Stop that cloning. Stop it right now:
Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of “new” sins such as causing environmental blight.
The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.
Asked what he believed were today’s “new sins,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.
“(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,” he said.
The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.
Two questions:
1. Does this mean we can threaten people who litter with hell? Cuz I’m all over that. When I was in Florida last summer, glorious sun, vast sandy beaches covered with the Big Gulps of the American south, all I could think about was how satisfying it would be to kick the next person I saw drop a Cheeto bag in the ocean really hard in the balls. It wouldn’t be quite as gratifying to just say a rosary for their sure-to-burn pathetic souls, but with the way my writer’s block is settling in for the long haul, I’ll take my accomplishments where I can get them.
2. Can the list possibly be expanded to include whatever it is Vera Wang is doing at Kohl’s? I was over there this weekend, looking for new mixing bowls and … I don’t know what that woman’s smoking but I want some of it. Is this just me being one of those people who thinks the purpose of clothes is to make you look nice, rather than make people go “oh, what an interesting designer you’re wearing”? Because a sack dress with a bunch of plastic shit glued on the front of it is … not productive, let’s just say. And while I personally love chartreuse, the idea of it anyway, finding six people who don’t look like a dog’s dinner in it is a hard fucking sell. I don’t think it’s nice, somehow, making things that look like that. It feels perverse, like she’s screwing with us. Maybe the Holy Father can intervene.
A.
I might take the Catholic Church seriously if for once they would come down hard on thou shalt not kill. It is a bit hard for me to visualize a “sin” worse than killing another human being. But, my country gets a big kick out of doing just that. We manage to kill more people who we (not God) have judged to deserve it, than any other so called civilized country in the world. Somehow we manage to equate our murderous lust with “justice”.
Then our “leaders” send our military over to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill still more people who we (not God) judge to deserve killing. But, we decide that a face to face judgement can be tiresome, so we just drop bombs and shoot rockets at areas where we are almost sure someone “evil” resides, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be in that area.
The silence of the Catholic Church is deafening when it comes to state organized murder. Yet, they had plenty of what it takes to scream bloody murder when they determined that Kerry was a “sinner” and shouldn’t replace the leader who presided over our most murderous state, and who sent our military into Iraq and Afganistan.
No, the Catholic Church is not a religious institution in my mind, or at least not a serious one. So, their definitions of what offends “God” don’t interest me in the least.
Does this mean we can threaten people who litter with hell?
Seconded. The last time I was in FL for 4th of July there were hundreds of people on the beach shooting their giant, plastic-capped mortars out over the Gulf, and I could only imagine how much crap was being launched in to the Gulf and the Atlantic all along Florida’s coastline that evening. On my regular walk the next morning, I filled a 40 gallon trashbag with what had washed back ashore, but I’m sure there were literally tons of bottle rocket sticks, mortar launchers, sparkler wires (large and tiny) and lighters (not to mention beer cans and cheetos bags) that never made it back to the beach.
Maddening.
Do people even think?
3rded for litterers getting hell. thank god i don’t go to fl beaches, might make me insane.
fucking bottle rockets. garbage garbage garbage. plastic plastic plastic.
ad no stem cell cause jesus suffered so humans must suffer. right? fuck you pope.
but mnkeying with food plants? that is wrong.
So an immortal stem cell line that descends from someone’s discarded embryo that was going to go in the medical waste trash is more important than all the productive medical research we’ve been getting out of the field. Right. I see.
Maybe it’s my inner Jew, but I’d rather not have litterers go to Hell. That’s entirely too long to wait, and it still leaves other people to clean up their mess (after all, since when did the fear of damnation actually ever stop anyone from doing anything, seriously). I’d rather those beach-cluttering jerks had to live by a principle calledtikkun olam (that is, healing the world), and had to go aroundpicking that crap up. Screw damnation and eternal punishment; I’m aboutrestitution in the here and now.
Tikkun olam’s the reason I’m out there with my trashbag, Interrobang…
Holy ^@%!@#$!
I had to see this Vera Wang marvel and it truly is a dog’s dinner. It’s on sale this week…you can look like something you put in the dog’s dish for the low low price of $52.80. Holy $%^#&!!@.
“Thou shall beware genetic manipulation.”
except where it involves genetic manipulation of food, because, well, it just wouldn’t be right to interfere with the free market.
nice.
i think i should check out the kohl’s ad.
The best thing about the Vera Wang collection? There’s one dress where the way the description’s formatted online it reads: Wang Studded Dress.
Okay, it’s juvenile, but I can’t stop laughing.
Seriously, though, Kohl’s really needs to get Jillian from Project Runway. I’d wear her stuff in a heartbeat, which is way more than I can say for Vera Wang.
I pick up trash along our country road and have often wish a huge laser shooting monster lived in the forest along side it. A monster that would zap the idiots that litter out of existence. Alas no such creature lives, mores the pity.
That said, when I see people litter I do call them on it. Most of them do not even know they are doing it. I ask them if they treat their own yards and homes the same way they treat the earth. Most of them stutter and are genuinely ashamed.
my grandpa would walk along highway and pick up trash. and he would find money doing it. i also got a deer skull.
i pick up trash. do your litter bit.