Following Christ is always such a difficult thing because it requires balancing many things. Christ many times tells us to proclaim the Gospel in public. But in today’s Gospel reading he tells us:

‘”When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.’ (Matt. 6: 5-6)

We have to be very careful to examine WHY we do what we do in public. Are we doing it because we are actually trying to accomplish something or are we doing it so that we may get public recognition for doing it?

I think the answer to this question can often be difficult to determine even for ourselves. What is our true inner motivation? It takes a great deal of reflection to understand all of our motivations. Lent calls us to spend lots of time in prayer and I think spending a fair amount of that time examining, with brutal self-honesty, what our motivations are, is prayer time well spent.

May God bless all of you in this Lenten season.

For those not in the know, Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. I’ve been feeling in a religious rut for a while now so I’m going to be putting a lot of focus on fasting, prayer and repentance (not so much on almsgiving, I’m broke.). Lent basically lasts until Easter (technically it ends mid-day on Holy Thursday at which point the 2 1/2 day Triduum starts) which this year is April 16th. It is considered to be 40 days although technically it is 46 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter and there are various days that “don’t count” depending on who you talk to to make it an even 40.

In any case, I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be fasting for all of Lent (this means basically one meal a day for the entire period) and blogging about how it is going and my reflections on growing close to God through suffering.

I was pointed to this article in the New York Times regarding cloning and I thought it was worthy of comment.

As I’ve said before, everyone should consider it manditory reading to read Wesley J. Smith’s blog (linked in my blogroll) regarding bioethics. This guy has spent the time to understand all the issues at hand and will repeat the underlying truths over and over until they finally make sense.

In this NYT article, Michael Gazzaniga tries to make the point that there are two different types of cloning: reproductive cloing and biomedical cloning. It used to be that people who thought like he did called biomedical cloning therapudic cloning, but apparantly that smokescreen has fallen out of favor.

So to make sure it was absolutely clear what was going on here I thought I would explain the ins and outs of the issue:

The whole issue fits under the broad heading of “Stem Cell Research”. Stems cells are cells that can turn into different kinds of cells, cells that could become skin cells or nerves cells or blood cells or brain cells or whatever. The problem is that not all kinds of stem cells can become every type of cell, they usually have a limited subset of cells they can become. So a stem cell that comes from the ambilical cord could become (I’m making this list up for demonstration purposes) skin or blood or nerve cells but could not become brain cells. Stem cells that come from other sources could become a different handful of types but again not all of them.

So the holy grail of stem cells is to find pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that could become ANY type of cell. This has the potential to allow for all kinds of treatments that otherwise couldn’t be done if we couldn’t find a type of stem cell that could become the needed cell type.

Up until this point, NOBODY has an ethical issue with this science. Catholics are perfectly content with stem cell treatments and the search for pluripotent ones. But after this point, the ethical delimas start.

You see, many scientists believe that the best source for pluripotent stem cells come from embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stems cells are the cells that make up recently created embryos (like in the last week or two). Us Catholics like to call that embryo a human being because, well, it is. Life begins at conception from our vantage point. Or said another way, life begins when a cell is created that can be properly fostered to divide/grow into a full grown human being. What is it before it grows? A very small human being. It’s nature doesn’t change because it grows.

So for us Catholics (and many others), the idea of taking/creating an embryo and instead of letting it develop to become a baby, destroying it so that the cells can be used for stem cell research, is very ethically troubling, just as ethically troubling as abortion because, well, it’s exactly the same thing it just has a different intent when the embryo is destroyed.

This is the point at which cloning enters the fray. You see, inherently all the scientists want is an embryo. They don’t care how it was created. So it can either be one conceived in the womb (in theory although very difficult in practice because of the difficulty of extracting the embryo from the womb without damaging it), one conceived in a petri dish OR one that was cloned.

