The Guardian
Tuesday March 25 2008
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor (We are made for more, March 24) writes movingly about love and truth, what it is to be human, and the purpose of existence; but he is wrong to exclude atheists from the beauty of his vision. We too can see deep responsibility for others as part of our freedom, just as we can see existence as having a great and wonderful purpose.
However, we do not believe in things because of tradition and dogma. The archbishop writes about meeting a nun who cares for HIV/Aids patients in Zimbabwe, but the Catholic church could drastically cut the incidence of HIV across the world if only it would encourage the use of condoms.
Catholics believe a soul enters the fertilised cell at the moment of conception, thereby making a full human being of it - they believe this despite there being no evidence for it and many philosophical arguments against this view. From this absurd superstition they proscribe much that is beneficial. His Scottish colleague calls the use of hybrid embryos Frankenstein science; a better analogy is with the Frankenstein film where Boris Karloff's monster kills something beautiful and innocent, the little girl, because he does not understand it and fears it. The church is the monster; the beautiful innocent is a science that hurts no one but will save innumerable lives.
Joe Morison
London
What Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor means by a "free vote" on the human embryology bill - one that is not subject to the Labour whip - is not a free vote at all. At least in so far as Catholic MPs are concerned, it is simply a vote subject to a different whip, namely a Vatican one.
The sight of MPs who are members of a religious sect being urged on by their leader to blackmail the government (by threatening to resign) is one that should raise all sorts of alarm bells with voters. They will be asking who runs Britain - Westminster or Rome? Is Ruth Kelly the MP for Bolton West or Vatican East?
Alistair McBay
National Secular Society
You are right to draw attention to the plight of patients with incurable diseases (Therapeutic cloning offers hope of treatment for Parkinson's; Johnson tries to defuse embryos bill crisis, March 24). However, it is mistaken to believe that embryo stem cell research is the way forward to find cures for these diseases. In spite of the huge sums of money the government has spent so far in supporting this line of research, to date it has yielded nothing of significant therapeutic value.
On the other hand, adult stem cell research is yielding promising results along several lines of research into serious diseases. A clear example is that of bone marrow transplants, and bone marrow harvesting in cancer, a successful application of stem cells in treatment.
Several religious faiths in this country have very grave concerns about the proposed direction of research in the current human fertilisation and embryology bill, and have expressed horror at the idea of mixing animal and human gametes in order to find cures.
If the government professes that we have a democratic multicultural and multi-faith society in this country, it needs to justify its vast expenditure and its continued promotion of a scientific route that is fraught with moral and ethical concerns.
Dr Matthew Thalanany
Colchester, Essex
The Cardinal Archbishop of Glasgow asserts that the fertilisation of animal eggs by human DNA involves the making of babies which are then raided for their constituent parts, demonstrating a lack of respect for human life.
If blastulae are babies then nature itself (or God) demonstrates just such lack of respect since the majority of naturally fertilised human eggs fail to implant and are flushed, unnoticed, into the drains in their thousands every day.
David McBrien
Maidenhead, Berkshire
Surely the logical moral corollary of the premise that there is no animal-human divide is for all who support it to become vegetarian?
Rose Frain
Edinburgh
