A terminally ill 28-year-old woman has been granted the right to die by a judge after a dramatic legal battle with her parents.

Grace Sung Eun Lee, a bank manager from New York who has terminal brain cancer, had told her parents and the doctors: ‘I want to die.’

But because her parents are deeply religious and belong to a Korean Christian church in Queens, they believe that allowing her daughter to choose death over life is a sin.

A judge at the state appeals court today sided with Miss Lee after the rift with her parents led to an agonising legal battle for the family. Doctors are set to be given the go-ahead to turn off her life support, unless her parents launch further legal action.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2213547/Paralysed-bank-manager-Grace-Sung-Eun-Lee-given-right-die.html#ixzz28iVjGWFS

There are days I despair for the human race. This is certainly one of them. Last month, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Moron) gave a speech denouncing science as Satan’s work to undermine Christianity. Seriously.

Via TPM:

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

According to Broun, the scientific plot was primarily concerned with hiding the true age of the Earth. Broun serves on the House Science Committee, which came under scrutiny recently after another one of its Republican members, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses against pregnancy.

“You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”

This man sits on the House Science Committee. That’s like letting a 5-year-old write the budget. Or Paul Ryan. Such profound, and deliberate, ignorance of basic education should disqualify Broun from having anything to do with policy making, much less science policy. This isn’t controversial stuff like “When does a fertilized egg become a person?” There’s a debate to be had there. This isn’t a question about something fundamentally unanswerable like what happens after we die. This is hard, proven and not that difficult to understand facts that Broun is childishly rejecting because he (mistakenly) thinks that it means he can’t worship Jesus.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/10/05/republican-science-is-all-lies/

During an Army-wide stand down for suicide prevention sessions, a Christian chaplain in Texas improperly led rookie soldiers in a candlelight prayer, an Army instructor said in a formal complaint last week.

Staff Sgt. Victoria Gettman, a lab technician instructor at Fort Sam Houston, told The Huffington Post that she was among 800 soldiers from the 264th Medical Battalion undergoing resilience training on Sept. 26. Almost all of the soldiers were fresh out of boot camp and in training for their first job in the Army.

After a 45-minute talk on how to cope with stress, the officer in charge turned the stage over to a chaplain for the sometimes controversial "spiritual fitness" part of the session.

Gettman did not catch the chaplain's name, and he has not been otherwise publicly identified. But as an atheist, she wasn't interested in what he had to say so she stood up and moved to the back of the auditorium. The 17-year Army veteran knew -- unlike the young soldiers -- that this part of the program was optional. Still, she could hear most of what the clergyman said from just outside the room.

"The chaplain said we have to have something bigger than ourselves. We need, and he stresses need, to have something divine in our life," she recounted, adding that the soldiers were not informed they were allowed to step out.

Gettman said the chaplain ordered the lights turned off and battery-operated candles passed around as the soldiers were told to bow their heads. "The entire theater was forced into a mass Christian prayer," she said. "I heard him refer to his 'Heavenly Father' and 'Lord.'"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/military-proselytizing-army-chaplain_n_1930703.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

9. It's not that the mind is closed

It's that the "insights" you speak of spark squarely from the anus of the "theologians", who base their insights on little more than sitting on a rock and thinking.

Studying any subject is about persipration, not inspiration. Look through a telescope, count the dwarf stars, galaxies and black holes, or look under a microscope, document the cellular mitosis, then come back and talk to us about "insights".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/121848885#post9

At the annual Catholic Medical Association conference, Bishop Robert Vasa says the current health-care crisis is ‘a clarion call’ for Catholic doctors in the U.S.


ST. PAUL, Minn. — Conscience rights' protection and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contraception mandate were the topics foremost on the minds of medical professionals gathered in St. Paul, Minn., for the Catholic Medical Association’s (CMA) 81st educational conference. The Sept. 26-29 conference, which drew more than 600 attendees, featured prominent speakers who shared the history of the present cultural battle and how to bear witness to the truth and bring it to bear on the practice of medicine.

Papal biographer George Weigel spoke on the crisis of modernity, author Brian Gail spoke on the life sciences’ challenges, First Things editor Russell Reno spoke about bringing faith into the public square, and Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, president of the Napa Institute, presented ways to use the new media for evangelization.

“The Catholic Church stands in the way of the sexual revolution — efforts to redefine marriage, access to abortion and reproductive technology and mercy killings,” said Reno. “Our increasingly aggressive adversaries will continue to use their political muscle to push us out of the way.”

“These are critical times,” said Bishop Robert Vasa of Santa Rosa, Calif. “Whether or not a physician is practicing in line with the teachings of the Church, they’re going to be forced to do something they may not want to do.”

“This is a clarion call for America,” added Bishop Vasa. “American Catholics, and in particular American Catholic physicians, have to wake up to the fact that they can no longer presume that their individual choices about how they practice medicine in this country will be respected.”

“We are in a very dangerous crisis,” agreed John Brehany, executive director of the CMA. “We see a deeply hostile government entering into the health-care sphere. We see an increasingly toxic culture. We know we’re heading into a time of great challenges. The Western world is facing economic challenges built up by social programs combined with the aging baby-boom generation. That is daunting.”

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/catholic-medical-association-attendees-tackle-how-to-survive-in-an-increasi/#ixzz289QlcErz