The Human Fertilisation and Embryology authority last week decided to allow licences to create cytoplasmic hybrid embryos for research purposes. These consist of an animal egg with its nucleus (containing its DNA) removed and the nucleus of a human cell inserted. The embryos are destroyed before they are 14 days old. Scientists want to create them in order to investigate debilitating, untreatable medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.
There is fierce opposition to the HFEA’s decision, not least from the Roman Catholic Church. Yet the head of the Authority’s ethics and law committee is a churchman: the former Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries – now Lord Harries. He told Sunday what ethical considerations his committee took into account.
Richard Harries has always been a kind of hybrid himself, a cross between Christian and secular agnostic, with the DNA of the latter typically winning out. His ‘ministry’ was dedicated to appearing orthodox (even Orthodox, when icons were trendy) and always undermining orthodoxy. His vanity and intellectual pretensions were tiresome to his evangelical clergy, while his advocacy of abortion, homosexuality and revisionism in theology were sadly predictable, and injurious to the Church of England.
I checked the BBC website for the original, thinking that Kendall had cropped the outtake without giving dissentient voices and found, not entirely to my surprise, that there were no dissenting voices. The interview also sounds pathetically weak to me. Questions beg themselves, for example: What other countries allow embryonic experimentation of this type? Have there not been claims before that embyronic stem cells might yield advances against illness – only to find that it was a gigantic academic fraud emanating from South Korea? You assure us that implantation is unthinkable – yet such embryonic experimentation as you propose would itself have been unthinkable a few years ago. So how can you guarantee no implantation? And so on. I also noticed Bishop Harries’ comment that he would not be a member of the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority if he was opposed to such experimentation. Ah, so the authority is composed of like-minded individuals? How then can it scrutinise scientific proposals? Kyrie eleison. This is the BBC which everybody knows to be hopelessly liberal and incapable of seeing any other way.
It’s interesting to hear, early in the interview, a sort-of explanation of the rationale for why the public consultation asked respondents about their views on the use of normal human embryos for experimentation and destruction, and why those who objected were ignored. It’s infinitely consoling to see that the godless UK government has managed to find a bishop who is prepared to bless its dirty work. No wonder they gave him a peerage.
3, I don’t find it surprising at all that they could find an Anglican Bishop to shill for them.
#4: Not at all surprising. It’s actually rather charming that the UK government should still think Christianity enough of a threat that it’s worth making use of corrupt bishops in this way. But I expect that specimens like Harries are rather irresistible to the princes of this world: with their power to polarize and marginalize the enemy, they’re a delicious luxury, a sort of chocolate treat. And they are cheap and cost-effective.
I see this research has already succeeded in producing a spineless bishop.
I’m in Oxford at the moment, and I’m quite thankful Lord Harries is the [i]former[/i] Bishop of Oxford. Taking communion isn’t as problemactic as it was when I here two years ago, for one thing.
take one part scripture (heavily watered down)
add a large dolop of relativism, sprinkled generously with a fearful desire to appear relevant to the world
mix in with a ludicrous self congratulatory ego
then take subject a replace spine with aformentioned mixture
emasculate and voila!
your very own hybrid Bishop