Hey, John Stone Street here from the Colson Center. Registration is now open for a free live stream event Thursday, July 24th, entitled Truth, Love, and Humor, Faith Without Fear. For this special conversation, I'll be joined by Seth Dillon, the CEO of the Christian satire publication The Babylon Bee, and Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family. In this wild cultural moment where speaking common sense truth can get you canceled? We need to have a conversation about what our responsibility is to speak the truth.
how we have to be faithful and leave the results up to God. Seth Dillon and Jim Daly will join me to talk about these things, as well as how speaking the truth is actually an act of love. The event is absolutely free. If you're in the Bay Harbor, Michigan area on July 24th, you can join us in person or you can join us online via live stream. Register today at ColsonCenter.org slash truth.
That's Colson Center.org/slash truth. Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. In a recent social media post, Kian Sadegi, the CEO of a company named Nucleus Genomics, announced, quote, Nucleus Embryo is the first ever genetic optimization software that helps parents give their children the best possible start in life. long before they're even born. Longevity was never just about health, it's about thriving.
That's why this announcement also marks the first time in human history a company has openly partnered with a couple to help them optimize their embryos based on intelligence. End quote.
Now don't be fooled. Quote unquote optimizing embryos is just slick ad campaign language for killing kids. Nucleos Genomics isn't in the business of using genetic therapies for diagnosing disease and then treating them. Its product is to test embryos for genetic imperfections and then eliminate those embryos. In other words, the company sells eugenics, and their campaign material is the story of the first couple to, quote unquote, genetically optimize an embryo for health and intelligence using their services.
The commercial proudly describes what motivates that process. Quote, the question arose, which of the twenty embryos should we implant? The obvious answer, we wanted to start with the one embryo that was most likely to grow up to be a healthy adult.
Now of course they fail to mention what this means for the other 19 embryos. As Matthew Lee Anderson noted, quote, the end of their launch video grants that this technology has to overcome a real stigma to be accepted. And so what the company appeals to is the autonomy of the consumer. Saying, quote, some people don't think you should have this choice, but it's not their choice to make, it's yours. It's the selfishness that's inherent to this whole project that makes it so cruel.
The campaign video highlights well-cared for children, but the company isn't promising to give children their best life. It's promising to give parents the child that they want for their best life. They're not helping eliminate dyslexia or autism or cancer or Down syndrome. They're eliminating kids. who might have these conditions so that parents never have to deal with such problems.
In 2019, evangelicals and Catholics together issued a joint statement that was entitled The Gift of Children. It said, quote, Children compel us to serve a future we cannot control. They are free beings, independent agents, who eventually will supersede us, living their own lives not echoing ours. Having children thus involves a profound surrender and children are often cause for anxiety. ⁇ Commercialized genetic testing only serves to commodify human beings.
reducing them from persons made in God's image to things that are for sale. A generation ago Francis Schaeffer satirized what was then science fiction, but is now this unpleasant reality. With an accompanying video to the book Whatever Happened to the Human Race, Schaefer included a skit of a grocery shopping couple who chose between grabbing chicken soup and cleaning supplies to then picking up a kid that had just the right color, hair, and eyes. And of course, more than a few dystopian science fiction films have offered similar predictions and warnings of eugenic services sold to people that are looking for easier, more manicured lives. In his 1998 book, The Way of the Modern World, or Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist, Dr.
Craig Gay warned of the modern mindset that prioritizes this kind of selfish convenience. Quote: For once, we have reduced reality to a world of things and objects, which is the end product of this convenient fiction. We can then begin to exert our will over reality. We can begin to act as gods within it. But all the fancy words and attractive lifestyles that promise us autonomy and ease do not change the realities of abortion or eugenics or euthanasia.
By placing humans in the role of gods, other humans become debased. By promising these better lives for some, their end result is the killing of others. We should never be surprised that when people attempt to take the place of God, they actually begin to act like a devil. Resisting the barbarism sold with this commercial face demands that we recover the biblical truth about human dignity. that every single human being, no matter age, health, or stage of development, is eternally valuable.
because each and every one carries the divine imprint of the image of God. We must never allow this essential truth to be obscured, especially by the by mere slick ad campaigns. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.
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