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Pope Denounces Some Biotech as Affront to 'Human Dignity'
eldavojohn writes "Today in a speech the pope denounced human cloning, embryonic stem cell research and artificial insemination, citing them as a violation of 'human dignity.' That said, the pope did 'appreciate and encourage' research on stem cells from non-embryonic cells in the human body. The pope encouraged the Vatican to be a leading voice in the philosophy and discussion of bioethics. 'Church teaching certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of science, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to faithful and all men of good will ethical-moral principles and direction for new, important questions,' Benedict said."
I hereby excommunicate this very silly pope.
PS: Every man, woman, and child is a pope. Non serviam.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
In his defense, basically everyone was in Hitler Youth. It was the Boy Scouts for Good Germans. Most children didn't have a whole lot of choice regarding their participation.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
That's a lovely sentiment, but the idea of human dignity that most people find familiar does not have its origins in the Church, but rather in the Enlightenment, which was populated by more than a few great thinkers who did not find very much attractive in the Church's history, monolithic structure or its behavior.
There were enough Popes directly or indirectly ordering the imprisonment and burning of heretics and other non-conformists that it's pretty clear that this modern post-Vatican II church is attempting to rewrite its own history to make itself into the champion of human dignity, when its real history shows it to have been a powerful political force quite willing to trample any notions of human dignity in the pursuit and maintenance of power and influence.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't recall any other popes calling it an affront to human dignity.
Perhaps not a pope, but the Congregation of the Doctrine of the faith did. Donum Vitae, Feb 22, 1987.
Are test tube babies not allowed to be baptized because fertilization occurred outside the body?
It's not the babies that are wrong, it's how they were conceived.
I'm no fan of any of these monotheisms but one correction regarding Women's Rights issues in Islam - They had them LONG before Christians did.
AT THE TIME when Islam started its teachings were the most progressive towards women of any of the monotheistic religions. Women were considered people, could own land and property _as_individuals_ , could not be forced to marry, were guaranteed support by their husbands, were guaranteed the equivalent or alimony if divorced, were allowed to work and own their own business, were allowed to decide if they wanted children, were guaranteed support for their children by the child's father even after divorce, and could divorce her husband if he did not sexually satisfy her. (I'm not making any of this up.)
Now mind you her testimony in "court" carried only the fraction of the weight of a man's and there are a whole bunch of other chauvinistic rubbish as well, but up until the 18th Century in western Civil Law an Islamic women had more rights than most women in the western world (in Theory).
Now in practice a lot of these rights were voided and ignored by those who called themselves Muslim but still practiced their own tribal cultures, but according to the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed she had them. MOST of the practices we find so abhorrent and attribute to "Islam" are also considered abhorrent by the actual teachings of the religion and condemned. They are cultural artifacts, not religious ones. Sadly, like the teachings of Christ, mean spirited, bigoted, hate mongering, power grabbing, control freaks have thouroughly confused most people about what those teachings are and twisted them into an evil that would horrify the original prophet/divinity.
The ridiculous Scenario you described is more shaming for you than the religion you are so ignorantly trying to insult. The actions you described would have _by_religious_law_ sentenced the Man to death.
SO now... Who looks like a fool?
I would never raise a daughter in Islam but I at least did the study to find out before making a jackass out of myself by spraying my bigotry around.
Is Christian Faith dangerous too? Hell yeah, and more so because while going to a fundamentalist Madrassa is considered a bad thing, going to a fundamentalist homeschool/bibleschool is a plus when running for US government office.
Many of the teachings are identical. Many of the ideas are equally terrifying for the future of humanity. Its like looking in a mirror. If your not looking its because your afraid of what you will see.
That may be the "official" reason, but the real reason is that he found an error in the Flawless Undisputed Work of God.
A quote:
In 1614 a Dominican priest filed charges at the Office of the Inquisition. Galileo was to respond by writing extraordinarily long letters which were circulated and became subject of debate. The most influential churchman of his age, Cardinal Bellamarine was to say of Galileo's theories: "a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also likely to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false".
His actual crime was noticing that The Book has A Problem.
If you'd like to see an even better example of this, check out Giordano Bruno. His crimes were:
What did he say? Basically the same thing as Galileo - that the "heavens" are simply other stars like our sun, the comets weren't messengers from God, etc. Read it here.
Oh yeah, they burned his ass at the stake for that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The babies that are born through artificial insemination are great. The problem with it lies in all of the fertilized eggs that are discarded once a pregnancy occurs or that are lost during "handling". Catholics, myself included, believe that life begins at conception and so when you get rid of an embryo, anytime after fertilization, you are destroying a life.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
The Catholic position is that human dignity and the value of human life are unconditional. Even if someone was conceived "wrongly", that still doesn't change. That's what unconditional means. This is the reason that the Church objects to the destruction of "surplus" IVF embryos, even while she opposes IVF.
DNA just wants to be free...
This pope is a pussy. Until he reinstates wife beating, Sunday worker stoning and human sacrifices (all of them promoted by the bible), I'm not going back to church. This pope does not respect the Holy Scriptures. At least they are reinstating pedophilia.
The zygote divides because God injected a second soul.
Sheesh.
Infuriate left and right
One interesting bit the Church is all about, and another poster alluded to it, is 'natural law'. The church has spent literally centuries documenting elaborate rationales for their beliefs. The Pope doesn't just bark out something that sounds good to him - he has a team of researchers and theologians write thse HUGE papers on it. The current Pope was, as I understand it, quite the prolific author of these when he was the chief guardian of the faith prior to being Pope (this is the modern equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor, but without the hot pokers and spikes).
My point - there is a convoluted 'logic' to their reasoning, which you can read for yourself, but having read through the relevant sections for this thread, I found them positively Escherian in their convoluted self-referentialality (is that a real word? You get the idea...) and all lead back to 'because we said so', which is the cornerstone of the Catholic churches' authority. They don't worry about their shrinking domain from an ideological standpoint, as you suggest - they have literally an entire theory of 'law' that says they don't have to worry. The pronouncements they put out are for the faithful - normal, rational people won't understand them because they are written in circular logic tarted up in faux-academic jargon - i.e., nonsense.