The catholic church touches a nerve because every single catholic I’ve ever met doesn’t hold the political views of vatican and therefore every catholic official is advocating a position their members don’t support. They are unelelected, unrepresentative and trying to force their views and conformance on everyone. That makes them dictators, and I don’t like dictators.

The problem isn’t so much that those idiot priests spout scientific untruths, everyone makes mistakes, the problem is that the vatican doesn’t correct those mistakes even though they know better. They endorse the lies and therefore make them official, and apparently part of their policy and that’s reprehensible.

Then there’s the hypocrisy of calling excessive wealth a sin while they live in their gold plated palace in Rome.

Finally, there’s the whole very depressing nature of catholicism itself, it’s entire focus and efforts are dedicated to sin and confession. Instead of celebrating the good things, the church spends all of it’s time telling it’s members they are sinners and need to confess to all the bad things they’ve done every week and be punished for them (probably by “instruction” people to make a “donation” to the church to pay for the next set of solid gold cutlery).

Maybe the catholic church should introduce braggings… where worshipers can go tell the priests all to good things they did this week and be rewarded for them. Focus on the good things for a change.

I’m not going to defend individual priests or the ediface of the whole establishment, but from what I know of them all individuals are capable of making mistakes, so to characterise the promotion of wrongly-held beliefs as ‘spreading lies’ is unhelpful.

After such resounding criticism of catholicism I find it hard to read your descriptions as unbiased, best-informed or sympathetic, therefore I cannot find it within myself to accept your presentation of their arguments, especially as they are based on negation, supposition and guilt by analogous association.

I certainly disagree with aspects of the catholic approach toward human behaviour which ignores the ability of technology to impact upon our habits and choices, but they do still represent a respectable intellectual tradition and constituency that cannot simply be dismissed without consideration.

I don’t exclude the UK Catholics. UK Catholics make up around 10% of our population. I doubt the majority of them share the vatican’s general views, which means that the church officials speak for a couple of single percent of the UK population. Your argument about accounting for catholic views is only valid if you extend that argument to include the Chinese communist party, which obviously with 2 billion members has an even greater hold on humanity and should therefore also be given a greater voice in our democratic debate?

The real problem with UK Catholics is that their representatives are not elected and certainly not representative. You’re not likely to remain a catholic official if you don’t toe the party line. If the catholic church officials would stop threatening MPs with ex-communication and stop spreading baseless horror stories about Frankenstein monsters in petri dishes long enough, we might actually get to hear what British Catholics think, instead of the bleating of the mouth-pieces of il duce in Rome.

Catholic officials are well known for spreading lies and trying to enforce their doctrine through terrorising populations, e.g. Small holes in condoms let HIV through. And western countries (that’s us) deliberately coating condoms in the AIDS virus.

They are trying the same tactics here.

I understand your point about the global demographic spread of Catholic adherents, but the way you argue it you seem to exclude any contribution to the debate which UK-based believers might be able to make.
Anyway the sheer spead of catholic thought requires acceptance that it has unified a greater hold on the opinion of humanity, and so must also be accounted for (even if repudiated) to gain the widest possible democratic balance.

“Most Catholics”, and I’ll use an entire wing of my family as a sample, don’t agree with many of the policies coming out of the Vatican; e.g. abortion, contraception, stem-cell research etc. Even my gran who has posters of Ratzinger on the walls of her retirement home the way a teenager has pop-stars never agreed with many of those policies.

The people church officials are campaigning for are the 1 billion Catholics that aren’t in the UK, nor most of western Europe for that matter.

If the Chinese Communist party or Iran’s Mullahs were dictating terms to our MPs there would be total outrage, but because it’s the Catholic Church no one seems to object.

As to Peter’s question, parents that want to deliberately inflict a disability (and hence a disadvantage) on their child are simply sick. If you think allowing parents to chose a deaf child is okay, then what about a child without eyesight, or without legs or arms, a speech impediment, learning difficulties or with a degenerative disease? Which “disability” is it okay to allow? It’s like the evil-twin of designer babies. Instead of selecting for an advantage, the parents are trying to handicap (literally) their child’s chances in life.

