If any of the following were in the Bible, I might just believe...

  

Fundamentalists allege that the Bible represents the "inerrant word of God" as Jerry Falwell among others put it: 

 The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.

The god described in this inerrant text is omniscient, meaning all-knowing, not just of things that were but of things that will be.  As our understanding of the universe's creation unfolds, Genesis, the bible's creation stories (there are actually two mutually exclusive ones in the same text) appear not just inerrant, but wildly off the mark.  Claiming our planet is only a few thousand years old is as big an error as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York City, for example. 

Thanks to the poetic nature of the bible, it is sometimes possible for fundamentalists to wriggle out of embarrassing omissions.   The absence of dinosaurs, for example, can be explained by a single reference to "giants" roaming the land, never mind that this interpretation would incorrectly make dinosaurs coexist with us rather than precede us by hundreds of millions of years.  

Trying to force this deeply superstitious, misogynistic, scientifically- and geographically-challenged text to fit unfolding reality is increasingly difficult.   This even side-steps why this book of all possible holy books was chosen (have fundamentalist Christians read the Rig Veda - in English or Sanskrit - considered holy to 900 million Hindus, for example, before rejecting it?).

Since it has become almost unsportsmanlike to continue to point out the gaping logical and scientific lapses in the bible, a work clearly not ready for prime time (or our time at least), why not instead work backwards?  Using the same poetic license of the bible's authors and editors, imagine what a truly omniscient god might have told his scribes to scribble, particularly if he really wanted to wow them.  

Mention of any of these natural wonders in a book meant to explain all things would have attracted converts and settled pointless internecine bloodshed and persecution.  Yahweh speaks frequently and often of other, competing gods of whom he is jealous, indicating he was not so much denying their existence as competing with them.  

So why would he not not mention quarks or protons or anti-matter, or the incredible depth of time?  Why did he not let people know how small they were relative to their own planet, the population of cultures of which they were completely ignorant, to Jupiter, to the sun, or to their own galaxy, not to mention their expanding universe?   Wouldn't this humble them more than telling an elaborate story of a great flood, a story that would make no sense to anyone who understands that 90% of biomass lives in water?  

Had someone been able to foresee quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, and evolution thousands of years before these things were understood, THAT would be impressive, even miraculous.  It might have even settled the question of the existence of god.  

And so ... were something like this in the Bible, I might just believe: 

