Secular Sanity

By Marie Alena Castle

The Star Tribune’s January 26 article on bioethics, “Let’s talk about science,” would have been more useful if Susan Wolf had identified the opposing viewpoints accurately. The issue is not Republicans vs Democrats but religion vs science. Religious beliefs have no role to play in forming government policies on bioethics because they are untestable, mutually contradictory and have no factual basis. It’s not “partisan posturing” that Wolf says is interfering with “real dialogue,” but religious intrusion into an area in which it has no qualifications and nothing useful to say. If we have lost the capacity to talk about science, as Wolf says, it is because scientific advances have introduced severe challenges to religious beliefs, but to question those beliefs is a social taboo and political suicide.

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By Rodney Sheffer 

No field of intellectual endeavor is as riddled with as much egregious error as theology. Produced and promulgated in the complete absence of any science or objectivity of any kind, theology has been, and still is, a kind of intellectual masturbation that has infected and retarded the growth and development of Western Civilization for over 3000 years. 

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By Marie Alena Castle

It is absolutely despicable that these anti-abortion letter writers (the latest being Hale Meserow on Jan. 2) get so misty eyed over the abortion loss of an unfeeling, unthinking, partially formed fetus, yet dismiss the fully sentient woman as a self-centered airhead acting only out of “convenience.” Such heartless contempt for women is appalling! Without safe and legal abortions, hundreds of women have died in this country, and still do around the world every year from illegal and self-induced abortions. Doesn’t it ever occur to these tunnel visioned sadists that, just maybe, these are desperate women facing severe and very personal physical, economic, social and psychological challenges that none of their “pro-life” insultingly trivial promises of a year’s supply of diapers, or whatever, can lessen?

If Meserow and his fellow misogynists succeed in making abortion “a sad memory,” it will not become “unthinkable as slavery,” it will BE slavery-reproductive slavery for women, no longer able to live as free, self-determining human beings. Given that illegal abortions will certainly continue, so will the deaths of desperate women. Will Meserow and his cohorts care about the loss of these women? Hardly. They didn’t before Roe v Wade. Women will continue to be for these patriarchal control freaks what they have always been through the ages-nothing more than vessels for childbearing, and disposable ones at that.

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 By Marie Alena Castle

The Star Tribune’s Dec. 28 editorial citing politics as the primary motivation for the disastrous “midnight rule” finalized by the Dept. of Health and Human Services missed the point. The rule is motivated solely by extremist religious beliefs about reproductive issues, not politics. The Bush administration is just using the political system to validate those beliefs.

This would seem to be a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and therefore unconstitutional. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom to impose one’s beliefs on others. Those who find their beliefs in conflict with their job of serving the public should find more compatible employment. Other groups with philosophical conflicts do this; so should those with religious issues.

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By Marie Alena Castle

For the Vatican to present its recent bioethics document as an “instruction” and assume it has the authority to decide moral issues for society is not only arrogant but ludicrous. As a self-appointed moral watchdog over scientific progress it has no standing because its views have no foundation in reality.

Historically, the Vatican’s position on personhood (when a fertilized egg becomes a person) has been based on the theological notion of ensoulment. When this occurred during pregnancy was the subject of theological debate for centuries but now is assumed to be at the moment of conception when female and male DNA combine.

If the Vatican wants to be involved in scientific matters, it should do what scientists do-show solid evidence for its assertions that souls exist and that conception produces one. If it can’t do that it has no more business instructing medical researchers about bioethics than astrologers have instructing astronomers about cosmology. As the stem cell researcher said, as quoted in your article, “Cells are not people” and a physician’s responsibility “is to patients-not cells in a petri dish.”

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