Type 1 Diabetes Breakthrough

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body loses its ability to manufacture insulin. It’s an extremely serious condition that must be treated in order for life to be preserved.

But it can only be treated, not cured.

Until now, it seems.

A new technique has been developed using a person’s own stem cells to apparently cure type 1 diabetes.

The catch is: It only works when the condition is newly diagnosed, so unfortunatley it can’t be used for those who already have established type 1 diabetes.

Still, it’s an advance–assuming the results can be replicated and expanded out into a standard medical treatment.

It also involves the use of adult stem cells, though that didn’t keep The Times from spinning it as an argument for promoting embryonic stem cell research.

GET THE STORY.

Carbon Offsets Vs. Indulgences

A reader writes:

I am sick and tired of hearing
(reading) carbon offsets compared to papal indulgences. I just got done
teaching my 7th graders (I homeschool) chapter 33 of the St. Joseph Balt.
Cat #2 on indulgences. And, while I am a fairly well read and
knowledgeable convert, I just don’t feel I am able to show the differences
as clearly and as eloquently as it should be done.

Could you devote an article to it that I could at least point others to?

Sure.

The comparison between carbon offsets and indulgences is something that one would expect given the gigantonormous amount of misinformation there is out there about indulgences.

Here’s a typically uninformed articulation of the comparison:

Carbon offset is the process of reducing the net carbon emissions of an individual or organization, either by their own actions, or through arrangements with a carbon-offset provider. . . .

George Monbiot, an English environmentalist and writer, has compared carbon offsets to the practice of purchasing Indulgences during the Middle Ages, whereby people with money could purchase forgiveness for their sins (instead of actually repenting and not sinning anymore). Monbiot also says that carbon offsets are an excuse for business as usual with regards to pollution [SOURCE].

The basic idea behind paying someone for cabon offsets is that you are hiring that person to do something to reduce the carbon emissions that otherwise would exist if you didn’t pay them to undertake the task. Thus, by paying them, you offset some of the carbon emissions that you yourself are generating.

For example, suppose that you are Al Gore and that you own a home that you run in such a way that it burns 221,000 kilowatt-hours in contrast to the 10,656 kilowatt-hours burned by a normal home. Such power consumption is inconsistent with maintaining one’s status as carbon emissions’ Scoldmaster General, and so what do you do?

Well, you could pay someone to go plant trees on the idea that the trees will grow and lock up (sequester) a bunch of carbon and thus reduce the amount of free-floating carbon in the environment–until such time as the tree dies and decays and it gets re-released anyway.

Or you could get even more creative.

In any event, the idea is that you pay someone else to reduce the carbon that would otherwise be emitted so that you don’t have to curb your own carbon-emitting lifestyle.

That’s why this is precisely how carbon offsets are different than indulgences.

For the record,

An indulgence is the remission before God of the temporal punishment due sins already forgiven as far as their guilt is concerned, which the follower of Christ with the proper dispositions and under certain determined conditions acquires through the intervention of the Church which, as minister of the Redemption, authoritatively dispenses and applies the treasury of the satisfaction won by Christ and the saints [SOURCE].

Carbon offsets are things that allow people to avoid altering their personal carbon lifestyle.

Indulgences are things available to people who have already altered their lifestyle by repenting of their sins and being forgiven of their guilt. They have to do with mitigating the temporal consequences that often accompany sins, even though the sins have been forgiven.

This is why indulgences are not a license to go on sinning. If you haven’t repented of the sin then forgiveness of its guilt is not available to you and thus indulgences, which come after forgiveness of guilt, are not available either.

Indulgences thus presuppose that you have already altered your personal lifestyle, which is precisely why they are not the same thing at all as carbon offsets.

Unfortunately, the anti-Catholicism of the last several centuries has so purvaded English-speaking culture that we constantly hear indulgences described as licenses to go on sinning (they’re not) and that they used to be sold by the Catholic Church (they weren’t).

This is simple misinformation.

MORE ON WHAT INDULGENCES ACTUALLY ARE.

AND THEIR THEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS IN SCRIPTURE.

Oh, yeah, and there’s another difference between the two: Indulgences are based on biblical principles. Carbon offsets are based on junk science.

Dr. Tim’s 3D House of Space!

M31r Jimmy’s 3D Mars Man post reminded me of those 3D posters that were popular for a while back in the ’80s/’90s. They usually resembled a cross between the white noise on your TV screen and some kind of LSD trip (at least, from what I hear). It was said that if you looked at the posters in just the right way (kind of crossing your eyes) that a 3D image would emerge.

