By Hilary White
LONDON, December 5, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Lord May, one of the scientific community’s most vigorous opponents of religious belief, has lambasted the Catholic Church for its opposition to condoms in the fight against AIDS.
“The Vatican in particular promotes abstinence outside marriage, and condemns condom use. This disapproval, for all its putative high-mindedness, simply is not an effective strategy for preventing dissemination of HIV,” said May, the outgoing president of Britain’s Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific organizations.
This assertion however, flies in the face of the fact that the few places where the Catholic teaching has been applied are the only areas where the rate of AIDS/HIV has actually been significantly reduced. All those areas where the international condom campaign is in full force have steadily rising rates of AIDS along with a host of other sexually transmitted diseases.
“This controversy has nothing to do with a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of condoms in preventing the transmission of HIV, but rather derives from religious beliefs against the use of contraception,” Lord May said.
In his address, May, an Oxford University professor of zoology, quoted from the litany of anti-Catholic and anti-religious clichés sacred to the secularist philosophy, accusing believers of threatening the development of society in their adherence to the “darkness of fundamentalist unreason.”Â
This is not May’s first attack on the Catholic Church. At a private seminar in the early 1990s he said that then Pope John Paul II had been responsible “for more deaths than Hitler,” for insisting on the sanctity of human sexuality.
Unconscious of the irony, May told the Society, “All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them.”
May warned in dark tones that “fundamentalism” was “skewing debates over some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, such as climate change and emerging diseases.”
He excoriated “fundamentalists” for inhibiting what he called the “Enlightenment values of free, open, unprejudiced, uninhibited questioning and inquiry, individual liberty and separation of church and state.” Many in the scientific community have found however, that the one area in which no questioning is permitted is about the premises underlying secularist fundamentalism.
The scientific community is becoming notorious for its blindness to its own intolerance in defence of absolute materialism. Many scientists and researchers who have dared to profess even passing sympathy with belief have clashed with a kind of undeclared secularist inquisition, losing positions and reputations.
To contact the Royal Society:
https://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/contactus.asp
Royal Society:
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG
tel: +44 (0)20 7451 2500
fax: +44 (0)20 7930 2170
Read May’s November 30 speech to the Royal Society:
https://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=2414
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
UN Leader Says Pope’s Teachings Responsible for “Sending People to Their Death”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/05041301.html
Doctors Without Borders Charges Vatican’s Anti-Condom Stand Helps Spread of AIDS
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/dec/03120302.html