I’m willing to accept that there could have been a man, but the evidence is rather slim.

Ivan.

Irishman said: “Micheal claimed he was fulfilling her wishes, as previously expressed years before. So it was Terri’s wishes, according the Michael.”

I realize that was the reason Michael gave for the decision, my point was it didn’t matter what reason he gave.

Such a statement might have made it more difficult for the parents to sue for guardianship to control the decision. A court would have to deal with a matter of deciding best interest for a person who could not decide for themselves, as they did in this case. “Teri’s wishes” might matter to a judge, but they certainly didn’t matter to Teri.

“This isn’t a matter of what Michael wanted, this is a matter of what Terri wanted….Luckily the law and Terri’s wishes ultimately prevailed, but it was a long and silly battle…What Terri wanted was what was important, not what Michael or her parents wanted.

beskeptical said:

Considering Teri had no more brain function that could recognize if she were alive or dead, I can’t find any rational reason that would be true. The law has to designate someone to decide.

The practical matter was deciding who got to decide. Micheal claimed he was fulfilling her wishes, as previously expressed years before. So it was Terri’s wishes, according the Michael.

icemith said:

Shahryar says:
Jesus allegedly died less than 2000 years ago.

I’ll let P. Edward Murray answer his own assertion of the gist of his comment above, but I do take some exception to the word ‘allegedly”, specially in the context that he has been making throughout this blog. … Jesus and Buddha and other leaders did die, must have, as they all lived, they were historical characters.

That’s the point, was Jesus really a historical character, or was he a convenient invention? I’m actually of the opinion there might have been a man named Jesus who stirred up some trouble with his itenerant preaching of the end times, but much of the remaining stories about him are corrupted interpretations and mythological projections onto him.

What people like to forget is that Terri was not dead and that her husband Michael violated his & her marriage vows.

Really, why bother getting married at all if you don’t want to accept the vows?

You have a really warped view. You appear to be thinking of the vow “in sickness and in health” or something. But the fundamental difference of opinion here is determination of what makes someone dead. Rating death based upon heart beating and breathing is sloppy. Hearts stop and can be restarted, breathing can stop and be restarted, and the person continue to live. The real determinant of “living” is brain activity. With no brain activity, the heart and lungs can function perfectly and the person won’t be alive by any sense of the word. They won’t be experiencing anything. There’s not even a “they” there. Even if you subscribe to the soul concept it is difficult to see how the soul can be in the body and the brain not functioning.

When higher brain function fails, the autonomous brain can last. This will drive body function for some time before organs start to fail. There are different amounts of brain failure after higher brain function ends. It seems like a gray area when the autonomous system is running by higher brain is non-functional. The higher brain is anything associated to thought and experience. The lower brain is driving heart, lungs, kidneys, organs, etc. There’s no experience occurring.

Sadly, to deny Terri’s life is also to deny our own. This already is a slippery slope we live on and like the victims of The Holocaust, I wonder when they will come for all of us?

Already, “they” have decided an unborn child is not real, is not a person and is not viable. With Terri, “they” have told us that even if you are breathing you are not alive.

It’s called the growth of knowledge. We understand better what it means to be alive, where life resides. Life is in the ability to think, perceive, and experience. Without that, what’s the difference between a corpse on life support and a potato plant?

Already “they” will stone you to death if you are a teenager and are Gay…doesn’t matter that God told us it’s not for us to kill, doesn’t matter that this poor college kid was innocent.

Now you’re being deceptive and duplicitous. You just equated the “they” of defining life as being brain activity with “they” who brutally slaughter gays for being gay. It’s called “bait and switch”.

Already “they” have decided that it’s totally ok to end the life of an elderly person.

Who is this “they”? I don’t think I know enough about the situation to which you are referring. Who is doing this?

Already “they” have decided that severly mentally ill people who have lost the ability to reason have the right to refuse treatment even though they are incapable of reasoning and they do not have the right to get well as much as science can help them.

Again, I’m not certain to what you refer. The situations I’ve seen is mentally ill people who are on treatment declaring that they don’t like the treatment and don’t want it, thus getting taken off the treatment and becoming ill again. I think you’re talking about legal cases where people are having medical treatments forced on them. True, the treatments may help them, but the side effects can also be bad, and who are you to say they’re better off sane and depressed and impotent?

How much farther can this continue?

I don’t know, how many situations can you misconstrue?

How long will it be until they decide any one of us is not perfect enough to live a “meaningful life”.

Strawman time.

The same blood type found on The Shroud of Turin. Skeptics may say that this is just a hoax…I ask why would anyone hoax it? For those of us to believe in a lie? Nonsense. What would that prove?

You’re very credulous of the Shroud. The truth is it’s a fake.

See, even the Catholic Church investigated it and determine it was a fake, including the testimony of the artist who painted it.

Carbon dating confirms the age as a 14th Century origin. The stains that are supposed to be blood are paint.

DNA was recovered from the Shroud – not blood, but DNA. Guess what, DNA can come from many sources, including skin cells and tears. The Shroud was not protected and kept away from the public until late in it’s history. When first displayed, it was handled, cried on, touched, and fondled by anyone who could cough up the right “donation” to the church.

As for why someone would fake it, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries were ripe with pious frauds. There are over a dozen shrouds out there claiming to be the “true shroud” of Jesus. In fact, there are enough “pieces of the true cross” to build a ship. Heck, there’s more than one item claimed to be Jesus’ foreskin. That time period people were strongly encouraged to believe in miracles, especially miracles by touching sacred objects. Thus any church worth a thing had some sacred relic or object. Bones of saints were particularly common. Nevermind that most of these are pig or chicken bones. People wanted to believe in them.

