My grandfather died young, of injuries he sustained during the Second World War. He survived to see it end but after a few years of terrible pain he died as surgical techniques of the time made surgery dangerous as the drugs to keep him alive did not exist yet.One wonders if Pell is against surgery too? As a young child in the 1970's I recall that family and friends who developed cancer were facing certain death. Last year I lost someone to an aggressive cancer , they lived twice as long with the disease as statistical precedences of the recent past as they used a new experimental drug. I now know many who have beaten the disease. If I think back of all the people I know that have had it and beaten it have contracted the disease in the last decade. Heart disease too , heart attack was once certain death. The later you can put those ills off the better your chances. Why? Because of medical progress.

Pell deals with the emotionally constructed world, the fairy land of dungeons and dragons. In the real world the only hope for so many ills is genetic therapy. To lessen suffering in the real world stem cell research must be conducted.

Pell claims he is against abortion but to be against stem cell research is to sentence so many babies that would not be aborted to death. There is no moral basis for preventing stem cell research. Let Pell worry about his dungeons and dragons club and leave the real world to the people with their heads in the real world.

People think that athiests or agnostics have no moral or ethical compass,well I hate to disappoint those with this popularily held opinion.Chimps and dogs have empathy within their family groups and they are not over awed by the concept of an all powerful being.

There may well be many superior consciousness' in our universe, however in evolutionary terms we are just minnows that live in one of millions of gigantic, unfathomable galaxies with our foot on the first rung of learning.Our consciousness will only progress at the anvil of honest learning and the traditional religions will have to evolve or become irrelevant.