brad> That the Christian Church may have gotten itself up-to-date as
brad> far as Astronomy is concerned, but that it's still running
brad> with an Aristotelian concept of biology--that the male plants
brad> the (entire) fertilized seed and the female just provides the
brad> matrix in which it grows? I mean, "beget" means that you
brad> contribute half (sorta) the genome and *only* half the genome,
brad> or it means nothing at all...
Millions of secularized American liberal Protestants, of various stripes and flavors, would protest at this point. First, the Vatican hierarchy is *not* coextensive with the "Christian Church" -- hell, there are lots of Catholics in the US who simply ignore their Church's teaching about stuff like contraception.
One of my moral philosophy professors, Charles Curran at SMU, got himself into pretty serious trouble with Rome for radically revising a wide-range of Catholic social doctrines, especially about human sexuality, that he certainly intended to be fully consonant with the most current life science views.
Of course things are not as progressive as they should be among liberal Protestant denominations, especially the ones which refuse to ordain gay men and lesbians. *But*, all of the tired nonsense about the virgin birth, perpetual virginity and the like is long gone.
Best, Kendall Clark