And in that time there appeared among them a great teacher who traveled from the east and spoke in a strange manner of an advanced civilization that had invented paper, the compass, and ships many times larger than Noah's ark. 
This teacher spoke of a vision he had of a time to come that was even more amazing than this Kingdom of which he spoke, which he called the Middle Kingdom, but all suspected to be fantastic, since everyone then knew the World to only be as large as the One Great Empire of Rome which occupied the land inhabited by the monotheists who believed in One Great God they called Yahweh but who seemed powerless to help them against the Romans of many gods who regularly suppressed their uprisings with great bloodshed and many crucifixions. Yet the people were still restive and wanted the Romans to leave so they could go back to their ways, but this man spoke of a land even better than the land of milk and honey the One Great God had promised to Abraham. The teacher's vision caused multitudes to leave their tent to hear him, but this worried the religious elders greatly who gathered to ask what should be done with this Gentile from the East. A decision was made but before they could act, the great teacher gathered together his students and told them this story that was passed secretly by one who was there:
In the beginning there was a tremendous concentration of matter, of everything that now exists and much, much more. In a fraction of a fraction of a second everything expanded across an unimaginable expanse met with anti-matter and 99% of it was destroyed immediately. What was left expanded, stabilized, and electrons found protons and the first hydrogen atoms began to coalesce. Hydrogen gas collected under incredible pressure over vast periods of time and heated to a degree where the repulsion of the positively charged nuclei was overcome and a great unleashing of energy created entirely new matter. The light that reaches our face from the morning sun is nothing more or less wonderful than the energy emitted from this process, carried to us across a distance so vast it takes several minutes to reach us. We see and feel the sun not as it is but as it was several minutes ago. Wrap your minds around that.
And while you do, consider that our sun was not formed first; no my brothers and sisters, other stars collapsed, died, exploded, spewing the newly created heavy elements resulting from the fusion of all these nuclei that eventually ended up as the stuff that makes up our bodies and our world. For truly I say unto you that our bodies are made of star dust. We, my children, are what is left of that grand and mysterious process the evidence of which will be detected one day by future men and women (yes, I tell you my brothers, women will one day not be despised and shut in their tents and told to remain silent in the presence of their husbands - some will not even take husbands but live independent and happy lives, and will be able to time the number and frequency of their children) all these things will come to pass and so many more, for if I were powerless to predict these things, the things of men, how could I possibly be believed when I claim to speak of metaphysical things beyond the realm of men? 
But I do not speak of these things for I have no way of knowing them one way or another. I can only know what I can see and sense and this vision that came to me was as real as any. Are you not tired of the old, small, jealous gods, always plotting and scheming and fighting over a world that is so small? I bring you the universe entire, expanding and so much larger and vaster than we could ever imagine it. I bring you pulsars and quarks and neutrons and protons and strong and weak forces. Let me tell you about the universality of gravity, that elegant force that always and everywhere seems to obey certain laws that can be reduced to the simplest of variables - tell me, my brothers, the weight of an object and its distance from another object, and I can tell you its gravitational attraction to that other object. And all objects, even the tiniest mustard seed, imperceptibly exert this universal force. And let me tell you that anywhere you stand on this planet, if you drop a stone it will be accelerated toward the center of the earth at 9.8 meters per second-squared, terms that may mean nothing to you since until the French Revolution which is a great upheaval in the Roman territory now called Gaul, there was no such thing as the meter, developed to liberate ourselves from measuring things by the feet of kings, and until a man named Galileo who will live not far from the center of the great empire now occupying our land and oppressing our people, but long after this empire has collapsed - yes, this too shall come to pass - developed a water chronometer, there was no accurate way of measuring time, certainly not in small units. 
But if your scribes can tell you of lakes of fires and 700-year-old men and you take it on faith, can you not also open your minds to far more amazing ideas that happen to be true? It shall come to pass that this 9.8 meters per second-squared will be a constant gravitational force on the surface of the Earth, but that since mass and gravitational force are inversely proportional, the moon, which men will visit in great vessels propelled by fire and walk upon its surface, has only one-sixth the gravitational force of the Earth, so that those men can bounce upon it and lift heavy objects with ease. In space whose vastness and coldness will terrify future thinkers once it is understood, there is no gravity at all, and water floats in giant spheres as will your body when you travel there, as your greatest of great grandchildren someday will. 
Oh, there are so many wonders to share with you, wonders far more mind-expanding than the silly stories of floods and houseboats and women created from ribs. Let me tell you about evolution and the vast expanse of time, and of our kinship with all living creatures, even the lowly earthworm which, brothers and sisters shares 40% of our genetic code as we do. 
What is a genetic code? It is something even more amazing, a set of instructions handed down from parent to child, from generation to generation, present in every cell that has all of the information needed to make each of us. All of this information is stored in a pattern of 4 different chemicals, the order of which determines how every part of every cell is to be made, how much, and when it should be shut down or sped up.
Think of that, my children - each of you has half of your genes from your father and half from your mother - despite your persecution of women, they are as important to making you you as your fathers and your father's fathers. And in fact, all of us are conceived female but to become male a gene turns on which makes us insensitive to a chemical called testosterone and that tiny difference makes all the difference - all the wonderful and sensual differences - that distinguish men from women.
I call you my brothers and sisters and children even though I do not look exactly as you and my tongue stumbles on the sounds you use so freely because these differences are truly as of nothing. We are all brothers and sisters and share common ancestors who looked very little like us and might even consider as food if they met us today. But all tribes of Israel and all people everywhere belong to the same species and share almost all the same genes with very few differences, minor ones really, that make us appear to be a bit different than we really are. 
And did you know, my children, that you need not fear or be repulsed by your bodies and its excretions anymore than you should be repulsed by the husks remaining after the grain has been harvested? Did you know that men have seeds not unlike the pollen of plants and like plants, many more seeds will be cast than can ever fertilize the ovum of women, and many more conceptions will occur than will ever survive to term, and that many more babies will be born than can ever survive to have children themselves, but that a time will come when people will find ways to keep babies alive, almost all babies, not fewer than half as is now the case, their first year of life, and that they will develop technologies that will allow a man or woman at birth to expect to live and reproduce with a success rate we cannot even begin to imagine. Wo unto him today who has fewer than a dozen children or his name and his genetic material will not be passed onto the next generation. But once these wonders of the new age come to pass, clean running water that you can drink without sickening, pipes to carry your waste into a central place so it does not contaminate your drinking water, vaccines to make illnesses that have plagued us for eternity bad memories, and wondrous medicines that really work, for those with or without faith, because in those times to come men and women will understand that your immune system made up of countless white cells floating in your blood stream are what fight infection, and that many illnesses thought to be demonic possession now because they frighten us and we are powerless to do anything so we make up stories to explain what we do not know will be understood to be nothing more than chemical imbalances that a pill taken once or twice a day can cure or treat forever. 
No longer will those who hear voices telling them to murder their children be treated as prophets or allowed to carry out their plans. Instead, they will be treated with compassion and the voices will leave them and there will be peace in their families who will understand that diseases of the mind, like diseases of the kidney or the lungs, have nothing to do with the moral goodness or badness of the sufferer. Such knowledge may throw all religious experiences into question, especially by those who are doctors specializing in these illnesses and who see firsthand how the words of a sick man and the words of a charismatic would-be prophet are indistinguishable but both respond to treatment. 
