In The Beginning….
As a scientist, a Ph.D. Molecular Biologist and Microbiologist, I rejoice in the knowledge and power that is at the disposal of my community. We have unlocked the deepest and most profound truths about the universe, from the macrocosmos to the microcosmos and beyond. We have conquered diseases once fatal, and have others on the run. We have genetically engineered crops and livestock that are more robust and yield greater quantity of food. We have truly fulfilled the mandate in Genesis to be fruitful, multiply and subdue the earth.
Along the way, we have lost something of ourselves as a race, something essential. The reductionism of the Twentieth Century has flashed back on us. We have come to see ourselves as less sacred, and therefore, less deserving of a unique dignity in all of creation. Science has become the ascendant religion of the West. Where the great monotheistic religions had humanity in relationship with God as their focus, Science reduces humanity to one more among a menagerie of species.
The purpose of this blog is to explore the lost human essence in the headlong embrace of reductionism, to promote the dialogue between Christian Anthropology and the sciences, primarily the Biological Sciences. Abortion, Euthanasia, Eugenics, Physician Assisted Suicide, all threaten human life on a scale never before imagined. There have been 1.8 BILLION abortions worldwide since the year of my birth, 1960. That’s one abortion for every 3.7 people walking the planet today. Where did we go so terribly wrong?
This blog will pursue the truth, wherever the truth leads. I invite the gentle reader to walk with me on the road of exploration. I am Roman Catholic, unapologetically so. I believe that much of what has been lost in human anthropology can be found in my Church’s documents, and in the scholarship of her sons and daughters. So too do I believe that my Protestant and Orthodox brothers and sisters, enlightened by the leading of the Holy Spirit, bring their very powerful witness to the truth, as do our elder brothers in faith, the Jews.
Indeed, pro-life is not the sole province of any one church or religion. We are all children of God, sharing the same dignity as such. Restoring that lost dignity is what this blog, and my life’s work is all about.
Welcome friend.
Hey Gerard,
I’ve been enjoying your comments over at Jill’s site and thought I’d come and visit your new “digs”.
I love it! The pictures declare the glory of Our Creator and it has a very clean, organized look.
Bravo.
I read a few of the pieces as well and found them very thought-provoking.
I’d like to blog myself. But if I did, how would I ever find the time to come back and visit your site? As it stands now, I already spend entirely too much time on Jill’s.
I can predict with some confidence that your site is going to seriously challenge my New Year’s resolution for more disciplined time management!
Keep up the good work!
Thanks Ed. I appreciate the feedback very much. And I’ve been enjoying your comments over at Jill’s as well. I’m new to blogging, but it’s pretty agreeable with me. Will you be at the March in January?
God Bless
I agree, excellent blog Gerard!
Nice blog, Gerard! Feliz Navidad!
Hi Gerard,
Peace and many blessings this Christmas to you and yours!
I will be bookmarking your blog as one of many I follow.
I have two blogs but since I was stalked on Jill’s site I don’t have them public.
I was trained as a scientist but am now in a different career. I enjoy your comments on Jill’s site and will read up on your blog.
Peace,
a friend
Great blog, Gerry! A Blessed Christmas season to you and your family! Hope you are all doing well and enjoying this most joy-filled season! Keep up the great work here!!!
Love,
Your friends in CT
Just discovered your blog… excellent! Keep up the good work.
Mac,
Thanks for the kind word. Having more fun than a human being ought to have
God Bless
Hi! I just discovered your blog through a link made in one of the facebook groups I joined which opposes the Reproductive Health Bill here in the Philippines. Great work on connecting science with pro-life issues! I really enjoy reading them, being a physician and a “scientist” as well.
Sadly, despite majority of Filipinos being Catholics, the contraceptive business is booming here. I think many people are put off when pro-lifers instinctively include purely religious views as their sole foundation for being pro-life.
Your blog will be a great help for those seeking to fully understand the many pro-life issues by including both science and your faith. It’s Faith and Reason in the flesh.
Keep it up!
Welcome to the human rights online revolution, Gerard! I saw your blog promoted on Jill Stanek’s.
With heroes like Lila Rose taking on Planned Parenthood, many people do not know that there are also some publicly funded state universities who are very aggressively pursuing abortion agendas as well, albeit very quietly.
As far as I know, ours is the only one in the country countering a university’s misinformation and in house abortion program:
http://uvalies.org/
Thanks for your activism.
Sean.
