This one has slipped my notice. Thanks to MercatorNet for catching it.
Was Clinton’s language deliberate or grossly uninformed?
BTW, MercatorNet.com is definetly something you should be reading. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, winsome — bookmark it and/or subscribe to their updates immediately.
Clearly, I don’t agree with everything Krauthammer has to say:
I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn.
But his overall point is sound
Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama’s pretense that he will “restore science to its rightful place” and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand—this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically “scientific.”
Another link from Christianity Today: Sci-Fi’s Brave New World: How the genre draws us to its own views of redemption
Which stories will guide us as we make our way through the perilous 21st century with its stunning technologies and burgeoning data about our bodies, minds, and universe? As science holds out to us possibilities previously only imagined, which myths will shape the imaginations of our decision makers? Which narratives will form our religious sensibilities, provide our spiritual values, and craft our view of the supernatural—indeed, of God? Only the true myth at the heart of Christianity is powerful enough to prevent excesses and avert atrocities. How can the church respond?
From Christianity Today:
Nearly three years ago, Alan Jacobs wrote in Books & Culture, “Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.”
I’m probably guilty as charged on that score.
I’ll just say that I find this very convicting.
We need to hear competing voices of information from the world around us, use our time in the digital world wisely, and learn to shut that world down when it becomes more important to get up in the morning and answer emails than it does to get up and read the Bible and pray.
A helpful reminder from Dr. Carson. Read the whole thing.
We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration.
The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because it is full, but because it is void. If only he knew that the void itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of creativity . . . yet he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited . . .
— Thomas Merton
The New Media Frontier has been nominated for Outreach Resource of the Year in Evangelism by Outreach magazine.
William Saletan writes at Slate.com about the responsibility that goes along with the use of reproductive technologies that create embryos. From the conclusion:
I’m a pro-choice moralist. I don’t want the government telling people what to do with their pregnancies or their spare embryos. But that freedom doesn’t eliminate moral obligation; it intensifies it. Each of us has to decide how to respect life in all its complexity. To me, embryos aren’t people, but they’re the beginnings of people. They aren’t to be created, killed, or frozen lightly.
That means, among other things, that they should never be an afterthought. Don’t have sex, at least not the procreative kind, without discussing what you’ll do in the event of pregnancy. Don’t make or freeze embryos without thinking through what you’ll do with them. And if, after talking it over, you can’t stomach the options ahead, maybe you should reconsider whether you’re ready for this. That’s a lot to ask, I know. But nobody said choosing would be easy.
While there are several things here I disagree with, Saletan makes two important and related points. Reproductive technologies (and, indeed the full spectrum of biotechnologies) carry an intense obligation that we ensure we act in ways that nurture and support human life, and avoid uses that destroy or even imperil life. This requires of us the hard work of determining what should and should not be pursued and by what means.
Some of you may know that I’ve written and spoken on the topic of Transhumanism. Salvo magazine has recently made some of their content available online, including the cover article from their first issue, “Better than Human: The Transhumanist Transition to a Technological Future.”
The article was written just after I had finished my master’s thesis on Transhumanism, and I had several conversations with the article’s author as he was working on it.
If we seek service rather than power, we may have significant cultural impact. But if we seek direct power and social control, we will, ironically, be assimilated into the very idolatries of wealth, status, and power we seek to change.