Our entire sense of reality will be threatened by this new awareness that so much of what we see and seem is a function of chemical reactions, understandable and in many cases changeable for better or worse. Other scientific fields will challenge our sense of stability and fill us with humility. We will learn the age of the earth is not in the thousands of years but in the thousands of thousands of thousands of thousands of years. Most of the earth's history did not involve us because people did not evolve until the last fraction of a second of earth's hour. We are close relatives of the chimpanzee and slightly less close relatives of the gorilla. The chimpanzees have 99.8% of the same genes as we do, my brothers and sisters, and at this awareness, some men will cringe and like the fable of Adam and Even want to seek refuge in their ignorant innocence, but once these things are learned, they cannot be un-learned. 
There will be creatures discovered many, many times more massive than the greatest land animal, the elephant, living in the ocean right now, unknown to our scribes because they never bothered to travel to those great oceans. These enormous whales as they will be called (not the large fish in that silly story of Jonah) are mammals like us and actually dwelled on land for a time before deciding to return to the sea. But they did not evolve gills again so were forced to hold their breath under water and blow it out of a great hole in their heads when they surface. 
And did you know that all life began in water and that even today most life remains in water. If all living creatures were piled up and weighed, it will be discovered that over 9 parts of every 10 of that mass will live in the water. This will make that silly story of Noah and his house boat doubly absurd since a flood that threatens land creatures will be welcome to the 90% of life that has not evolved to live on land. 
I do not mean to shock you, my children, but look carefully at your bodies. Did you know that you are all of you farms, cultivating tiny forms of life that the men and women of future generations will call microbes? Some of these microbes make you ill, but most of them live in peace and are essential to digesting your food and eliminating your waste. You have more of these microbes than you have of cells. And each cell, remember, has a complete set of instructions to make you you. There will come a time where if a man struggles with another man or with a woman (for in those future times, women will be considered as people too, and slaves also, since slavery will be ended and all laborers paid for their wages and free to work for another master or not at all) and commits murder but no one witnesses the crime, did you know that people in that time will be able to use as little as a hair or a tiny piece of skin and find within it the set of genes that is unique to that one person (unless he has a monozygotic twin, but I digress)? The science of crime will surpass the science of the courts of that time, and juries will be swayed not to understand what this means, but many innocent men will be set free when it is clear that the hair or the skin or the blood at the scene of the great struggle was not theirs? One piece of hair!
Now look again at your hands and tell me if they are mostly space or of matter? I tell you this: most of the universe including most of you is empty space. Even the densest bone or rock or piece of metal is mostly space. The mass of everything is contained in the nucleus, which is as tiny relative to the electrons swirling around as the tiniest mouse is to the largest of our temples, but imagine if all the weight of the temple were in that mouse and the rest was empty space. Each atom is like this and your body is made up of billions and billions of atoms, all attracted to each other by a complex array of forces, but none actually touching. 
And as the Greeks once knew but our scribes have forgotten, we stand not on a plane but a sphere and we revolve about the sun once every 365 and a quarter days and our sun is but one of billions upon billions of other suns that appear to us as stars not because they are smaller - many aren't - but because they are so distant. Wow unto him among us who does not understand the incredible scale of forces not known no but one day to be tapped by scientists in a country on a continent our people do not know exists, forces that exist in the tiniest center of an atom, where protons and neutrons are clustered together and can be unleashed by splitting that atom and destroying a city and all of its women and children and oxen and cats and dogs, dropped from a machine made not of wood but of metal, a light metal alloy yet to be developed, powered not by a sail but by a series of tiny explosions of a purified liquid extracted from the fossil remains of great creatures that our scribes do not even know died hundreds of millions of years before our species appeared. Yes, I tell you that men will untap these forces then regret the terrible destruction they have wrought, because in those days to come people will not accept the divinity of total war, of genocide of entire peoples, the way King David at the Battle of Jericho commanded his men to slaughter not just all women, children, and babies, but all animals too. In those days to come there will be great and prodigious slaughter but there will also be a great outcry against that slaughter and this outcry will come loudest from those who do not follow our Yahweh or any god at all. Yes, I tell you, that this and so much more will unfold.
These modern people will speak of rights and war crimes and trials not of religious authorities or kings but of men and women - for in those days there will be judges like Judy - common men and women like them. Even kings can be tried for trying to violate a housemaid but even in that day, the king will be able to afford a much better attorney so may go free.
They will introduce words alien to our ear but well known to our Greek predecessors such as democracy and republics. They will give all of their citizens, not only men of noble birth, the right to vote, although not all will use that right. 
They will have amazing talking boxes that will transmit talking images of men and women talking 24 hours a day, not needing candles because electrons stripped from the nucleus of certain chemicals will give off an energy - created when an current of those electrons passes through a resistor - that causes a filament in a glass bulb to glow and turn night into day. These talking boxes will carry not just images of talking heads but also of ladies wrestling each other in enormous vats of mud and dogs balancing themselves on wheeled wood devices they will call Skateboards. This great talking box will amaze but also distract and even though children at that time can be amazed with the fact that a beam of electrons traveling at the speed of light is hurtling into space and then coming back down again to form those pictures, images, and sounds, they will find this less interesting than watching cats jumping into and out of a cesspool. 
There is so much more, my children, but I see that the religious authorities are coming now and do not like the commotion I have created with my teachings. They are asking if I have been given a permit to speak and if I am of the right sect and I have traveled so far I honestly can't remember who is considered the right sect here - have I passed from the land of the Pharisees or am I still in the land of the Samaritans? 
They are taking me away and perhaps will break my body on the rack or burn me alive as all are commanded to do who follow the jealous and angry Yahweh, but these visions I have of the future are true and I hope that one of you who has ears has heard and will write down the truth so that when false prophets come, theirs are not the only fables who are propagated through the ages. 
Think for yourself my children. If you hear my screams from the Temple basement, it is only the elders doing what they feel they must do to maintain order and keep women and Gentiles and all of you in their place. Forgive them for they know not what they do. But explore, be truthful, and follow the truth wherever it takes you. Many are called to this path of painful exploration, but few will follow. It is a lonely path and expect to be mocked and derided by those who have not studied and do not know. No one is blinder than he who will not see. I cannot lie and say I have seen a god I have not, but I can imagine a future without this god and it is a good and prosperous future, free from the petty superstitions and prejudices of our people, divided like all agrarian people into warring tribes and factions that hate each other more than they hate the Romans. 
But even the Romans are farther along the path than we are and do not fear scholarship and science as we have been taught to do. Yes, they have their augurs and their high priests but they also have so many gods they don't take any one of them too seriously and leave each other alone to make their own choice. 
Well, I must go now because I live in a time and place where we have no choice; our god is chosen for us by who our father happens to be and what piece of dirt we happen to be born on, but I tell you that in the time to come, the universality of all things will make the pettiness and silliness of our world view shrink to insignificance. 
Peace be with all of you. What need I fear if the world and the elders are against me as long as the truth is on my side?

