Insight on the News
Blood Transfusions—Safe From AIDS?
“I don’t think concern about AIDS should enter into the decision about surgery or any other reason to receive blood,” claims a spokesman for the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control. However, a 60-year-old surgery patient who became infected with the AIDS virus after receiving donated blood that had been tested for AIDS may not agree.
The New York Times reports that the patient received blood from a donor who gave this blood “so soon after a homosexual encounter that he had not yet developed the antibodies that trigger the AIDS blood tests.” However, about three months later, the donor again gave blood. This time it “showed signs of AIDS antibodies and was rejected,” reported the Times.
With the use of the newly developed AIDS blood test, medical authorities were confident that the nation’s blood supply was successfully purged of contaminated blood. Yet, failure to identify contaminated blood that has not developed antibodies to trigger proper test results shows that the risk to persons accepting blood transfusions is real indeed. More than 21,000 AIDS cases have been reported in the United States since 1977, almost 2 percent of which are attributed to transfusions of contaminated blood.
Those observing God’s law remain free of the potentially contaminating effects of blood transfusions. Why? Because they “keep abstaining . . . from blood and from things strangled,” which have not been bled. While such persons abstain for religious reasons, they enjoy added benefits, for the governing body of the early Christian congregation added: “If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you!”—Acts 15:28, 29.
Catholics Uphold Evolution
During a general audience held at the Vatican in April 1986, Pope John Paul II stated: “As far as the doctrine of faith is concerned, we see no difficulty in explaining the origin of man’s body by means of the hypothesis of evolutionism.” Why not? Because such Catholic “doctrine of faith” holds that, apart from the body, man has an immortal soul. The church contends that this soul, and not the body, was directly created by God.
According to Genesis 2:7, however, when God formed man out of the dust and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, “the man came to be a living soul.” Man was not given a soul but became a soul, a living person. (Compare 1 Corinthians 15:45.) At Ezekiel 18:4 we are told: “The soul that is sinning—it itself will die.” This indicates that the soul is the person, not some immaterial part of him that lives on after his body dies.
On the surface, it may seem that there is no problem in accepting an evolutionary origin of man’s body. But in doing this, the Catholic Church has rejected the Genesis account of creation, a record that Jesus Christ himself accepted as true. (Matthew 19:4-6) Whose viewpoint should a Christian accept?
Unscriptural Compromise
The visit of Pope John Paul II to the Rome synagogue on April 13, 1986, has been described as a “historical event” destined to ‘open a new era.’ Why? Because it was the first time a pope had paid an official visit to a Jewish place of worship. According to La Repubblica, a Rome newspaper, by means of this gesture the Catholic Church is attempting to “correct the errors of history,” since the church has not “always lived up to the obligations of the love of Christ toward its Jewish brothers.”
The pope’s visit was intended to underscore the “common spiritual heritage” shared by Catholics and Jews. However, what John Paul has defined as “the fundamental divergence” between these two religions still remains, namely, the fact that the Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. What is the pope’s solution to this problem? In his address, he mentioned showing “respect for one another’s intimate convictions” and the need to avoid any further pressure to impose the faith of one upon the other. Such statements, notes La Repubblica, confirm the “papal renunciation of every form of proselytism” with regard to Jews.
However, the apostle Peter told the Jewish priests and older men in Jerusalem that “there is no salvation in anyone else” but Jesus Christ. Moreover, when Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching on the basis of Jesus’ name, they replied: “We cannot stop speaking about the things we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:8, 12, 18-20) Should not Christ’s followers today do the same?