Monday, August 30, 2010

Artificially Conceiving a Bad Romantic Comedy | First Things

Aug 27, 2010 - Mary Rose Somarriba

Jennifer Aniston’s big new movie made headlines this week—for flopping. The Switch, a romantic comedy about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated, brought in embarrassingly low ticket sales of only $8.4 million on opening weekend. Hollywood reporters have tried to think of all number of reasons for why it flopped so badly, ranging from the myth of lazy August filmgoers to the theory that Aniston is a blockbuster buzzkill.
But the answer may be the story itself. Just four months ago, Jennifer Lopez’s film on the same subject, The Back-up Plan—which came out this week on DVD— opened to a low $12.2 million. As reporters Gregg Kilday and Kim Masters put it, “Artificial insemination, it turns out, is the new box-office poison.”

Continue reading at First Things

There’s nothing funny about an industry that treats human beings as live-stock.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Embryonic Stem Cell Researchers Promise Everything but Deliver Nothing

By Diogenes | August 24, 2010 Catholic Culture

Read all the mainstream-media coverage of Judge Royce Lamberth’s decision to stop federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and you may notice that two major themes emerge. Neither theme is inaccurate, yet both are misleading.

First, the conventional accounts remind readers that embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR) has great potential.

It is “promising but controversial research,” says the Wall Street Journal. It is a “promising new science,” Time magazine agrees. Scientists “hope to be able to use” ESCR to treat many diseases, Reuters reports. The Los Angeles Times cites a White House spokesman who said judge’s decision “carries the potential to block ‘critical, life-saving research.’" [My emphasis throughout]

Promise... promising… potential…hope. What you don’t see, in all those news accounts, is a report that scientists have used ESCR successfully to treat diseases, or are using ESCR in clinical settings right now. You don’t even read about successful ESCR experiments that could soon lead to medical breakthroughs.

Continue reading at Catholic Culture : Off the Record : promise them anything

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Orang-utans are not remotely like humans

19th August 2010 – Helene Guldberg, Spiked.

Experts should know better than to claim that great apes can communicate in a similar way to human beings.

apes Time and again, we are told that humans are not that special after all: abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are now purportedly evident amongst the great apes. The most recent claim, published in the current issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is that orang-utans use mime to make themselves understood.

Continue reading Orang-utans are not remotely like humans at Spiked.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

The Enemy of my Enemies

 By Diogenes | Catholic Culture - August 20, 2010

To be honest with you, I couldn’t get worked up about Bill Donohue’s campaign to persuade the owners of the Empire State Building to light up the tower on the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth

Yes, it would be nice if the Empire State Building honored Mother Teresa. But if the owners continue to refuse? Outside of Manhattan—and New Yorkers sometimes need to be reminded that there is a world outside Manhattan—no one will know, one way or another. I’m sure Mother Teresa herself doesn’t care. When you’re living in the glow of divine light, the electric kind isn’t likely to produce much excitement.

But if I’m puzzled by Donohue’s insistence on this issue, I’m absolutely flummoxed by the effort by a group of radical-left Catholic organizations to persuade the Empire State Building management not to turn on the lights. Indifference to the issue is quite understandable; there are lots of other more pressing issues on the public agenda. But active opposition to the Catholic League’s campaign—from people who describe themselves as Catholics-- is truly astonishing. This bears investigation.

First let’s take a look at the list of groups that joined in condemning Donohue’s drive:

  • Catholics for Choice
  • Call to Action
  • Chicago Women-Choice
  • DignityUSA
  • FOSIL
  • National Coalition of American Nuns
  • New Ways Ministry
  • Roman Catholic Womenpriests—USA
  • Take Back Our Church
  • Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual
  • Women's Ordination Conference

This is no ordinary list of Catholic organizations. These are groups that have been officially denounced by the Catholic hierarchy, groups led by people who have incurred formal excommunication, groups dedicated to the promotion of causes that the Church condemns.

Now look at the text of the letter they wrote to the Empire State Building’s management. They aren’t actually arguing against turning on the lights for Mother Teresa; they’re arguing against turning on the lights for Bill Donohue. The groups condemn him as “an attack dog for the radical right, helping to promote its misogynist and homophobic agenda.”

Ah, now I understand. If Bill Donohue wins, these groups lose. And now for the first time, I feel myself getting excited about his light-up-the-Empire-State-Building campaign.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

MercatorNet: Hope, change and AIDS

1st December 2009 – Mercator Net.

