Our immune system, certainly one of the great marvels of nature, equips us with 100 billion (100,000,000,000) immunological receptors. Each of these tiny receptors has the uncanny natural capacity to distinguish the self from the non-self. Consequently, they are able to immunize or protect our bodies against the invasion of foreign substances that could be harmful to us. Marvelous as nature is, [...]
In October of 2003, and for the first time in the United States, the abortion industry settled a malpractice lawsuit based on the link between abortion and breast cancer. The Cherry Hill Women's Centre in New Jersey failed to inform a woman of both the breast-cancer, as well as the mental, risks of induced abortion. The plaintiff, identified only as "Sarah" to [...]
By Donald DeMarco The InterimKyrie and Brielle Jackson were born on Oct. 17, 1995, a full 12 weeks ahead of their due date. The standard practice, that time, at the Medical Centre of Central Massachusetts in Worcester, where the twins came into the world, was to place them in separate incubators in order to reduce the risk of infection. Kyrie's birth weight [...]
The rhetoric put forward to rationalize the killing of an innocent person, especially one with whom the killer has a close or even intimate relationship, has always required considerable ingenuity. This is not so much the case at the present moment. In recent years, an individual has come into prominence who is the very personification of death-on-request. Shunning the need for laboured [...]
On the passing of Bob Hope, President George Bush offered this succinct and fitting tribute: "Today America has lost a great citizen … Bob Hope made us laugh. He lifted our spirits." Sir Robert Hope, who held an honorary knighthood in Britain, was honoured four times by the U.S. Congress and by every branch of the military. But it is the latter [...]
Derek Humphry, the main founder of the Hemlock Society, was born in Bath, Somerset, southwest of London, England, on April 29, 1930. His childhood was not a happy one. At an early age, after his parents divorced, his mother left him to marry an Australian. He did not see her again until he was 23, but their re-acquaintance was short-lived. She announced, [...]
"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis … Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley and the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality …. but to discover it." Thus spake, not Zarathustra, but Ayn Rand's philosophical mouthpiece, John Galt, the protagonist of [...]
Tennessee Williams's Desire teaches us about corporate creed and the culture of death After You Touched Me!, which did nothing to enhance his reputation as a dramatist, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in the hope that the Big Easy would provide the inspiration he had been lacking. There can be no doubt that his new venue inspired the title of the [...]
I read with great interest The Interim's report of a Grade 11 student who was given an "unofficial suspension" for wearing a pro-life shirt that read, "Abortion is Mean" (January 2002). The principal at Central Elgin Collegiate in St. Thomas, Ont. saw fit to send Lisa Klassen home because, as he put it, some people found her message "offensive." One might argue [...]
Shortly after the turn of the century, a French country doctor married the daughter of a landowner. The day after the wedding, he discovered, to his rude surprise, that his father-in-law was penniless. Disgusted, he did not speak to his wife for the next 40 years. At meals, he communicated to her by signs. She came to refer to him as "my [...]
Karol Wojtyla had been bishop for two years when his Love and Responsibility was first published in 1960, the beginning of a licentious decade which marked the dramatic unfolding of the "sexual revolution." For Wojtyla, the central issue that this "revolution" posed was not freedom or repression, but "love or its negation." He stressed the counterrevolutionary theme of responsible love in the [...]
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), at a major crossroad in his life in 1896, wrote a letter to a friend expressing his desire to become a philosopher: "As a young man I longed for nothing else than philosophical knowledge, and I am now on the way to satisfy that longing by passing from medicine to psychology." In one sense, his philosophy was simple and [...]
It was 1870 and the Franco-Prussian War had just begun. A 25-year-old philologist, on his way to the front, observed a cavalry battalion exhibiting impressive clatter and pomp as it passed through the town of Frankfort. Taken by the spectacle, the young scholar had a vision, out of which was to grow his entire philosophy: "I felt for the first time that [...]
Philosophy was born the moment it was discovered that there is a critical difference between appearance and reality. The way things really are is not simply the way they appear to us. The surface of a table appears solid and static to us. Yet, according to physics, it is highly porous and charged with electrical particles. It has been said that philosophy [...]
Whenever a politician delivers an address, his audience simply assumes that his message is going to be political. So deeply entrenched is this assumption that it prevails even on the relatively rare occasion when a politician delivers an address that is essentially ethical. It is like assuming that your lottery number is never going to be a winner and not noticing, on [...]