Baptist Brotherly Love, courtesy of the Baptist Archives

’Christian’ doctors condemn stem-cell experiments

'A breathtaking jump to cloning and destroying human beings'

May 21, 2005
WorldNetDaily.com

The nation's largest faith-based group of physicians condemned human cloning experiments by Hwang Woo-suk of South Korea and Ian Wilmut of Britain's Edinburgh Medical School, saying they should be halted for ethical and medical reasons.

"In just a few short years since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, we have witnessed a breathtaking jump to cloning and destroying human beings," said Dr. David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical Association. "These researchers don't seem to recognize the difference between human beings and barnyard animals."

Hwang reportedly cloned and destroyed the world's first human embryos for stem cells last year, and Wilmut cloned 'Dolly' the sheep in 1998. Thursday they announced a partnership in cloning experiments.

In South Korea, government-funded researchers reported producing human embryos through cloning and then extracting their stem cells. The experiments signaled a major advancement toward growing patients' own replacement tissue to treat diseases.

Stevens said the new experiments will use human beings like lab rats to study diseases.

"Is this how we want the human race to be treated – as mere fodder for scientific experimentation?" he asked.

Stevens contends researchers and reporters are using misleading rhetoric. He insists the experiments are not merely cloning cells, "they are cloning living human beings and then destroying them for their stem cells."

"Each one of us began life as a human embryo," he said. "If you had been sacrificed for your stem cells at that point of development, you wouldn’t exist today."

Dr. Gene Rudd, CMA associate executive director, argued that even if researchers somehow were to determine a potential therapy through cloning, any treatment would require harvesting massive numbers of eggs from women.

"That would mean subjecting literally millions of women to the risks involved in high-dose hormonal stimulation to cause hyper-ovulation," he said. "Women can experience permanent side effects or even death."

Stevens said the "rush to embryonic stem cell research and its associated human cloning may fill the pockets of researchers, but it is highly unlikely to match their hype about cures."

"Embryonic stem cells have been shown to be highly unstable and difficult to control, and they tend to form tumors," he explained.

Meanwhile, he argued, adult stem cells – obtained, without ethical objections, from sources such as cord blood – already have provided treatments for patients suffering from more than 50 diseases.

Stevens pointed out that if Hwang and Wilmut had done their experiments in Canada, Germany or France they would have been put in jail for five to seven years.

The U.S., however, has no law prohibiting human cloning.

In California and New Jersey, he notes, human cloning is permitted as long as the human beings created are destroyed.

Antievolution bill dies in Missouri

May 17, 2005
The Panda’s Thumb

When the legislative session of the Missouri House of Representatives ended on May 13, 2005, House Bill 35 died in the Education Committee. HB 35 provided that:

All biology textbooks sold to the public schools of the state of Missouri shall have one or more chapters containing a critical analysis of origins. The chapters shall convey the distinction between data and testable theories of science and philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy, such as biological evolution, the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.

The second and third sentences, of course, are modeled after the so-called Santorum language, present only in the Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of Conference for the No Child Left Behind Act and not in the act itself. The sponsor of the bill, Cynthia Davis (R-O'Fallon), was a cosponsor of both of the previous legislative session's "intelligent design" bills in the Missouri House of Representatives, HB 911 and HB 1722.

On May 4, 2004, the House Education Committee allotted ninety minutes of hearings to HB 35, although it was so late then in the legislative session that there was no realistic possibility that the bill would proceed further. During the hearings, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "All but one person who testified in favor of the bill were members of two families, both of which home school their children." Testifying against it were Bob Boldt, Jan Weaver of the University of Missouri, Columbia, and Becky Lutherland, representing the Science Teachers of Missouri. Undaunted, Cynthia Davis told the Post-Dispatch that "she hopes that by getting a hearing, she at least introduces a concept that might catch on in next year's session."

October 15, 1977  At breakfast time, Jesus Christ projects his face onto a slightly-burned flour tortilla in a Lake Arthur, New Mexico home. Maria Rubio tells reporters: "I do not know why this has happened to me, but God has come into my life through this tortilla."

May 25, 1980 Televangelist Oral Roberts senses an "overwhelming holy presence" and hallucinates a 900-foot-tall Jesus Christ. The deity reaches down and picks up a 60-story hospital, bragging to the Oklahoman preacher: "See how easy it is for Me to lift it!"

August, 1986  Jesus Christ appears in the shadows and rust marks of a soybean oil tank in Fostoria, Ohio.

1987 Jesus Christ appears in the rust marks of a Chicago bowling alley's dilapidated metal chimney

1991 Jesus Christ projects his face onto a forkload of spaghetti in a Pizza Hut billboard in Atlanta, Georgia.

1992 Jesus Christ projects his image into the bark of a Sycamore tree in New Haven, Connecticut.

1993 Jesus Christ projects his face onto a frosted bathroom window of a Manhattan apartment.

October 11, 2000 The BBC reports that the face of Jesus Christ is appearing in the shadows cast upon a corrugated metal wall in Port Germein, South Australia.

January, 2002 On his television show The O'Reilly Factor, the eternally obnoxious Bill O'Reilly informs the pastor of the 5th Street Presbyterian Church in New York City: "Jesus would have demanded that the homeless people shape themselves up or else; because, we all know the passage: 'The Lord helps those who help themselves.'" [The quote appears nowhere in the Bible, much less in a quote attributed to Christ.]

January 27, 2002 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the face of Jesus Christ is appearing on s gnarled tree trunk in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin backyard.

May 15, 2004 The face of Jesus is seen on a wall of an adult book store in Pasadena, California. Huge crowds of adoring Mexicans so clogged the streets and created so much litter that the Pasadena Police Department had the show owner repaint the wall. Jesus did not project again but the store operator reported booming sales of marital aides, magazines and latex novelties from the awed viewers.

Comment: Might not our domestic pornographic industry, second only to the White House in sleaziness , produce a new product that might have religious overtones? Perhaps a condom with a suitable religious message printed on it such as “My rod and my staff shall comfort thee.”