The Seperation of Church and Lab

In a story about Obama's reversal of Bush's ban on stem cell research, the news organization used the title of "Obama Moves to Separate Politics and Science." One of the themes of this blog is that the media do not like to call it like it is when it comes to religion, for obvious (financial) reasons. Why wasn't the title "Obama Moves to Separate Religion and Science?" The whole reason the stem cell research was banned in the first place was because of the religious belief that doing research on a lump of 150 non-differentiated cells (the size of matter we are talking about when discussing this type of reserach) constitutes "killing potential human lives."

As many people have pointed out (E.G. Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation) if potentiality is the measuring stick, then every time someone scratches their nose (which removes tens of thousands of cells that have the potential to become a human being) they are committing a holocaust.

Another response is, "If killing any pregnancy even at the two-cell stage is murder, then God is by far the biggest baby murderer ever." The facts of miscarriage rates are stunning. here are a few studies I found:

• 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period).
  
• Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies.
• The prevalence of miscarriage increases considerably with age of the parents. One study found that pregnancies from men younger than twenty-five years are 40% less likely to end in miscarriage than pregnancies from men 25-29 years. The same study found that pregnancies from men older than forty years are 60% more likely to end in miscarriage than the 25-29 year age group.
  
• Yet another study found an increased risk in women, by the age of forty-five, on the order of 800% (compared to the 20-24 age group in that study), 75% of pregnancies ended in miscarriage.

But I digress. CNN's headline isn't surprising. This is one of the best examples of how, 365 years after Galileo, religion is STILL trying to suppress critical thought at every step and the media are too afraid to call it what it is: attempts by religious people to stop science in its tracks. Some in the media are even asking if Obama's actions are an attempt to distract people from the economy! They think that we will not notice that it is their questions of Obama's motives - and not Obama's act - that are the actual attempt at distraction. While this Jedi mind trick might work on people who don't understand the significance and potential of stem cell research, it won't work on the rest of us.

-GG


UPDATE: After a technical issue and an absence, I have had to re-post all of my old posts. As a result there will be many posts listed as published today, Dec 3, 2009, that were posted sometime earlier in the year, but I do not know the exact date. this post is one of them.