Silencing an unpopular or even offensive point of view as the National Portrait Gallery is currently being pressured to do does not justify or excuse censorship. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many censorship campaigns that did not claim to be acting on behalf of the People, usually a majority suppressing the dissenting voice of a minority. Inserting a sensitivity clause into the First Amendment was something the founders could have done but wisely chose not to. And by the way, if we don't defend speech we disagree with, then freedom of speech doesn't really mean much does it? Popular speech needs no protection - it's popular!
And let's not forget that history is full of voices that spoke words that offended the majority of their time but were in fact correct.
Galileo seemed to be contradicting Scripture and the majority of his time who "knew" that the earth was stationary and the sun revolved around it. He was censored.
Mark Twain questioned the morality of slavery and the arbitrary taboo of interracial friendship, offending the majority of his time in his book Huckleberry Finn (a work some school systems in the United States, conservative Christian ones still want to ban).
When Margaret Sanger opened a clinic to help poor women take control of their reproductive lives, she was almost arrested for violating the Comstock Law of 1873 that prohibited discussion or dissemination of information about contraceptives as "obscene." It would not be until 1966 that the Supreme Court recognized the right of (married) couples to use contraception! Yet these ideas were considered as offensive to the majorities in their time.
When Martin Luther King spoke out against racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War (which he saw as interwoven), he was condemned as a communist (Glenn Beck would have been proud). Even LBJ, who parted ways with MLK over Vietnam, referred to him at one point using the n-word.
And of course we can go back much farther to a long line of moral leaders who were condemned in their time for saying unpopular, even offensive things, such as that the rich would have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel getting through the eye of a needle, or that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us. That sort of thing.
And while we are speaking of offensive free speech, let's consider that book found free in most hotel rooms. In this story, you'll find several cases of infanticide, incest, drunkenness, debauchery, mass murder, slaughter of innocents (and their animals), and a fairly detailed account of one (censored) man's torture and execution... which brings us of course to the ants.
I personally fail to see how ants on a corpse are as offensive as, say, graphic pictures of Sebastian riddled with arrows (I counted at least 12 in the Louvre alone), beheaded John the Baptists, and more punctured, bleeding, broken, suffering Jesus's than I think is healthy for any small child (or adult) to see. I remember walking into a room in a museum in Florence to see a giant picture depicting in gleeful detail the torment of several people being burned alive in an auto de fe. Now the spiritual descendants of those engaging in this cruelty - and depicting it in such apologetically graphic terms - want to remove a work of art because it has some insects? Give me a break!
I do not advocate censorship of the more violent and divisive imagery thrust upon us by a religious "majority" (although most accept without thinking too much about it, such as why the nails went through the palms rather than the wrists or why blood would have spurted several feet (as one particularly gory painting in Rome illustrated) when a soldier pierced Jesus's side even though it had been established that he was "already dead"). I would prefer not to have my view of a beautiful mountain-top marred by a wood carving of a corpse nailed to a piece of wood, as recently happened near Zermatt, but understand the religious organization that put up the memorial has a right to free speech, even if it may offend me and disturb small children (or adults who think about it much).

