Wednesday, December 29, 2004

CREEPY STUFF IN THE NEWS. A woman in Maryland has had her own grandchildren. Really. When her daughter and son in law could not conceive, this woman volunteered to carry the babies. The doctors fertilized her daughter's eggs with her son in law's sperm and an embryo was created. The embryo was implanted in the grandmother, who is 55 years old.

The grandmother has now given birth to triplets, as is often the case when doctors mess with the natural process.

So, the gestational mother is the genetic grandmother. The genetic mother is the gestational sister. That sounds like a bad country and western song, doesn't it? Or life in Arkansas?

I find this all creepy and unsettling. I am not much of one for messing with the reproductive process anyway. But, this raises a lot of issues that doctors cannot resolve by chemistry.

I think I prefer that babies come into the world in the normal way and we let God decide who has kids and who does not. Wow, there is something the Pope and I agree on.

There is something we don't agree on, however, and it is creepy item number two. The Pope is trying to bury the axe with the Orthodox church, so he in un-burying some saints. John Chrysostom and Gregor Nazianzen were big in the Orthodox church. They were buried in Constantinople, now Istanbul. When the Catholics were tuning up for the Fourth Crusade, they took a detour to Constaninople in 1204, sacked it, and stole the bones of these two saints. They also raped women and children, stole art, gold, and silver, spreead animal excrement in the cathedral, and generally amused themselves at the expense of the Orthodox. The Pope had already excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople about 150 years before. However, there is not much that can be done about that now. The bones of the dead saints are a different matter.

One problem, however is that John Chrysostom is also a "Doctor of the Church" for the Romans.
Therefore, it is thought that the Pope will hang onto some of John's bones. They call them Relics by the way, which sounds much better than bones, corpses, dead bodies, and other more accurate descriptions.

Can you imagine a bunch of Baptists digging up Spurgeon and carting his corpse around?

The world is a creepy place.

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