The Bio-ethics report and the counter-reformation

aggresso

If you pay a tithe to Geraldine Kennedy you can see the latest offering from the Irish counter-reformation in the form of a letter to the Irish Times (http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/letters/2008/0510/index.html#1210372189649, under the title "Report on Stem Cell Research"). There are lot of impressive names at the bottom of said letter

I wonder in what room they put this nonsense together? Smells very well organised. I betcha if you asked Opus Dei, they'd tell you they had nothing to do with it.

Would you believe them?

Besides that, have you ever heard seen such bull**** published in a national newspaper before (excepting the musings of John Waters)?

Try just this: "Scientifically it is a fact that a new, unique, human individual comes into existence when the DNA from sperm and ovum come together at fertilisation."
My wife's an identical twin. Are her and her sister to be considered collectively a unique, human individual? Could be! I'd be married to both of them (indeed since they're both married, they'd be bigamists).

This absurdity is not got around by simply denying its existence: "Neither [does] the fact that many embryos die, nor that twinning can occur, [change] the fact that destroying IVF embryos is destroying the lives of human individuals." Perhaps not. But you need an argument to get around the absurdity.

The hottest quote is this: "
The issue of the rights of embryos is often portrayed as a religious one, but our position is based on scientific principles and concern for fundamental human rights, not on religious dogma." Which scientific principles, they don't say. Perhaps they mean the infantile nonsense authored by William Reville a few days ago in his "Under the microscope" column (http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2008/0424/1208904387013.html -- again, only if you pay the Times Tithe).

For a more detailed critique of Reville's view, have a look at: http://www.aggressive-secularist.com/2008/04/revilles-theology-is-back-at-irish.html

flogen

This is basically a blog post that's made its way onto the forum - but there's a point in there somewhere so if the OP wants to raise it again, perhaps they could take it to one of the Science forums, Humanities or even one of the Religious forums... it would find better responses in one of those places anyway.