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Whatever floats your boat Bishop Harries. If unshakeable belief in the unknowable is what it takes to keep you on the near side of the line which separate sanity from insanity, you are in plenty of company. The alternative is to accept that life has no meaning and death is eternal. I for one have no problem with that. Quite the contrary, I have found increasing comfort in it as I've grown older and of course it makes me immune to those who pass around the collection plate holding out hope to those who must believe in god when the clergy infer that you can buy your way into heaven.

This is a good discussion. It can be found at:

They agree on the Embryology isue. Simon Jenkins puts it well:

"Important and sensible research is under attack for using animal eggs as embryo containers. Since the metaphysical status of egg-casing is not one on which the church has yet pronounced, opposition appears based on "yuck" and nothing else. But yuck has become diktat, with Catholic MPs up to cabinet level being given a three-line whip by their bishops. We are back to Galileo and the Inquisition".

So too does Harries:

"I am sure the Roman Catholic bishops are intelligent, rational people, but their starting point on embryo research is mistaken. They believe that the newly fertilised egg, the tiny bundle of multiplying cells smaller than a pin head, has the same right to life as an adult. But more than two-thirds of fertilised eggs are lost in nature anyway. If each of these really is a person, that is, an eternal soul, it would lead to the absurd conclusion that heaven is mainly populated by people who have never been born".

There is a letter in tonight’s Belfast Telegraph by the UK health minister Ben Bradshaw correcting the distortions and factual inaccuracies perpetrated by the SDLP's Mark Durkan in an article about the Embryology Bill in the paper last week. It is astounding the extent to which individuals influenced by religious propaganda get the facts so badly wrong about this bill. When Simon Jenkins says above that it is back to Galileo and the Inquisition he is not far off the mark.

Brian, in post 2 you hit the nail on the head. The RC position re the ethical beginning of human life is patently absurd. If they *really* believed this, they would regard the natural non-implantation of the majority of viable embryos as the greatest public health disaster affecting humankind.

But they don't.

The answer is that it is not about actual ethical belief, but about *control*.

-A

Hi Amenhotep;

It would seem that a God also doesn't help matters in humans by not having human females go into heat, as is the case in most other mammals. So ovulation is not advertised and most human sex acts take place at the wrong time for fertilisation. So if sex is designed for procreation, why does God make it difficult to use it for that specific purpose? And why does he allow all those cells to go to waste? Indeed, there are several steps before a pregancy occurs: fertilisation of sperm and ovum, segmentation, implantation etc. If sex is to procreate, why allow so much of it to occur without this result and without telling the partners?

But you are right. Opposition to the Embryology Bill has really nothing to do with concerned clerics protecting us all from the consequences of evil scientists creating Frankenstein monsters, mixing animals and humans, and destroying 'life'. it is really about control:over our bodies, over our minds, over our behaviour, over our morality. It is power politics in a clerical dress.

Can't honestly say I know much about Richard Harries and his beliefs, but 'definite agnostic' sounds like a pretty wobbly position! (Maybe some folk have not realised that a word very close to agnostic is 'ignoramus'!!)

Thankfully, God has not left us in the dark...the Bible tells us we can know Him through Christ, and enjoy a salvation we can be sure of!