Cord Blood

[Pravoslavnik]

MMCristidis;

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  St. Basil's [i]Hexamerae[/i] is probably the most famous treatise of the Holy Fathers which speaks in great detail about the nature of the earth, the sun, and the "firmament."  If you study St. Basil's many homilies from the [i]Hexamerae[/i], they reveal, not surprisingly, a fundamentally geocentric model of the cosmos which was informed by the widely accepted astronomy of Ptolemy.  In fact, Ptolemy's classic writings on astronomy served as the geocentric paradigm of European (and Arabic) thought until the time of Copernicus.  Do you know of any writings from the Holy Fathers which [i]disagreed[/i] with Ptolemy, and described a heliocentric solar system?  I would be surprised and interested to read them.

[mmcxristidis]

MMCristidis;

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  St. Basil's [i]Hexamerae[/i] is probably the most famous treatise of the Holy Fathers which speaks in great detail about the nature of the earth, the sun, and the "firmament."  If you study St. Basil's many homilies from the [i]Hexamerae[/i], they reveal, not surprisingly, a fundamentally geocentric model of the cosmos which was informed by the widely accepted astronomy of Ptolemy.  In fact, Ptolemy's classic writings on astronomy served as the geocentric paradigm of European (and Arabic) thought until the time of Copernicus.  Do you know of any writings from the Holy Fathers which [i]disagreed[/i] with Ptolemy, and described a heliocentric solar system?  I would be surprised and interested to read them.[/quote]

I'm sorry Mr Pravoslavnik, but I have read over St. Basils Hexamerae (six days) and I can't seem to find where he states outright that the earth is flat. Perhaps you, being so much more well read than myself can point out where he says this. I must have missed it. also where it says the sun revolves around the earth.
Classical Greek philosophers of the 4th century BC believed the earth spherical. This flat earth belief, although held by some ancient peoples and popular with some uneducated people during the dark ages was a belief mostly foreign to Greek thinkers of St Basil's time.
Did Ptolemy believe the earth was flat ? not according to this, Flat Earth and the Ptolemaic System :

http://thriceholy.net/desert.html#Flat%20Earth

From the same article :

The earliest Christian apologists quote with approval 'round earth' astronomy:

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* “'Should one in boldness say, Lo, I am God! Besides the One -- Eternal -- Infinite, Then let him from the throne he has usurped put forth his power and form another globe, such as we dwell in, saying, This is mine.'”
* (Justin on the Sole Government of God, quoting Pythagoras' testimony to the one God, Chapter II).

* “Beautiful without doubt is the world, excelling, as well in its magnitude as in the arrangement of its parts, both those in the oblique circle and those about the north, and also in its spherical form.”
* (Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, Chapter 16). 

Could you please give some examples of writings of other saints where they state the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth ? I did read in St. Basil's Hexamerae that he said the earth is the center of the universe, but I don't see how it could be interpreted as saying the sun revolves around the earth.
Also I do believe the earth is only about 7000 yrs old, not millions. This link,

http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_date1.htm

gives some very interesting dates, among them are :
6000 BCE: Early church commentators (Clement of Alexander, Origen, Eusebius, Lactantius, Theophilus, etc.) believed that since Adam was created on the 6th day after creation, that Jesus would come into the world in its 6,000th year.
5586 BCE: This date appeared in the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) produced in Egypt in the 3rd century BCE. 8
5555 BCE: A data produced by Josephus, a Jew from the 1st century CE. 8
5508 BCE: The year of creation adopted in the 7th century CE in "Constantinople and used by the Eastern Orthodox church until the 18th century CE." 1

Given that human recorded history only goes back some 5000 or so years, 7000 or so years seems much more accurate.
If it was really millions of years old ( which can't be proven) I would think recorded human history would go back farther than 5000 yrs.

[joasia]

Why would donating organs be wrong?