Dear Gerard,
My name is Andrew Haines, and I’m a cofounder of ProLife ProPatria (http://www.prolifepropatria.com), a bioethics and social/political science commentary site aimed at representing a pro-life position from the vantage point of natural law philosophy.
Given your history and expertise–and your passionate work with the pro-life movement–we would love if you’d take a look at our site and give us some feedback. Recently, we’ve been in touch with a number of Catholic thinkers (Drs Robert George, Patrick Lee, Francis Beckwith, Christian Brugger, et al.), some of whom have agreed to serve on our editorial board. In particular, we are looking to form relationships with biologists/scientists who would be able to guide us in the right direction on the less-theoretical side of things. If you would be interested in helping out in any way, we’d be happy to talk about it!
I hope we can be in touch; feel free to email me at andrew.m.haines@gmail.com anytime. Thanks in advance for your consideration.
Best,
Andrew
PS: If you email me your address, I’d be happy to sent a PDF of our organizational aims and objectives (mission, goals) for 2010.
Dr. Nadal,
What a wonderful letter. Thank you for writing it.
I noticed your avatar is the autism ribbon which
immediately caught my eye as a mom of an
autistic 7-year-old.
I read your bio, what kind of autism research are you doing?
AND did you see the HBO movie “Temple Grandin” recently? Very well done. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, keep up the great work on your blog.
Hello. I was looking for an email address to send you a pdf of a pamphlet on which I am co-author. I am a psychiatrist who has worked extensively with women who have had mental health problems related to abortion issues, and I thought you may be interested in what I have written. You can contact me privately at martha.shuping@gmail.com if you would like to see a copy.
I don’t have the pamphlet posted at my website yet and may not for a while. The pamphlet is adapted from an article titled Big Girls Do Cry by Martha Shuping M.D. and Chris Gacek which was published in Townhall Magazine in Feb. of 2009, and that is able to accessed through my website.
To see Big Girls Do Cry, go to http://www.rachelnetwork.org then click “in the news” and you should be able to access the pdf of the article if interested.
Many people are coming to understand that women and men experience grief and loss after an abortion. But many people are unaware of the numerous statistically significant studies that show that abortion is a risk factor for more than a dozen different psychiatric disorders, or that many women are aborting wanted babies because of pressure from others, or lack of support for the choice to have their baby.
I think the article and the pamphlet show a picture of abortion that is very different from what most people realize. Abortion has very little to do with women making a “choice.” The lack of information, the lack of genuine counseling, and the degree of pressure brought to bear are astounding. The mental health sequelae are devasting to many women and men.
For further information related to some of the research, see also http://www.standapart.org in addition to the Rachel Network website.
I am a weekly lurker on Jill Stanek’s blog, and I always appreciate your knowledge and wisdom. I direct a prolife pregnancy ministry…thought I would peek at your blog. I find blessings in the writings of people like you!!
Gerard, I just popped over from Rod Dreher’s site, where you’d left a link in a combox. Have always enjoyed your comments there, and am looking forward to following your blog. I really like what I see here! You’re doing important work. Thank you!
Dr. Gerard,
I am a new visitor on your site who found you while looking for more discussion regarding the excommunication of Sr. McBride in Phoenix. Your clarity about that event is much appreciated by this Catholic.
In your bio, you mentioned that you and your wife homeschool your children, yet you have no blog posts yet about that decision and about how it is going.
Please consider doing so. I’m one reader who is interested and I’d guess there are others. I’ve considered home schooling countless times and have friends who’ve chosen that option, but have so far continued with institutional schools and home supplementation because I’ve been a little reluctant to remove my child to an environment where she is the only student.
Background: My husband and I have a single child. We have tried both public and private school options and been fairly disappointed with the constructivist pedagogy and the promotion of progressive, secular values at both. Shoring up the weaknesses, in both coursework and culture, has been alot of work, but rewarding too.
Next year, she will enter a Catholic high school with a strong sense of community and a recently renewed determination to stay true to Catholic identity. Given that our experience here in the Pacific Northwest has been that “Catholic identity” can mean different things to different Catholics, we are going in with eyes wide open and ears to the ground and the hope that what we find there resonates with our own beliefs and values.
Hello, Diane. Just saw your post today. I homeschooled my own daughter from 4th grade through high school graduation, and I think homeschooling is a wonderful option. Unfortunately many people hesitate to try it based on many misconceptions.
If you want to talk to other parents of high school students who are successfully homeschooling, I have a yahoogroup with hundreds of members from all over the country, where you would be welcome to join, read the posts and ask questions.
