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Originally posted by Mr Woolf:
I don't know: You all seem to misunderstand the fundamentals:

God is good.
Must be, as He defined the term.

So "good" is only "good" because God says so? In which case it's a whim of a deity (he could call murder good, for instance) and - at the very least - a tautology. Or perhaps god only commands that which is good? In which case there is a higher moral standard than god. Either way, your assertion sucks.

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God's creation was good.
He said it was.

Technically speaking, a translation of a hugely outdated piece of text alleged it was. As Thomas Paine said, just because someone else claims revelation I've no particularly good reason to believe it as so.

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Ergo, anything which is bad must have come from Satan.

God created *everything*. Including Stan. And the bad talking snake. Therefore god created evil. QED.

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Originally posted by Mr Woolf:
Doesn't alter the fact that it was man who nailed Jesus to the cross.

Which doesn't alter the fact that there is absolutely no proof that Jesus either existed or that even if he had that he was truly the son of a god.

Anyway to get back on topic.

The good Cardinal in his comments spoke about interfering with nature. Interesting words given that he was fitted with a pacemaker a few years back. I wonder if he has now asked that this unnatural device be removed. After all we wouldn't want to think such a senior man of the cloth was being a hypocrite - would we?

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Originally posted by Mr Woolf:
In this case, I am sure that the guy hears a bit about a lot of things going on which he instinctively feels are morally wrong. He doesn't fully understand the technology, but then, who does?

If he does not understand the technology or what is actually being proposed then he is wrong to offer his uneducated advice and direction to other catholics on the subject. He is certainly entitled to his opinion but his comments go far beyond just stating such. Two questions?

1. Do you consider it immoral (and a sin of presenting false witness) for him to tell others what they should be doing based on his misconceptions of the science?

2. Wouldn't it have been more correct (and responsible) to have checked his facts before making his idiotic and obviously hypocritical comments?

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Since the guy is Catholic, then we're never going to agree on everything,

A very dubious statement indeed. You are a protestant so his catholic faith means that to you he is a Heretic - rather than agreeing with anything he says you really should be calling for him to be killed. That is the correct punishment decreed for heresy.

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but I think he's right to speak out in the way in which he did about subjects in this area in general.

I agree, it exposes the hypocrisy and idiocy of these supposed upholders of morality and gods word.

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but then, I have a bit of a rep as a fringe fundamentalist to consider.

A rep which exists only within your over-fertile imagination. How can you claim any fundamentalism when posting in defence of a Heretic.

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My stance is that man is trying, ultimately, to create perfect humans, and that is God's perogative, not man's.

Which leads to the problem of a perfect god who creates imperfect beings - If we are imperfect then the being who created us cannot be perfect.

Human beings are hardly perfectly designed - we have multitudes of poor design in our physiology. As a theist you claim a creator god therefore the ultimate blame and responsibility for all the suffering and death due to illness and genetic abnormalities must be attributable to the person who created the system.

The same simple logic exposes the idiocy of the entire sin concept. If man is a sinner by design then the responsibility is upon the designer not us for merely performing to spec.

Did God create Satan?

quote:

Originally posted by Mr Woolf:
Did God create Satan?

Sure. He also created Solomon Grundy and Lex Luthor. Luckily we have Superman to protect us.