Octopodial Chrome

Antarctica finally has a church. Concerned with the spiritual condition of those on post there, the Russian Orthodox built a church, disassembled it and are shipping it to King George Island. A Father Georgy will be assigned to the chapel.

Holy Russia used to do this sort of thing all the time, sponsoring chapels in foreign lands for the use of all Orthodox. It’s good to see that this has returned.

Marvin Olasky writes a well-reasoned article about the Ten Commandments hullabaloo in Alabama. Yes, it should probably be legal to privately fund a religious monument in a State building. But is it serving the cause of Christianity to do so?

I must admit that I don't understand the controversy over the practising homosexual man the Episcopalians choose to call a bishop. By their own reasoning, it makes perfect sense. They've been ordaining homosexual men and women to the priesthood for years (decades?) now. Surely if it's perfectly okay in priests it's fine in bishops, no?

Of course, had they any real sense of their own faith, this wouldn't be an issue, either, but for the opposite reason: the idea would be as absurd to them as it is to anyone who actually bothers to read the Bible or study the traditions of the Church. God's ministers are supposed to be more faithful to His commandments than laymen, not less.

Oh well—perhaps it will lead the last weak remnant of that church back to the authentic, historic, one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Was reading an article on cloning & the New England Journal of Medicine in the National Review, and was once again struck by the oddness of the cloning debate.

For some reason, the leftist view is that it is wrong to clone a human being and let him be born (so-called reproductive cloning—really, all cloning is necessarily reproductive, as it's the reproduction of a particular person). This, although in-vitro fertilisation is alright. But OTOH, they argue for the necessity of what they euphemistically call therapeutic cloning: the cloning and subsequent destruction of a person. It's a wonderfully Orwellian turn of phrase, that: to give life and then take it is therapeutic; war is peace; freedom is slavery. Nothing any Nazi, Communist or socialist every came up with was so grotesque, so evil, so intellectually illegitimate.

Of course, the root cause of this disconnect is the current refusal to recognise the embryo as a true person, albeit one which is not fully developed (much like an infant, toddler or teenager is a person, but hardly at the height of competency). Interestingly enough, it was medical men in the 19^th century who discovered that the embryo was an individual, pushing for laws against that form of infanticide commonly called abortion. In the 20^th century many physicians supported the doing-away of those laws; in the 21^st, they are wanting to create children specifically to destroy them. What next?