I don't have specific backing by the patristics about this subject, on hand, but I think that looking at the meaning of our common ressurrection can point out, indirectly, the reason why organ donation from a living or dead person is not acceptable. Where a person is laid to rest turns to ash and at the command of God, we are to rise to face our Judgement. How does that work when one or more of our organs are in someone else? Organ donation is another result of mankind's falling away from God and perverse view of human logic. People may exult the reason for donation as an act of love. I've read that by many, on other sites. But, this is just another muddled human understanding of what God considers our responsibility as an act of love.

With all due respect, may I suggest that it is important to interpret the use of the word "heart" by the Holy Fathers in the context in which it was written?

The soul and heart are definitely connected to the point that the holy fathers interchange the meanings as if they are referring to the same thing. I've heard of heart transplants where the patient actually starts feeling the characteristics of the deceased person. That's gotta mean something and that takes me back to my comment that human logic is perverse.

The heart is the core of our physical life and the soul is the core of our existence.

[mmcxristidis]

There's big bucks being made in the blackmarket by harvesting human organs worldwide. Can this be more demonic ?
Here's an interesting article i came across today which came out last week about what Israel has been doing for years it seems.

Israel now admits that it harvested human organs from Palestinians

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 02953.html

[joasia]

Yesterday, I wrote my comment. Today, I found St. Met. Philaret's explanation of this matter and was struck by how identicial his explanation is with my thoughts about it...This was already posted her in 2006, but I thought it would be good to post again. And I recall someone mentioning his comment previously.

An Orthodox View of Heart Transplantations
by Saint Philaret the Confessor

The world, including most people who would identify themselves as “Christians, receives every new attainment of modern science as an undoubted blessing to be accepted as a matter of course. Orthodox Christians, however, must be more discriminating, for our hope is not in this world that passes, but in eternal life. Here the [former] chief hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad speaks on the latest such attainment, to and for those whose spiritual consciousness has not been totally deadened by modern worldliness and rationalism (Orthodox Russia, no. 4, 1968).

THIS AGE IS a strange age. We know that throughout the extent of human history there have been moments of spiritual and cultural crisis, of moral decline and restoration; there have been moments also of a so-called “revaluation of values.” But only in our age has there arisen in the world a manifestation much more frightening and menacing: namely, the loss of values, their catastrophic disappearance from the life, from the spiritual and intellectual horizon, of contemporary humanity.

One may readily observe today the loss of normal conceptions of nation and family, the loss of the value of life itself, in itself and as the greatest gift of God, and the striving to get away from the obligation to live–in the fantasy-world of narcotics, so to speak in a temporary suicide And parallel to the disappearance of true values there appear counterfeit values. For today literally everything is counterfeited: Christianity is counterfeited, religiousness is counterfeited, the very Gospel is counterfeited; culture in its best manifestations, the striving for peace, etc., etc.–everything is steeped in lie and falsehood, and a man With a living soul and conscience suffocates in the reign of the lie and the counterfeit.

And in this stifling atmosphere of evident and undoubted spiritual decomposition, the “last word” is the most terrible of all. We speak of the newest “attainment” of medical science: the transplantation of the human heart.

Here before us is the most terrifying of all counterfeits: the counterfeit of life itself–this greatest gift of the Creator! A man lives out his life, his powers ebb, the organism dies away, and the heart, this center of the organism’s life, is just about to stop... No medicines, no remedies or attempts to prolong, to detain this departing life, can help any longer... But now–a solution is found! The man is given a new, strange heart, and with this is introduced into his organism a new, strange life, belonging to another man...

The heart is the center, the mid-point of man’s existence. And not only in the spiritual sense, where heart is the term for the center of one’s spiritual person, one’s “I”; in physical life, too, the physical heart is the chief organ and central point of the organism, being mysteriously and indissolubly connected with the experiences of one’s soul. It is well known to all how a man’s purely psychical and nervous experiences joy, anger, fright, etc.,–are reflected immediately in the action of the heart, and conversely how an unhealthy condition of the heart acts oppressively on the psyche and consciousness... Yes, here the bond is indissoluble–and if, instead of the continuation of a man’s personal spiritual-bodily life, concentrated in his own heart, there is imposed on him a strange heart and some kind of strange life, until then totally unknown to him–then what is this if not a counterfeit of his departing life; what is this if not the annihilation of his spiritual-bodily life, his individuality, his personal “I”? And how and as whom will such a man present himself at the general resurrection?

