Tag: religious dogmas

Religious Right Wants to Force Women to Implant Genetically Defective Embryos

Genetically Defective Embryos’ Right to Live: “There can be no selection between handicapped and non-handicapped life”

This is the opinion of the Christian government of the state of Bavaria and of a stong minority of the government of Germany. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of embryos to be implanted into women in fertility treatment should be outlawed.

Even though preventable, without abortion, and without having less offspring, women should be obliged bear defective children. These children will have a life of suffering, make their family suffer and be a burden to society. By simple pre-implantation genetic testing all this suffering could be avoided and instead a happy productive child could be born.

Religion prefers genetically damaged children to healthy children

I think only the twisted mind of religion could come up with such a perverted idea of how to create suffering on this earth. All this in the name of the rights of defective embryos! But, instead, a healthy embryo, already available, and ready to be implanted, will be discarded and distroyed.

German Government Divided over Calls for Embryo Protection

Artificial insemination: Politicians want new legislation to ban genetic testing of embryos.

Maria Böhmer of the CDU, a senior official in Merkel’s Chancellery, is also calling for a rapid ban on PGDs. “There can be no selection between handicapped and non-handicapped life,” Böhmer said. The politician argued that it would be impossible to place limits on the selection of traits once doctors were permitted to do PGD tests.

Following a federal court decision that would allow pre-implantation genetic diagnosis procedures in Germany, a number of conservative politicians are calling for a tightening of German law to ensure that “selection” of embryos cannot take place.

A growing number of conservative politician in Germany are rallying for a swift prohibition on genetic testing of embryos produced via artificial insemination prior to implantation in a mother’s womb. The politicians with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), are reacting to a ruling last Tuesday by the Federal Court of Justice that such procedures were not in violation of the country’s Embryo Protection Law.

“We need a swift change in the law to make clear that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) does not lead to selection,” said Markus Söder, the health minister for the state of Bavaria. Söder, a member of the CSU, said he had sympathy for future parents who would want to do this, but that it was unacceptable that embryos could be destroyed through PGD procedures.

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Atheists Sam Harris, Bertrand Russell on Morality, Dangers & Violence of Religion

Religion, even if untrue, could help guide the average person’s morality. Religion could help if religion taught morality at Wall Street, compassionate behavior for chief executives, just profits instead of blind greed.

Unfortunately, Western religions miss the big issues and instead devote themselves to obstructing society on minor philosophical points (rights of embryos containing 300 cells only are more important then life saving research), prohibition of condom use in Africa, etc.

But, religious books are outdated, badly interpreted, and as Sam Harris would say, dangerous to society. Sam Harris, a militant Atheist, aptly dismantles religion in his speeches and Videos. Really interesting & valuable.

Sam Harris: The View from the End of the World: Dangerous Deadly Religion

This is a voice only recording, you prefer to see a Video (albeit not very well done), you find a video with nice structure by topics http://fora.tv/2005/12/09/View_From_End_Of_World

Video Content description

Quotes taken from the youtube post of the video above follow:

  • In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. “This is genocidal stupidity,” Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics.
  • In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it’s likely. The good news of Christ’s return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. “End time thinking,” Harris said, “is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future.”
  • Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. “But what would they say to a guy who believes there’s a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaning the quest gives them.”
  • “I’ve read the books,” Harris said. “God is not a moderate.” The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or Old Testaments; slave holders in the old south used the Bible to defend their practice. The religious texts have power because they are old, but they are also hopelessly out of date because they are old.
 Sam Harris has been identified as one of the “Four Horsemen of Atheism” — company he shares with Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. An outspoken proponent of skepticism and science, his two books — The End of Faith and its follow-up Letter to a Christian Nation — have become best-sellers.
In The End of Faith, Harris showed “a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities.” After receiving thousands of angry letters in response, he wrote Letter to a Christian Nation, which centered on religious controversies in the United States: stem cell research, “intelligent design,” and links between religion and violence.

Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He is the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.
source: ted.com/speakers/ sam_harris.html

samharris.org


The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

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Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage)
by Sam Harris
4.1 out of 5 stars (689) $8.64


God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Ev…
by Christopher Hitchens
3.7 out of 5 stars (918)  $10.19


The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
3.8 out of 5 stars (1,543)
$10.85

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Ph…
by Daniel C. Dennett
3.6 out of 5 stars (180)
$11.56


The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings…
by Christopher Hitchens
4.5 out of 5 stars (70)
$11.01

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Abortion foes almost kill the US universal health insurance bill

Abortion foes (so called pro-lifers) in the US want to interfere into other people’s business.

