| | All men [should] be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and ... the same [should] in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."- Thomas Jefferson, Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779.
Ideally, the US government would fund neither medical research nor education--but given that it does so, its actions must be ruled by reason, not by an effort to promote or enforce the superstitious restrictions of any particular strain of religious mysticism.... Tracinski
Drawing a cloak of reason over government funding is irrationality in the extreme. How can that which is unreasonable in the first place function according to reason, talk about tarting up the pig.
There is nothing more deleterious to freedom than a militant atheist who finds religious significance in everything or wants to replace religion with a blind obedience science.
The delusion that Science is forever on solid unimpeachable ground is demonstrably false. Science, at any point in history that you care mention, has been wrong, often totally wrong. Science may seek truth, but it is a never ending journey. Further, anyone naive enough to believe that science is virtue incarnate should read up on the Tuskeegee experiments or the eugenics experiments in NC that we were recently discussing in this forum. Major eugenics research at Wake Forest University was paid for by a patron whose long history of ties to science had a racial agenda that included a visit to a 1935 Nazi eugenics conference and extensive efforts to overturn key civil-rights legislation.
The issues raised by Tracinski are only apparently religious and appearances can be deceiving. I am not a creationist but I know enough about them to know that they are not monolithic in their thinking and that their wisest proponents do not reject evolution as it relates to mutation and natural selection. The greatest distinction between science and creationism is that the latter argues for a special creation in the case of man; respected scientists have believed the same.
Nor is reluctance to federally fund stem cell research strictly a 'religious' issue. It is a human rights issue having to do with the sanctity of life, something in which Rand herself was particularly interested.
Tracinski can defend the Dr. Robert Stadtlers of the world, if he likes, but he might put his intellect to better use by encouraging science to end this debate once and for all by determining when a fetus becomes a human life. Both Rand and Peikoff acknowledge this is problematical when they say,
"One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months", and "This is not to condone the morality of arbitrarily delaying an abortion until the last months of pregnancy — when the fetus is approaching humanness. "
Until the question of when human life begins is answered the debate will never end.
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I am in favor of federally funded stem-cell research for the same reason that I
am in favor of teaching evolution in public schools. Ideally, the US government
would fund neither medical research nor education--but given that it does so,
its actions must be ruled by reason, not by an effort to promote or enforce the
superstitious restrictions of any particular strain of religious mysticism.... As a symbolic issue, to spend billions on medical research while
exempting this one area sends the same message the president will send if he
uses his first and only veto to block this bill: that enforcing religious
restrictions is the government's highest priority.
