In a comment to my post yesterday criticizing the self-promotion of Glenn Beck as a leader for conservative Christians, a reader asks, “exactly where is the charismatic Christian leader who would be preferable in your eyes to Mr. Beck?”
That’s a fair question. My personal preference would be a for a coalition of cobelligerent leaders rather than a singular charismatic figure. And on the Catholic side, one of the key figures would be Archbishop Charles Chaput. While Beck is busy sharing the latest insights he picked up while reading a history textbook, Chaput is dispensing actual wisdom.
In his prolific speeches and writings, the Archbishop of Denver continuously proves that he is an astute diagnostician of the maladies that afflict the West. Consider, for example, a recent address that he delivered in Slovakia:
Two of the biggest lies in the world today are these: first, that Christianity was of relatively minor importance in the development of the West; and second, that Western values and institutions can be sustained without a grounding in Christian moral principles. [...]
Downplaying the West’s Christian past is sometimes done with the best intentions, from a desire to promote peaceful co-existence in a pluralistic society. But more frequently it’s done to marginalize Christians and to neutralize the Church’s public witness.
The Church needs to name and fight this lie. To be a European or an American is to be heir to a profound Christian synthesis of Greek philosophy and art, Roman law, and biblical truth. This synthesis gave rise to the Christian humanism that undergirds all of Western civilization.
On this point, we might remember the German Lutheran scholar and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote these words in the months leading up to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943: “The unity of the West is not an idea but a historical reality, of which the sole foundation is Christ.”
Our societies in the West are Christian by birth, and their survival depends on the endurance of Christian values. Our core principles and political institutions are based, in large measure, on the morality of the Gospel and the Christian vision of man and government. We are talking here not only about Christian theology or religious ideas. We are talking about the moorings of our societies – representative government and the separation of powers; freedom of religion and conscience; and most importantly, the dignity of the human person.
This truth about the essential unity of the West has a corollary, as Bonhoeffer also observed: Take away Christ and you remove the only reliable foundation for our values, institutions and way of life.
(Via: Insight Scoop)
August 31st, 2010 | 10:02 am
Mr. Carter,
You are right — Archbishop Charles Chaput is an intelligent, courageous figure who repeatedly challenges the conventional wisdom. He is a symbol of hope for American Catholics battered by years of drift and indecision.
August 31st, 2010 | 10:16 am
We are in the world, not of the world, and our job is to witness, until the world ends.
August 31st, 2010 | 10:18 am
Thank you so much for posting this…I’m going to send to all the young people in my family.
August 31st, 2010 | 10:46 am
The fundamental problem is the deification of the state. The Christianization of civilization brought governments into being the purpose of which was to protect humanity’s God-given, inalienable rights — with its de-Christianization, Caesar is again pretending to have the authority to bestow and withdraw those rights. Compliance with this is idolatry. Silence regarding it is compliance. It seems to me that neither the Church, nor Glenn Beck, nor anyone else has formed and articulated a plan to respond to this situation in a realistic way. It is pathetic that this is the case so recently after WW II, when Germany clearly demonstrated to the whole world that making Caesar god turns him into a savage beast instead.
August 31st, 2010 | 11:28 am
A small token of Abp. Chaput’s qualification for the role suggested her: About a year ago after reading one of his characteristically astute writings illumining current events with the Gospel, on a whim I wrote him an e-mail asking to join his fan club.
I never expected an answer, or even that he would read my e-mail. But back came this reply: “The only fan club worth joining is that of Jesus Christ.”
I am the archbishop’s disobedient servant, and remain steadfastly a member of his fan club!
August 31st, 2010 | 11:29 am
Thank you for your observations–I agree Archbishop Chaput is providing a most needed witness to wisdom and his words reflect well on the Catholic Church.
If I may be so bold, let me suggest another charismatic Christian leader for your “coalition of cobelligerent leaders”: His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America. His Beatitude brings together not only the wisdom of Orthodox Christian monastics but also a deep pastoral awareness of the spiritual and moral challenges facing the American people. Added to this, he is a monk of the monastery of Valaam and so has a more than passing familiarity with Russia, her people and her culture.
There is a hope that Catholic and Orthodox Christians will be able to work together to re-evangelize Europe. A similar coalition of Catholic and Orthodox Christians–together with traditionally minded Protestant and Evangelical Christians–is need in America and I think Metropolitan Jonah would have much to contribute.
Again, thank you for your post.
In Christ,
+FrG
August 31st, 2010 | 11:31 am
It takes a very peculiar, modernized and unorthodox — if not entirely dishonest — understanding of Christianity to claim that democracy or the separation of church and state have their roots in Christian values. The history of Christianity is the history of Crusades and Inquisitions — of religious and ethnic intolerance and violence. It is the history of The Divine Right of Kings and a class of clergy that vied for power with monarchs and quite intentionally kept the masses uneducated to the point of illiteracy.
