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agangbern
Guest
We don’t despise our bodies. They are very good. In the beginning there was no problem with our bodies. But after the fall of man, there arose something we need to do about the inclinations of our bodies. Man became confused about his original nature. Hence Jesus Christ came to help us remember man’s true nature as willed by God from the beginning. We struggle to return to our original innocence.
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Sol_Invictus
Guest
Feces beautiful? wow you’ve really convinced me. Why would I want a body after existing as a soul. One would think that latter would be superior.I like my body and it’s been very, very good to me. And I’m a cancer patient for the third time!
Even things that are apparently gross, like feces, are really an awesome thing if you understand nutrition and anatomy and physiology. I took a nutrition class last year with lots of science in it…and it really is awesome.
Better get used to having a body because you’ll have one for eternity. You get a body back at the Last Day.
(It will be perfected so hope you’re happy with it. I wouldn’t recommend complaining about the resurrection body at the Last Day to your Maker, He might think you’re an ungrateful little cad and throw you in with the goats.)
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Sol_Invictus
Guest
How could I be a heretic? You’re attitude that sex is good and therefore we should indulge in it is the very attitude which our modern society and many pagans have held. Cmon people theres more to life than sex
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agangbern
Guest
If you have tried existing merely as a soul, I am sure you would not say that again.For without a body, the soul can do nothing.
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Sol_Invictus
Guest
Right then it is not contradictory.
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Sol_Invictus
Guest
What?
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bpbasilphx
Guest
How can anyone say the human body is a thing of beauty? To say that God would create something so filthy and disgusting contradicts the idea of Divine perfection. This is precisely the problem with modern culture.
What you’re saying, Sol Invictus, is the heresy of gnosticism, and nothing even half-way close to Christianity.
What you’re saying, Sol Invictus, is the heresy of gnosticism, and nothing even half-way close to Christianity.
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bpbasilphx
Guest
PS–You must also have a terrible self-image, too! 
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Contarini
Guest
So you have been a disembodied soul and can testify otherwise?
For that matter, in Thomistic philosophy a soul that had never been in a body would not even be an individual.
Edwin
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blackrobe
Guest
Exactly. The body is the principle of differentiation. What a shock it will be for the Cathars and assorted gnostics to find that their bodies are what makes them who they are for all eternity.
JSA
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Sol_Invictus
Guest
Well technically yes I was at one point. It was better to never have existed than exist in a body.
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agangbern
Guest
So you have at one time existed merely as a soul. When did it happen? How did it happen? Did you see your body when you existed as a soul? Where were you when you were a soul?
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a_priori
Guest
Our bodies are incomprehensibly complex and wonderful. If you study human physiology at great depth, especially embryology, you would be absolutely blown away with the magnificence of what God hath wrought in the human body.
Do we despise the sunset?? Do we despise the Autumn colors?
These things pale by comparison. The human body is the absolute pinnacle of God’s creation.
Despise the body? I’m not getting this…
Do we despise the sunset?? Do we despise the Autumn colors?
These things pale by comparison. The human body is the absolute pinnacle of God’s creation.
Despise the body? I’m not getting this…
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kentuckyliz
Guest
The soul does not pre-exist the body. God ensouls each person at conception, with a brand new soul. No body, no soul.
Your desire to never have existed leads me to the professional obligation…I must ask…are you thinking about hurting yourself? It strikes me that you might be suicidal.
Perhaps merely depressed. I’d recommend that you seek professional help.
God bless you. :hug1:
Your desire to never have existed leads me to the professional obligation…I must ask…are you thinking about hurting yourself? It strikes me that you might be suicidal.
Perhaps merely depressed. I’d recommend that you seek professional help.
God bless you. :hug1:
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ribozyme
Guest
Ha…ha…ha…
What do you have to say about those people who want to upload their minds into computers, or replace their brain with a more powerful computational substrate (maybe carbon nanotubes.)…
Yes, those people exist. And I am not the only one who sympathizes with that particular agenda.
The human body is far from perfect and it is not the apogee of evolution. In my opinion, what makes humanity special is our ability to overcome (currently some) of our biological programming. According to people such as Ray Kurzweil, our ability to understand and modify our own programming is increasing at an accelerated rate over time.
One might misinterpret this by acheiving this end by altering genes, but pharmaceuticals are an excellent ethical (and contemporary) example of this. For example, fibrates and statins are used to combat dyslipidemia; ACE receptor inhibitors, and angiotensin II antagonists, are used to combat hypertension; DPP-4 inhibitors, metformin, sulfonylureas, and the obvious insulin combat diabetes mellitus; protease inhibitors, reverse transcriptase inhibitors, entry inhibitors, integrase inhibitors combat HIV; SSRIs, SNRIs, and MAOI (in severe cases); and there are tons of “targeted” tyrosine kinase inhibitors in the pipeline that might combat cancer.
