Friday, June 22, 2007

Brave New Salvation | Christianity Today

Brave New Salvation | Christianity Today:
"On April 21, 2447, the death of a 143-year-old woman hailed a new era. Lungs of people everywhere swelled with relief. Impeccability had dawned.

The deceased, Rosa Pecadorita, a coca grower in a remote village in the Andes mountains, was widely believed to have been the last living sinner. As the obituary in The Global Times put it, she was 'the last remaining human whose genes had not been therapeutically adjusted to prevent her from engaging in behaviors that the Global Referendum of 2304 deemed harmful to society and which the treaty that ended the Great Wars of Religion of 2105-2304 classified as sins.'"
This article was in the June 2007 print edition of Christianity Today, and was posted on the CT website a day or so ago.

The matter-of-fact sort of way this article is written reminds me of the phrase "banality of evil", coined by Hannah Arendt in 1963. This phrase first appeared in the context of Arendt's book on Adolph Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, and refered to the fact that most of the actions of the Third Reich were carried out by ordinary people who considered what they were doing to be proper and natural.

Christianity Today has collated links to recent articles dealing with bioethics on their web site. It may be worthwhile to look some of these over.

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