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To: jwalsh07
More garbage. You are 180 degrees out of phase. Kass does not believe any such thing. You might actually try reading something he has written before attempting to lie about him.

If you think I'm exaggerating about Kass' medieval belief system, try this one:

We, on the other hand, with our dissection of cadavers, organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization, surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery, "wanted" children, "rights over our bodies," sexual liberation, and other practices and beliefs that insist on our independence and autonomy, live more and more wholly for the here and now, subjugating everything we can to the exercise of our wills, with little respect for the nature and meaning of bodily life.

Leon R. Kass, Toward a More Natural Science

Dissection of cadavers? Organ transplantation? Laboratory fertilization? Gee, is this guy okay with anesthesia and vaccination, or is it God's duty that we die of yellow fever at age thirty, as was the custom in the time he reveres?

29 posted on 05/22/2005 7:40:24 PM PDT by BlazingArizona
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To: BlazingArizona; MHGinTN; Coleus; Sun; seacapn

What a wonderful example of the importance of context! You give weight to and illustrate Dr. Kass' very reason for the comment that you quote out of context.

This passage is in the last paragraph of the essay, "Thinking About the Body," (pp.276-298 in my paperback copy of the 1988 edition by Free Press publishers) which describes different societal rules about the *dead* body and how it is treated and considered. After pages discussing the ways "that we are by practice forced to decide who or what we think we are, really, and most of all. How to treat dead bodies may seem to be a trivial moral question, compared with all the seeminly vital problems that confront the living. But from a theoretical point of view, few are as illuminating of our self conception and self-understanding."

This statement is dealing with the way that different societies treat dead bodies as a reflection of "who or what we think we are," at the end of a long essay about dying (and our perception of what happens between the moment of life and death) medical study and practice, and the influence of the treatment of the body as "the motions of inorganic particles" vs. "pure will and reason." It is not a discussion about research or morality, but about the living body of the thinker about the body and the treatement of the body by the thinker after death.

Kass discusses the differences between what science and medicine study and teach vs. every day knowledge, customs and intuition. He tells (of Herodotus' telling of Darius' telling) of the differences between the customs of the Greeks, who burned their fathers' bodies after death, the Indians who are said to eat the bodies of their fathers after death. The Greeks are supposed to see the difference between the body and the father, while the Indians do not.

The paragraphs just before your quote:

""Though little noted, our story features a third people: the Persians in the person of their king, Darius. Darius is presented as the man who has seen through the mere conventionality of conventions. Indeed, he revels publicly in his discovery. He compels people to look upon ways that are not their own, to confront what must be seen from his detached and enlightened view as the simple arbitrariness of their own way. Having transcended the limits of law - especially those tied to ancestral piety - he makes sport at the expense of the pious. Strict rationality is the Persian way: "The most disgraceful ehing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie." We learn elsewhere in Herodotus that the Persians looked to nature as divine - but only to the aloof remote, permanent, and regularly moving boidies of the heavens (sun, moon, and stars), beings so unrelated and indifferent to human affairs that they might for all practical purposes just as well be absen. (In practical terems, the Persians were indistinquishable from atheists - and their practices show it.) Their funeral practice is what you might expect:

"There is another custom which is spoken of with reserve, and not openly, concerning their dead. It is said that the body of a male Persian is never buried, until it has been torn either by a dog or a bird of prey."

""The Greeks, it seems are a mean between the superstitious Indians and the automous Persians, reverent rather than fanaticla or impious, reasonable rather than either irrational or hyperrational. In honoring the bodies of their ancestors, they acknowledge their own gratitude for the unrepayable gift of embodied life. Yet, they make their peace with mortality by facing up to it and, through such representatives and Pindar and Heodotus himself, seek the enduring through memories, poems, and inquiries into the naked truth of things.""

The sentence following yours is,

"We expend enormous energy and vast sums of money to preserve and prolong bodily life, but, ironically, in the process, boidily life is stripped of its gravity and much of its dignity. Rational but without wonder, willful but without reverence, we are on our way to becoming Persians."


31 posted on 05/23/2005 3:46:11 AM PDT by hocndoc (Choice is the # 1 killer in the US)
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To: BlazingArizona
I take it you're admitting you lied about Kass vis a vis in vitro fertilization since you never addressed it?

Now to compound the lie you post a quote qith no context. Truth is your friend dude. You can oppose or support certain things without mischaracterizing those you oppose.

33 posted on 05/23/2005 5:50:05 AM PDT by jwalsh07
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To: BlazingArizona

It is not surprising that someone who will tell a lie about Kass would find the above comments outlandish. But it is telling of your deceitful methodology that you cannot post comments by Dr. Kass proving your lie so you post something that in your twisted secular mind is 'just as damning'. You're a transparent joke at FR.


35 posted on 05/23/2005 8:02:08 AM PDT by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote life support for others.)
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