The link to this particular email list is
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conservativehs2c/ and you do have to be a member to read the posts and ask questions, but it’s easy to join.
I was at one time on an email list that included college admissions officers and also many parents of homeschooled high school students. We could ask the admissions officers questions, but any time a parent just wanted to offer advice or talk to another parent, that was annoying to the admissions officers, so I started a list to foster conversations. That was the “original” homeschool to college list, homeschool2college at yahoogroups.com.
But then some of us realized that there were people on that list that don’t share the same values and there was a need for a place where conservative parents of traditional relgious faith could discuss homeschooling through high school and the transition to college, including college prep curricula, service hours, college applications, scholarship applications, or anything related to that whole process of getting homeschooled kids through high school and into college.
At the local level, your student has so many opportunities. During middle school and high school, my daughter was in small group of friends, originally about a dozen but later only four, who shared a Spanish tutor. The Spanish tutor had been a missionary to a Spanish speaking country, and also had taught Spanish at community college, so she was superb, and my daughter loved her. We all chipped in to pay part of the fee, and normally met for about a 2 hour block once a week working through a standard textbook.
Here in NC, from age 16 onward, the local community colleges allow dual enrollment for homeschooled students who can take two free classes every semester, earning high school and college credit at the same time, so that by the time they finish high school, they may already have completed a whole year of college little by little over their junior and senior years of high school.
Also, a local private school offers Chemistry classes wth lab after hours, and other sciences and foreign languages, so that in the late afternoon when students have gone home, homeschooled students can take advantage of a state of the art chemistry lab and other resources.
There is no limit to what you can do in high school short of your own creativity and your student’s interests. My daughter was able to participate in a lot of challenging ballet opportunities that would not have been possible if she had been in public schools.
I also at one time started up a fine-arts academy where homeschooled students of all ages had music, art, and drama with other students of a similar level. My daughter participated in some plays through this group, and had three years of classical guitar lessons with her friends, taught by teachers who also taught at local colleges.
Just because you “homeschool” doesn’t mean that every day of her life your daughter will be alone, as in a solitary prison cell. Chances are, she’ll get through her basic course work more quickly because there will not be time wasted in changing classes, going to the locker, taking attendance, time off for a pep rally or school assembly, time for Sally to find the right page, time for teacher to berate Joe for not doing his homework, etc.
And with the extra time, there is plenty of opportunity to puruse individual interests or extracurriculars.
But even the main courses can certainly be facilitated by a tutor in a group setting. State of NC makes the point that in a “homeschool” the courses should be taught “at home.” Fine. As the principal, I bought the Spanish book, and I made sure my daughter worked through the Spanish assignments. But there is no law anywhere that a student can’t have a tutor, and it worked well for us to send her off to her friend’s house with the tutor for Spanish practice. She learned a lot and enjoyed it.
She also got to do some international field trips as part of her high school, including tagging along on a business trip with her father who is a watchmaker. Her dad was taking a course in the Swiss method of watch repair, and at 14, she got to take the course alongside her dad, and then travel around to visit watch factories and watch museums in between a few days sightseeing in the Alps. Later, she visited Ireland and helped at a couple of different pro-life events.
Homeschoolers do so many fun, amazing things, nobody has time to be lonely. And I haven’t seen homeschoolers missing out on much.
Martha Shuping
You note that branches of Christianity and Judaism provide useful contributions to science – why no mention of Islam, since it is the third abrahamic faith?
Haley,
Islam’s Golden Age died some 800 years ago. It was replaced by the University system which grew in and through the Catholic Church. The overwhelming majority of scholars in the sciences have been Christians and Jews. Nothing would fill me with joy more than the Islamic world abandoning Jihad, suicide bombings, the misogynistic treatment and regard of women and join the rest of the Western world.
The truth is that their students are flocking to European and American Universities for graduate education in the sciences, as their universities are woefully inadequate. Should the Islamic world get on board with the Enlightenment, I’ll gladly include this Abrahamic faith that has collapsed in on itself.
As an American-born, Islamic college student, I thought that was an odd distinction to make. Since Muslims make up one fifth of the global population, isn’t the extremist generalization a bit ridiculous?
As we are seeing currently in the Mosque debate, too much of the American public fails to distinguish between extremist terrorist groups and “the Islamic world.” It would be like assigning blame to the entirety of “the Catholic world” for the actions of pedophiles in the church- something I’m sure would infuriate you.