Furthermore, no evidence beyond stipulation is given for the necessity of maintaining Christian principles in order to maintain “the foundation” of Western society. Even if it was somehow true that Western society was founded on Christian ideals, it would in no way follow that those principles are still necessary today. Somehow, the bishop drags moral relativism into the discussion — as if this was some crime, perpetrated by non-Christians. Well, certainly, any reading of the history of Christianity loose enough to claim that it is the foundation of democracy could just as well claim that it is the foundation of moral relativism — why not? Judge not, lest ye be judged, and all that.
The real source of claims that Christianity is somehow necessary for our society is nothing more nor less than the fear of Christians that their religion is losing supporters. What better way to keep them than claiming that turning away from their way will lead to some irreparable ruin? It’s an old trick — one used by groups in power to maintain their dominance long before Christianity came around.
August 31st, 2010 | 11:35 am
…and why can’t Beck be one of the co-belligerents?
August 31st, 2010 | 12:03 pm
Wait, why do we have to pick someone else as a “leader” other than Glenn Beck? Why can’t we all just live out our faith as it bears on political issues, as we learn it in our churches, homes, and communities? Isn’t “Well, whose better?” a question based on the false premise that we actually need someone in that position?
August 31st, 2010 | 12:10 pm
“It takes a very peculiar, modernized and unorthodox — if not entirely dishonest — understanding of Christianity to claim that democracy or the separation of church and state have their roots in Christian values. The history of Christianity is the history of Crusades and Inquisitions — of religious and ethnic intolerance and violence. It is the history of The Divine Right of Kings and a class of clergy that vied for power with monarchs and quite intentionally kept the masses uneducated to the point of illiteracy.”
Ah, yes, you seem to have missed the point of all this history by wearing the “Medieval Church is Nothing But Crusades and Inquisitions” blinders.
When they said “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s”, they meant it. The birth of the separation of Church and State was in Canossa, not Philadelphia. All those Crusades and Inquisitions you so curse are manifestations of that unique, burgeoning separation. The Crusades saw the Pope successfully direct Christian kings into fighting a common foe instead of each other, while the Inquisition took away from the king or emperor’s indiscriminate powers of religious persecution. (Whereas the state used to prosecute, rather horribly and arbitrarily, those accused of heresy, the first Inquisitions streamlined the process and exonerated many people who would have burned at the hands of the theologically-inept royal prosecutors. The Spanish Inquisition is not the only Inquisition.)
Even the Divine Right of Kings was a source of contention between Church and State, such as with the Investiture controversy which led to an emperor marching half-naked in the cold to seek a Pope’s pardon.
What, you would seriously believe Thomas Jefferson just pulled separation of Church and State out of a hat?
August 31st, 2010 | 12:31 pm
A 12 year-old boy writes: “Even if it was somehow true that Western society was founded on Christian ideals,…”
Ha.
Ha ha.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
August 31st, 2010 | 12:31 pm
I remember a quotation from an early edition (edited out in later editions) of “The History of the Modern World” by Professor Palmer. This remarkable passage made the point the Christianity introduced the idea of equality of all persons under God. The former pagan distinctions of power, beauty, wealth, intelligence, high ancestry, even of good health, were declared not determinative of one’s worth. All stood equal before God in his or her ability to achieve the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, and the classical virtues of ancient pagan civilizations. All were called to holiness. It is tragically true that an amalgam of ignorance, sin, weakness, and misunderstanding misled those who were entrusted with the message and that terrible consequences followed. Still, the fundamental idea of equality of all persons before God as a “self-evident” truth did and does find its most powerful expression in Christian teaching if not in its early practice.
August 31st, 2010 | 12:32 pm
“The Crusades saw the Pope successfully direct Christian kings into fighting a common foe instead of each other”
Um… I’m not seeing the separation. Having a religious leader — the Pope — direct the heads of governments to execute wars based on religious motives against foes with whom the conflict was essentially religious isn’t my idea of separation of church and state. Is it really yours?
Similarly, the inquisitions codified and reinforced the validity of legal criminal trials (and executions) on the grounds of religious violations against a particular dominant religion.
The investiture controversy involved, literally, the pope (a religious leader) exercising an ability, if not a right, to remove and undermine a political leader (of the state). Again, you call this separation?
If you want to call the church growing in power and taking over some of the functions of the state, such as the direction of wars and the trial of citizens, “separation of church and state”, I suppose you’re welcome to, although it sounds an awful lot like opposite day in the Twilight Zone to me. Either way, though, this certainly isn’t a thing like the modern notion of separation of church and state — the idea that religion should be kept out of the legal system, and that consequently, all religions are on equal footing.