How will the child feel? If I’d discovered my parents had done something like that to me for essentially their own selfish needs, I’d be so furious I’m not sure what I’d do; I’d certainly disown them.

Mind you, you can’t argue with experience, just individual responses to them, so the question about which is more rational is an open one.

Provided the constraints on the science do not allow the practice to stray outside accepted ethical guidelines I’m happy with embryo research, just as abortion is only desirable in cases of necessity – legality is the regulator and guarantor, not the permit-granter.

Outside of these areas debate will inevitably become conflicted, and as it is impossible to whip political principles (only conclusions) a free vote is the sensible option.

If parents choose deaf embryo A in preference to hearing embryo B, it’s not obvious that the child that A becomes is harmed by this choice since, had the parents chosen otherwise, A would not have existed at all.

But they have desperately harmed B, because B will not get a life at all. So either way, you are killing one embryo so that another may live.

Consider that you are a soul (sorry, Laurence) awaiting insertion into your mortal coil. You’re offered a choice: one body that can hear, and one that can’t. All other variables about the two bodies are the same. Which would you choose?

This stuff about intentionally inflicting disabilities on children reminds me of a TV debate some years ago concerning AIDS. Some ghastly radical feminist type was saying there was nothing wrong whatsoever with AIDS infected people having children, because, even if the child dies in agony, he/she will “have five years of very valuable life”. The Guardian journalist, Ed Pearce, took a huge scunner to this, and so did I.

As for having a free vote on embryo research, while I resent the interference of unelected clerics, and have no serious objections to what the government is proposing, I think it is a long established Parliamentary convention that free votes are held on issues like abortion, capital and corporal punishment, etc.

Very roughly, I think a “matter of conscience” is one which for one’s political philosophy provides no definitive response or guidance.

While I don’t quibble that this is the commonly understood definition of a matter of conscience, I do struggle to understand why under this definition the embryo bill – which is about medical research and thus potentially about enriching people’s lives in what seems very liberal to me – counts while the Lisbon Treaty bill – which was a vote on essentially the practicalities of a referendum and had little to do with political philosophy – didn’t.

I think a more accurate definition is that a “matter of conscience” is something the churches kick a fuss up about while everything else is something they could not care less about. The fact that neither the Church of England nor the Catholic church regard the alleviation of poverty as a “matter of conscience” tells you all you need to know about them.

Deliberately inflicting a disability on your child in the name of culture is barbaric, and no amount of politically correct bollocks will convince me otherwise.

Mind you, I have similar views on infant circumcision, and that’s got me into trouble before, so…

The dilemma involved in the clause though goes beyond that. Do we have the right to genetically engineer the child of our choice or to remove defects in children before they are born? What does that say about those people who are already living a full life despite having those disabilities?

Ah, so we’ve regressed since medieval times. That’s good to know.

I think that’s pretty implausible don’t you? Unlike the Christian Scientists, the Catholics have no objection at all to the majority of medical advances.

It’s more just a fact, than implausible. The Catholic Church is implacably opposed to stem-cell research on theological grounds, and this is where some of the most dramatic developments may (or may not) emerge. We might find ourselves routinely bringing sight to the blind, unlike Jesus who performed the trick once 2,000 years ago (allegedly). Is it too much to suggest that the Catholic Church really doesn’t want this to happen?

Medieval theology held that ensoulment took place when the unborn child “quickened” (ie it could be felt by the mother) rather than at the point of conception.

“Quite apart from offending their outdated notions of the sanctity of life, they simply can’t bear the thought that we may (or may not) be about to see some spectacular medical cures which are going to make their own “miracles” look frankly silly”

I think that’s pretty implausible don’t you? Unlike the Christian Scientists, the Catholics have no objection at all to the majority of medical advances.