It took me a while to actually make one of these work, but after that it got easier, and eventually I could make out the 3D image within a few seconds. Not that the actual image was anything to write home about… they were really sort of like crude paper cut-outs, but they were there, if you looked hard. It was a moderately interesting effect.

WARNING! ANALOGY ALERT! Barely thought-out spiritual musings ahead…

It occurred to me that in some ways, these posters are like the way we might approach religious faith. I heard from numbers of people I trusted that these posters really worked, and that there was something – some kind of image not immediately visible – "inside" them. There was the apparent image (which could look pretty chaotic), and then there was the image within the image. Thing is, to make out the deeper image took a little work. It did not just leap off the paper. To even give the thing a decent effort required a certain amount of trust. It took me quite a while, looking at a number of different images, before I could see what others already saw. If I hadn’t kept at it, I would never have seen that deeper dimension.

Now, that reminded me of another sorta-related thing which I found very cool;

INAKA’S 3D SPACE WORLD!

Akira Inaka creates 3D images of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. These images work in much the same way as the 3D posters I mentioned above. It might take some experimentation, but they really do work, and the effect on some of the images is pretty striking, giving the viewer a little sense of the spatial depth that is lacking in regular photos of galaxies and nebulae and other neat stuff. Inaka gives instructions on the site on how to make the things work. One note of advice; if you do this for too long, you might run into some serious eye fatigue, and maybe a headache. If you start to notice that happening, just quit and come back to the site later.

I found the site by following a link on the Hubble Heritage website (which I’ve plugged before). The site offers a convenient way to look at some very beautiful images of the cosmos. The captions can be as fascinating to read as the images are to see. The vast distances, mind-boggling dimensions and sheer energy represented by some of these photos can be truly staggering.

Pretty SCARY, eh keeds?! Ooooohh…

What’s This?

3dfaceonmars

It’s something you’ve probably seen before.

Don’t recognize it?

Try whipping on a pair of red-and-blue 3-D glasses, since this is a 3-D photo of it.

Don’t have any handy?

Me, either.

Try letting your vision fuzz over and see if it’s familiar.

Still need help?

ANSWER HERE.

It’s the face on Mars, and was NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day recently (CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

And it does look like a face to me.

But not a human one. To tell you the truth, it looks like the face of a pet turtle I used to have when I was a boy.

See? It eyes are under the kind of protuberances that turtles have, and it’s got its beak-like mouth open, and he’s just coming out of his shell.

Like in this picture . . .

Boxturtle

You don’t suppose that means . . . ?

And then the flying saucers would be . . . ?

GAMERA! Friend of All Children!

On Losing My Speedo…

My car is a wonder of modern American disposable engineering. A cheap compact with no frills and over 140 thousand miles, it astounds and delights me every time the engine cranks over (I am part Scot).

Lately, in addition to various other mysterious signs of aging, the speedometer just stops working at random. Mostly it works, but it can cut out at any time.

Now, when this happens, I noticed that I do one of two things; I either drive whatever speed "feels right", or I (consciously or un-) begin to adjust my speed to fit in with local traffic. This being the second car that I have been blessed to own having this defect, it struck me that A) maybe it was no accident, B) that a speedometer is an apt analogy to the human conscience, and C) that it was something out of which I could probably squeeze a blog post.

Of course, there may be many of you suggesting that D) maybe I should get the stupid car fixed, but given the actual value of the car, and the cost of pulling the dashboard and trying to find the problem (I have serviced my own car, like, twice in the last decade-and-a-half), it’s nearly prohibitive. It’s not really dangerous… just an irritation. Besides, I can often fix it by pounding on the dash just right… but I do plan to have it fixed as soon as possible.

But back to the conscience metaphor… The conscience (like the speedometer) is an internal guide that tells us how we’re doing. We are given external guides (like road signs and Revelation) against which we can pretty reliably measure how well we are keeping The Law. But our consciences are not infallible. Sometimes they are defective. In a few instances, maybe they just never worked right at all. In the case of a defective conscience, a person will naturally tend to do one of two things… either they will do whatever "feels right" (whatever they want), or they will conform to the pressures of their immediate society.

We really need the external law, too (the road signs, Church teaching), or the reading on the speedometer becomes nearly meaningless. Following your conscience does NOT mean just doing whatever "feels right". The conscience is made to conform to an authoritative standard. If a policeman tickets you for driving 75 when your speedometer was reading only 62, there is no appealing to the defective instrument… the cop wins. If the church tells you that fornication is a sin, you have no defense in noting that, personally, you have no big problem with it. Your speedo is out of whack. Period. You are bound by your conscience, but your conscience is bound by The Law.