Because of the immediately obvious opposition to using conceived embryos, many scientists have put their hope in cloning to give them the embryonic stem cells they want. This desire is magnified because of the trouble that scientists have had with concieved embryos in their stem cell research. You see, embryonic stem cells often become cancerous/dangerous to the subject when injected in the person. This is thought to be because the cells don’t have matching DNA to the person they’re being injected into. If however, the scientists were to be able to create an embryo that has exactly the same DNA as the person being treated, the hope is that they could get around the cancer/rejection problem.

So scientists have two motivations to figure out how to create cloned embryos: To potentially avoid the ethical questions about destroying life and to hopefully give a new avenue to prevent embryonic stem cell rejection.

The good news for scientists is that they have a process that promises the ability to do exactly what I outlined above: create an embryo with the DNA of the person that is to be treated. This process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer or by its initials SCNT. The process is as follows:

-An unfertilized egg is taken from a woman
-Just about any cell is taken from the subject to be treated.
-The DNA is sucked out of the egg
-The DNA is sucked out of the subject’s cell
-The DNA from the subject’s cell is placed into the egg, creating an embryo
-The embryo is stimulated into starting the division/growing process

While it is fairly easy to outline the process, there are all kinds of difficulties with it. Things like doing these processes without damaging the egg or the DNA. It’s so difficult that no one has yet been able to successfully do it for human embryos, at least that they can prove (note the recent scandal with the Korean research that was likely completely fabricated data). However, there have been numerous experiments with animals where they have successfully used this process to create a cloned animal embryo and then grown that embryo into an adult animal, Dolly the Sheep being the most famous.

So, FINALLY I get to the point of the article from the NYT!

Note that I said that SCNT was the process used to make Dolly the Sheep. In other words, it was used to do what is called reproductive cloning. Also note that the logic that got us to discussing SCNT was stem cell research and the desire for pluripotent stem cells. This is what the scientists would like to call therapudic or (in the NYT article) biomedical cloning.

The fact is that these two “different” types of cloning are EXACTLY the same thing. They can try to call them different things, but the procedure is the same and is called SCNT. The only conceivable difference is intent. However, after one has performed SCNT, no matter what the original intent was, the embryo could either be distroyed and used for medical purposes or it could be grown into what it is a miniature version of: a human being.

Finally, there are a number of additionally troubling issues specifically with SCNT the most overlooked of which is the need for eggs from women. See, they don’t create these clones from thin air. Unless some unforseen breakthough comes about, they will always need 1 egg for every clone they do. So if they’re going to treat millions of people with embryonic stem cells, they will need millions of eggs from women. This issue popped up during the Korean experiments where women were forced to donate eggs to the experiment.

Additionally, much of the focus on SCNT and embryonic stem cell research (which has yet to produce ANY treatments) takes away focus from far less troubling stem cell research using adult stem cells (of which the above mentioned ambilical cord stem cells are an example of) which not only shows much promise, but has ACTUALLY developed meaningful cures/treatments for a number of different illnesses.

However, these issues are just the icing on a very ethically troubling cake. The reality is that no matter what proponents of embryonic stem cell research say, every time they create a new stem cell line, they destroy a growing human embryo.

In a Crawford family first, my brother actually recommended a movie of religious nature that I enjoyed watching: The Mission. This movie was made in 1986 and stars Robert DeNiro.

The number one thing that struck me in this movie was the value of Penance. Robert DeNiro plays a slave capturer who kills his brother in a fight and turns away from his past life to become a religious brother. During his transformation he goes through a process which is very common for new/renewed believers: he doubts whether his sins can be forgiven. And while God forgives, the process of penance helps us to recognize the truth. The sequence of him carrying a heavy load of miltary gear up the mountain to the natives that he had hunted and sold was very powerful and the natives freeing him from that load was even more powerful. You could feel the healing in DeNiro’s tears.

Penance is a very powerful healing tool.

