Vatican Lists New Sin: DNA Manipulation

Church Official Also Lists Drugs And Pollution As Sins With "Social Resonance"

(AP)  Sinning has gone global, according to a Vatican official who has singled out genetic experiments, pollution and mind-damaging drugs as among today's new sins.

Also receiving fresh attention by the Vatican are society's injustices, along the lines of the age-old maxim: "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer."

After last year's "Ten Commandments" against road rage and other sins committed behind the wheel, the Vatican has provided its latest update on how God's law is being violated with modern means.

"The poor are always becoming poorer and the rich ever more rich, feeding unsustainable social injustice," Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview published Sunday.

Girotti was asked what, in his opinion, are the "new sins."

He cited "violations of the basic rights of human nature" through genetic manipulation; drugs which "weaken the mind and cloud intelligence" as well as imbalances between rich and poor.

"If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a weight, a resonance, that's especially social, rather than individual," said the monsignor, whose office deals with matters of conscience and grants absolution.

Vatican officials stressed that Girotti's comments broke no new ground on what constitutes sin.

Both Benedict and the late Pope John Paul II frequently expressed concern about the environment. Under Benedict's papacy, Vatican engineers developed plans for some Holy See buildings to use solar energy, including photovoltaic cells on the roof of the auditorium for pilgrims' audiences with the pontiff.

John Paul dedicated much of his long papacy to condemning the gap between have and have-nots in speeches in his travels throughout the world as well as in writings.

Closer to home, Girotti was asked about the many "situations of scandal and sin within the Church," in what appeared to be a reference to allegations in the U.S. and several other countries of sexual abuse by clergy of minors and coverups by hierarchy.

The monsignor acknowledged the "objective gravity" of the allegations, but contended that the heavy coverage by mass media of the scandals must also be denounced because it "discredits the Church."

Benedict has been leading the Vatican's campaign against abortion, and Girotti was asked about the "widespread perception" that the Church does not consider women's "difficult" predicament.

Girotti rejected that view, saying that Catholic organizations help unwed mothers, educating "their children who come into the worth because of their lack of foresight" and facilitating adoption.

Last year, the Vatican took on the social problem of road accidents, issuing a kind of "Ten Commandments" for drivers against the sins of road rage, alcohol abuse and even rudeness behind the wheel.

[honestabe8]

all of us that post on these forums with any frequency know that singinrick is a blowhard. he is entertaining, in a car-wreck-by-the-side-of-the-road kind of way.

[newsterl]

Excellent sigotratando, I certainly dont have a problem with you, my problem is when the religious reich starts PREACHING to me how things ''are'' or what *I* ''need'' to do. I come on CBS for news and interesting stories, most people do, but havebeen seeing it turning into the national sub-branch of the church of gezus, with post after post that read more like sunday sermonettes than comments about the NEWS or the story.
I cannot and will not let that sort of thing go unchallenged to the point where these forums become little more that a religious recruiting ground- without some oppositional posts.
When someone forces their version of a book down my throat and TELLS me to do something because the BOOK says so, it becomes little more than a bash-fest.

The material about Washington, Jefferson et al and ''christian nation'' I am glad you agree was good, THAT is the kind of research and posts I LIKE to provide, but lately that has been impossible due mainly to one individual who has seen fit to make this site his personal recruiting station.

[sigotratando]

Sigotatrando: dont waste your time with stinkingprick...
Posted by newsterl

Thanks newster1. Apart from the very long conversation with two strong, committed Christians yesterday about what goes on in this forum, I have decided to limit my challenges, exchanges, & dialog to points of logic & coherence. While the elements of a belief system are relevant to the motivations & perspectives of the substance of the respective articles, it is only incidental & accidental that edification results from being drawn into protracted reactive exchanges.

For instance, I thot that your exposition on Washington, Jefferson, & the line in the Constitution regarding tests, followed by some pretty decent conclusions, appropriately addressed the "founded on Christian principles" assertion. It is posts like this that I come to this forum for, with the intent to expose myself to information & perspective that I had not considered. I have a friend who is a leader in "Citizen Journalism", & he agrees that this is the idea & original intention behind providing a Comment area.

Thank you, truly, for your participation. If it were so easy to filter & focus, everyone would be able to do it. I intend to practice. I will get satisfaction by seeing that I have made a coherent point (characterized as "accolades") without the desire to persuade. Thanks again.

[sigotratando]

"You catch more flies with honey then you do with vinegar."
Posted by GrammaWhamma

Beware gramma, such a statement will be characterized as being "message of appeasement". Message & method are easily confused.

[newsterl]

In 19 out of the 25 cases, 50% of the recovered sperm showed strong motility up to the 42 hour test, declining sharply thereafter. It is noted that this fits with standard in utero vetinary textbooks. Up to the 40 hour point, the chance of fertilising a suitable egg seems high- whether human or animal!

