Ignorance and Deceit in the Service of God

Here in the good old Dis-United Kingdom the furore continues over the Government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (yes, I know I got it the wrong way round in my previous post). The Roman Catholic Cardinal of England, the very creepy Cormac Murphy O'Conner, has now added his ignorance and self-deceit to the outrageous misrepresentation offered a couple of days ago by his Scottish equivalent.
These are, of course, men who consider themselves chosen by God to tell us all what to believe and how to behave, but such self-serving moral narcissism rarely impresses anyone with a streak of independence running through their veins.
Down on our little allotment, Nosher and I have continued to debate the merits of igorance and deceit in the service of God (if He or She actually exists, of course). Imagine our delight when Lord Winston, the country's foremost expert on human fertility, contributed his opinion that the spreading of 'untruths' threatened the 'probity' of the Catholic Church. That's a polite way of referring to a much more serious offence against moral purity, and, if you read your history carefully (avoid the Catholic versions because they're propaganda) you'll find that the Catholic Church has never spurned 'untruths' when they suited its purpose.
It is, of course, an irony of staggering proportions that an institution and its leaders who pride themselves on being the guardians of our moral welfare should so actively involve themselves in perpetuating not only their own ignorance but also that of the more credulous and gullible people who look to them for guidance and instruction.
The nub of the matter is not whether a free vote is allowed in Parliament (it will make no difference to the outcome - the Bill will go through, and for good reasons), it is whether a minority of religious dogmatists should be allowed to spread 'untruths' in the service of their God and remain unexposed for what they really are.
The use of human nuclei (fertilised already during treatment for infertility) removed from the human cell in which they originated and implanted in an animal cell in order to create living test-tube is what is at issue. Normally such nuclei would be destroyed - their use in research to find cures for at present incurable diseases seems eminently reasonable to the vast majority of people whose main concern is to reduce the suffering of the victims of such diseases.
But the Catholic Church takes a different view. Using a fertilised nucleus in this way apparently constitutes a violation of the human rights of this little nucleus. This is a bit like saying the removing a tumour from a patient and then destroying it violates the human rights of the living cells of that tumour.
A fertilised human egg is only a potential human being, not the real thing. Yet some decades ago the Vatican instructed all Catholics everywhere that a fertilised human egg constituted a human being and had been given a soul by God at the moment of conception (there's absolutely no evidence for the latter of course - it's metaphysical speculation and religious dogma).
Now, neither Nosher nor I have any objection to people believing such things - our objection is when religious believers take it upon themselves to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives, and, what is even worse, employ their ignorance and self-deceit to propagate untruthful nonsense about 'Frankenstein science' in order to scare others and, ultimately condemn millions of people around the world to excruciating suffering from diseases that stem-cell research offers the best hope of curing.
So, the very people whose moral narcissism leads them to believe they are morally superior to the rest of us don't seem to mind at all condemning others to suffer for their selfish beliefs.
I think that says it all.
More from http://www.overthegardenfence.blogspot.com/ soon.
Find out more at http://www.paulsturdee.co.uk/
and http://www.pgsbooks.co.uk/
Paul Sturdee's book Is God a Terrorist? is available from Amazon and all good bookshops.