Pinker, Patristics, and Pain

. . . nothing is worse than extreme affliction that destroys the 'I' from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves. Simone Weil

Steven Pinker thinks that talking theologically about bioethics will put us in a world of hurt. Well, yeah. Saint Basil, in a delicious reversal, justifies religious suffering by comparing it to medicine:

It is shameful indeed that they who are sick in body place so much confidence in physicians that, even if these cut or burn or cause distress by their bitter medicines, they look upon them as benefactors, while we do not share this attitude toward the physicians of our souls, when they secure our salvation for us by laborious discipline.

Ariel Glucklich's Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (from which I got the Basil quote) nutshells why it's a bad idea to base medical ethics on nothing more complicated than the untempered conviction that pain must be stopped:

Pain may be medicine, a test, a rite of passage, or an alchemical agent of inner transformation. Consequently religion can act as consolation, as a challenge, or as a basis for social solidarity and not only as a sword hanging over the heads of sinners.

Put that in your "retrograde superstition tied moronically to the primitive idea that God created us for the purposes of punishment" and smoke it.