What I Read Online – 05/18/2013 (a.m.)

• A Letter from an Elder Completing His Term – Kevin DeYoung

  • To be an elder implies the possession of at least a modicum of biblical wisdom and insight
  • The eldership seems to not only encapsulate the gospel but to heighten it. As

• Sex, Dating, and Relationships | Challies Dot Com

  • Instead they encourage Christians to form “dating friendships.” In this little phrase “dating” is the activity and “friendship” is the relational category. You are not boyfriend and girlfriend, but friends, and you spend time together (i.e. date) as friends for the purpose of seeing if there is mutual interest and compatibility. Romance and sexual activity and commitment can wait; for now, it is simply “two friends getting to know each other with a view toward marriage.”
  • The authors want dating couples to understand that until they are married, their relationship to the person they are pursuing is a neighbor relationship in which any sexual activity or even the awakening of sexual desire is inappropriate. What is conspicuously absent from the Bible is a category that falls between neighbor and spouse. Yet this is where so much of our relationship confusion comes from–an invented category that is more than one but less than the other and lacking any clear biblical guidelines

• 9 Things You Should Know About Human Cloning – The Gospel Coalition Blog

  • Cloning is a form of reproduction in which offspring result not from the chance union of egg and sperm (sexual reproduction) but from the deliberate replication of the genetic makeup of another single individual (asexual reproduction). Human cloning, therefore, is the asexual production of a new human organism that is, at all stages of human development, genetically virtually identical to a currently existing or previously existing human being
  • Cloning does not produce an exact genetic replica of the donor (the person the genetic material was taken from to produce the cloned embryo
  • The use of the terms therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning are misleading. All cloning produces a human embryo and is therefore reproductive in nature. The more accurate, neutral phrasing is cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical-research.
  • The primary moral objection to cloning for research is that it creates human life solely for the purpose of destroying it; using a human embryo merely as a means to an end
  • 7. Currently, the primary justification for therapeutic cloning is as a means of harvesting embryonic stem cells—a process that ends a human life—for research purposes. Despite years of media hype and billions of dollars dedicated to the venture, embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) has never produced any clinically proven therapies—and likely never will. As the Washington Post wrote earlier this week, “few experts think that production of stem cells through cloning is likely to be medically useful soon, or possibly ever.” ESCR has been one of the most expensive boondoggles in biomedical history.
  • The use of adult stem cells, however, has none of the ethical problems and far fewer of the biomedical complications of ESCR. In fact, more than 70 types of therapies have been developed using adult stem cells.
  • Although the studies on cloning and ESCR produced by the President’s Council on Bioethics were once available at Bioethics.gov, the Obama administration has removed all the work produced by the previous council.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.