Great Editorial in "Christianity Today"

Here is a wonderful editorial in the Evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, weaving together illicit research on embroyos with other life - especially end of life - issues. We include an excerpt, but urge you to read the entire article. And pass it along to your pastor!

Go Gently into That Good Night | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon and author of How We Die, peppers his book with warnings of the hubris of scientists. "The fantasy of controlling nature lies at the very basis of modern science. … The ultimate aim of the scientist is not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge with the aim of overcoming that in our environment which he views as hostile. None of the acts of nature (or Nature) is more hostile than death."

Nuland says medical science will never find the Fountain of Youth. "Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end."

Perhaps our culture clings so tenaciously to the hope of extended youthfulness and lasting life because we have shoved death from view. "All the things that once prepared us for death—regular experience with illness and death, public grief and mourning, a culture and philosophy of death, interaction with the elderly, as well as the visibility of our own aging—are virtually gone from our lives," writes Virginia Morris in Talking About Death. "Instead, we are tempted daily by that perfect apple, by promises of youth and immortality."

The apple that's currently tempting our society is the half-million frozen human embryos created in fertility clinics. Our culture so clings to life that it is prepared to legislate taking of life at its earliest stages in order to graft it on at the end.

Comments

[thea mcginnis]

i agree with the writer. but there isn't equality in aging or health. poor genetics play a key factor in how strong an individual is health-wise. perhaps in pain, people seek out scientific solutions to the natural agonies of aging or to avoid the marginalization of being older. or perhaps they are just so alone in their pain - we don't have large families; many people are widowed and live by themselves. there is so much loneliness which i think magnifies one's pain.

as to frozen embryos, perhaps that is our greatest sin - to think we are better and deserve to live more than those coming after us.

[Joe]

I disagree with the first paragraph:

"[President Bush] is the final bulwark preventing the unchecked use of nascent human life for medical research."

In principle, there is no difference between President Bush and House Democrats on Federally-funded human embryonic stem cell research. They both agree on Federal-funding of this hideous, grotesque, anti-life research. They differ only as to how many dead, innocent, unborn human beings ought to be the victims of this "research."