[newsterl]

Id like to see some experiments expanding on the already touched on human/animal gene combinations, would be cool to have a half dog half human. Ive seen evidence its has been tried in labs years ago in Russia before the new technology.

For accurate mapping of the suspect fallopian blockages, it was decided to use live horse *** as an indicator. Fresh supplies were obtained from the Chomorsk State Breeding Centre daily, and consisted of full- fraction ejaculate, approximately 150-200 cc per session.
... patients were given the ejaculate in a suitable injection device, warmed to blood heat. 1cc samples were first withdrawn for tests on comparative sperm motility.

Not all patients were at an oestral stage where mechanical penetration of the cervix would have occurred. Nevertheless, all showed on subsequent uterine examination by micropipette, that sperm cells had penetrated the cervical mucus in the normal manner.
Where no blockage remained, equine sperm were found in high concentrations at the upper end of the fallopian tube. No possibility of error occurred, since the samples recovered by Riemann tube were of recognisably equine morphology
On three occasions, egg cells were observed in the recovered samples. All showed the characteristic crowds of several hundred sperm attempting to penetrate the outer wall.

[newsterl]

" characteristics eerily look similar to the Columbine HS killers in 1999.

You think its necessary to go out through the internet and stalk stalk stalk and also rip on Christians.
Thats the SAME THING THEY DID.
Posted by sickrick"

I dont stalk people, you put your personal info - a full name or email address, phone or street anywhere on the web a SIMPLE google search will find it, and it will find everything else about you in the same results in less than 3 seconds. Google will find ONE word on an entire web site, including text in PDF documents that matches the search
Someone else here as well as you posted your full real name, AND your email address, either one would enable anyone in Google to find everything about you in public documents, if they have your name they have your home address and with that they can also do a search in your county assessor''s office and read about your house/real estate, how much you paid, and what your taxes are- all it takes is a name, and you put that out there, and on your youtube page with your location. Dont blame those you attack for wanting to see what kind of nut they are dealing with by googling you, YOUR characteristics are more like those rabid right wing anti-abortion types who blow up womens clinics and shoot doctors

[newsterl]

e document that was finally approved at the constitutional convention mentioned religion only once, and that was in Article VI, Section 3, which stated that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Now if the delegates at the convention had truly intended to establish a "Christian nation," why would they have put a statement like this in the constitution and nowhere else even refer to religion? Common sense is enough to convince any reasonable person that if the intention of these men had really been the formation of a "Christian nation," the constitution they wrote would have surely made several references to God, the Bible, Jesus, and other accouterments of the Christian religion, and rather than expressly forbidding ANY religious test as a condition for holding public office in the new nation, it would have stipulated that allegiance to Christianity was a requirement for public office. After all, when someone today finds a tract left at the front door of his house or on the windshield of his car, he doesn''t have to read very far to determine that its obvious intention is to further the Christian religion. Are we to assume, then, that the founding fathers wanted to establish a Christian nation but were so stupid that they couldnt write a constitution that would make their purpose clear to those who read it?

[newsterl]

The absence of Christian references in Washingtons personal papers and conversation was noted by historian Clinton Rossiter

The last and least skeptical of these rationalists [Washington] loaded his First Inaugural Address with appeals to the "Great Author," "Almighty Being," "invisible hand," and "benign parent of the human race," but apparently could not bring himself to speak the word "God" ("The United States in 1787," 1787 The Grand Convention, New York W, W, Norton & Co., 1987, p. 36).

These terms by which Washington referred to "God" in his inaugural address are dead giveaways that he was Deistic in his views. The uninformed see the expression "nature''s God" in documents like the Declaration of Independence and wrongly interpret it as evidence of Christian belief in those who wrote and signed it, but in reality it is a sure indication that the document was Deistic in origin. Deists preferred not to use the unqualified term "God" in their conversation and writings because of its Christian connotations. Accordingly, they substituted expressions like those that Washington used in his inaugural address or else they referred to their creator as "natures God" the deity who had created the world and then left it to operate by natural law

[newsterl]

The religious issue was dragged out, and stirred up flames of hatred and intolerance. Clergymen, mobilizing their heaviest artillery of thunder and brimstone, threatened Christians with all manner of dire consequences if they should vote for the "in fidel" from Virginia. This was particularly true in New England, where the clergy stood like Gibraltar against Jefferson (Jefferson A Great American''s Life and Ideas, Mentor Books, 1964, p.116).