None of the proposals under discussion would ban abortion. None would take away your right to buy abortion coverage with your own money. None would force you to pay for somebody else’s abortion. These are the conceptual parameters on which all sides have, for the time being, agreed.

So they already clobbered Congress into making special complicated arrangements for abortion foes (so called pro-lifers). Only for this vociferous group. Not for other special interests or religious convictions.

Abortion, we’re told, is different from other issues caught up in the health care debate. It’s a question of ultimate values, impervious to compromise. […]
Each side has legitimate worries. Pro-choicers fear that insurers will abandon abortion coverage. Pro-lifers fear that insurers will be forced to include it. Pro-choicers fear that women won’t buy abortion coverage if the premiums are separated up front. Pro-lifers fear that abortion opponents will be suckered into abortion coverage if the premiums aren’t separated up front. We’ll have years of studies, hearings, legislation, and lawsuits to follow up on these concerns and fine-tune the policy.Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2239647/

  • “Pro-lifers” are opposed to abortion and thus want to make sure their money does not go towards funding someone’s abortion
  • Well I am opposed to paying for the war in Iraq.  Did they make special income tax arrangements for me? Those in favor of the Iraq war can pay a special additional war tax.
  • I am also against nuclear weapons. Those who want the US to have nuclear missiles should opt into a special nuclear tax option.
  • I am opposed to keeping people alive in intensive care, when they are brain dead in a coma. Or when they are terminally ill and in pain and are not allowed to die.
    • Some of these guys live for 15 years in intensive care in a coma.
    • Very expensive.
    • Can I please have a health insurance exemption so I don’t have to pay for that?
  • I am totally profoundly against this artificial prolonging of life,  I consider this torture.  It is against my consciousness and against my religion.
  • It is unnatural. In nature, very sick animals and people get mercy killing by predators.

The above items are ultimate values for me. No compromise is possible. They are my religious belief, so by no means I must be forcet to pay for unjust wars of aggression and painful prolonging of life a against a person’s will. My beliefs on the follwing items are a little less strong, still I think I deserve exemptions in order not to pay for the following items:

  • I am also against paying for diseases people caused to themselves. I don’t want to pay treatment for people who
    • committed suicide attempts
    • abuse alcohol and drugs
    • do extreme sports and have accidents due to their recklessness
    • engange in criminal activities and get shot by police or rival gangs
    • overeat
    • don’t exercise
  • I live in a hot state. I am also opposed to treat people for frost bite. That should be an add-on.
  • I live on ground floor. I don’t want to pay for elevator maintenance.

So we should have 15 different voluntary private add-on insurance options for each of the following: comatose, terminally ill, obese, self-endangering, reckless, criminal, drug addicted, alcoholics, ……

Note the absurd idea that parents or young people will, at extra cost,  add insurance for abortion, criminal activity, drug addiction. They will presume that they will not engange in these behaviors, that they will not need the insurance.

This is religious zealots’ terror.  If you are against abortion, then don’t do abortion. But leave other people alone.

Actually, I agree that one should use better birth control, to make efforts to avoid needing abortion. But the same people who are against abortion are the ones that are sex education and promotion of birth control.

Human Stupidity: irrational brainwashed dogmatism in otherwise intelligent people

Humans, in spite of great brain and social capacity, get totally irrational and blind on certain issues. Frequently this is due to dogmas, taboos, religion, political correctness, old habits. etc.  Maybe someone’s hidden agenda is the source for some such manipuative selective (self)-deception .

Galileo and the PopeIt took the pope until 1992, 13 years after Neill Armstrong stepped on the moon, to recognize that the Galileo Galilei was right and the earth was not stationary. And people still take the pope seriously when he prohibits the use of condoms in Aids-struck Africa and threatens to excommunicate who turns off the artificial feeding of a girl after 20 years in brain dead coma.