Why Georgia Voters Who Voted Down a $10 Tag Fee to Finance Trauma Care Are Simply Wrong

There is such a thing as an informed opinion.  Not all beliefs are equally valid, even widely held ones.  As Galileo reminded us a few hundred years ago, the popularity of an opinion does not prove it since so few people reason well.  
Anyone who believes that paying an extra $10 in tag fees is less costly than having an emergency room fold or someone die because a trauma center is beyond the golden hour away does not understand probability and statistics (which unfortunately is most people).  When we drive our cars, whether we get in an accident or not, we probabilistically bear the cost of the loss times the frequency and distribution of the loss.  You don't have to be an insurance company actuarial to realize one or two saved lives will offset a $10 fee.  For God's sake, that's 2.7 cents a day!  How can one claim to be pro-life but values that life at less than a nickel a day?
Taxes and insurance premiums both represent a trade-off most mature and intelligent adults accept (unless either is too high, which is not empirically true here).  In exchange for a  small certain loss ($10) we offset a potentially catastrophic but low probability loss (or in this case, help pay for it).  Those who want the benefit of an extensive trauma network, one of the best in the world, but don't want to pay for it are trying to get a free ride.  
If they understand this, then they are immoral.  If they do not understand this, then they are ignorant.  Some of course (Sarah Palin comes to mind) are a little of both.
I think it's time we stand up to the bullies spreading hate and misinformation just as President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a Republican of course) did in his time:  "There is a splinter group, of course, that believes that you can [attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs]... Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Their numbers remain negligible but they are rich and figured out that if you buy a news station you can buy an election by duping people into voting against their economic interests.  That's what they did here. This was the most expensive election in United States history and it wasn't even a presidential election!  Most of the billions spent went into nonsensical, misleading attack ads.  Sadly, those ads worked. 
As Goebbels, arguably the inventor of using modern media for propagandistic effect, put it best, a lie repeated often enough will be believed. 

Why Do Religious Opponents of Stem Cell Research Think Rooting for Its Failure is Humane?

A friend forwarded me a link to a news story regarding a Catholic priest's opposition to an experimental embryonic stem cell treatment to help save a paralyzed patient's life.  In the interview, Father Tim Hepburn seemed to imply that he was rooting for the failure of the treatment in order not to encourage it, since he viewed it as immoral. 
Sidestepping for a moment the entire issue of when life begins and what obligation if any we have to bring every potential human life into being, this second-guessing of critical decisions involving patient care and scientific research reminds me of the Terri Schiavo media circus. A prominent spokesman at the time for other Christians, now-disgraced Congressman Tom Delay, expressed gratitude for Schiavo's vegetative state: "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America" and to bring a "biblical world view" to America.
Now this same vocal minority, using similar sloppy logic, opposes a treatment they do not understand of someone who is not their loved one and root (pray?) for its failure.  In effect, they are hoping for the prolonged paralysis and suffering of a living person out of fear it may encourage research that  threatens potential life. I fail to see how this position is humane or pro-life.
Indeed, it reminds me of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where the pious of Jesus's day avoided alleviating the suffering of the man before them for abstract, deferred, and highly dubious religious reasons.
I have text-searched the Bible for embryonic stem cells and generated no hits, so am curious as to how such a cruel position can be justified on religious grounds anyway. Applying very broad prohibitions against terminating life cannot with any confidence be applied to all forms of potential life, especially those that could never have been dreamed of in the agrarian, relatively primitive society that created the Bible. I can understand intelligent adults disagreeing about these things, but it is intellectually dishonest to cover one argument in the cloak of religious certainty, certainly not to the level that  justifies aborting this newly conceived medical research and treatment before it is fully viable.
If those with no medical or scientific training are confident enough to weigh in, based on what they heard, about the best way to treat patients suffering from spinal cord injuries, why stop there? What, for example, is the Vatican's opinion about the most effective chemotherapeutic agent to use in Stage IV breast cancer? Or which surgical procedure is most appropriate for removing an appendix? Does Father Hepburn prefer external beam or brachytherapy radiation therapy for Stage II prostate cancer?
If those questions sound ridiculously technical and inappropriate for a religious representative to address, then why is it any less inappropriate to assume that one has either the expertise or the moral standing to wade into such a complex field in such a selective way?
Father Hepburn was disingenuous when he claimed that his was not a religious position per se.  His religious position seemed the only reason he was being interviewed at all, and so respectfully.  I am sure there are many engineers and teachers and philosophy professors who have similar educational backgrounds and as much standing on this issue as Father Hepburn who were not invited for an on-camera interview.
At any rate, the vocal minority opposed to stem cell research IS highly correlated with although not strictly limited to religious affiliation (those who describe themselves as born again are somewhat more likely than those who describe themselves as Catholics to oppose stem cell research).
Nevertheless, 69% of Catholics in a recent Harris poll support stem cell research. This issue, like birth control and Copernican theory (I date myself, but I have a long historical memory), is another where the pronouncements of the hierarchy are out of step with the beliefs and practices of those in the pews who financially support them.
Of course the hierarchy of the Catholic church does not pretend to be a democratic organization in any sense, and certainly it's possible that most Catholics are wrong and the church leadership is right. But over time, overwhelming public opinion and scientific evidence do change church pronouncements.
Overwhelming opposition to the church's 1616 condemnation and excommunication of Galileo and its resultant loss of credibility led the church to reverse its insistence on a geocentric universe and allow Copernican theory, the stem cell research of its time, to be taught a few centuries later.
Church opposition to the rising tide of representative democracy and reflexive support of monarchy by this most traditional of institutions eventually softened. Voting in Italian elections is no longer seen as grounds for excommunication as it was at one perilous point in the late 19th century.
Attitudes towards Jews and women have softened over time to reflect changing cultural mores, and recently a more humane posture toward homosexuality seems to be in the works.
So we can progress and grow and change. I understand that Father Hepburn is in a particularly difficult position that even most of those he represents do not agree with. For all I know, he personally would rather not like the recipient of this stem cell treatment to suffer or die, but he is a loyal soldier and the Vatican has given him his marching orders.
But we are free to follow the dictates of our own conscience and to use our own reason. As Galileo, who remained a devout Catholic all his life, put it best:

• "I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with our help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely." 
• - Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel, p. 65.