The second thing that I thought of what how far the mighty Jesuits have fallen. This movie portrays the best of who the Jesuits are. They were formed by a Saint who knew the value of fighting for the faith or as is said in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

‘Ignatius had suggested for the title of their brotherhood “The Company of Jesus”. Company was taken in its military sense, and in those days a company was generally known by its captain’s name.’

The movie shows the Jesuits standing up for the faith and, just as importantly, the people of the faith in the face of secular persecution. Today, however, the Jesuits far too often find themselves associated with questioning the faith and denying Jesus and particularly his divinity. How the mighty have fallen…

A long time has passed now since Teri Schiavo has died, but for those who truly care about the care of the elderly/disabled, the issues is still of great importance.

One of the blogs I have on my blogroll on the right hand side of the blog is for Wesley J. Smith. Mr. Smith made a name for himself by writing the book “Culture of Death” in 2001 before the phrase became a media sensation. The book is not about abortion or euthenasia but about the current state of medical ethics and the transition from needs based care to “quality of life” based care. I’m told it is a very good book and I’ve heard him speak about the subject at a conference and it was very compelling, so I suggest everyone read the book (it’s on my stack to read).

In any case, on his blog one of the issues he often comments on (along with stem cells and cloning) is feeding tubes. He today re-made a point that his made many times that for some reason struck a cord with me:

Food and water are different than other kinds of medical treatments because EVERYONE, no matter who you are, WILL DIE without food and water. While the same is true for air/oxygen, the significant difference is that air is readily available at our noses in normal circumstances. So while people make comparisons between ventilators and feeding tubes, they are not equivalent. If you wanted to make an appropriate comparision, removing a feeding tube would be the same as removing a ventilator AND sealing the room so that no more oxygen can get in.

I think we all agree that sealing a room so a person can’t breath is immoral. Similarly, in the western world, refusing to provide food to ANY person, whether they be a homeless person on the street or a person who can’t swallow (because remember that all a feeding tube is, is a simple tube that goes down ones throat past where the bypass to the lungs is so that one doesn’t inhale (literally) the food), is similarly immoral.

I found a great quiz. You should try it out! It’s a quiz with various statements regarding who God is. You have to try and pick the correct ones (from a Christian perspective) without picking some false ones that reflect some heresy in the early Christian Church. The one clue I will give you is that there are no 1/2 right statements so there is no need to pick anything other than the two extremes of Agree/Disagree (it’s a range of 5 between the two). The goal is be 100% Chalcedon Compliant and 0% on any of the heresies (of which there is a bunch including Arianism, Gnosticism, Adoptionist, Nestorianism, Donatism and Pelagianism).

As an FYI, Chalcedon Compliant means in compliance with the Fourth Ecumenical Council or the Council of Chalcedon held in the fall of 451 AD. For more information on the Council see here.

As I said in my vacation post, I went to my brother-in-laws wedding on Saturday.

Well there was one thing that bugged me very profoundly: the “minister”. Wendy’s family is not Catholic and although they went to a Christian Church for a number of years, it didn’t really stick and none of Wendy’s immediate family attend church on a regular basis. Tim, being 5 years younger than Wendy probably doesn’t even have many meaningful memories from going to church as a boy as he was pretty young when they peeter out.

For whatever they decided to get a minister to do the ceremony but instead of finding a church that they wanted to attend and finding a pastor associated with that church, they decided to get what I will forever more call a rent-a-minister. I doubt this guy has any formal religious training to justify the term minister (at least in the traditional American use of the term) and even more importantly, didn’t seem to view his job as being all that religious in nature. It was clear from the conversations I had with Tim, the “minister’s” planner and the “minister” that Tim and his fiancee only met to arrange the logistics and payment of the wedding ceremony. The ceremony was outside at a golf course and had no association to any church.