But the new attainment does not end even here. It is intended also to introduce into the organism of a man the heart of an animal–i.e., so that after the general resurrection a “man” will stand at the Last Judgement with the heart of an ape (or a cat, or a pig, or whatever).* Can one imagine a more senseless and blasphemous mockery of human nature itself, created in the image and likeness of God?

Madness and horror! But what has called forth this nightmare of criminal interference in man’s life–in that life, the lawful Master of which is its Creator alone, and no one else? The answer is not difficult to find. The loss of Christian hope, actual disbelief in the future life, failure to understand the Gospel and disbelief in it, in its Divine truthfulness–these are what have called forth these monstrous and blasphemous experiments on the personality and life of man. The Christian view of life and death, the Christian understanding and conception of earthly life as time given by God for preparation for eternity–have been completely lost. And from this the result is: terror in the face of death, seen as the absolute perishing of life and the annihilation of personality; and a clutching at earthly life–live, live, live, at any cost or means prolong earthly life, after which there is nothing!

How far from this is the radiant Christian view of life and death I Imagine a deeply-believing Christian who has labored his whole life on the fulfillment of the Lord’s commandments and on the purification of his own heart, and who finally draws near to that Christian end for which he has prayed and for which he has been preparing his whole life; if suddenly one were to say to him: “Don’t you want to live a while longer? Here–we will cut out your heart and put in its place a different one, perhaps an ape’s–and you will live for a while yet...” What would a believing Christian answer to this but the words of the Gospel–Get thee behind me, Satan–thou savourest not the things that be of God, but these that be of men (St. Matt. 16: 23).

See then that ye walk circumspectly, cried once the Apostle, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is (Eph. 5: 15-17). Oh, how circumspectly we must walk in our day–with caution, lest we apostatize spiritually and fall into the snare of the enemy. For in truth our days are yet more evil than the times of the Apostles... And it was not for nothing that in these latter, already post-revolutionary days, one of the Far-Eastern archpastors prayed constantly to God thus: “Cut off the allurement of lies, loosen pressing temptations, and With the power of Thy Grace protect and keep all of us, and grant our hearts to sense the truth.”

For contemporary humanity for the most part has lost completely the feeling, the sense, the acceptance of truth and the ability to discern in its spiritual essence what is happening in the world. And the threatening, sorrowful prophecy of the Apostle is being accomplished concerning those who did not learn to love the truth: God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that they all might he damned who believed not the truth, but bad pleasure in unrighteousness (II Thes. 2: 11-12).

Christian! Remember what life is, and what is death! And thanking your Creator for the most precious gift of His goodness–for your life–use this gift as is proper, so that at the end of your earthly life you may, without clutching faintheartedly at this passing life, die in such a way that upon you may be fulfilled the joyful promise of the Apocalypse: Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them (Apoc. 14: 13).

• Since this was written, a transplant has indeed been made into the human organism of a sheep’s heart; and an unsuccessful attempt four years ago utilized a chimpanzee’s heart. A recent operation in California presents yet another frightful picture: the transplant of the heart of a suicide. (Trans. note.)

From The Orthodox Word, Vol. 4, No. 3 (May-June 1968), pp. 134-137.