The lack of impact on HIV incidence in Africa from years of multi-million dollar Western investments in condom promotion was too glaring and too consistent to keep ignoring -- even though UNAIDS brazenly attempted to do just that. When researchers at the University of California at San Francisco – who had been commissioned by UNAIDS! -- found that condoms have not been responsible for turning around any of the severe African epidemics, UNAIDS tried to alter these important findings and ultimately refused to publish them.

Continue reading at MercatorNet: Hope, change and AIDS

Utilitarian ideology hampers fight against African AIDS

29th February 2008 – Mercator Net.

I recently visited Ethiopia to help conduct an HIV and AIDS prevention training program as part of a grant by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The participants were expecting yet another biological crash course in how to minimise the risk of infection. Instead, it centred around themes like true love versus false love, respect and communication. These are all aspects of mutual faithfulness as a strategy to avoiding HIV infection, the "B" of the Ugandan-inspired "ABC" strategy in which A=Abstinence, B=Be Faithful and C=Condoms.

For the men and women attending the training, the "Be Faithful" approach was a revelation and a relief. One woman, a wife and a mother, expressed a sentiment shared by many by saying she was pleased with this approach and the horizons it opened in people’s hearts and minds. But she was also puzzled as to why such basic human themes are not more routinely promoted in the context of HIV prevention, adding: "Why hasn’t anyone explained it like this before?" By the end of the week, another married couple decided to reunite instead of continuing to hold different jobs in different cities.

Continue reading Utilitarian ideology hampers fight against African AIDS

You have dogmas, but I don’t

11th August – Mercator Net.

The world’s most dangerous idea would have to bear upon its biggest problems; these are not political or economic in nature, but ultimately cultural in origin – which is to say that they are in some way related to religion.  It would be difficult not to include among them the breakdown of the family – the scale and speed of which is hard to imagine without the birth control pill.  Though it promises “control” – an illusion – it has instead delivered discord, demographic disaster, and ultimately deflationary pressures in the economy. A similar frame of mind – “if it works, it is ok” – also justified the unscrupulous financial practices which contributed mightily to our present economic woes.

More precisely, then, our biggest problems can be traced back to moral and intellectual shortcomings which, in our present cultural climate, are no longer recognized as such.  To point them out is to risk giving offense; contemporary life is thus governed by deceptive if fashionable convention rather than by truth.  

Continue reading at MercatorNet: You have dogmas, but I don’t

Being human is no big deal???

11th August 2010 – Mercator Net.

A few years ago, a New York Times reporter celebrated the extension of human rights to nonhuman animals, after the environmental committee of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant great apes the right to life and freedom. In an odd but recurrent pattern of increasing animal rights at the expense of human dignity, the reporter exclaimed that we were kidding ourselves with our belief in unalienable “human” (his quote) rights.

Continue reading at MercatorNet: Being human is no big deal

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Love is not IVF and surrogacy

17th Feb 2010 – Mary Meets Dolly.

I am sure to get lots of flack about how this entry is callous, cruel and judgmental but sometimes you have to be honest.  A couple weeks ago one of the readings at Mass was about Love.  1 Corinthians 13 says:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I had this reading in mind when I read this story about a couple that used IVF and foreign surrogacy to have a child:

Continue reading “Love is not IVF and surrogacy” at Mary Meets Dolly

PAPAL WITCH HUNT DETOURED

 August 10, 2010 - Catholic League.

Attorney William McMurry, who sued the Holy See for being complicit in the sexual abuse of his three clients, is seeking to end the lawsuit; similar suits are still pending. McMurry won a settlement from the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2003 for $25.7 million.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed this issue today:

McMurry acknowledges that "Virtually every child who was abused and will come forward as an adult has come forward and sued a bishop and collected money, and once that happens, it's over." That's right—once they got their check, they cashed out. But not McMurry: his motives were more primordial. Which is why he continued.

What collapsed yesterday was the heart and soul of McMurry's interest: his attempt to put Pope Benedict XVI on trial. It was his objective to hold men in Rome accountable for the behavior of men in Louisville, simply because they all worked for the same organization. McMurry knew this was a high bar to clear—proving culpability on the part of the Holy See for what goes on in Kentucky—and so he decided it was a futile exercise.

There was one other reason why McMurry quit: he couldn't find any more alleged victims. But it was not for lack of trying. He admits he searched in vain for months looking to find any man who may have been groped. "No one who has not sued a bishop is in a position to help us despite our best efforts over the past several months," McMurry said.

