A different kind of controversy
| 13 October, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Last Wednesday, in celebration of Stem Cell Awareness Day, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) announced the winners of its annual poetry contest. The poems were not all well received, however. One poem in particular, titled Stem C., contains liturgical language used during the Christian sacrament of Eucharist, causing the Life Legal Defense Foundation and the California Family Council to label the poem as “blasphemous.” CIRM has removed it from its website and apologized for “any offense caused by the poem.”
You can still find the winning poems online.
What do you think? Is this poem blasphemous, or do you agree the language is artistically appropriate?
[poll id=”13″]
Here’s the poem so you can decide for yourself:
Stem C.
By Tyson Anderson
This is my body
which is given for you.
But I am not great.
I have neither wealth,
nor fame, nor grace.
I cannot comfort with words,
nor inspire to march.
I am small and simple,
so leave me this.
Let me heal you.
This is my body
which is given for you.
Take this
in remembrance of me.
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This simple, elegant, and sincere poem is exactly how some people think of stem cell research. The debates on stem cell research are not merely arguments between the religious and the non-religious. There are many religious people who support stem cell research. I, personally, find it far more offensive to have unwanted IVF samples merely thrown away. And they are, regularly and in large volumes. This man’s poem is speaking of the sacred gift of life and healing in an honorable and respectful way. Though it might be difficult for the folks from LLDF and the like to understand this viewpoint, that is the whole point of a Stem Cell Awareness day and the point of such a contest from CIRM, to illustrate new or alternative perspectives. To take down the poem and apologize for it’s meaning is self defeating. While I understand the desire not to offend, giving a small, vocal minority the power to blunt the key message of the day is a disservice to the rest of the population.
Blasphemous!! Maybe to the religiously naive. What do they consider crossing oneself before a football game or other athletic endeavor?
Medicine will never advance if persons confuse science and religion. Science must march on with either good intentions or mistakes in judgement, both will prove beneficial. If your nearest and dearest is suffering from a disease that can be cured by any form of stem cell treatment/ research; would anyone stop the treatment?. The sufferer must have the choice. The poem is fine.
It seems okay to me, although as poetry, some of the language is distracting and the imagery difficult. It needs to be read a few times to figure out what the author is trying to say.
I’m a Christian and I find this poem beautiful. I take it to be the “voice” of an IVF embryo languishing in a freezer, denied the opportunity to become a human being and bound for disposal, but offering itself in a very Christ-like way – “let me heal you” in my death, instead of being destroyed with no legacy whatever.
There are those who will call anything blasphemous that challenges them to think about their beliefs.
It’s the word “body” that gets this poem in trouble with some religious types. And maybe the “heal.” It seems to me those who selected the poem with its obvious and unnecessary allusion to something that would get the religionists hopping were asking for the controversy.
Blasphemy, like pornography, is in the eye of the beholder. That said, I doubt the two organizations named would have been so critical of this poem if it had been submitted for “National Organ Donor Day” instead of “Stem Cell Awareness Day.”
The offered voting choice that it is blasphemous but artistically appropriate implies that the poem is potentially blasphemous to someone else, but not to me; otherwise, how could it be appropriate in any sense of the word? As Ken has pointed out, people that label things as “blasphemous” are unlikely to recognize any world view beyond their own.
Censorship is offensive. Self-censorship is a step down from there.
I am not a Christian, but I found the poem to be beautiful.
I don’t find anything irreverent or impious in the poem, and it’s by far the best poetry of all the winners.
Although I wouldn’t class myself as a practising Christian, I think Ken Pimple’s comment says it all.
With blasphemy in mind, I expected to read something that would really be objectionable to believers in the supernatural. However, I fail to understand how any rational person could find “Stem C.” blasphemous or objectionable in any way.
In a world where every cell shed from my nose that is viable is potentially a clonable human being, the position is more and more outrageous.
For anyone to care if someone calls it blasphemous is even more outrageous, regardless of anything else. By that logic, I can call them blaspheming heretics and they should shut up. But somehow I don’t think that they will, because they are fanatics.
Bowing to fanatics of any stripe is bowing to tyranny. Never do it.
Blasphemy is “irreverence toward holy personages, religious artifacts, customs, and beliefs” or an “impious utterance or action concerning god or sacred things”. Does the poem really show show a lack of reverence towards God and Christ? Or does it simply use Christ’s words to highlight an act of sacrifice worthy of a Christian? It seems that those who cry “Blasphemy” in this case are acting as inappropriate wardens of Christ’s words (used here in poetry) and the application of His teachings (used here to signify Christian values of sacrifice and healing).
The poem is structurally deficient.
Of the fourteen lines – six are copies of religious text, leaving only eight original lines.
A poem that is forty three percent plagiarized is inadequate as an original composition.
The rhythm is difficult – not just in the overall stanza but in the pronunciation of individual words as well.
Using the word ‘neither’ with more than two items can be problematic.
In this case it does nothing to help the rhythm and it seems out of synch with the next sentence.
Irrespective of the meaning of the words – the poem does not fall trippingly off the tongue, IMO.
that’s a poem?
1. impious utterance or action concerning god or sacred things.
2. Judaism
a. an act of cursing or reviling God.
b. pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH) in the original, now forbidden manner instead of using a substitute pronunciation such as Adonai.