• + +

Facts About the Faith

The Human Heart. It was a belief among the ancients–among physicians in the age of the Egyptian Pharaohs, for example–that the heart is the center of the body, responsible for regulating all of its functions. The teachings of the Orthodox Church also hold that the heart is the center of the person, containing not only our individual identity, but harboring, in its chambers, many of the spiritual virtues to which we strive. The hesychastic teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, drawn from an ancient tradition of the Church, concentrate human activity in the heart. It is the physical regulation of the heart beat and breathing which, in part, accounts for the intensity of concentrated prayer achieved by those who reach up in prayer with their bodies to touch and be transformed by the Grace of God. Our bodies correctly used, St. Gregory Palamas tells us, are not evil, but are the very temple of the Holy Spirit. And the heart is the repository of Divine Grace.

In our times, when the brain is considered the center of the human person and the repository of the personality, it seems absurd to imagine that the heart, a “mere pump,” could literally play a role in spiritual life. For that reason, many Orthodox theologians have begun to speak of the heart as a metaphor for the soul and deny that the heart plays a physical role in our spiritual life.

Nonetheless, some contemporary scientists are beginning to take a new look at the heart. Dr. Nikolai Khokhlov, a member of the advisory board of the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, spoke informally at the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery some years ago of research that he was about to investigate during an appointment at the prestigious Max Planck Institute. This research suggested that the heart, contrary to current theory, is a kind of regulating mechanism for the human body, controlling metabolism, overall body functions, and even some brain activity. This research wholly supports the assumptions of the ancients and the experience and teachings of the Orthodox Fathers.

We must be very cautious, then, about dismissing the teachings of the Fathers on the human heart simply because modern science, which may not yet fully understand the more subtle workings of the heart, seems to attribute to the brain those things which the Fathers attribute to the heart. Science may yet vindicate the Fathers and once again show us the divine source of their knowledge.

Embalming and Autopsies. In the Orthodox Church we do not make the dualistic distinction between the body and the soul that one finds in some ancient, pre-Christian sects and in certain early Christian heresies. The body and soul, according to Orthodox teaching, are integrally bound together. The good health and correct, moral use of the body can affect the soul, just as a healthy and sound soul can reflect itself in the external appearance of the body (and especially in the eyes).

When a Christian dies, we show tremendous respect to his body as the place where the spirit of the human being resided. The body of a holy person, for example, is highly revered, since even his flesh and blood have been permeated by the holiness of his life. To embalm and disfigure the dead body for no reason–and embalming is not required in most states in the U.S.–is to show disrespect to it. And autopsies, when they are done for no specific purpose and routinely, are blasphemous. One need only attend an autopsy to understand that this statement is not hyperbolic, but wholly accurate. Except when indicated by forensic considerations or specific needs in medical research, autopsies should be discouraged among Orthodox Christians.

The bodies of monastics and bishops, whose lives are dedicated to spiritual principles and aims, should under no circumstances be embalmed or, except in the case of suspected foul play, subjected to post-mortem examination. This is a rule which every Orthodox Christian physician should understand and one which he should attempt to uphold with every possible means. Since monastics should, if possible, repose in their monasteries–rather than in the hospital, as is usually the case in the Western world now–, Orthodox physicians should be available and ready to assist in the preparation of the needed certificates of death, so as to avoid the eventuality of an autopsy.

If our faith is one limited only to intellectual precepts, and not to the world of our bodies as well, then it is an artificial and incomplete faith.

From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. VII, No. 2, p. 15

[Catherine5]

Referring back to israelis' atrocities to Palestinians, YES! It's terrible, yet this is only one small part of the huge persecution that has taken place almost ignored by most Westerners - unfortunately except types like socialists who tend to stick up for the Palestinians.

I would suggest everyone with a conscience to study up a bit about how israel treats Palestinians in general, and how frighteningly powerful this unjust nation is in an almost single handed direction of American and European foreign policies with regard to the entire Middle East and South Asia.
Great that you brought that up. Mr Cristidis!

Relating to general medical care topics of the hour, I found this article about the health "reform" bill which I found insightful:

"Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, who are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. (For a withering analysis by an outraged M.D. of the nearly 2000 - page House bill, see here.) The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate profits.