Just think about it. Every day, for the past several months, William McMurry and his colleagues went to work in hot pursuit of finding some adult man who may have settled out of court. It did not matter how trivial the offense, how many decades ago it occurred, or how old the alleged victim was, all that mattered was that the offender had to be a priest. No minister, rabbi, school teacher, coach, counselor or psychologist would do. And now the gig is up.

Catholic League: For Religious and Civil Rights

Monday, August 9, 2010

NORTH KOREA About 23 Christians arrested, 3 executed

6th August 2010 – Asia News

Seoul (AsiaNews) – North Korea’s Stalinist regime has discovered some underground Christians in a house church in Pyongan Province. All 23 who met to celebrate a religious function were arrested. Three were tried and given the death penalty, which was swiftly executed, sources told AsiaNews. Confirmation about the incident also came from the North Korea Intellectual Solidarity, a group of North Korean exiles.

According to the sources, the arrests and executions were carried out in mid-May. “At that time, right after the disastrous currency reform, police discovered 23 Christians in Kuwal-dong, Pyungsung County, in Pyongan Province, who met at an underground church. After their arrest, they were interrogated at length. Eventually, the group’s “ringleaders” were sentenced to death and executed. The others were sent to Kwan-li-so (Penal labour colony) No 15 in Yodŏk.”

These North Koreans discovered underground Christianity when some of them travelled to mainland China for work.

“As the authorities fear the spread of religion, many area residents are rounded up and interrogated for days,” the sources said. However, “they cannot help it because the situation is so desperate that people are going back to religion. Such sentences are meant to scare people.”

North Korea denies freedom of religion absolutely. Officially, the country has three Christian places of worship (one Catholic and two Protestant churches) and four Buddhist temples, but only in the capital Pyongyang. No one has been able to confirm how many exist in the rest of the country. Accounts about their number by foreigners who have travelled around the country vary.

The only cult allowed is that of ‘Eternal President’ Kim Il-sung and his son, the ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-il.

After the Korean War in 1953, the Stalinist regime ruthlessly proceeded to kill the country’s estimated 200,000 Catholics, and destroy their churches and abbeys.

Sources have told AsiaNews that in North Korea there are “no more than 200 Catholics left, all very old”.

NORTH KOREA About 23 Christians arrested, 3 executed - Asia News

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Scientific Fundamentalism?

August 2010 – Word on Fire Blog.

Robert Mixa responds to Lawrence Krauss's recent article in Scientific American which makes the popular claim that religion and science are at odds. Read below for Mixa's fact-filled rebuttal.


The myth that science and religion are irreconcilable is a hardy perennial among contemporary “intellectuals.” Lawrence Krauss’s recent article in Scientific American (“Faith and Foolishness,” August, 2010) is just one more example of the trend.
Dismayed by the perpetuation of this myth, I sent a link of the article to my friend, who is working on his PhD in philosophy. Since his dissertation research deals extensively with the philosophy of science, he was able to give me a lot of insight into the problems with Krauss’s argument.
As we discussed the article, we began to realize that Krauss’s construal of all religion as fundamentalism is, in fact, itself a fundamentalism which is not capable of understanding the unique Catholic synthesis of Faith and Reason, and which arrives at its anti-religious conclusions through selective use of evidence.

Continue reading at Fr. Robert Barron's Word On Fire - Culture: Faith and Foolishness?

Friday, August 6, 2010

Pope Benedict wanted to be a librarian

August 2010, Telegraph.

His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, declined his request to spend his last years as the archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives and as a librarian of the Vatican Library, according to the incumbent librarian and archivist Cardinal Raffaele Farina.

Speaking in Inside the Vatican magazine, Cardinal Farina recalled when he was appointed prefect of the Vatican Library in May 1997 he had a brief meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger in which he was asked his own opinion of the future pope joining the team.

At the time the future Pope Benedict was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pope’s doctrinal enforcer.

But he found his job “burdensome” and wanted to retire to academic study of ancient documents for the rest of his life.

He asked the Pope if he could step down from his role when he turned 70 on April 16, 1997, a move which would have permanently removed him from Vatican politics and from the eyes of the world.

Continue reading - Pope Benedict wanted to be a librarian - Telegraph

Atheist Guru repeats his lies.

