Imagine the Quaker
an erstwhile mirror site for weblog on newquaker.com
archives | newquaker.comFriday, January 23, 2004
An actual telephone call this evening from a telemarketer on my "Do Not Call List":
"Hello?"
"Hello, sir. May I speak with Mrs. Harton?"
"No. You can't."
"Oh."
"She doesn't exist."
"I'm so sorry to hear that ... I'm sorry to bother you."
"That's quite all right."
"Well, good evening, sir."
"Good-bye now."
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 8:25 PM
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
So take a moment to re-read last week's best post at Nick Queen's Patriot Paradox—for the 1st Christian Carnival. What's a "Christian Carnival"? In this case, it's a gathering of posts from various weblogs that showcases their best blog post from the previous week.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 8:00 PM
Monday, January 19, 2004
From the "Gee, I wish I'd written that" file comes this outrageous foreign-policy humor from Anarchie Bunker. Just don't drink anything while you read it—it's that funny.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 10:33 PM
Sunday, January 18, 2004
When scientists run with knives. I get weary thinking about the deeds of the cloning Doctor Panos Zavos. According to a Reuters news story yesterday, he claims to have successfully cloned a human embryo, implanting it in a 35-year-old woman, and is roaming around looking for other women to experiment with. Those who attended his news conference in London were "stunned" to learn this news.
Humans have for many thousands of years been trying to figure out how to get the very things which God gives freely, in ways that he does not bless. Our history is littered with these exertions. We don't even get out of Genesis without witnessing the many human efforts to create children outside of the norm: Lot sires both the Moabites and the Ammonites through drunken, incestuous copulations with his crafty daughters, who desired to preserve the family lineage, even if it meant sleeping with their father; Sarah's manipulation of Abraham's procreative bed with her servant Haggar, despite God's promise of Isaac, a ploy that was played out again with Rachel and Jacob, and later of course with others. The fertility expert, like the trained maverick Doctor Zavos, is only one in a long line of humans who want to exploit this creation for—really, for what? Money? Fame? Power? I can't answer that question, and anyway it's irrelevant. Cloning is not an integral part of human fertility treatments, but is really a novelty, a scientist's amusement, a frolic through the lab, a studied use of human flesh for the sheer exhilaration of making a look-alike baby.
Doctor Zavos' test-tube antics have as much to do with hubris as the Bush administration's majestic blueprints for dancing on the moon and kicking up some red dust on Mars. Aside from the Tower of Babel's brick builders' arrogance, these great schemes simply make men swagger, but we are hard pressed to find in Scripture the pertinent proscriptions for this behavior. It isn't there. Perhaps that is because this anthropological pride is a base emotion, a fountain of many others that would bring us into God's disfavor. We can legislate against it, make pretentious pronouncements about its offensiveness, and hurl like invectives words such as "unethical" and "immoral." But this is only like speaking a foreign tongue to these people: While they can of course detect fury in a mob's noise, they don't understand what is conveyed by it. Like the abortionist, these are men and women who will not be stopped by crowds of angry villagers with torches and pitchforks, but rather by Christians who will take the time to befriended them, sharing with them the really important things in life.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 1:10 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