Indeed. Substitute biology for astronomy and stem cells for planets and he could have been writing to a modern audience. In many ways, he was.

Christianity and Sex: It's a Problem That Won't Just Go Away

The modern obsession with sexuality would have struck a contemporary of Jesus as odd, perhaps startling. He had some things to say about adultery, but never once mentioned homosexuality, for example, and good luck finding any clear and convincing reference to masturbation as a mortal sin, which the Catholic church still teaches. It might be surprising to some that Catholicism had no fixed teaching on contraception until recently and until the 13th century it was possible for priests to marry. In 1968, the commission appointed by Pope Paul VI initially found no reason a Catholic in good standing could not take the pill or use other forms of contraception, but that was not the answer Paul wanted to hear, so he fired those who favored the pill and voilá, Humanae Vitae was issued which split the church, with the hierarchy upholding the ban and the laity virtually ignoring it. (Karen Armstrong gives an excellent history of this period.) 
But I think regardless of the facts of the specific issues at hand, the method by which religions in general, especially those who are more concerned about orthodoxy (right thinking) not just orthopraxy (correct behavior), seek truth is deeply problematic. Galileo exemplifies this: a few passages of the Bible seemed to imply that we live in a geocentric universe. Until the discovery of the telescope, what the Greeks had actually known (and the Roman church forgot) could not be proven - that our system is actually heliocentric. So if you have a sacred text that stakes its claim on something that its authors could never imagine to be able to be proven or disproven, then what do you do when technology allows you to discover things with your own eyes that clearly are not accurately portrayed in that text, or collection of texts? The modern solution has been generally to shrug and say of course those texts were a product of their time and contain great wisdom in general even if some of the particulars are glaringly inaccurate (as Galileo asked, why would anyone turn to a text as an authority on a topic on which it is generally silent - why indeed?). But that approach is of course not good enough for fundamentalists of all stripes, and also for traditionalists, such as the Pope, who are confronted with overwhelming evidence that the way they have conceptualized the world is deeply flawed. The idea of renouncing your sexuality in some spiritual union with God does not seem a particularly reliable construct, and those who are compelled to take vows of celibacy seem empirically to include some who are deeply troubled, perhaps looking for refuge from forbidden impulses that torment them. Put those men together with a vulnerable population and disaster results. 
This is not to say that all who pursue celibacy or other forms of self-denial are all pedophiles or predators, only that one can't help wondering if allowing priests to marry and have a healthy, pro-life outlet for their natural, God-given sexuality might decrease or even eliminate the types of horrors that have occurred with numbing frequency in so many settings that have the same elements: demands for celibacy, exclusion of women, and an unyielding centralized chain of command where loyalty to superiors trumps loyalty to scientific or forensic reality. 
So I doubt cosmetic changes or another commission or tearful apology will do the trick. What is needed is a fundamental overhaul of how authority flows, which in a sense was what the Reformation was about, although Martin Luther and King Henry VIII had their own demons also, and Protestants showed our our side of the Atlantic that they could be as good at imagining witches and killing innocents as any Inquisitor. 
We know the earth is much older than Usher's 1650 estimate (he dated genesis to Oct 23, 4004 BC), in fact so much older that all of the history of our species would represent less than a fraction of a second of the earth's hour of time. We know leprosy is not particularly infectious and we believe that slavery is wrong and that adultery or cursing your parents should not be capital offenses. So the logical and moral gymnastics required for belief, certainly the type of authoritative belief and obedience demanded by Rome, are much greater today than ever which is why all churches, despite the recent evangelical flourish in the United States, are facing a very deep credibility crisis. How they negotiate that crisis will determine how and in what form they survive, but if educated people of good will are ever to take the pronouncements of an unelected group of celibate males seriously, they must first renounce the idea of infallibility (itself a modern doctrine promulgated by Pius IX in 1870) and admit they put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Maybe even more so.

A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester

To Jerry Falwell and all those who believe in a "veil of protection" being removed by God:

Consider this quote from William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire):

"Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican partices, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he could afford the lifestyle of a Renaissance prince; as vice chancellor of the Roman Church, he had amassed enormous wealth. As guests approached the papal palace, they were excited by the spectacle of living statues: naked, guilded young men and women in erotic poses… One [fete] known to Romans as the Ballet of the Chestnuts, was held on October 30, 1501… [According to Burchard's Diarium] After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city's fity most beautiful whores danced with guests, "first clothed, then naked." The dancing over, the "ballet" began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, "which," Burchard writes, "the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles." Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. "The coupling took place," according to Burchard, "in front of everyone present." Servants kept score of each man's orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man's machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes - cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those "who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times." [p. 79]

This sort of activity, unthinkable today, is part of the church's legacy. The point is not that papal leaders were any more depraved than the rest of society - they probably weren't, although they were certainly more wealthy and powerful.