Economist L. Randall Wray observes that ever since Congress threw out the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from investment banking, insurance and Wall Street finance have been “two peas in a pod.” He writes:

“[T] here is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums—and the number grows every year because employers drop coverage and people can’t afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance ‘reform’ that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall Street. . . . This is just another bailout of the financial system, because the tens of trillions of dollars already committed are not nearly enough.”

The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud, or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill.

Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don’t have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don’t have insurance and don’t purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don't have health care can't afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they are forced to buy.

To subsidize those who can’t pay, the Senate bill would make families earning two to four times the poverty level who don’t have employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8% to 12% of their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In another effort to make the insurance payments “affordable,” the Senate bill calls for the lowest cost plan to cover only sixty percent of health care costs.

“In other words,” writes Dr. Andrew Coates in a November 23 article, “a guarantee of insurance industry dominance and the continued privatization of health care in every arena.”

Compulsory health insurance is like compulsory selective military service (the draft), except that all of our numbers have come up. The argument has been made that auto insurance is compulsory, so why not health insurance? But the obvious response is that you can choose to drive a car. The only way to escape the vehicle we call a body is to give up the ghost.

The Right to Sovereignty Over Our Own Bodies

And that brings up another issue alluded to by Dr. Rush: the matter of freedom of choice in health care. Some people would equate it with freedom of religion. Not everyone believes in Modern Medicine. If we the people have a right to choose what we believe about life after death, we should have the right to choose what we believe about life before death, by choosing how to maintain our own bodies.

The conventional treatment promoted by the medical/pharmaceutical complex is an aggressive approach that can wind up killing the patient as collateral damage in its war on the disease. Among other researchers questioning the wisdom of this approach is Gary Null, who reported the results of an exhaustive independent review by the Nutrition Institute of America in 2004. The reviewers concluded that the number one killer is not heart disease or cancer but conventional medicine itself. Conventional medicine was found to be responsible for an estimated 783,936 deaths annually, including 106,000 deaths from adverse drug reactions, 98,000 from medical errors, and 88,000 from infection; and those figures were conservative, since no more than 20 percent of iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) mishaps are ever reported.

There are more natural, less invasive alternatives, but most are not covered by insurance; and even such simple remedies as healthy organic food may be too expensive for people forced to use a major portion of their incomes for medical insurance. A true public option of the Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem by keeping health care affordable. If other industrialized countries can find the money for a national health service, we could too. For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada, which originally obtained the funds for its national health service from its own publicly-owned central bank. But that will be the subject of another article."

--"Ellen Brown is an attorney and the author of 11 books, including Forbidden Medicine, The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen), Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker)"

[Pravoslavnik]

So many complex subjects have been raised one this thread-- related to medical ethics, health care reform, and even cosmology--that it almost seems some separate threads are required.

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   Catherine has certainly raised a number of reasonable questions about the meddling of private for-profit corporations in the recent health care reform legislation.  Some have long suggested that America has "the best democracy that money can buy," and the for-profit health care corporations have certainly spent a great deal of money on lobbyists and campaign contributions to Senators and Congressmen of both parties.

    It is also certainly the case, based on a number of quality studies, that many industrialized societies spend far less per capita on health care than the U.S. and achieve better public health outcomes.  The U.S. ranked about 36th in the world in a recent World Health Organization analysis.   Of course, American medicine excels in expensive, high-tech, end-stage care-- as in the case of the heart transplant subject which initiated this discussion.

   Apparently, the new health care mandates are the first example in history of the Federal government of the U.S. REQUIRING all citizens to enter into a contract with a private enterprise.  It will probably go to the Supreme Court.

   I, for one, would almost prefer to go and live in the wilderness.  If, by God's will, I am afflicted with some serious disease, so be it.  I would rather be annointed by an Orthodox priest while expiring in some hermitage than end up in one of our God-forsaken, high-tech ICU's on a ventilator or a dialysis machine.  In any case, the Lord advised that we fear the destruction of our souls, not the destruction of our bodies...