It was clear from the beginning of the ceremony that he didn’t know these two people and was just spouting out some canned ceremony he got from somewhere (maybe he downloaded it from the place he got his “minister license” on the Internet). Then to top things off, he read from scripture and picked about the worst verse I could think of that has the word love in it. I forget where he started, but I think he skipped the beginning of the passage or maybe just a few lines, but here it is from the beginning up until where he stopped:

“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love…” (Ecclesiates 3:1-8

I’m pretty sure avoided the kill part in that passage and he definitely stopped with ‘a time to love’ because verse 8 continues:

“…and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. ”

What kind of IDIOT picks a passage from the bible in regards to marriage that is not about love but just includes that word in a long passage of positive and negative things for whick the point is “all things will come to pass”. A book that starts off “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!” The book of Ecclesiates is a book about the transient nature of life and that we must look to a higher source for our meaning. Traditionally the Jewish people have had a hard time with the inclusion of this book in the Hebrew scriptures (which is of course the Old Testament) because many thought it over-emphasized that lack of meaning of our lives. Point being, this is not a book you should be quoting from as a sign of our earthly love for our spouse unless it is part of a larger sermon about needing to place your faith in God above all things (and that will sustain your marriage). But that’s not what he did, that’s the only scripture reference he made. In fact, outside of saying “in the presense of God” he made no indication of God having any role in the marriage in any form other than quoting from Ecclesiastes and saying “this is this couple’s time to love”. And don’t even get me started about that statment!

It really ticked me off. I would have much preferred that the ceremony just be done by a Justice of the Peace as they call them. If you’re going to deny the religious importance of a marriage by not actually being concerned with having a real minister do it, why put up the charade of a rent-a-minister? I’m sure Tim and his new wife have no idea what this “minister’s” theology is and what the religious nature of a marriage is in his book. And they don’t care. So why would they have him come and preside over their wedding as a “minister”? At least with the Justice of the Peace, all that their saying is that this ceremony is to legally bind the couple as man and wife, which is something that all couples that are getting married are interested in. But if you’re not interested in making a conscious statement about the religious nature of the marriage (and to do that it seems appropriate to me that the person performing the marriage has the same view (not just A view, but the SAME view) of the religious nature of the marriage) just make it a non-religious ceremony and get on with it. But to hire a rent-a-minister… that was an injustice to God and everyone seated there including Tim and his new wife.

I read this news story, Ruling: Pregnant moms can harm babies at will, with horror. Yet again the mindset that until a baby is born they “aren’t a person” continues to rear its ugly head. However, it seems that we are SO blinded by this false perspective that we can’t even see when it doesn’t apply.

There is another premise of the ruling that I disagree with: that when she smoked the drugs that killed the already born child is relevant.

If a pregnant woman sets up a gun on a trip wire as she leaves the house knowing the next time the door is opened a shot will fire through the lower corner of the doorway (knowing that when her husband comes through the door the newborn in a carrier the newborn is likely to pass through the door in this location) should that woman be free from criminal prosecution when the child is killed because she set up the gun before the baby “became a person”?

Of course not!

Yes, there is a difference in this case in regards to intent, which is why the manslaughter charge is the right one instead of first degree murder. But none of this changes the fact that an action of the mother killed an ALREADY BORN child and therefore, even by our ridiculously lax standards, an “already a person” child. In other words, the fact that the child “wasn’t a person” when she smoked the drugs is not relevant because the child “became a person” before the mom’s drug use killed him.

I believe that in a world that wasn’t completely corrupted by this notion that a baby “isn’t a person” until it was born would not only see the falacy of the “isn’t a person” idiology but would have the clarity to see the false logic of the timeline loophole that is being used here.

Roe vs. Wade must end and it must end not only because it is a tragedy for unborn children but because it warps our ability to think clearly. Or as the best Catholic blogger on the planet, Mark Shea, puts it: “Sin makes you stupid”

For today’s (OK, it’s really yesterdays and there will be another one later today) reflection, I want to focus on the importance of Mass. We often hear the phrase “keep Christ in Christmas” from people who are frustrated with the over commercialization of Christmas. We hear this for good reason because many forget “the reason for the season” as they say. Heck these days Christians are fighting just to keep the word Christmas around as stores move to the slap in the face phrase “Happy Holidays”.

