Disembodied wrote:
Hopefully this will spark some discussion: the latest 20-page Vatican statement is that sex reassignment surgery, surrogacy and gender theory "threaten human 'dignity' which puts them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that violate God's plan for human life".
[...]
Does anyone here find this line of thinking defensible? How are we to know what's in "God's plan" and what isn't? Isn't that itself playing God? If we presume the existence of God, for all we know the plan might have been to be born the wrong sex and to undergo sex reassignment and the unique challenges along with it.
I can see a lot of problems with the reasoning here but obviously there are a lot of people in the world who still agree with it. It seems like the Church is increasingly grasping at straws with its reference to 'dignity' (whatever that means) and I'm surprised it's still relevant at all today. I know there have been some Orthodox people in this thread and I wonder what their take on this topic is.
Defensible? Not exactly...but I think that may be the point.
The picture of Christianity that I have in my head looks like: "Human reason is reliable only up to a point, beyond which, human beings are obliged to trust in revelation to 'understand' God's purpose for them." The revelation is supposedly provided by God, either by way of intermediaries (scripture and/or its appointed interpreters) or by way of directly communicating some sort of spiritual insight. The content of the insight might e.g. be ethical ("I shouldn't terminate this pregnancy," "I shouldn't acknowledge same-sex couples' right to marry," etc.) or theological ("God is somehow both three persons and one," "God became human in the form of the immaculately conceived Jesus," etc.) - reason by itself would never be able to afford these insights, so God graciously provides them himself.
It's...very troubling, IMO. I can pretty easily sympathize with the "Reason has its limitations" part; but the further step to "trust in intermediaries" opens the door to authoritarianism (as I think I heard a Catholic family member explicitly acknowledge). It's possible to think of it by analogy to a child being asked to trust in its parents, which I guess would tame the idea somewhat. But I find the more appropriate takeaway would be that God is an (or rather
the) utterly inscrutable authority - and might, therefore, command his subjects to act in ways that look senseless and abhorrent from the human point of view. I haven't read Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling, but I think the book explores that theme via Abraham's struggle with God's command to kill his son Isaac. I think Kierkegaard even speaks of the ethical as something that might have to be "suspended," should it please God...?
I think I heard something about a Christian parent who feared that Kierkegaard could create more apostates than any atheistic author.
EDIT (4/10) - Speaking of euthanasia, this is slightly off-topic, but I only today found this Website created by a woman moments prior to her self-administered euthanasia, from about a decade ago. It's all kinds of moving - beautiful, heartbreaking, inspiring, appalling (I mean, appalling to think that any individual or institution would persist in their opposition to her decision!):
https://www.deadatnoon.com/index.html