@mesquite,
Yes, it is a pissing contest which is too bad because I'm of a mind which thinks it's a good thing to challenge the promoters of a system of morality, Christianity, which somehow neglected the whole issue of the morality of slavery until their founder had been dead (and risen) for approximately 1846 years.
Worship other Gods?~~oh, no!
Steal?~~~ No way.
Kill? ~~ shalt not!!
Covet thy neighbor's beauteous camel and his wife's assets?? No-no-no.
Slavery? ~~ um...that's an iffy. Erm, slave owners should be good slave owners and slaves should be good slaves. "huh?"
Really.
The point, of course, is that if the Christians couldn't figure out that the Great God's command to His Chosen People that
they shall have slaves was as
wacky as His Command that no one should eat Lobster or Cheeseburgers, maybe we shouldn't trust them when it comes to figuring out when a human life begins, whether sex can be just for fun and that two members of the same sex should be able to have that same fun without being driven out beyond the walls of the city and stoned to death.
Christ had the right idea about women, but Paul screwed that up and we are still dealing with his idiotic view that women are somehow lesser than men. (Where'd he get that from? Not from Jesus.)
Yet we are supposed to depend on these "thinkers" to form our societies?
Knowing now that the Christian theory of a Human Centered Universe was a crap idea for its entire twenty centuries* of being, maybe we shouldn't depend upon them to guide us on the scientific matter of stem cell therapies or any other science that doesn't specifically deal with changing water into wine.
[There have been adjustments.]
Thou shalt not kill.
Joe(See John XXIII on the meaning of the words :Just War.)Nation
*(That's right. Even five hundred years after Copernicus, Christian Catholics were still insisting that our solar system was the center of a god-created universe . They gave up that idea about twenty years ago. Good, huh? Fundamentalist Christians and Islamics still are holding on tight.
Folks, there is no center of the Universe. )