Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Sin: the bad news and the good news

The bad news is that god just told ratzi you are going to burn in hell if you try to clone somebody.

The good news is that the people adding to the list of deadly sins are the same people who brought you the first 7 deadly sins. The worst of those sins, I would have thought, was murder so you could take some comfort from the fact that the church itself has demonstrated that killing people is actually OK.

The better news is that, being sins in the eyes of the Catholic Church means you can now be forgiven for cloning, deforesting, etc along with the old standards like cheating on your wife [yo, Elliot, you shoulda been a Catholic!]. I sure as hell won't forgive you for polluting or deforestation so this development actually marks a big improvement for McDonalds, Mr. Cheney and others.

Given the prevalence of all the original 7 deadly sins throughout history since their original declaration by the CC, I'd say its gonna be boom times for cloning and whatnot. Too bad they quit selling indulgences: adding important bioscience techniques to the list of deadly sins could be a real money maker for the strapped church, especially with all the venture money the biotech startups have to spend setting up research facilities. [it being tax season, I am wondering: If the biotech firm that contemplates cloning would write off the indulgence money as a charitable donation to a religious organization or as an investment expense in research?]

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