But lost in the phrase “keep Christ in Christmas” is the other half of the word: ‘mas’ which of course is a reference to Mass. Most people don’t know this but there used to be a number of ‘mas’ days. There was Candlemas celebrating the Presentation of Jesus in the temple as an infant. There was Michaelmas on September 29th to celebrate Michael’s victory of Lucifer. There was Childermas that commemorated the slaughter of the innocents by Herod. And there were others.

All of these celebrations/commemorations centered around Mass and with good reason. It is through Mass that Christ is made present to us in the Santuary, just like he was presented in the temple. It is through Mass that we celebrate Christ’s victory over death, just like Michael’s victory over satan. It is through Mass that we commemorate and tap into the slaughter of innocent blood in Christ that is our salvation. And finally, it is through Mass that we are able to recieve Christ in the Eucharist just as the world recieved Christ on Christmas day.

So as we prepare ourselves for the Christmas season in this season of Advent let us prepare ourselves not just for the celebation of Christ’s birth but also for that which he came into the world for: for Christ’s Mass.

(I give credit to The Fith Column’s blog entry How the Christians Stole Christmas for the inspiration for this reflection.)

Jesus Christ! Save us! Have mercy on us ALL!

This article is the lead article right now on the San Francisco Chronicle’s homepage. It highlights an organization called Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. The title of their organization properly sums up the goal of the organzation: The extinction of the human race.

I don’t think I’ve read an article that made my blood boil more than this one in a LONG time. Even Mark Morford’s overly sexualized screeds don’t provoke me as much as this one did.

Included in the article full of blantent lies are the following blood boiling statements:

1. That the UN thinks that we’re having a population explosion. Actually, the UN thinks that the world population is going to peak in 2050 or so and is then headed for a disasterous decline. The article even quotes the UN Study that says this, but only points out the peak population (projected) in 2050 as 9.1 billion. Talk about dishonest! There is no mention in the article that the 9.1 figure is a peak and that we’re headed towards decline. It’s quoted in the “the world just keeps growing, 9.1 billion by 2050!” style.

2. The aticle directly contradicts itself regarding the goals of this organization. To quote, “It’s obvious that the intentional creation of another [human being] by anyone anywhere can’t be justified today.” (emphasis mine) says the founder of the organization who later is paraphrased as saying “In many ways, the idea of reducing the world’s population is as much about human quality of life as it is about the health of the planet.” HELLO!?! Do you have a stinking brain cell working in you! You’re arguing for the EXTINCTION of humanity. You are NOT arguing for population reduction. Hell, as referenced in the article, you’re slogan is “May we live long and die out”.

3. Also stated in the article “Knight takes care to point out that VHEMT isn’t anti-child.” YES YOU ARE! That’s EXACTLY what you are saying: “reproducing would bump you up into the Hummer-driver category.” as you say in the article. And we all know that you’re the type of person who thinks that anyone who drives a Hummer is pure evil.

As a cover for their “we don’t hate kids” crap, they talk about the benefits of adoption or to use his words: “In light of the number of species going extinct because of our increase, and the tens of thousands of children dying every day from preventable causes, there’s just no good reason to have a child,” adds Knight. “We have to ignore all those children to create another one. It’s like saying, ‘Well, they just don’t matter.’ But they do matter: They’re all children in the human family.”

See, this is a PERFECT example of a person seeing a GLIMMER of truth and explioting to an extreme that does a disservice to all of humanity. What do I think of when I think of people who choose not to have children and instead spend their whole lives helping others, mostly children? Why but of course I think of nuns. What else would I think of, being Catholic? Many orders of religious were setup for the sole purpose of helping the less fortunate. These are people who are willing to forgo a ‘normal’ life to live a life of service helping others.

But what do those who do not know God do when faced with the same realization?

They call for the extinction of the human race while telling us that they’re not anti-child.

That’s IT! Expect a fisk about this post in the next day or two…