People who normally are highly intelligent (like the pope) become totally irrational, unconscious, self-deceived on issues related to dogmas, taboos, religion, habits, political correctness. Not only at Galileo’s time, even today the taboos go as far as to repress scientific research

  1. Persecution of researchers on racial differences in intelligence. This is a tough issue, because equal intelligence of all races is a dogma shared by liberals who would agree with most of my other points. So any research that points to different intelligence in the races must be repressed. But, we claim we are an open-minded scientific society. As long as scientific results don’t contradict our dogmas.
  2. Repression of research violating dogmas:
    Bill Clinton condemned the “Bell Curve” (about racial differences in intelligence) without even reading it. The US senate condemned, with a 99:0 vote, prestigious research in the American Psychological Association journal showing that in cases of sexual  “child abuse”, no damage can be found if no violence has been employed and the victim has at least average intelligence.

    1. Scientific Publications Condemned and Repressed by US Congress and Senate
    2. Racial differences in intelligence: James Watson, Nobel Prize winning geneticist persecuted for scientific truth
  3. Child pornography witch hunt:
    under the guise of saving a few abused children, the entire interpol hunts down some poor loners who pay for a web site with teen sex photos. They get arrested with the entire might of interpol, and get their life destroyed.

  4. Supreme Court oks indefinite detention for possession of photos. But violent robbers get freed.
  1. Nude adolescent photos worse then TV showing killing children, bullying, gang violence, street crime against children
    1. Movie of 15 year old girl repeatedly brutally stomped on head: prime time news. Depicting the same girl posing nude would be child porn, a heinous crime.
  2. Abuse of language to mislead:
    Words get distorted, worse then Göbbels in Nazi Germany.  Adolescent nude non-sexual phots are called “child pornography”.  Consensual sex with teenagers is called “rape”.  A new law in Brazil defines inappropriate touching as “rape”.  This use of a clearly defined term “rape” for actions that is clearly NOT rape, as defined by popular language  for centuries, is  a clear misuse of language, meant to arouse more anger against the alleged perpetrators.
    • When a “Rape” is not a Rape! The Abuse of the word “Rape”. & the Perversion of Language |
    • Female evolutionary Superiority in social manipulation causes feminist Language Distortions’ universal acceptance |
    • Feminist arguments against prostitution debunked
  3. Pedophile witch hunt & obsessive repression of teenage sexuality.
    An enormous legal apparatus, under the guise of protecting 5 year olds from clear obvious abuse (no extra law is needed for that because penetrating a 5 year old is severe bodily harm) ends up arresting 17 year old girls for sending their own nude photos to their boy friends.

  4. Prohibiting  the use of embryos for stem cell research.
    Throwing the embryos into the garbage, that is allowed. This nonsense has diminished after Bush left office, but the religious right still thinks the rights of a lump human cells with an imaginary soul trump the right for health and cure of adults with diseases.
  5. Religion & Atheism:
    Religion is the source of many of our aberrations in thought, logic, and policy. I am too scared to even mention the most violent religion on earth. Christianity is past the crusades and witch burnings.
  6. Darwins Theory of Evolution: in spite of overwhelming scientific support with not one single counter-example. The churches see, correctly, that with Darwin’s theory, there is no more pressing need for a God-Creator, so they do their best to invent Creationist nonsense to confuse the non-scientific public.
  7. Repression of drugs as harmless as marijuana
    at the cost of waging wars in Colombia, jailing a considerable percentage of the population. The drug war is similar to underage sex witch hunt.
  8. at the same time allowing alcohol and tobacco to kill thousands of people.
    There seems to be some kind of contradiction and inconsistency. Also allowing advertising for junk food that created a world wide health menace of obesity from early childhood on:
  9. Obesity, unhealty food, sedentary lifestyle:
    due to misguided evolutionary mechanisms (hunter gatherers don’t have McDonalds, chocolate, unimited all you can eat buffets) we tend to eat wrong and be lazy to make unnecessary moves. Add to this industry greed, …. and we have a health epidemic.
  10. Negating right to die for the terminally ill.
    We are a liberal society that respects self determination and individual dignity. And we are not a religious state, so why do religious people want to force incurable cancer sufferers to rot and die slowly? If we let our dog die like this, the humane society would sue us for cruelty with animals. And of course it is totally taboo to discuss the cost of keeping an almost dead person “alive” for another half year.
  11. Victimless crimes:
    Why does government and police interfere when consenting adults decide to buy and sell sexual services? Are we not a free country? Is anyone harmed by this? And why are people in jail for planting two flower pots of marijuana in their own back yard for their own consumption? But booze and cigarette stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange?
  12. Prohibition of prostitution:
    under the guise of protecting women from “abuse”, Cambodjan brothels get closed, leaving the sex workers jobless and without income.  Seems the “victims” are unable to decide for themselves, they need the law and self appointed feminists to decide for them. Basically,  consenting adults are not allowed to sell and buy sexual services.  For the majority of men who don’t have much sexual success, prostitution could be psychological comfort:
  13. Men’s Rights & Feminism:
    I ran across a very compelling theory, that middle aged unattractive feminists conspire to eliminate competition by young attractive women (especially minors), cheap sex (prostitution), pornography and even sex dolls, so man have no other sexual outlet and are thus forced to stay with unattractive women even though it costs them half their income and property. This is why this brand of feminists do not oppose the burka, do not favor self determination in prostitutes, …
    • Female quotas on death row? Unsuccessful male losers overlooked by feminist zeal!
  14. Rape hysteria and false rape accusations:
  15. Human Rights:
    The well meant intention to dignify human life has led to absurd protection of criminals in detriment of public security and protection.

