Via John Cole, this stuff never ceases to amaze me:
God sees embryos as “full and complete” humans, Pope Benedict said on Wednesday in an address that firmly underlined the Roman Catholic Church's stance against abortion and scientific research on embryos.
“The loving eyes of God look on the human being, considered full and complete at its beginning,” Benedict said in his weekly address to the faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square.
Quoting Psalm 139, Benedict said the Bible teaches that God already recognises the embryo as a complete human. That view is the basis for the Church teaching that aborting or manipulating these embryos amounts to murder.
In Psalm 139, the psalmist says to God: “Thou didst see my limbs unformed in the womb, and in thy book they are all recorded.”
“It is extremely powerful, the idea in this psalm, that in this ‘unformed' embryo God already sees the whole future,” Benedict said.
And sometimes, kills it off. Between 15 and 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, which means Benedict's God looks upon around one fifth of those futures and decides to choke them off in the womb. This, of course, earns the Big Guy no opprobrium among Catholics or vilification among evangelicals. In fact, it doesn't even make them hesitate before asserting that the full maturation of each and every fetus is unquestionably God's will and those who'd dare disrupt the process are committing a vile crime against the natural order. A natural order which naturally destroys 15 to 20 percent of the world's potential infants.
To be clear, it's not that I think abortions are good or God bad, but the gaping inconsistencies fundamentalists blithely accept simply astonishes me.
