Boaz,

I have to second Bugsy and Pericles.
Hamas (Muslims) are fighting Fatah (Muslims) Were you sleeping for the last few years?

"What should be straight-forward scientific research has been turned into a mess by the educated but scientifically illiterate supported by a cheer squad of know-nothings."

Too funny for words.

The know-nothings seem to include, Brian, the author.

Lets see....natural selection was not Charles Darwin's concept...it was Edward Blyth's.

Research in agriculture and medicine 'took off' well before Darwin, and often in spite of evolution.

To say the Catholic church equated science with heresy for a millennium is just stupid.

Even talking about therapeutic cloning (as if cloning a human life and killing it for research is different to cloning a human life for reproduction is more moral?)

All this shows the author does indeed know nothing about the history of science or the history of the church.

Whilst the author would love to return to the days where there were no moral bounds on scientific research, the rest of us remember history and know of the great evil such a notion creates.

Someone should tell the author that this issue is now a non-issue, with a far cheaper, more efficient way to obtain embryonic stem cells than the willful creation and destruction of human life.
http://alangrey.blogspot.com/2007/06/stem-cell-breakthrough.html

Such ignorance is pitiable, and especially dangerous when there are only limited resources for research. Focusing on speculative, inefficient and morally questionable research methods are just not good for our health.

Dan, those who try to silence believers who act in public life are most prejudiced. Of course we are all prejudiced to the way we each think - we are all naturally biased towards our own beliefs. Yet it is more prejudiced to dismiss an argument because a person is religious, which is ''irrational''.

Can't you see how dismissive that is? Churches don't teach that an embryo is a human being because it is written in some magic book, they honestly believe it, like I do, and like so many eminent scientists around the world do.

Dan asserts those against stem cell research should 'prove' it is a human. It has never been a widely accepted fact that an embryo is not a human. There is nothing more stifling than moving the goalposts in a debate.

Clarify your view by accepting you believe in the destruction on human life at an early stage to help older people live a few more years.

Do that, or prove that the embryo is not a human.

Consider this: if it is human, and you are destroying it, that's bad (I hope you would agree...) If it is not human, than that would be OK, a neutral outcome for the embryo, a positive for ailing people. But if you were an objective person, you would want to make sure you were not killing someone in the process, so the logical approach is to prove that it is not a human.

Now has anyone ever done that? NO. Go to any search engine, read any text book - once you have fertilisation you have a human being. You will never have a human with just an ova; nor with just a sperm. Put them together and you get a human - surely we agree on this.

If you are that keen on stem cell research just admit that you are happy with the destruction of human life at an early stage for the sake of therapeutic benefits. Then we can continue the debate. Until then, we are just chasing each other's goalposts around the park.

Perhaps there have been no demonstrations against the Dalai Lama because, despite his country being under violent opression, he doesn't go around telling us who to hate and who to fear.

Not a bad example for a religion that has no God.

Might say that the comments of Enda do fit well into academic studies based on the philosophies of Western history.

Certainly it was St Thomas Aquinas who saw the need to tone down overdone Christian faith with Socratic Reasoning as some term Aristotalian Reasoning.

This it was Aquinas who set the Western scene for not only the Rennaissance but the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment and onto our present democracy, which in all truth goes back to the Greeks more than to the Bible.

Two philosophers after Aquinas do strongly carry the Faith/Reason contract combination through. England's John Locke in the late 17th century and Germany's Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century.

No need to go on, except to say that the philosophy of Western history makes intriguely interesting reading, and makes one feel disgusted that our present government if it stays in will do away with such a study if and when it strips down the Humanities.

I'd rather meet the Dalai Lama than the Chinese leadership...
Whatever your brand of religion or non-religion there is still all that art, music, literature, drama etc out there from all sorts of traditions...has that done us all more harm than good?