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59 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Slam Dunk!, November 2, 2005
Heard her on the radio here last week and had to buy the book, even though it's not the kind of thing I usually read. But I read it in one sitting. It' impossible to put down. I just loaned it to a friend who says the same thing.
Finally, a book filled with fact and measured analysis, not empty rhetoric. Winnick, an attorney and journalist, uses both skill-sets to adroitly slam the pretentious world of elite scientists and "ethicists" and expose their truly disturbing, sometimes racist agenda. Best of all, she does so using real people and situations, so complicated issues are presented in dramatic, readable form.
What's particularly great is how she's able to explain complicated science in very simple terms. For the first time, I understood embryonic stem-cell research and cloning and what all the fuss is about. While she clearly doesn't have a pro-life agendum against this work, she brilliantly demonstrates the puffery beneath it - and the economic interests. She's not a scientist but obviously she's done a huge amount of research, reading medical journals and so forth.
Her exposure of racism is amazing and based, again, on facts. She's taken the time to review hundreds of biology textbooks from the 1960s to the present, showing their subtle racist and anti-religious messages. Amazingly, these textbooks were written by those who pretended on the outside to be progresstive, but, as she shows, were scandalously racist.
She shows also how medical research has been so commercialized that it cares less and less about human safety. Her chapters on failed gene-transfer and fetal-tissue therapies are amazing. Medical researchers rush their products into human trial so they can make a killing in the marketplace, caring virtually nothing about people.
She also does a great job exposing California's Proposition 71, which raised billions for stem cell research. Unbelievable scientific fraud and Hollywood pretension.
Also great work describing "celebrity scientists" like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, who clearly think they are so much better than the rest of us. These guys are actually quite pathetic. Also great work on Paul Ehrlich, the population guy, whose racism is absolutely amazing. I remember him from way back, when I thought he was a cool guy. She shows what a fraud he was and how he used "science" to push his racist agenda.
Winnick has a great sense of humor. There are little touches that made me laugh out loud, like the rat that had been treated with humam stem cells, and Goober, the baboon, whose heart was implanted in a newborn child - in furtherance of "science."
This is not the work of some religious fanatic, but a brilliant woman who has decided to challenge conventional thinking about religion and science. Winnick is a really great writer who combines understatement, wit and fact. We need more books like this.
One of the best books I've read in a long time.
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114 of 159 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enlightenment, November 5, 2005
Once upon a time, we learned that the scientific method was dispassionate; that scientific observations were independent of the observer. By its very nature science affected belief about the world and the cosmos by persuasion without preconception. Science required no revelation. It was not doctrinal. It did not promise miracle cures, instantly. This book makes it clear that none of this is any longer the case, at least for celebrity-science hyped by today's fatuous mainstream media outlets.
Undoubtedly, much unbiased and unpretentious scientific research is still conducted beneath the media radar. As most of it is not supportive of progressive politics, however, it is deemed mostly unworthy of dissemination by media elites. Another "science," however, provides a target-rich environment, and "A Jealous God" strips away its stealthy patina, exposing it for what it is: a power grab by a self-appointed elite with a "progressive" social agenda. Shockingly, this book exposes the eugenics roots of the stem cell research movement, and those roots are steeped in racism, as the author makes painfully clear. These benevolent folks would reengineer our very substance, and, as the author shows, are arrogant enough to believe that they are actually entitled to force all of us to fund their efforts! The tale of California's Prop 71- where taxpayers own only the risk, with no chance of return - alone makes this book worthwhile.
Like the author, I am not a religious person. I am skeptical of revealed truth. I remain no less skeptical of some supposed "truths" reported widely and enthusiastically (dare I say zealously) under the rubric of "science," particularly when, most improbably, these truths all seem to converge at a locus inhabited by elites which would exercise political power over every aspect of every human life, right down to our genes - for our own good, of course.
This book calmly and dispassionately shows with meticulous facts that it is not enough that science long ago routed religion as the source of knowledge of the cosmos. The author cites Professor Peter Singer of Princeton, who says that the Ten Commandments must be replaced with ten new ones. For instance, "Thou shalt not kill," will be redacted to say that humans should be killed under certain circumstances. "A Jealous God" makes it clear that, should the political/celebrity/progressive "science" prevail, when all the new commandments are written, there is likely to be one holdover: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The author makes that conclusion inescapable, based upon much evidence.
After reading this book, I infer that this current brand of popular "science" overreaches. Citing only utility, its ethicists promise us bodily health, denying that any countervailing values are operant. Those values - as advanced by religion - according to the crusading new science, are merely the shadows of ignorance and superstition conjured by our distant ancestors, as they huddled together in caves and around fires, divining omens from the heavens. Hopefully, there will be no catastrophic unanticipated result stemming from manipulation of the biochemical foundations of humankind, lest our progeny revisit those caves and embers, only to rediscover in reconstituted penumbras, the ancient question: are we mere biological mechanisms, or part of some greater, even divine, plan? One need not be religious to pose that question, and even modern science, rightly understood, may never provide the answer.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't judge it by its title, August 12, 2006
Despite it's strong title and the title of the last chapter ("The Road to Hell"), this book is actually very mild and straightforward. It does not portray "Science" as historically and actively seeking to overthrow religion. It merely illustrates a few of the modern areas in which the goals (especially monetary) of certain researchers run roughshod over practically any ethical or moral considerations, not just religious views. What may be most surprising to most readers is that the most recent and most vital cases involve demands for research to be publicly funded but totally free of regulation or even public scrutiny, through means (and perhaps even to ends) that are abhorrent to people from both left and right wings of politics and religion.
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