It really doesn’t matter the religious affiliation or location of the school, so much as the individuals doing the work. I am currently a biopsychology student, and I hope to someday contribute to the scientific pursuit of truth- despite my religion.
Haley,
The American people are not making the distinctions between islamic radicals and “the Islamic world” because “the Islamic world” was curiously silent in the aftermath of 9/11.
You then go on to draw an analogy to “the Catholic world” and pedophile priests. The great difference is that the Catholic people rose up in rage at this perversion of our faith and rooted the pedophiles out of the parishes. No such outrage and rising up has occurred in your mosques. The Islamic world tolerates this, and in far too many quarters, welcomes it.
I do hope that you make significant contributions to science, but the truth… the unpleasant truth for you is that Islam has not been a player in the intellectual arena for 800 years. As a people that comprise 20% of the global population, that should be an occasion of some soul-searching for you.
Muslims do not need to apologize to you for the actions of an extremist terrorist group. I certainly don’t feel that need- as an American I was as deeply hurt as you were by the loss of fellow citizens.
And I really appreciate your heart-felt good wishes for my scientific career. You have no idea of who I am or what my potential actually is, you only know my religion and my desire to not be discriminated against. Unfortunately for you, Mr. Nadal, the end of the Islamic Golden Age was not the end of contributions from Islamic intellectuals- there are many Islamic scientists working in much the same way you are right now. Religions do not contribute to the scientific arena, individuals do. In fact, I feel that one’s religious beliefs shouldn’t have very much to do with his scientific career, as it almost inevitably invites bias into his studies.
That should be an occasion for some soul-searching for you.
Haley,
You began this conversation by noting the following:
“You note that branches of Christianity and Judaism provide useful contributions to science – why no mention of Islam, since it is the third abrahamic faith?”
and have now come around to stating,
” In fact, I feel that one’s religious beliefs shouldn’t have very much to do with his scientific career, as it almost inevitably invites bias into his studies.”
The last statement is true. But my point was in stating the integral part of higher learning has played in Jewish and Christian civilization.
I answered your original question rather honestly. Yes, there are individuals from the Islamic faith who are working in science. However, I stand by my statement of the painfully obvious in response to your original question:
Islam, as opposed to Christianity and Judaism, has simply not been a player at the University table since the collapse of its own Golden Age 800 years ago. I presume that you are a student at a University here in the U.S. and not at one of the Islamic colleges overseas.
You are the one who raised the question, and now you don’t like the truthfulness contained within the answer. It’s a tragedy that Islam is known around the world for barbarism and cruelty:
Taliban, Burkahs, Female genital mutilation, stonings, beheadings, suicide bombings that number into the thousands, Jihad, 9/11, hijackings, hostage-takings—all in frightful number creating a pervasive culture of perversion of a faith that brought great advances in science and mathematics to a world beset during the Dark Ages.
I’m glad that Islam has students such as yourself who eschew the violence and backwardness that have characterized it since the implosion of its intellectual movement 800 years ago. But it will take more than just learned individuals. It will require a sea-change in attitude.
The great University system that grew up through the Catholic Church was initially patronized by the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, and Monarchs of Europe. It was a joint embrace by religion and government (and still for centuries many who patronized the universities were given to their own cruelties).
When the people see religious leaders and government patronizing and promoting the arts and sciences, they get on board and slowly civilization begins to change.
The Jews found a home in the Western university system, a place for their own scholarly pursuits to thrive and grow; so much so as to literally become a part of their corporate identity. That’s why I mentioned Christianity and Judaism in my article.
The appropriate response for you is not to shoot the messenger, but to work with other Islamic intellectuals toward making Islam’s corporate identity one that brings it into the Western intellectual orbit. From your postings, I would say that you are off to a good start, and I wish you every academic and professional success.
Today, much of the educational system throughout the world is very secular. At larger universities especially, there is a lot of mixing of religions and cultures. When I attended Michigan State University, there were many international students from every continent, including students from many Islamic nations.
Today, it doesn’t matter what your religion in terms of academia or academic success. Anyone wishing to puruse higher education, if they gain access to the university system, will have opportunties to learn and to make a contribution in their field including science.
However, historically, when entire civilizations in various parts of the world were centered around particular faith traditions, we see that the Catholic Church has always valued reading, literacy and education. During the Middle Ages, when books had to be hand-copied and were thus very costly and rare, it was the monks in the monasteries who dedicated their lives to the task of hand-copying books, especially the Bible, but also the histories and scientific texts of the Greek, Roman, and Islamic civilizations. But for Catholic monks hand copying and preserving these treasures, some would likely have been lost forever which survived to this day due to these efforts.
