“Most people in Hindu and Buddhist countries,” Dr. Silver says, “have a root tradition in which there is no single creator God. Instead, there may be no gods or many gods, and there is no master plan for the universe. Instead, spirits are eternal and individual virtue — karma — determines what happens to your spirit in your next life. With some exceptions, this view generally allows the acceptance of both embryo research to support life and genetically modified crops.”By contrast, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the master creator who gives out new souls to each individual human being and gives humans “dominion” over soul-less plants and animals. To traditional Christians who consider an embryo to be a human being with a soul, it is wrong for scientists to use cloning to create human embryos or to destroy embryos in the course of research.
I cannot help but wonder how much further along we would be in fighting birth defects, eradicating disease, and increasing our understanding of the universe we would be if science was not constantly bumping into certain unfortunate superstitions.
The brutal truth is that Christianity has been acting like an anchor struggling to hold back scientific progress for hundreds of years. They live in constant terror that someday science will reveal that their faith is based on a lie, and they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to slow down that eventuality.
thanks for this post...sad as it is..
ReplyDeleteEven when science disproves some closely-held tenet of faith (like Gallileo did), they discredit the man, destroying the idea & sweeping all the inconvenient little inconsistencies back under their bible-rugs for a few more centuries. If it doesn't go away, they eventually re-write doctrine to include the revelation. It must be proof that we are not that far from the dark ages yet, that science is still having to do these end-run maneuvers around dogma today.
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