Today's NYT reports that the Catholics still haven't learned a goddamn thing from the Renaissance:
"Excommunication Is Sought for Stem Cell Researchers
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: July 1, 2006
ROME, June 30 — Scientists who engage in stem cell research using human embryos should be subject to excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, according to a senior Vatican official.
Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who heads the group that proposes family-related policy for the church, said in an interview with the Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana published Thursday that stem cell researchers should be punished in the same way as women who have abortions and doctors who perform them.
'Destroying an embryo is equivalent to abortion,' said the cardinal. 'Excommunication is valid for the women, the doctors and researchers who destroy embryos.'
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Apparently the coo-koo cardinal doesn't understand that the research is carried out on embryos that are going to be destroyed in any event. But you know, it's simply amazing to me how the catholic church can keep making the same anti-science mistake over and over again. "And yet, it moves."
6 comments:
IMHO, they use even more devastating torture Guilt. To be fair the catholic church does not excommunicate women who have had an abortion, sanctimonious mouthings about love the sinner hate the sin, BUT forever stand in judgment.
The part of me that believed in the Catholic Church for so many years wondered how the Holy Spirit could countenance the election of a Nazi pope who is going full throttle backwards to take the Church to its most repressive roots.
Then it occurred to me - maybe that's the plan. Maybe the current hierarchy has to destroy itself to enable truly good people to build something that follows Jesus' teachings on love for our fellow humans, for compassion and tolerance.
Damn shame the hater are certain to hurt so many people in their self-destructive process.
I was excommunicated many moons ago, when i remembered before Christianity. Thank you, Hecate for my reading.
Galileo's Pope and one- time close friend was willing to accept the model of the earth spinning as it circled the sun.He rather liked the idea as it was not in the bible; neither was his own position . He was even willing to entertain the revolutionary possibility that mathematical models revealed what was really going on.
What he refused to do ,so early in his reign, was put his presitge behind Galileo. He knew that at any moment some new information might appear either to support or discredit Galileo. He could not risk being on the wrong side. He was open about this situation, as was Galileo in his complaints against the Pope.
Galileo did not go prison because of his theories, he could have held them, done his experiments protected from heresy charges by the Pope . He ended up in jail because he was determined to get the Pope's active financial and moral support.
He burnt his old backers and fought an increasingly desperate and obsessive campaign to force the Pope's hand. The Pope showed him the instuments of torture.
A absolute prince can't afford to allow his hand to forced. Even the concept is truly heretical .Think what Elizabeth I would have done, did do.
It was a vicious and unedifying fight enough but seems wholesome compared to the Church's current obsessions
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