A defective conscience can – and should be – fixed.

Thing is, though, that I have received a few minor traffic tickets in my life, and in none of these instances was I driving a car with a bad speedo. The problem was, I had been ignoring a perfectly functioning speedo. I’d lay odds that this is the case in the vast majority of speeding violations. People just aren’t paying attention… they are driving whatever speed they like, or they are going with the flow, or their mind is elsewhere, they are distracted.

For most of us, the conscience is working fine (or close enough), but we often ignore it. We can develop the habit of ignoring it.

One last thought… when you drive according to the traffic laws as faithfully as you can, you become like a living, moving representation – a personification of the law – to other drivers. You’re the living law, just as we are all meant to be a living Catechism for those around us. That doesn’t mean you won’t be honked at… just try to avoid the fast lane.

That’s it. Just something I pulled from random mental notes from a busy week. Tawk amongst ya-selves… got any good car stories?

JA: Motu Proprio Soon

John Allen maintains that the motu proprio liberalizing the use of the Tridentine rite of Mass is real and should be out soon.

EXCERPT:

An April 3 letter from Cardinal Walter Kasper, who among other things heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, responds to concerns from the International Council of Christians and Jews about the pre-Vatican II Mass, in light of controversial passages it contains regarding Judaism. The last sentence of Kasper’s letter, the text of which I have, is the key line: "While I do not know what the pope intends to state in his final text, it is clear that the decision that has been made cannot now be changed."

Kasper’s language clearly indicates that something definitive has happened. It adds to the confirmation given by the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, on March 31 that a motu proprio from Benedict XVI, meaning a document under the pope’s personal authority, on the pre-Vatican II Mass is coming.

But when will it appear?

The hot tip now is April 30, the feast of St. Pius V on the Roman calendar, or May 5, the feast of Pius V on the older calendar.

GET THE STORY.

Allen’s story points out that certain prayers in the Tridentine rite may offend interreligious sensibilities, and it will be interestng to see what, if anything, is done regarding them. While one of the most troublesome passages was removed by John XXIII, if the Holy See were to take swift action to alter more passages, it would undercut the effect of liberalizing the rite before it could have its impact.

Brain Death Documents Published

Yesterday’s post about the International Theological Commission publishing its document on limbo called to mind the distinction between an official document of the magisterium and an advisory document that the Holy See has given permission to publish.

Lots of advisory documents get written and, while permission to publish them does signal at least a somewhat favorable attitude toward their contents, it does not invest them with teaching authority.

But what about advisory documents that aren’t given permission to be published? What happens to them?

Normally, they vanish into the mists of the night and are forgotten.

BUT NOT THIS TIME.

EXCERPT:

Breaching normal protocol, several participants in a 2005 Vatican-sponsored conference over the ethics of declaring someone brain dead have published the papers they delivered at the debate.

Many of the papers reproduced in "Finis Vitae: Is Brain Death Still Life?" argue that the concept of brain death was devised mainly to expand the availability of organs for transplant and claim that some patients who had been pronounced brain dead continued to live for months or even years.

Publication of the papers, which the Vatican had decided not to publish, is evidence of the strong feelings about brain death held by a minority of the members of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Roberto De Mattei, vice president of the National Research Council of Italy who is not a member of the academy, said he edited "Finis Vitae" in order "to expand the debate and bring it to a wider audience."

Limbo Document Published

The document that the International Theological Commission has been working on concerning limbo has now been published.

AS ANTICIPATED, it casts doubt on the doctrine of limbo without claiming anything certain regarding the fate of infants dying without baptism, instead encouraging an attitude of hope regarding their salvation.

This is in line with the development of Catholic thought in the last few decades regarding the fate of such children, as well as the discussion of their fate in the Catechism.

That hasn’t stopped the MSM from portraying this in sensationalistic and inaccurate terms, speaking of the pope bucking Catholic tradition or changing Church teaching.

In fact, the International Theological Commission is not an organ of the magisterium but an advisory body. Its documents, even when their publication is approved by the pope, do not have magisterial force. What the pope did in this case was allow an advisory document to become public. That’s not the same thing as changing Church teaching.

Shame on the MSM for not being competent enough to get the basic facts of the story straight.

CATHOLIC NEWS SEVICE’S PIECE IS PRETTY GOOD, THOUGH.

BACKGROUND (LINK FIXED).