctify his so – called scientific soul – as opposed to getting free air time from the media to break all this indecorous, half-baked ‘crackpot’ views.
Good article, Joe Dunkley!
To all at N&C enjoy the Spring Sunday that is in it!
You all will have laughed at the Monty Python assertion that “Every sperm is sacred”, but where the Catholic church is concerned they are dead on. Not eggs, sperm. Is the egg not fertilized? Not viable? Does the egg not implant? Does the pregnancy miscarry? It must be God’s Will(TM). Are stem cells harvested from a single fertilized egg in a laboratory? Gasp, Major Travesty!
Bilgewater. Utter and complete bilgewater.
Nothing quite attacks ‘the sanctity and dignity of human life’ with quite the dismissive force of the first book of the Bible: “Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” … (Genesis 3:19).
In Holy Communion, the chalice containing the wine that has just become the blood of Christ is held aloft by the officiating cleric in emphasis of its sanctity and dignity. Quite awe-inspiring to the believer. If the cleric held aloft a well-filled vacuum cleaner bag, I doubt it would have quite the same effect on the congregation.
Yet it should be done, because regardless of the ‘sanctity and dignity’ any one of them has at any given time, that is what the congregation is according to the sacred book.
Unless of course, we are talking about the ‘sanctity and dignity’ of an abstraction. Now that’s a different story.