Raymond Gravel Questions abound regarding Fr. Raymond Gravel, the Quebec priest and former Bloc Quebecois MP who is suing LifeSiteNews.com. Questions, but no answers. It all stems from a few basic facts on which there is general agreement. On June 29, 1986 Raymond Gravel was ordained a Catholic priest for the diocese of Joliette, Quebec. In 2006, Gravel plunged into [...]
By as split 4-4-1 advisory decision, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a 2008 Quebec Court of Appeal decision that found some of the federal Assisted Human Reproduction Act intruded on province’s jurisdiction over health. Pro-life and faith groups condemned the decision because it gave provinces control of the creation, destruction and manipulation of human embryos. The Supreme Court upheld in part [...]
The creation of the world’s first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell has been greeted with optimism and controversy. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, a genome research organization, announced their accomplishment on May 20. The team was able to construct the 1.08 million base pair chromosome of a modified Mycoplasma mycoides cell using the digitized genome of M. mycoides and chemically synthesizing [...]
On Nov. 3, 2009, a United Kingdom judge ruled that Tim Nicholson’s environmental principles qualified as a “philosophical belief” under the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations. The former head of sustainability from Grainger plc can now sue the company for religious discrimination, as they fired him because of his environmental policies. This treatment of environmentalist views as a religion is indicative of [...]
Darwin Day in America; How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science by John G. West (ISI Books, $26.95, 450 pages) The success of modern science in providing us with all sorts of material goods, medical wonders and solutions for an array of societal problems has granted it well-deserved respect in the minds of the discerning public. [...]
Michael Polanyi changed his career path from science to philosophy so that, paradoxically, he could help protect science from being absorbed into a narrow ideology. In his 1962 Terry Lectures at Yale University, he recounted a conversation he had with Nikolai Bukhanin in 1935. At that time, Bukhanin, whom Lenin called the “Golden Boy” of the party, was a leading theoretician for [...]