These same monasteries that copied the books also in many cases offered schooling for the nobility and princes of European kingdoms, so that many rulers of European countries had been educated by monks.
The Catholic Church also gave rise to the university system that endures today, so there has been a continuous, enduring involvement in learning and education throughout the history of Catholicism.
Indeed, the book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, while particularly emphasizing the contributions of the Irish monks and Irish church in particular, adds much more depth of understanding on this topic in regard to literacy and learning.
The Jewish tradition, going back much further in history than either the Catholic or Islamic religions, also have always been committed to literacy, and have an enduring tradition of scientific contributions that continue to the present, with many notable Jewish scientists continuing a very long tradition that is rooted in their Jewish world view.
However, even within very recent memory, I recall news reports and even books addressing a problem regarding the education of girls. In more than one Islamic nation, there have been problems of girl children being forbidden to attend school, even when the teacher is a woman, and even if conducted in the teacher’s home. I have read of girls and women teachers being beaten with chains, set on fire, or threatened with death if they persisted in teaching and learning opportunities for females. These were not isolated occurances.
I was present at a meeting at the United Nations at which women from Iraq and Afghanistan thanked those nations who had supported them in the progress they have made in very recent years. Whereas only a few years ago women were forbidden to attend school in Afghanistan, now there were women in office with a role in government. One of the attendees in the meeting asked why so few women, why not equal numbers of men and women in government, and why not a Constitution that gaurantees 50-50 participation in government.
The woman gave an explanation that Afghanistan does not want to have just “warm bodies” in office, but educated women who can make serious, equal contributions to their male counterparts. She pointed out that since very few women have had opportunity for education in her country, with very few women even learning to read, for now it is not so easy to find educated women who are prepared to enter government, though there are some–the speaker among them. However, she said that with more girls now becoming educated she was optimistic that in future years, more and more women would be prepared to enter government.
In some Muslim countries, there has been oppression of women in terms of even basic education, but what about reading, literacy and so on in the Muslim world overall without considering the issue of women.
For Christians including the Catholics, when the printing press was invented in the 1400′s, Christians were eager to use the press to print Bibles and other books for religious use, and it quickly came into wide use for all kinds of books and publications. One part of the motivation was the desire of many to have the Bible read by many believers. Although people often think especially of the Protestant Reformers wanting to get the Bible into everyone’s hands, in fact, Catholic Bibles were also printed in past centuries as well as today.
Christians and Jews both emphasize the actual reading and study of their holy books and always have. There was a steady progression from the dedicated hand-copying of the Bible and other books through the transition to printing press, right up to modern times.
However, in the Muslim world, the Koran is a recitation, and it is the spoken word of the Koran seems to be of highest value. Additionally, until relatively recent times it was a very strict requirement for the Koran to be hand-copied and printing was forbidden.
This mistrust of the printing press was generalized to all reading material. For religious reasons, it was necessary to hand-copy the Koran, but the ban on the printing press for many centuries encompassed all reading material.
When Napolean was in Egypt with the French Army, ruling Egypt for a time, he brought in a printing press for the use of the army in printing their newspaper and for other printing needs. This was in the 1800′s that they brought in a printing press because there was not one in Egypt, and in fact, it had not been permitted in Egypt. When Napolean and his soldiers left Egypt, they took the printing press with them.
It took an extremely long time before the printing press was gradually accepted in the Muslim world, with the printing press slowly gaining acceptance for secular materials though originally not the Koran, though more recently some use of the printing press in regard to the Koran has gained some degree of acceptance.
Nevertheless, with centuries of delay before Muslims accepted use of the printing press, this put them at a disadvantage in terms of literacy, and educational and scientific progress. With the printing press, European scientistis could publish their discoveries in journals and books that could easily get into the hands of many readers, while the lack of printing press and the necessity of hand copying books and articles within the Muslim community served to isolate them from learning about the discoveries others and from dissemanting new information among their own people.
I readily admit that have not studied the Muslim worldview in sufficient depth to be able to explain why the printing press seemed such a threat in the Muslim world for at least the first four centuries after the invention of the printing press. But I have read that some Islamic countries had no printing press as recently as 1900, and it was only gradually accepted during the 20th century. Even today, there is a lower rate of literacy in these countries that were initially reluctant to use the printing press. It takes time to catch up.
