Tulsa-Smith:- emotional...: Biblical history repeats itself in modern settings

Monday, September 03, 2007

Biblical history repeats itself in modern settings

Do you remember the story of Jacob and Esau - the twin children of Isaac, the son of Abraham - in the Bible? At birth, Esau came out first, but with Jacob holding onto his ankle - continuing the intra-placental struggle they had been involved in.

That rivalry between the brothers culminated in Esau selling his birthright, as the first son, to Jacob for a pot of gruel.

In Milan this time, the same kind of weird thing happened - two twins were to be delivered but one had Down's Syndrome, while the other was quite healthy and normal.

Their parents opted to surgically abort the sick fetus and keep only the other one. Well, doctors ended up removing the healthy fetus by mistake - somehow, the sick fetus had 'managed' to switch positions with the healthy one between the examination room and the operating theatre!

Can you believe that? The angry parents reported to the Police after they insisted the unhealthy one should still be removed.

Now, the Vatican is using the case to press home its message about the need to stop all abortions . Quite a miraculous turn of events, wouldn't you say? Excerpts:

[....The abortion was preformed on a woman in Milan who had two fetuses at 18 weeks' gestation. Physicians said the mistake was the result of the movement by the fetus between the examination and the abortion procedure. Italian news agencies reported that the woman had the remaining fetus aborted and then informed police about the matter (AFP/New York Times, 8/28).

The Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano said the woman's choice was "illegitimate even though it was authorized by law" (Agence France-Presse, 8/27). Sen. Paola Binetti in the Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote, "The time has come to re-examine the abortion law," adding, "What happened in this hospital was not a medical abortion but an abortion done for the purposes of eugenics.".....]

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Greenville, Rhode Island bakery owned by the Cavanagh family, which uses the plant to produce church communion bread from just water and bread. That business is known to produce about 850 million sacramental wafers annually and to supply 80% of the Holy Communion bread used in American, Australian, Canadian, and British churches. The only middlemen in the supply chain are nuns living in convents! Now they want to expand to West Africa with their Christian sacramental ware for Pentecostal, Catholic, 'New Wave', and Orthodox church offerings. I make reference to the so-called New Wave churches - my term for those churches that broke away from the orthodoxy of the Protestant fold, just as the latter roke off from the Catholic church by virtue of the exploits of Martin Luther centuries ago. Many new-wave and other church goers in the generally undeveloped West African subregion of Africa pay more to religious organizations in monthly tithes and offerings than they do to their government in personal income and value added taxes. Now, that last fact is quite interesting because it is an admission that a bakery in Rhode Island has seen a huge market in the center of Black Africa for small white perfectly laminated and non-crumbly holy wheat bread, reportedly costing "less than a penny" apiece, for the use of both the bible-reading and the bible-believing religious organizations. However, the picture from the Cavanagh's factory floor speaks volumes, in my own opinion, about the need for the company to watch its business ethics and to treat all customers equally irrespective of location, creed, or other discriminatory demographic information or criteria. So, I just hope and pray that the wafers falling off the conveyor belt and by the way side are not destined for West Africa and that the actual wafers delivered will be wheat bread and water, and not just glutamate-free bread and 'pure' water, if you get my point, even if so requested by some shady, greedy, and unethical businessmen over in West Africa. Posted by Okonkwo O. Awa on Sunday, December 28, 2008.

In the summer of 2007, Pope Benedict XVI (BXVI) encouraged The Church to reach out to young people using new technologies, as he himself learned to send out cellphone text messages to the faithful. So in obedience, a tech savvy evangelizing Catholic priest got some help from a Web designer in order to write all the daily books of prayers into a low-cost computer software application downloadable onto the iPhone. Rev. Paolo Padrini's iTunes prayer book was officially approved by The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications in December 2008. Of course, all proceeds from the electronic prayer book venture will go to charity. Speaking of charitable behavior, The Holy See has seen it fit after 400 years to honor Galileo Galilei in 2009 as the "patron" of the non-mutual exclusivity of the faith versus reason dichotomy. That is very appropriate in this age of new technology, even though The Church still smarts from its error of judgment in calling the famous astronomer a heretic after he publicly embarrassed The Church by reporting that his scientific observations in Astronomy with his unique telescope had led him inexorably to believe that the Earth actually revolved around the sun, in direct opposition to the teaching of The Church at the time that Planet Earth was the center of the universe. In seeking to paint the Church in a new light of worldly knowledge by distancing itself from a past of imbibing pure dogma, The Vatican may have ventured to cross the final frontier and boundary between Science and Christianity by acknowledging recently that there could be life on planets other than the Earth! Posted by O. O. Awa on Wednesday, December 24, 2008.