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Edited on Mon Nov-21-05 04:09 PM by KCabotDullesMarxIII
This is a thread about intelligent design, and the Catholic church's rejection of it as science. Why do you have an obsession with clones?
The reason is not complicated in any way. The thread header was a simple misunderstanding of the Catholic Church's position regarding Intelligent Design. However, the people who reject Intelligent Design under any discipline, I believe, do so because they resent the idea that human beings are made to certain specifications. Only a strongly negative and emotional reaction could have allowed them to buy into such manifest nonsense, when the evidence to the contrary is all around us.
Would you ignore the questions on an examination paper, preferring to rely on automatic writing, the first thing that came into your head? No. You'd want to now the design, the plan, the questions to be answered emanating from the mind of the person who set the exam. What he/sh would expect by way of answers.
And the constitution and ongoing preservation of the universe - just ASSUMING for a moment a Creator - would have required that he/she/it had somewhat better intellectual powers than even the most brilliant academic, who, himself, set the most difficult exams - never mind the most brilliant students sitting such exams.
Once people reject the notion that they were custom-built, why would human beings, some of whom are very evil, some somewhat evil, and all of us prone to evil from time to time - however relatively innocuous, feel constrained to behave in socially responsible/helpful ways at all. The better ones might well feel driven by conscience to try to be good and kind and compassionate and helpful to others. But not the others. Why should they? I mean on what rationale?
The desire to clone human beings, as expressed by at least one scientist, is precisely one such example of where the sense that we are not subject to any moral laws can lead. I mentioned earlier the matter of a poor soul cloned on the whim of an evil scientist, appearing in the world without a mother, father or family, even for a few hours. Not even the memory of the warmth of a human womb. If that doesn't worry you, I don't know what to say.
Regarding your last paragraph, atheist you may be, but I can't see how you can be a materialist.
"Look at laws and you will see these ethics expressed. They do not require religions".
When laws were first codified, every society, every human being believed in a God. Right and wrong were associated however fearfully with a divine Creator. It is only our mad Eastern society in which atheism is rife.
I don't now why you associate agnosticism with atheism. They could not be further apart. Better to be an honest searcher than a feckless herd-following believer. Nobody was a more vehemently anti-Catholic agnostic than I was, as a teenager, yet, looking back, I am sure that my previous sentence nevertheless held good.
I see the man in Christ's description of the last Judgment (perhaps mistakenly), whom he welcomed into Heaven at his Father's right hand, though the latter claimed not to know him, as an agnostic, rather than an atheist. While it is clear that many who were formally very religious were and are in fact atheists - because they do not recognize love (other than in its most self-centered form) or act upon it.
As Christians, we should at least begin by looking upon everyone we meet as "another Christ", and feel sorrow if it is clear that they are going to miss their mark, as of course does happen. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his "Gulag Archipelago", when a person reaches a certain depth of depravity/evil, the statistical possibility of his genuine conversion is meaninglessly minute. Judas' sorrow after betraying Christ, would have been from self-pity at the enormity of his actions. It seems noteworthy to me that it is, as far as I know, the only instance of Jesus being resigned to the damnation of an individual.
Do you think that the "innate" ethics that you refer to, such as caring for family and friends - what we call the natural virtues - came about by the same mysterious processes as the physical universe? Incidentally, although we teach that all our righteousness, (such as it may be) is by the grace of God and not our own intrinsic excellence, Christians always have to fight against the idea that maybe we have become pretty good people. Christianity is not about being converted, once and for all, as the fundies believe. Because of our defectible nature, we need to be converted again every day. As long as we live we are faced with choices between good and evil every waking hour.
As regards the natural virtues, which you referred to, they will never be proof against social strife, wars, etc. One of the key precepts that Jesus taught was that we must look beyond our own nuclear families, however dear they are to us. And I think that makes sense, don't you? It is where so many Republicans fall down; where their faith is too immature and callow. Christianity was never intended to be just an accessory, an easy add-on feature, however apparently ornamental - society stopping at our front door.
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