No sooner had the ink dried on the UK's formal application to leave the EU, that the most important reason for the existence of the EU from the very beginning became immediately apparent. Besides the verbal altercations between the UK and Spain over the fate of Gibraltar, we were even regaled with a military standoff between naval units of the UK and Spain! This highlights the fact that the referendum in the UK about whether they should leave the EU or not, was mired in quite a few doses of untruths. This, the UK will unfortunately slowly discover gradually as the situation unfolds, as Britain discusses its withdrawal not over a two-year period as it falsely believes, but over a much longer period as already indicated by Angela Merkel!
This issue of the untruth being bandied around is fast becoming the mark of an era with its abundance of false prophets and which does not know where to look for the truth. We are often regaled on social media with news that is obviously false to some, but others who lack the resources are unable to check their correct sources for proper information. It is not having the knowledge where to look for the truth that is going to daunt present and future generations. This is one of the greatest challenges which I endeavour to teach my students; to obtain medical knowledge for example, only from reliable medical sources not from some hobby magazine or website of unknown provenance. This is true for other subjects too, including everyday life.
In Alice in Wonderland, one character declares an antithesis to a thesis. It has one day in the year which is its proper birthday but decides to celebrate its unbirthday on the other 364 days instead! Benedict XVI, in a recent publication of his, identifies this problem as the problem of our times. It is the great untruth which we have to counter, buoyed by the knowledge that strong as it may appear to be now, it will fail to enter the halls of history but remain only as a footnote, because nothing can survive the actual truth itself!
Martin Scicluna made assertions in the press regarding the beginning of human life which are simply his subjective opinion and he is not qualified to give. He states that religion should never determine the time when human life begins and should stay out of the debate leaving everyone to believe whatever untruth they will, grasping for straws as to what the real answer is. Plato quotes Socrates as saying in his Crito: "Ought we to be guided and intimidated by the opinion of the many or by that of the one - assuming that there is someone with expert knowledge? Is it true that we ought to respect and fear this person more than all the rest put together; and if we do not follow his guidance we shall spoil and impair that part of us which, as we used to say, is improved by just conduct and ruined by unjust." You see Socrates, like Plato, was a philosopher who believed in objective ethics - those of the common good, which believed in the one truth rather than the several subjective ethical mistruths put forward by the sophists of his time!
The expert in this case is and always has been the science of embryology. The Church has always followed science on this issue. In the medieval era, the Church followed Aristotelian science, thought to be true at the time. Men came into being about 30 days after conception, women some time later! This is what Thomas Aquinas states following the science of the time! Real scientific study of these issues only started about 150 years ago when we had the means and technology to study them. The invention of the microscope is one such invention. Embryology today leaves no doubt at all that the human being has its beginning at fertilisation of the ovum by the sperm to produce a zygote or embryo. This one cell, which unlike any other cell in the body, has the intrinsic active potential to develop into an adult human being. If left alone, even initially outside the uterus, it divides and grows into an adult. All scientific evidence both genetic and epigenetic leaves no doubt on this issue. That one early cell has all the requisites to be considered the first cell of the human being which ends up building to trillions of cells. Starts as one cell and ends up as a bunch of cells! This is the first cell of the species Homo sapiens.
It is because of what science tells us, that the Church expects all human beings to respect the developing embryo from fertilisation onwards. Reason tells us to give respect, dignity and legal rights to other members of the human race and therefore the early human life is not only a human being but should be regarded as a human person like all other human beings who are accorded Natural Rights to life and development in line with natural law. It is because of what science tells us today that the Church has changed its position from the Aristotelian one to the present! Mr Scicluna argues ad nauseam about female rights and the fact that any woman should have an abortion if she wants one. Women's rights are there and should be respected but they are Prima Facie inferior to the rights of an innocent human being! As for the argument that some women will have an abortion anyway if they set their hearts on it, why do we not legalize theft, because those who want to steal will steal anyway? The State should show its magnanimity by protecting the lives of innocent human beings otherwise it would be foregoing its duties and would then join the several other untruths by playing a game of hiding and not seeking. It is not those who scream loudest who have the truth but those who reason objectively more forcefully.
There are certain truths concerning human nature that are pre-moral, that is, the way we are made precedes any moral choices we might make. Human nature calls for respect from the very beginning of the coming together of the male and female gametes giving the new embryo the active potency needed to begin a new life. To do this, the gametes have to come specifically from a single man and a single woman, whose responsibility it is to raise such offspring well. Such offspring have rights contained in reason and laid down in the UN Children's Convention. Children whose identity and development implies that this should regularly be the duty of the genetic parents who convey identity to the children.
Ideas going contrary to this profound reason based on our fundamental nature, ideas concerned with annihilating gender as a norm, donating gametes by necessity regularly to third individuals, surrogacy, marriage between people of the same gender and all such confusion against natural reason will also have their day. They will present strong cases and seem worthwhile and popular for a while, but in the end, they and their proponents will go down the gutter of subjective untruths and end up forgotten. There is only one truth in the world, not a truth changed by culture, law, science or history, but a truth amenable to human reason alone, the rational grasp of Eternal law!
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