William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister in New York City, made perhaps the most violent of all attacks on Jefferson''s character, all of it based on religious matters. In a pamphlet entitled Serious Considerations on the Election of a President, Linn "accused Jefferson of the heinous crimes of not believing in divine revelation and of a design to destroy religion and `introduce immorality''" (Padover, p. 116). He referred to Jefferson as a "true infidel" and insisted that "(a)n infidel like Jefferson could not, should not, be elected" (Padover, p. 117). He concluded the pamphlet with this appeal for "Christians to defeat the `infidel'' from Virginia"

[newsterl]

efferson didn''t just reject the Christian belief that the Bible was "the inspired word of God"; he rejected the Christian system too. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he said of this religion, "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites" (quoted by newspaper columnist William Edelen, "Politics and Religious Illiteracy," Truth Seeker, Vol. 121, No. 3, p. 33). Anyone today who would make a statement like this or others we have quoted from Jefferson''s writings would be instantly branded an infidel, yet modern Bible fundamentalists are frantically trying to cast Jefferson in the mold of a Bible believing Christian. They do so, of course, because Jefferson was just too important in the formation of our nation to leave him out if Bible fundamentalists hope to sell their "Christian-nation" claim to the public. Hence, they try to rewrite history to make it appear that men like Thomas Jefferson had intended to build our nation on "biblical principles." The irony of this situation is that the Christian leaders of Jefferson''s time knew where he stood on "biblical principles," and they fought desperately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent his election to the presidency. Saul K. Padover''s biography related the bitterness of the opposition that the clergy mounted against Jefferson in the campaign of 1800

[newsterl]

Jefferson was just as suspicious of the traditional belief that the Bible is "the inspired word of God." He rewrote the story of Jesus as told in the New Testament and compiled his own gospel version known as The Jefferson Bible, which eliminated all miracles attributed to Jesus and ended with his burial. The Jeffersonian gospel account contained no resurrection, a twist to the life of Jesus that was considered scandalous to Christians but perfectly sensible to Jefferson''s Deistic mind. In a letter to John Adams, he wrote, "To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise" (August 15, 1820). In saying this, Jefferson was merely expressing the widely held Deistic view of his time, which rejected the mysticism of the Bible and relied on natural law and human reason to explain why the world is as it is. Writing to Adams again, Jefferson said, "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" (April 11, 1823). These were hardly the words of a devout Bible-believer.

[honestabe8]

the pope says this, the pope says that. silly man in a silly robe. his church is having a difficult time attracting new priests, largely because of the celibacy thing. if they insist on keepin that, there will be more priest/alterboy relations. looking back at history and the inquisition, it couldn''t happen to a better institution.

[newsterl]

In a letter to Horatio Spafford in 1814, Jefferson said, "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes" (George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey Citadel Press, 1983, p. 371). In a letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith, he wrote, "It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest" (August 6, 1816 Thomas Jefferson- one of your "FOUNDING FATHERS" you people like to claim was a christian or founded the country as a christian one.

[newsterl]

These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as "the father of the American Revolution." To this day, many mistakenly consider him an atheist, even though he was an out spoken defender of the Deistic view of God. Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe.

Fundamentalist Christians are currently working overtime to convince the American public that the founding fathers intended to establish this country on "biblical principles," but history simply does not support their view. The men mentioned above and others who were instrumental in the founding of our nation were in no sense Bible-believing Christians. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was fiercely anti-cleric

[newsterl]

Such a view of American history is completely contrary to known facts. The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible.

[newsterl]

Whenever the Supreme Court makes a decision that in any way restricts the intrusion of religion into the affairs of government, a flood of editorials, articles, and letters protesting the ruling is sure to appear in the newspapers. Many protesters decry these decisions on the grounds that they conflict with the wishes and intents of the "founding fathers.

[newsterl]

This country was NOT founded as a christian nation George Washington was a DEIST not a christian!

"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy which has marked the present age would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society."

George Washington letter to Edward Newenham October 20 1792; from George Seldes ed. The Great Quotations Secaucus New Jersey: Citadel Press 1983 p. 726
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."

George Washington address to Congress 8 January 1790
Washington subscribed to the religious faith of the Enlightenment: Like Franklin and Jefferson he was a deist.
"...That he was not just striking a popular attitude as a politician is revealed by the absence of of the usual Christian terms: he did not mention Christ or even use the word "God." Following the phraseology of the philosophical Deism he professed he referred to "the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men" to "the benign parent of the human race."

[newsterl]

" You came to this forum, and you KEEP coming back, and then you keep using this lame childish excuse that people don''''t want to hear it."

Seems to be all the negative comments in these threads are directed at *YOU* and your preaching posts you seem to like to flood this site with, I''m simply responding to them as a reader of CBS NEWS not CBS CHURCH.
Other people are sick of your psychotic gezus and bibull rants too, they are sick of all of this but since you choose to keep doing it, others have to respond to it negatively, and they do.

[newsterl]

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823