Who made you? God made me.
Why did God make you? God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this world and be happy with him forever in the next.
In whose image and likeness did God make you? God made me in his own image and likeness.
Is this likeness to God in your body or in your soul? This likeness to God is chiefly in my soul.
How is your soul like to God? My soul is like to God because it is a spirit and is immortal.
The catechism no longer uses the question and answer format, learned on those long ago Sunday afternoons, and forever associated with the scent of beeswax, brass polish and the fascination of watching Father Arbuthnott's teeth moving about in his jaw, as we sat in rows on St Teresa's shiny, polished benches.
Yet the layers of complexity embodied in these simple words, that our parish priest patiently expounded to his ungrateful (and unworthy) audience, are resting on the bedrock of the nature of humanity. To elucidate it in the way used in that long ago catechism is to adopt a particular language and explanatory system that is not part of thinking about the world by many people. For many people this kind of thinking and its language is expressly and often bitterly rejected.
That rejection, so capable of being amply backed up by historical and cultural evidence, is not an excuse for not thinking about the nature of humanity at all.
You may not have an immortal soul that is like to God. You may understand our world as the only environment in which a human being can realise its individual ends. You may reject as myth the notion of a divine sacrifice that offers salvation from separation from God. Heightened language and imagery of this order might not be your cup of tea.
As the decades pass we elaborate our beliefs, extend our understanding and refine the objects of our investigation. Some of us, depending on our training and our interest, can be really clever at this kind of thing.
Still it stands; we are made in an image and likeness. To pick apart that image and likeness, to create human life without hope of salvation - i.e., individual realisation as a human being - because that humanity has been conjoined with another species, is as offensive to any Humanist (look at the very name, humanist, of those who choose another world view), as it is to any Catholic.
What is announced today of what has been created in a north east England laboratory chills the soul.
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5 comments:
I am afraid that I feel the same way about mixing snowdrops and tomatoes or giving cows dessicated cow brain to eat. Taint natural. Tis dangerous. Very gruesome, and I am not a catholic or a humanist as far as I know.
It's unstoppable, Lilith, and some even argue that makes it right - the unstoppable march of scientific progress brigade.
On the Purity and Danger grounds it's infinitely offensive.
One of the bats in my belfry is my contention that few "rationalists" (other than people like, say, Mao and Stalin) are fully logically consistent. Thomas Hardy, great writer though he was, seemed to me like someone standing on a hill, shaking his fist angrily at someone he said he didn't believe in. Sartre ended his Cartesian destruction with an attempt to construct a new existentialist moral code on the basis of his avowed belief in our essential nothingness.
Can you have goodness without The Good? I can't see how morality (in the way we usually think of it) can exist without some form of deistic belief.
It seems to me not only that there is an unbreakable link between what looks like merely abstract philosophy, and its practical consequences, but that you can work backwards from the deed to the thought. I see in the heart of this experimentation, not so much a benevolent philosophical neutrality as a God-hating taboo-clasm; I don't think it's really about finding "cures" - and even if that were the motive, it'd be more likely to end in extra recommendations for abortion and sterilisation. We're heading for eugenics and all the rest. Whether in European "work camps" or in Japanese-run experimental projects in Manchuria, the hatred and despair works itself out in messing about with other people's insides. I think it's the road to white-coated, pseudo-scientific, atavistic insanity.
I don't have firm religious convictions, but if things continue in this direction, I may be forced off the fence. Better that than listen to b*ll*cks about "embracing the dark".
Of course there is a God. For there to be evil there must be good. For there to be good there must be a reason. For there to be a reason there must be a purpose.
Dron knows the darkness and walks in it. Despair is never having to say you are happy. The knowledge of God is set deep in the heart of every human. You chose the light or the dark and by not chosing the light you chose the dark.
Diabolus fecit, ut id facerem!
I can live with monsters if they are killed after only three days (now) up to a maximum of two weeks (perspective) after birth, before you can even see them formed, if this is going to cure me of cancer or diabetes or give me back my milk teeth.
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