The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that reject God’s plan for human life.
The Vatican’s doctrine office issued “Infinite Dignity,” a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five years. After substantial revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its publication.
In its most eagerly anticipated section, the Vatican repeated its rejection of “gender theory,” or the idea that one’s gender can be changed. It said God created man and woman as biologically different, separate beings, and said people must not tinker with that plan or try to “make oneself God.”
“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document said.
Still an atheist but I would love if I died and found out God was just a guy in a cubicle who inherited a mess from its coworker who was fired.
“Look I am sorry everyone keeps getting aids and cancer alright I am trying. Freaken galaxies weren’t rotating right so had to invent dark matter. Also Sharon ate the last donut and I get like a billion bug and feature requests from you apes every second. I didn’t sign up for any of this! Ok ok calm I am in my happy place…you should probably go to heaven now. It’s viking heaven but it’s working”
I feel like it would be a great fictional concept to explore the Christian God as not all powerful. He’s well connected, certainly, with how many priests there are around the world, but he still has limits. Bad stuff happening? He isn’t able to stop it, but wishes he could. Divine punishment for the truly sick individuals? He could, but it would mean he can’t prevent as much bad stuff as he already is, and humans do a decent enough job of dealing with the shitheads.
It was a bad idea to have God be omnipotent. The idea of a benevolent god who isn’t omnipotent and needs your help to spread good in the world is a far more compelling idea.
Some of the conceptions of early Judaism were like that, after they made their God all good it still struggled to fix stuff.