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Pete_1
Guest
To the best of my knowledge the Catholic church teaches their is far more to life than sex.
[2361](javascript"Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death."143
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a_priori
Guest
If I can bring a little laughter into someone’s life it will have been a good day indeed.
I think they should go for a walk in a beautiful meadow, grab a sunflower and marvel at the Fibonacci sequence contained in it’s patterns. Then perhaps they will understand that true appreciation for what it means to be human is to enter into the beauty and aesthetic intoxicants of God’s creation that are certainly mathematical but hardly the barren number-crunching capacity some seem to value above all else. They leave something important behind.
With all due respect, you lack the vantage point to make such a pronouncement.
Did someone’s biochemistry book just vomit? The point is that these are all wonderful things. Biosynthetic pathways and seeing enzymes do their thing in and of itself has great beauty. I think we are on the same page here in the sense that this is good stuff.
We just need to avoid creating a nanotechnological Tower of Babel. We are ascribing metaphysical abilities to ourselves that we are not entitled to no matter how many numbers we can crunch in a second.
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kentuckyliz
Guest
Well, I’m not a sci fi fan so I don’t know some of this stuff that you’re talking about. I do understand the Nietzschean desire to be Ubermensch though, and have much healthy skepticism because of the law of unintended consequences.
I have no beef with scientists and researchers and advances in medicine. In June I had what I jokingly called “hamster juice” injections…a drug synthesized from the stem cell line of the ovarie of the Chinese hamster…very expensive and rare drug, hardly ever used, had to go to a city two hours away to fill the prescription…but it kept me from having to take a whole month off work to go totally hypothyroid (a miserable experience) to get TSH stimulated for scans. So this drug isn’t “necessary” but my employer appreciates me not being gone for a whole month and it added a lot to the quality of my life. Hypo is hell. So those lab geeks in Boston that figured out this drug are doing the Lord’s work in serving their fellow man.
The PET-CT fusion scan I had in June is a fairly recent invention, and I appreciate this powerful and accurate scanning method that found a surprise, my third primary cancer. God bless the technological geniuses that figured out PET, and CT, and how to fuse these two scans.
My breast cancer is ER+/PR+ and HER2/neu+, and I am receiving customized treatment based on those results: tamoxifen followed by aromatase inhibitors, and Herceptin (which works on the other side of the cell membrane as the tyrosine kinase inhibitors). Ya know what? My mom probably had these same factors going on when she had breast cancer, dx’d 1988, and she died 4 years after dx (after an “apparently” successful course of treatment). They didn’t know about ER/PR and HER2/neu back then! The knowledge and the research and the treatment technique just wasn’t there yet. So I am grateful for this advance in knowledge that I hope will make all the difference for my survival.
Even with the chemo, the Neulasta injection that prevents neutrapenia and the powerful Kytril anti-nausea drug are newer and chemo is a “breeze” compared to how it used to be.
So all these scientists and researchers and docs and pharmaceutical and technology companies are great, they have my gratitude, they are doing the Lord’s work. It is a corporal work of mercy.
Do these scientific advances mean the body isn’t an amazing, wonderful creation of God?
By no means! My surgeon could cut me open but could not make me heal. My body did that on its own God-given design. I have had four surgeries in the last 12 months and it amazes me how I have almost no pain, and the healing happens without any willing or action on the part of me or my doctor.
I think when everything works well in your body, you take a lot for granted. My salivary glands are damaged from two rounds of radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer (a treatment discovered/invented by my nuke scientist friends in Oak Ridge TN), so I always have to sip, and get terrible dry mouth, and you have no idea what it’s like to eat a cracker and it crumbles but never gets moist enough to swallow. Having this problem makes me deeply appreciate the perfection of God’s design in a well-functioning body.
My lower GI tract absolutely gets screwed up from chemo and it’s a rocky road to get it working again. Hypothyroid state shuts it down too. A digestive system that works according to its perfect design by God is a thing of awe. So no, feces in itself is not beautiful, yuck! But if you know anatomy and physiology and nutrition and the chemistry that relates to it…OMG what an amazing and beautiful system. No human would have ever designed that, not smart enough!
There are Jewish blessings for the ordinary workings of the body including elimination, and although it strikes us as weird because that’s not our prayer tradition, now that I have experienced the pain or discomfort or inconvenience of the body not working right, I know I can never take its good functioning for granted ever again.
He knitted me together in my mother’s womb, and I am fearfully and wondrously made. Praise be to God today, tomorrow, and forever more.
P.S. my brilliant health care team are all people of deep faith!