    1. Somali pirates rewarded with asylum in Europe in Holland or Britain.
      • Problematic Human Rights: captured Somali pirates are usually released
      • Pirates with Grenade Launchers Attack British Ship. Captured and set Free by Portuguese Navy
    2. Old white middle class white ladies in Britain get searched for bombs, just to avoid charges police might racially profile young arab muslim men.
      • UK: Police stop and search innocent white people to balance race figures, terror watchdog says
    3. law abiding citizens in self defense and police doing their duty risk getting sued by criminals
      • Why a doberman is better then a security guard or policeman
      • “Human Rights” protect criminals to the detriment of law abiding citizens
      • Killer’s human rights: German killers sue Wikipedia to have their names expurged
      • Henry L. Gates, Jr., arrest: racial profiling necessary for safety, political correctness discourages neighborhood watch
    4. vicious killers on death row can complain about cruelty in execution that take 3 minutes to die (while law abiding citizens are not allowed to die humanely in a hospital but die agonizing deaths taking weeks)
    5. Should society really spend billions on safeguarding criminals. Maybe the old fashioned methods like execution, whipping, cutting off hands etc. should be reconsidered? (I am playing devil’s advocate, I am not whole-heartedly suggesting these solutions)

Female quotas on death row? Unsuccessful male losers overlooked by feminist zeal!

•

Paraphlegic man wins right to die, to starve to death

An Australian high court ruled Friday that a quadriplegic man has the right to refuse food and water and can be allowed to die, a rare legal finding that some see as a major victory for right-to-die campaigners.

While hailing the victory, Nitschke decried the fact that Rossiter will have to undergo a slow and painful death through starvation, rather than having a quicker and painless way to end his life. Because he cannot use his hands, Rossiter must rely on others to withhold treatment rather than being able to take his own life. Switzerland has an assisted suicide law, and Rossiter has considered going there.

“It’s a bit sad that the best that Australia can come up with,” Nitschke said, “is that we can let a person like that starve to death

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/08/14/australia.right.to.die/

He said it all. No dog would be allowed to slowly die of starvation. But for Mr. Rossiter, this is better then being forced to stay alive in his suffering. See also http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/assisted-suicide-death-dignity-right-die/right-to-die-paraphlegic-starve-to-death

Paraphlegic man wants right to die, to starve to death

It is totally beyond my understanding why people don’t have the freedom to decide about their life. Why a paraplegic person can be forced to live a life that is torture, hell. Who are these people, who are these laws that want to force people to suffer? Animals have the right to be sedated and put to sleep. The Humane society would never tolerate an animal being kept alive and suffering for years.

It is also absurd that the guy has to painfully starve himself to death instead of being allowed to be put to sleep humanely (or should I say with dignity only allowed to animals)

A 49-YEAR-OLD quadriplegic who says his life is a “living hell” will find out whether he can starve himself to death as early as next Friday.
The Brightwater Care Group has lodged an application seeking advice on whether the nursing home should continue feeding Mr Rossiter, despite his wish to starve to death.
Mr Rossiter has described his situation in total paralysis as unbearable. He is in 24-hour care at Brightwater, in Perth’s northern suburbs.
Speaking through a tracheotomy tube, Mr Rossiter said he wasn’t afraid of dying, just the pain. Mr Rossiter yesterday told Perth Now that Australia should adopt Switzerland’s euthanasia laws and allow people freedom of choice in their right to live or die.
“I’m hoping the courts won’t force them (nursing home staff) to sustain me,” Mr Rossiter said.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25896071-2,00.html

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