Why were frauds done? Because the clergy were paid by the petitioners who wanted forgiveness, who wanted a shot at healing. It was a common occurrence in the Middle Ages. The better your relic, the more you could charge and the more people would come. Thus items related to Jesus were more important than those of saints. Ergo, pieces of the cross, shrouds, etc.

Why would people believe this stuff? Well, why do people believe in the miracle of the stain on the underpass wall? The stain on the window? The face of Mary on a tortilla, a treestump, a grilled cheese sandwich? People want to believe, to justify their religious belief and to provide a sense of connection. So they pick any stimulus vaguely suggestive and interpret it to support their need. It’s sad, really, to see these people so weak in faith that they’ll accept anything to justify their belief.

Really interesting that those who are not religious view those who are as going off the deep end?

Going off the deep end…. like believing a piece of cloth painted in 1300’s is a sacred image of Jesus from his resurrection in the year 32ish? Like believing Mary reveals herself to the faithful in a burn pattern on a grilled cheese sandwich?

I’ve always wondered why those who are not religious always decide that they are never wrong but always right?

I certainly don’t claim to never be wrong and always be right. I merely wish to see the evidence. Show me I’m wrong. Vague notions of random wishful thinking don’t cut it.

In fact, who gave you the authority to claim that I am off the deep end or about 1 Billion + other Christians are too?

Reality.

Was Galileo off the deep end?

I don’t know, did Galileo belief in the sacredness of a piece of cloth? Did he believe bread and wine magically became flesh and blood that looks, feels, and tastes like bread and wine but has the “real” quality of being bread and wine?

What about Brother Guy at the Vatican Observatory? Watch out, he’s even more Catholic than I am plus he even has a PhD in Astronomy!

Having a PhD in Astronomy doesn’t prove your rational in all aspects of your thought. Many people are able to separate their realms of thinking from professional and personal.

Not the same, though, understandable since you seem not to understand the difference between Religion as in one of the 3 main religions and baloney.

So what is the difference? How long it’s been around? The number of people deluded by it? The fact we can name the author? Because the ridicuousness of the story certainly is equivalent.

You tell me, why do “the 3 main religions” outrank Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism? What’s the difference between those three and Roman Mythology, Greek Mythology, Norse Mythology? Other than the details of the belief, of course.

First, what the doctrine of Transubstantiation actually says (and has said ever since it was defined by Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century) is that, in the Eucharist, the metaphysical breadness of the bread and the metaphysical wineness of the wine are miraculously changed to metaphysical body-of-Christ-ness and blood-of-Christ-ness.

(I’m not going to argue the point here; it’s both highly technical and off topic. But if your Sunday School teacher told you otherwise, then either your Sunday School teacher was flat-out wrong or you didn’t understand.)

John, the “metaphysical body of Christ-ness” is entirely incomprehensible. I read through this page:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05573a.htm

After digging through all that, what I get is that the bread retains the outward appearance of bread while becoming flesh, and the wine retains the outward appearance of wine while becoming blood. The “Real Presence” metaphysicalness not-withstanding, the wine really is blood and the bread really is flesh.

For had Christ intended to assert the coexistence of His Body with the Substance of the bread, He would have expressed a simple identity between hoc and corpus by means of the copula est, but would have resorted to some such expression as: “This bread contains my body”, or, “In this bread is my Body.” Had He desired to constitute bread the sacramental receptacle of His Body, He would have had to state this expressly, for neither from the nature of the case nor according to common parlance can a piece of bread be made to signify the receptacle of a human body. On the other hand, the synecdoche is plain in the case of the Chalice: “This is my blood”, i.e. the contents of the Chalice are my blood, and hence no longer wine.

Seems like a weak strain of logic relying on his choice of wording to suggest that he couldn’t have been speaking metaphorically because he didn’t state, “I’m speaking metaphorically”. But it’s gibberish to suggest the implication is anything other than the belief is in real flesh and real blood, magically masquerading as bread and wine.

P. Edward Murray said:

As to the Holy Eucharist, Christ is there in body & soul.

Ever hear of The Miracle of the Eucharist where one day,hundreds of years ago, as one priest wondered if it was real, suddenly, the consecreated bread became real flesh and the consecreated wine became blood?

The flesh is real human heart tissue and the blood is real human blood type AB.

That’s from an avowed Catholic. Maybe he’s wrong about his own religious dogma, but if so it’s a common error within his religion.

John W. Kennedy said:

Second, let us not forget that science, alas, has given birth to a few anti-rational cults of its own — consider, for example, the nauseating episode of Star Trek Enterprise in which the hero justified an act of genocide as being in accordance with the intentions (God save the mark!) of Evolution.

I don’t recall that episode.

idlemind said:

Let me get this straight: a second-rate space opera (sorry, trek-folks) is the benchmark for scientific thought? What part of the word “fiction” in “science fiction” don’t you understand, JWK? Is science fiction actually the metaphysical-essence-of-science for you?

Star Trek isn’t a benchmark of science, but it is a vehicle of common culture, and thus demonstrates a misconception that is common in our culture.

I doubt many here being critical of religion do so purely on the basis of not believing the same. Except for someone else’s religious beliefs there are no legitimate reasons to discriminate against gay people. Except for someone else’s religious beliefs there are no legitimate reasons to ban stem cell research. Except for someone else’s religious beliefs there are no legitimate reasons to push for inclusion of unscientific materials in science classes. So no, I am not going to be tolerant of everything every person with irrational beliefs claims I should be tolerant of.

On the other hand, while persons of one religion have certainly persecuted those of another religion (and Christianity is as big an offender as a victim) I doubt you could find a single scientist that beat a Christian to death just because the Christian didn’t fit the profile of a good scientist.