It is also important to remember that the church forbade the teachings of Galileo (and in his time all the teaching of Copernicus) until 1822! In other words, the church was wrong - patently and openly and demonstrably wrong - in its belief in a geocentric universe and took about 300 years to admit its error. It was also wrong about the age of the earth, the time it took to create it, and a number of other technical issues, but my point is that if they were wrong about these issues (as they later admitted), could it be possible that they are wrong about birth control, family planning, and abortion? We have a precedent for the church taking a stand - a very harsh stand punishable by death at the stake - then later admitting (unfortunately far too late for its victims) that it was wrong.

Religious leaders throughout history have modified what they considered to be unforgivable sins. Why should now be any different? Sir Thomas More, whom catholics view as such a paragon of virtue (standing up to King Henry VIII did take courage), thought that reading the Bible in English was a damnable offense. He would have had William Tyndale burned to death for heresy for translating the Bible to English. If he were alive today, he would think any modern catholic should be condemned to hell for reading the Bible in English. You would have argued with him about this the way you argue with me about abortion and no doubt, he would have been as unyielding.

Consider this quotation from historian William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire):

"In argument [More] was bitter, vituperative, given to streams of invective. And although as a writer he celebrated religious tolerance in his Utopia, in practice he was a rigid Catholic, capable of having a servant in his own home flogged for blasphemy. He believed that heretics, atheists, and disbelievers in a heareafter should be executed, and as chancellor he approved such sentences."

Adultery in medieval times was also a capital offense, but of course only if women were found guilty.

Cesare Borgia as pope probably had an incestuous affair with his 17-year-old daughter, as he later acknowledged when he legitimized her child via a secret bull. (Earlier, to the sound of open laughter, the canonical judges declared her intacta - a virgin - although she was clearly 6 months pregnant at the time.) He may have arranged the murder of his brother, Juan.

In the name of Christ, millions (adjusted for today's population levels) perished in the petty religious wars that raged through Europe. The Roman Inquisition was particularly cruel:

"The Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign of terror [than the Spanish Inquisition]. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny. As a consequence, the advocates of reform, who had proposed the only measures which might have healed the split in Christendom, fell under the dark shadows of the hereticators' suspicion. No Catholic was too powerful to elude their judgment… Pietro Carnesecchi, who had been the pope's secretary was cremated in a Roman auto-da-fe. [burned alive] … Possession of Protestant literature was a felony; advocacy of heretical ideas was a capital offense; and informers were encouraged by assigning them, after convictions, one-third of the condemneds' goods. Trials were conducted by a special commission, whose court came to be known as … the burning room. In less than three years, the commission sentenced sixty Frenchmen to the stake. Anne du Bourg … suggested that executions be postponed until the Council of Trent defined Catholic orthodoxy. [French King ] Henry [II] had him arrested… He meant to see him burn, too, but … the King was killed in a tournament. [pp. 201-2]

And of course the Spanish Inquisition was also savage:

"Torquemada's methods reveal much about one of the age's most unpleasant characteristics: man's inhumanity to man. Sharp iron frames prevented victims from sleepig, lying, or even sitting. Braziers scorched the soles of their feet, facks stretched their limbs, suspects were crushed to death beneath chests filled with stones, and in Germany the very mention of die verfüchte Jungfer - the dreaed old iron maid - inspired terror. The Jungfer embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hold of revolving knives and sharp spears…

Jewry was luckier - slightly luckier… If the pogroms of the time are less infamous than the Holocaust, it is only because anti-Semites then lacked twentieth-century technology. Certainly they possessed the evil will. In 1492, … Spain's Jews were given three months to accept Christian baptism or be banished from the country. Even those who had been baptized were distrusted; Isabella had fixed her dark eye on converted Jews suspected of recidivism - Marranos, she called them; "pigs" - and marked them for resettlement as early as 1478. Eventually between thirty thousand and sixty thousand were expelled. Meantime the king of Portugal, finding merit in the Spanish decree, ordered the expulsion of all Portuguese Jews. His soldiers were instructed to massacre those who were slow to leave. During a single night in 1506 nearly four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword. Three years later the systematic persecution of the German Jews began." [ p. 35]

You should probably multiply these figures by several thousand to make them proportional to the population of the time.

Yet God did not condemn European society to poverty and misery; far from it - He (if one uses such a puppet master model) raised Europe and its progeny, the United States in particular, to levels of unprecedented wealth, not just in materialistic things, but in intellectual achievement, technological prowess, and scientific discovery. If anyone deserved punishment for their collective sins, it was surely medieval Europe, but if that punishment is waiting, God sure its taking his time.

This is not to say that civilizations won't fall and decline. I just don't think it has anything to do with the intervention or lack thereof of some heavenly hand.

God killed far more infants from disease through the beginning of this century than man ever did through abortion. Who knows how many died throughout Europe because of the church's misappropriation of capital and continued opposition to the scientific method.