Just like the lady who said it would take time to have enough educated women to serve in the Afghanistan government in equal numbers to men, when there are no books being printed, when their is a lack of literacy and lack of books, it would take time for reading to take hold in a nation.
While individuals are able to pursue studies at the university level, to succeed and to contribute–if one considers the issue of not having printing for several centuries when the printing press was coming into wide use in western nations, by Christian, Catholic and Jewish cultures, one might see that there are many repercussions some of which continue to impact the Muslim world.
The history of the printing press within the Muslim world is a very interesting topic to study, along with those repercussions, including a persistent low level of literacy in many of the Muslim countries relative to the western nations.
How much to advertise on your blog?
Hi Dr. Nadal,
For the last three years or so I have been commenting as much as my time will allow on articles all over the place that seek to disprove or disparage the abortion-breast cancer link. I have had several letters to the editor published locally, and have, I believe, successfully helped to turn off the rhetoric on a number of sites by presenting the truth about the science of the ABC link and the truth about the scientific misconduct over the last 50 or so years. I have taken on Susan G. Komen time and time again and believe that they have heard me and countless others who do this sort of thing. We are all making a difference. Why else would Komen issue their two talking/message points papers last year, 1) defending why they donate money to Planned Parenthood and 2) trying to convince us all that there is no ABC link? They are feeling the pressure, believe me.
I look forward to your new blog and your new mission to report on the ABC studies sent to you by the Coalition on Abortion-Breast cancer.
Good luck to you and God Bless.
Thanks so much Rebecca! I hope the blog is a good resource for you. Let me know if there is anything I can do.
You’re doing it! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
Dr Nadal, Rebecca
We were pleased to ready about Dr Nadal’s commitment to daily critique reports which suggest the ABC link, and now we are pleased to find this blog. Following is a quarter page flyer which we propose to use to saturate colleges with, since a great part of the abortions committed are on college girls and women. The formatting is lost but we do make great use of bold and italics, and the lines are more balanced.
We are surprised that none of the major pro life groups have made this a project central to their work. But maybe the Holy Ghost has a reason for that. It seems that any halfway intelligent, rational girl or woman would immediately drop abortion as a consideration for a pregnancy, if there is any, that is, ANY, chance of contracting breast cancer later.
ABORTION-BREAST CANCER
CONNECTION
=============================================
● National Cancer Institute chief researcher
and study co-author says induced abortion
IS A RISK FACTOR IN BREAST CANCER,
increasing your risk by as much as 40%!
● read about that increase in risk at
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/The_Link.htm
and then tell all your friends
● pregnant? FREE: see your baby
on ultrasound–in Tucson call
806-0266, 512-1196, 622-5774
● we can help you with any difficulties
related to your pregnancy, just
call 800-395-HELP or go to
http://www.pregnancycenters.org/advantage.asp
_____________________________
THERE ARE NO GOOD REASONS
TO ABORT YOUR BABY,
BUT MANY GREAT REASONS
TO LET YOUR BABY LIVE!
_________________________________________
Tucson Pro Life, 520/3261542
Hi, Dr. Nadal.
I’m glad I found your blog while I was searching for human embryology.
I am a medical student (going to graduate in weeks). I am also a (have-just-come-back) Roman Catholic. I feel relieved after reading your articles.
Thank you so much.
Hi there Dr Nadal
I’m a Ph.D. chemist also, and a pro-lifer. In my college days I was involved with Operation Rescue, although I managed not to get arrested.
It’s been my opinion for some time, that pro-lifers should just come right out and say, “Forget religion, forget philosophy, forget angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments about ensoulment, and stick to the SCIENCE …”
At this point your typical liberal is all ears, since most of them idolize science although ironically they typically know very little about it…. Then continue..
“…and the science says: life begins at conception. Period, end of story.”
What can they say at that point?
Re: the Muslim education of women mentioned in a post above — let a wiser mind than my own speak:
One cannot but ponder the question: What if the Arabs had been Christians? To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing. Here, I think, is some text for an eloquent sermon on the virtues of Christianity.” — War as I Knew It, General George S. Patton, Jr.
http://vivificat1.blogspot.com/2006/02/general-patton-on-arabs-and-islam.html#ixzz1iiE9INSw
Just a fellow human, catholic, and respecter of human life and it’s natural as well as it’s sacred dignity – sinful though we may be.
Thanks for what you do, have done, and with the prayers of many, will continue to do with respect to human life.
It’s great to see a scientific, highly educated Catholic willing to put truth out front – to set not only ourselves, but others, free.
May God continue blessing you in your work, and in your life.