Omnipotence

The modern Project of Omnipotence has a great deal to do with 'positivism,' --which should sound familiar to those who have read this brief critique of "positive law" regarding the Homosex "Marriage" amendment.

The manipulation of life through Embryonic Stem-Cell Research is another expression of positivism:

Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, raised the alarm in face of a technology that regards man as a being who can be easily manipulated.

Bishop Crepaldi had the opportunity to explain -- from the point of view of the social teaching of the Church -- the role of humanity in relation to the "technical nakedness," out of which nihilism expresses itself.

The prelate referred to the temptation to manipulate embryos, warning that the main danger for society and culture is the "'technification' of spheres of life that, so considered, instead of being governed by man elude him to the point that his power is transformed into impotence."

That's a very circuitous and elegant way to say "Don't Screw with Mother Nature...or she may bite you in the ass."

According to the dicastery's secretary, "the dream of Prometheus or, to be closer in time, of Francis Bacon, wanting to place in man's hands the secret of omnipotence, in fact, leaves those hands bare, handing man over to technology which becomes the anonymous nakedness of mere action."

Taking up what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his work "Introduction to Christianity," the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace recalled that positivism, according to which "what one knows how to do can also be done" results in the "dictatorship of technology."

On the contrary, the proper approach:

...Recalling John Paul II's words in the Message for the 1990 World Day of Peace, "nature understood as creation is a vocation." Bishop Crepaldi added that "things are not just things, but also the meanings that link them among themselves."

"For man this order becomes normative in the moral sense. On one hand, nature is a 'gift' and on the other it is a 'design' which has been entrusted to man so that he will collaborate in its realization."

In other words, taking the 'esse' as a given helps us understand. One cannot manipulate esse without consequences. This particular theme was best demonstrated in the Frankenstein story; it is not necessarily mythological in the sense that it may be prophetic.

(Source: Zenit "New Dictatorship")