I have no beef with scientists and researchers and advances in medicine. In June I had what I jokingly called “hamster juice” injections…a drug synthesized from the stem cell line of the ovarie of the Chinese hamster…very expensive and rare drug, hardly ever used, had to go to a city two hours away to fill the prescription…but it kept me from having to take a whole month off work to go totally hypothyroid (a miserable experience) to get TSH stimulated for scans. So this drug isn’t “necessary” but my employer appreciates me not being gone for a whole month and it added a lot to the quality of my life. Hypo is hell. So those lab geeks in Boston that figured out this drug are doing the Lord’s work in serving their fellow man.
The PET-CT fusion scan I had in June is a fairly recent invention, and I appreciate this powerful and accurate scanning method that found a surprise, my third primary cancer. God bless the technological geniuses that figured out PET, and CT, and how to fuse these two scans.
My breast cancer is ER+/PR+ and HER2/neu+, and I am receiving customized treatment based on those results: tamoxifen followed by aromatase inhibitors, and Herceptin (which works on the other side of the cell membrane as the tyrosine kinase inhibitors). Ya know what? My mom probably had these same factors going on when she had breast cancer, dx’d 1988, and she died 4 years after dx (after an “apparently” successful course of treatment). They didn’t know about ER/PR and HER2/neu back then! The knowledge and the research and the treatment technique just wasn’t there yet. So I am grateful for this advance in knowledge that I hope will make all the difference for my survival.
Even with the chemo, the Neulasta injection that prevents neutrapenia and the powerful Kytril anti-nausea drug are newer and chemo is a “breeze” compared to how it used to be.
So all these scientists and researchers and docs and pharmaceutical and technology companies are great, they have my gratitude, they are doing the Lord’s work. It is a corporal work of mercy.
Do these scientific advances mean the body isn’t an amazing, wonderful creation of God?
By no means! My surgeon could cut me open but could not make me heal. My body did that on its own God-given design. I have had four surgeries in the last 12 months and it amazes me how I have almost no pain, and the healing happens without any willing or action on the part of me or my doctor.
I think when everything works well in your body, you take a lot for granted. My salivary glands are damaged from two rounds of radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer (a treatment discovered/invented by my nuke scientist friends in Oak Ridge TN), so I always have to sip, and get terrible dry mouth, and you have no idea what it’s like to eat a cracker and it crumbles but never gets moist enough to swallow. Having this problem makes me deeply appreciate the perfection of God’s design in a well-functioning body.
My lower GI tract absolutely gets screwed up from chemo and it’s a rocky road to get it working again. Hypothyroid state shuts it down too. A digestive system that works according to its perfect design by God is a thing of awe. So no, feces in itself is not beautiful, yuck! But if you know anatomy and physiology and nutrition and the chemistry that relates to it…OMG what an amazing and beautiful system. No human would have ever designed that, not smart enough!
There are Jewish blessings for the ordinary workings of the body including elimination, and although it strikes us as weird because that’s not our prayer tradition, now that I have experienced the pain or discomfort or inconvenience of the body not working right, I know I can never take its good functioning for granted ever again.
He knitted me together in my mother’s womb, and I am fearfully and wondrously made. Praise be to God today, tomorrow, and forever more.
P.S. my brilliant health care team are all people of deep faith!
R
ribozyme
Guest
I do not know what I want to do for my career. Maybe, I should design drugs or identify potential targets… I felt rather inspired after reading about the efficacy of HAART and imatinib. These treatments were able to render terminal ailments (HIV and CML) into manageable chronic conditions. (Unfortunately, resistance to drugs developes in those therapies requiring the development of new drugs.) Metastatic cancer, however, is a different story, for example, erlotinib only yields a small survival advantage in advanced pancreatic cancer (fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/AC/05/briefing/2005-4174B1_03_01-OSI-Tarceva.pdf) when used with the current standard of care (gemicitabine). (Maybe IGR -1 receptor inhibitors might solve this problem as resistance developes); sunitinib is a contrary example as it significantly increases progression free survival time in RCC compared to interferon-alpha immunotherapy. (pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1906573)
I feel that these results have meaning (especially in patients lives). I also feel accomplishing something similar to those aforementioned drugs might afford me with a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction that I am actively reducing suffering. (However, I might work on something like torcetrapib.) I do feel this is something I would be proud to do as it would benefit the infirm and I would help humanity, not simply increasing a company’s bottom line and profits.
Another person I admire is Aubrey de Grey; but he doesn’t seem to be doing anything that is currently helping people, in contrast to the people who design and test pharmaceuticals.
Meant to say “ACE inhibitors” and “angiotensin II receptor antiagonists”…
I wonder if we can add CETP inhibitors and squalene synthase inhibitors too for dyslipidemia…
I do not a mystical view about nature; instead, I see it as survival of the fittest mediated by Darwinian evolution. This is especially true when considering the treatment of HIV although adherance to current regiments mitigates the concern of acquiring resistance by keeping viral loads undetectable as this reduces the chance of a resistant strain from emerging.
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