4th August 2010, Damian Thompson, Telegraph.
Vanity Fair have sent me a preview of Christopher Hitchens’s very unpleasant piece about his cancer – unpleasant not just because Hitchens describes in detail the invasion of his body by a monstrous tumour, but also because it contains a despicable slur against the Pope. (And Henry Kissinger, but I don’t care about that.)
He writes: “Will I really not live long enough … to read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly criminals like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”
This should scarcely need saying, but Pope Benedict XVI is not a criminal: neither Hitchens nor anyone else has produced evidence that he covered up the crimes of paedophile priests. On the contrary, he sought to tighten up canonical procedures against sex abusers. There were plenty of cover-ups; it’s just that the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith didn’t organise them and, indeed, fought battles with some of those prelates who did.
Continue reading Christopher Hitchens: I'm sorry that I probably won't live to see the death of 'elderly criminal' Benedict XVI – Telegraph Blogs

UPDATE
Vanity Fair recants: Pope not an elderly criminal just an elderly villian.

Fr Robert Barron comments on Christopher Hitchens at "Word on Fire".

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Politics: A Decade Later: Time for a Dose of Reality on Stem Cells

August 2010. Catholic News Agency (CNA)

By Richard Doerflinger

In 1998, Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin first isolated human embryonic stem cells (ESCs). These early, unspecialized cells were hailed as a way to create all cell types of the human body at will, a Holy Grail for curing diseases. Moral qualms about killing embryos for the cells were swept away in this wave of enthusiasm. In a few years, it was said, life-saving medical advances would show that such objections should be ignored.

A decade later, it is time for a reality check. ESCs have been involved in some interesting experiments, but are not close to producing cures. This is not due to limited federal funding—it is equally true in countries with no such limits, and in states pouring their own public funds into the research. ESCs in fact are unpredictable, difficult to control, and prone to causing tumors in animals. Experts now admit that human treatments using them may not emerge for decades, if ever.

The bishops’ statement Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship urges Catholics to become informed on important moral issues in public life, including this issue of destroying embryos for stem cell research.

Continue reading - A Decade Later: Time for a Dose of Reality on Stem Cells :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

Monday, August 2, 2010

Priests Commit No More Abuse Than Other Males - Newsweek

8th April 2010

The priesthood is being cast as the refuge of pederasts. In fact, priests seem to abuse children at the same rate as everyone else.

The Catholic sex-abuse stories emerging every day suggest that Catholics have a much bigger problem with child molestation than other denominations and the general population. Many point to peculiarities of the Catholic Church (its celibacy rules for priests, its insular hierarchy, its exclusion of women) to infer that there's something particularly pernicious about Catholic clerics that predisposes them to these horrific acts. It's no wonder that, back in 2002—when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines—a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests "frequently'' abused children.

Yet experts say there's simply no data to support the claim at all. No formal comparative study has ever broken down child sexual abuse by denomination, and only the Catholic Church has released detailed data about its own. But based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. "We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."

Continue reading Priests Commit No More Abuse Than Other Males - Newsweek

Book Review: Cracks in the Crescent - Islamic Contradictions

By Philip Blosser
Philip Blosser is Professor of Philosophy at Sacred Heart Major Sem­inary in Detroit, Michigan.
Cracks in the Crescent.  By Hussein Hajji Wario. Bethany Press. 252 pages. $24.95.
Since the events of 9/11, Christians in the West have become increasingly interested in what makes the Muslim world tick. Writers and publishers, for their part, have begun turning out a growing number of books introducing Western Christians to the world of Islam. Offerings from Catholic publishers include Jacques Jomier's The Bible and the Qur'an (Ignatius Press, 2002), Dan­iel Ali and Robert Spen­cer's Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics (Ascension Press, 2003); Spen­cer's Islam Unveiled (Encounter Books, 2003), and Giorgio Pao­lucci and Ca­mille Eid's interview-based volume, 111 Questions on Islam: Samir Kha­lil Samir, S.J., on Islam and the West (Ignatius Press, 2008), to mention but a few.
Hussein Hajji Wario's Cracks in the Crescent warrants special notice. Two facts set this book apart. First, Wario is not only a former Sunni Muslim with years of experience in an Islamic culture, but unlike many Muslims was thoroughly educated in the esoteric aspects of Islam. Second, the arguments he uses to expose Islam — arguments honed by years of experience of debating Muslim peers after his Christian conversion — are drawn from the extensive literature of Islam itself, not merely the Qur'an, but Islamic history, Seerah (the life of Muham­mad), Sunnah (specific words, actions, and practices of Mu­hammad), and Hadith (narrations based on the words of Muhammad shedding light on the Qur'an and matters of jurisprudence), and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). The purpose of his book, Wario says, is to help both Muslims and non-Muslims seeking answers about the true nature of Islam.
Continue reading at New Oxford Review