3. Theology . the crime of assuming to oneself the rights or qualities of God.
4. irreverent behavior toward anything held sacred, priceless, etc.: He uttered blasphemies against life itself.
1, 2, and 3 are utterly irrelevant to me. No. 4 in a more generalized manner could potentially apply, but doesn’t in this case. So, no!
I can understand that there are people in this world who would consider this blasphemous, but they are the Levitican equivalent of the Moslem fanatics who got bent out of shape by the cartoons of Mohammed. By no measure are they Christians anymore than the al Qaeda types who blow up civilians are Moslem.
Ridicules seems the protests, but that is part of a fanatic and close mind society that sees evil in everywhere. There are many poets that take words from the bible to illustrate suffering or joy of humans. See this example of a Nicaraguan poet that was persecuted by the Christian fanatic Ronald Reagan administration:
“Why Have You Abandoned Me?” by Ernesto Cardenal (from QR
A Friday Noon)
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
A caricature have I become
and people despise me.
They sneer at me in all the newspapers.
Tanks surround me,
machine guns take aim at me,
barbed wire, loaded with electricity, imprisons me.
Each day I am being called up,
with a number they have branded me
and behind the grate they photographed me.
My bones can be counted like on an X-ray sheet.
Naked they pushed me into the gas chamber
and my clothes and shoes they have shared among
themselves.
I cry for morphium, but nobody hears me.
I cry in the fetters of the waistcoat,
in the mental hospital I cry the whoie night long,
in the ward for uncurable patients,
in the old people’s hall for contagiously iil.
In the psychiatric clinic I wrestle perspiring with death.
Even under the oxygen mask I suffocate.
I am in tears at the police station,
in the court of the house of correction,
in the torture chamber,
in the orphanage.
I am contagious with radioactivity
and people avoid me for fear of infection.
But I will tell my brethren about you.
In our meetings I will praise you.
In the midst of large crowds my hymns will
The people which still have to be born,
our people,
will rejoice in a great feast.
I just sent this email to Don Gibbons at CIRM:
Mr. Gibbons,
I am very disappointed with the decision made by CIRM, to remove a poem, because some people may have seen it as religious and/or offensive. I read the poem, and did not see anything that was remotely offensive. Why should someone like me, who is not religious, have the world around them censored because others find words offensive? This is an extremely bad precedent.
Is the CIRM not interested in offending the non-religious peoples of the world? Because your organizations actions have now caused me to be deeply offended. Why is a government organization, which is funded by taxpayers bowing to pressure from religious groups for censoring words and ideas? Is this not the same as having the tax-payer support government organization embracing the religions and it’s ideas? I, for one, and not happy to see this. Are we, as a society, to walk on verbal egg-shells and not allow full expression of ideas because someone, somewhere, may be offended?
I urge those in the science and government communities to not allow religious groups to bully and censor ideas, thoughts and words. The world must break free from the power strangle-hold that ancient mythological constructs have forced upon the people of the world. Your organization just added another link to the iron chain that imprisons the minds and innovations of the human population. For shame.
Elizabeth Van Horn
@Josemaria says:
15 October 2010 at 04:05
Josemaria, My first vote for a US president was for Ronald Reagan, and as an atheist I had no problem placing that vote. Your political-leftist bias is spilling over into this discussion. The Reagan administration were not Christian “fanatics”.
What really happened is that Ernesto Cardenal become a spokesman for the leftist-guerrilla Sandinistas….and THAT was a problem.
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3556/Cardenal-Ernesto-1925-Poet-Became-Spokesman-Sandinistas.html
Your attempt at rewriting history, for this comment section, in support of leftist-political ideology deplorable. It also is a standard tactic of the old-leftist-guard. No more Newspeak.
Dear Commentators:
You may believe whatever you want. My right is, likewise, to believe whatever I want to. Why, then, do you offend those of us who do not agree with your poem’s perception. It is my opinion that it is blaspemous and, according to my beliefs, it is.
Despite your opinions (for they are not arguments) I perceive that it is a blasphemy, and your disgust can not force me to accept that it is not.
In reference to the comparisom that some of you make, when refering to those fanatic islamoterrorist — i.e. that they are a different kind of people from the muslim world, within wich they grow and operate — you are behaving as that shortsighted type of people that believed in the Nazist’s lack of power and social control of Germany during the year previous to WWII. But of course, you will swear that you could’nt have been one of them, nor you would accept that today you are acting as one of them.
Some of your “actions have now caused me to be deeply offended”; for wich is your right “to bully and censor ideas” from religious individuals? Is it not an irony?
Regardig Cardenal’s writigns, he is using a biblical text as reference [and in the political context of an ideologically biased poet]; but he is not manipulating the words that, for me and for hundred of millions, are part of a sacred liturgy. Respect if you want to ask for respect.
Finally, how can you try to prove, with some physical arguments, that my religious — and therefore metaphysical — beliefs are wrong?
lol! I thought the word “blasphemy” went out of use after the inquisition was abolished! Apparently, there are people who still think some superstitions are more equal than others.
Silly beliefs, including but by no means limited to prayer, dowsing, astrology, transubstantiation, souls, deities, etc. do not deserve any special protection from free speech whatsoever.
In fact, belief without any empirical reason for the belief should be challenged and – why not? – ridiculed.
Nobody has a right not to ever be offended. Nobody has a right to sacred beliefs. This debate is medieval in nature and not befitting of a 21st century society.