The Dawkins Delusion: "90% safe is better than 100% safe"

"The Dawkins Delusion: Benedict XVI is 'stupid, ignorant or dim'", Gerald Warner - Telegraph

What the Pope actually said about condoms on March 18, 2009:

"I would say that this problem of AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem. The solution can only come through a twofold commitment: firstly, the humanization of sexuality, in other words a spiritual and human renewal bringing a new way of behaving towards one another; and secondly, true friendship, above all with those who are suffering, a readiness - even through personal sacrifice - to be present with those who suffer. And these are the factors that help and bring visible progress." -Catholic News Agency

Like many others who have attacked the Pope over these remarks, Richard Dawkins apparently thinks it a bad thing to criticize the distribution of condoms in the fight against AIDS. After all, condoms often block transmission of the HIV, which causes AIDS. Dawkins claims that "the Pope is either stupid, ignorant or just dim".

But condoms, according to the United Nations, have only a 90% protection rate against HIV transmission. On the other hand, marital fidelity and abstinence from premarital sex has an essentially 100% success rate at preventing HIV transmission.

The Pope's critics may not wish to acknowledge that objective data demonstrates promiscuous condom users are at a much higher risk of HIV infection and AIDS than individuals who reserve sex to marriage. Their loud, indignant objections are not based on science, but upon other interests that influence their judgment.

Consequently Dawkins can't fathom how a 100% effective plan is better at stopping AIDS (and ennobling individuals) than the destructive and dehumanizing gamble of rubberized, promiscuous sex.

Natural family planning NOT ethically equivalent to embryonic stem cell research

Re: Differences surface in McCain-Obama Christian forum

To: R. Alta Charo, professor of law and ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dear Professor Charo,

USA Today quoted You, "If (McCain) believes in human rights at the moment of conception, then he ought to be against embryonic stem cell research, IVF (in vitro fertilization) and even the so-called rhythm method."

If this quote is accurate, then it’s only two-thirds right. Certainly, the inalienable rights of a newly conceived human being ought to be protected, and embryonic stem cell research and IVF result in terrible violations of these rights.

However, the “rhythm method” and other forms of natural family planning involving periodic abstinence (such as the highly effective “Creighton Model”) involve acts of a much different sort, acts that do not result in injury or death to any human being. Couples who practice periodic abstinence exercise their reproductive powers in a responsible and loving way, without trying to manipulate, circumvent, or destroy either the nature of the sexual act or its natural consequences, namely conception and childbirth.

By contrast, IVF and embryonic stem cell research subject newly conceived human beings to manipulation and death by experimentation and selective extermination. Even if these activities are carried out for good motives, such as to further medical research or bring children to an infertile couple, they are ethically reprehensible because they involve the exploitation and killing of one class of human beings in order to obtain some benefit for another class of human beings.

It is no coincidence that couples who practice periodic abstinence as a means of regulating conception and childbirth tend to be strongly “pro-life”, believing that from the moment of conception, human beings have inalienable rights which must be protected by any just society. Those who hold such a position stand ethically on high ground.