My own belief, for all its worth (and in my belief system what you or I think or believe is not that important), God speaks to us, if at all, through the language of mathematics, science, and economy. There are certain rules for us to follow, and if we follow them, we prosper. If we don't, we starve and live short, miserable lives. The fact that we have a longer life expectancy by far that at any point in human history, that we have a higher quality of life than ever before, that we have freed ourselves from the astonishingly high infant mortality and maternal mortality of the pre-scientific, church-governed age, is prima facie evidence that we are doing something right, and, if one is to endorse the belief that God rewards societies that are following his laws or whatever, that we must be pleasing him or her.

At any rate, the number of abortions has been going down in the United States; why were we not hit with a terrorist attack in 1980, when the 1,297,606 abortions worked out to a rate of 359 per 1,000 live births, than more recently, when the rate dropped to 314 per 1,000 live births (1,221,585 total in 1996) if this attack has anything to do with abortion?

If you view abortion as death, it is one of only many causes of death. The fact that our population is growing, and has surged even since mid-century, means that our birth and survival rate must exceed all causes of death combined.

Galileo - As Relevant Today As Ever

Galileo

History doesn't repeat; it rhymes.

Galileo was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare. Like Descartres, Voltaire, and Diderot, Galileo received a Jesuit education.

Until Galileo, astrology was linked inseparably from astronomy which was widely believed (by Copernicu and Kepler, among others).

In 1609, Galileo discovered the telescope. This simple tool allowed him to observe things that were contrary to the entrenched belief system of his time and would lead him to a meeting with the Inquisition.

By discovering and observing the moons of Jupiters, he was able to prove that the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa.

Much more radically and fundamentally, however, Galileo made the leap from scanning sacred texts for truth to scanning the world around us as it is, not as we wish it to be, measuring, forming a tentative explanatory model, then continuing to test and modify. In other words, he invented the scientific model. He believed that Truth was measurable and objective, that God wasn't tricking us when he gave us senses and the ability to infer governing laws from our observations. "The Book of Nature is written in mathematical characters," he once famously said.

In 1616, the Catholic Church declared Copernican theory, the radical notion of a heliocentric universe, "false and erroneous", losing serious credibility thereafter.

What is not as well known about Galileo is that he reinvented himself in old age. When the Church forbade him from teaching Copernican theory and placed him under house arrest, he obeyed. Although losing his vision and suffering from arthritis, he launched into an exploration of the basic laws of motion. It was Galileo, not Isaac Newton, who articulated the concept of inertia, that a body at rest tends to stay at rest and one in motion tends to stay in motion. Force is necessary only for a change in velocity.

Copernicus, by the way, was not a radical, as he is remembered, but in the employee of the Catholic church when he advanced his heliocentric theory as a hypothesis in 1512. He induced this from the Pythagorean conviction that nature was ultimately comprehensible in simple mathematical terms. The geocentric model didn't explain or predict the movement of planets with any simple models.

Galileo's daughter

Dava Sobel

"Witnesses are examined in doubtful matters which are past and transient, not in those which are actual and present. A judge must seek by means of witness whether Pietro injured Giovanni last night, but not whether Giovanni was injured, since the judge can see that for himself. But even in conclusions which can be known only by reasoning, I say that the testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling, I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a 100 dray horses."

- page 93

"The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held to academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors -- as if I placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seem to forget that the increase in the known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts;not their diminution or destruction.

- page 67

"Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they... hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they failed to understand properly, and which were ill-suited to their purposes."

- page 68

"Let us grant then that theology is conversant with the loftiest divine contemplation, and occupies the Regal throne among sciences by dignity. But acquiring the highest authority in this way, and she does not extend to the lower and humbler speculations of the subordinate sciences and has no regard for them because they're not concerned with pleasantness, then her decision should not arrogate to themselves the authority to decide on controversies in professions in which they had neither studied nor practiced. Why then, this would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect, should undertake to administer medicines and direct buildings according to his whims – at grave peril to the poor patients' lives, and the speedy collapse of these edifices.

• page 68

To prohibit the whole science would be but to censure a 100 pages of holy scripture which teach us that the glory and greatness of almighty God are marvelously discerned in all his works and widely read in the open book of heaven. For let no one believe that reading the lofty concepts written in that book leads to nothing further than the mere seeing of splendor of the sun and stars and of their rising and setting, which is as far as the eyes of brutes and of the vulgar can penetrate. Within its pages are couched mysteries so profound and concepts so sublime that the vigils, labors, and studies of hundreds upon hundreds of the most acute minds have still not pierced them, even after continual investigations for thousands of years.

- page 69

The cause of the acceleration of the motion of falling bodies is not a necessary part of the investigation.

• page 337

It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without inducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. I, on the contrary, wish to be allowed freely to question and freely to answer you without any sort of adulation, as well becomes those who are in search of truth.

• Vincenzio, page 17

"Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze but the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the alphabet in which it is composed. It is written language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wonders about in a dark labyrinth."

- page 16

Page 63: Those scriptures cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways... when they would base themselves always on the literal meaning of the words. For in this wise not only many contradictions would be apparent, but even grave heresies and blasphemies, since then it would be necessary to give God hands and feet and eyes, and human and bodily emotions such as anger, regret, hatred, and sometimes forgetfulness of things past, and ignorance of the future. Holy scripture and nature are both emanations from the divine word: the former dictated by the holy spirit, the latter by the observant executrix of God's commands. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with our help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.

• page 65