As to the origins of the separation concept, the modern American notion is more properly traced back to John Locke, or if you really want to stretch it, to Martin Luther. Certainly, *struggles for control and power* between church and state existed much earlier, but I think you are confusing those with the actual concept of separation of powers as a policy virtue.
August 31st, 2010 | 12:37 pm
Anonymouse — because before that, there would have been no question that the interests of church and state were identical. The crusades represented an *emerging,* if imperfect, distinction. If you’re talking about an idea “developing,” you have to compare it to the situation earlier, rather than to the more developed, later version of the idea.
August 31st, 2010 | 12:39 pm
“While Beck is busy sharing the latest insights he picked up while reading a history textbook, Chaput is dispensing actual wisdom”
Perfect!
I have struggled with what it is, exactly, that bothers me about Beck. Mr. Carter has brought my search for that answer to an abrupt end.
August 31st, 2010 | 12:39 pm
“What, you would seriously believe Thomas Jefferson just pulled separation of Church and State out of a hat?”
He likely learned it from the Brit, James Burgh. Though the phrase can be traced back to American Founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams. There is truth in both sides: Inquisitions and Crusades were “Christian principles.” But so were the reactions against them by the folks on the receiving end.
Williams got banned from Winthrop’s “Christian Commonwealth” and formed Rhode Island on more secular principles. Both actions — Williams’ and Winthrop’s — reflect “Christian principles.”
August 31st, 2010 | 12:45 pm
Anonymouse,
Your comments show you clearly misunderstand Christianity, as well as the roots of democracy. What personal traits would you say are required from citizens in order to sustain a democratic republic? Justice? Prudence? Temperance? Patience? Humility? Similary, what personal traits erode a democratic republic? Greed? Pride? Envy? Lust? The cult of the self?
The distinctly Christian nature of the West is what develops the necessary personal traits that allows for freedom to exist at all. Remember, in the history of the world, freedom is the exception, not the rule.
If moral relativism, apparently no crime with you, continues to gain ground, what systems could you put in place instead of Christianity (or almost any religion) that you could guarantee would instill these necessary traits in the populace? There is no true reason to BE virtuous in a world that is morally relative. In fact, it serves you not at all to be so. Thus, in a world that is morally relative, freedom ceases to exist because freedom is an extension of absolute Truth that demands you not enslave your neighbor to benefit yourself because your neighbor is equally valuable.
Plus, the fact of the history of Christian sin does not simply disqualify Christianity from moral commentary. If that were so, moral relativists such as yourself would have even less room to stand than the Church (Stalin and Mao and Castro and all that). Despite its own sins, and yes, there are many (after all, Christ came for the sinners), the Church still stands as witness to Christ’s truth and more importantly, as the path to redemption from individual sins.
And on a side note, “judge not lest ye be judged” is not a free-for-all, anything-goes card to be played when you want to silence people who think what you’re doing is immoral; the real meaning of the phrase is that one should not judge the motives of another, however, actions are certainly open to moral judgment.
August 31st, 2010 | 1:38 pm
In reading this piece I am reminded of Raphael’s famous painting of the School of Athens with Joe Carter in the role of Plato, pointing to the heavens and invoking the need for the guidance of an ethereal committee, while Glenn Beck, channeling Aristotle, arm outstretched and palm down, calls into convocation a half a million actual people on the Washington Mall back here on earth.
Mr. Carter might be well advised to remember Teddy Roosevelt’s remarks about how it is not the critic who counts, but the man in the arena.
August 31st, 2010 | 1:45 pm
The Archbishop is a fantastic witness and leader. Glenn Beck is rough around the edges. They appeal to different audiences at different stages on their journey to Christ.
The tragic schisms in the Body of Christ are the cause of theologians obsessing about arcana — important and creed-shaping arcana to be sure, but arcana nonetheless — i.e., obscure Angels-on-The-Head-of-A-Pin material that is not accessible to the vast, vast majority of Christians united in one baptism.
Come together first in His Most Holy Name, work out the differences later. The enemy delights in our house divided. It is a pivotal moment in history: every generation is a pivotal moment. That is how the constitution set us up, precariously: the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. That is also how original sin set us up, unavoidably: we, the Body of Christ, His church, are in constant danger of being torn apart by the inexorable centrifugal force of Adam’s Pride. Take shelter in a return to principles. Flee to the forgiveness purchased in Blood.
In that light, it’s hard to get worked up about Beck in the abstract — what he could become, what he might represent — despite his many imperfections. The struggle is going to be long and hard. Appreciate anyone willing to pick up his shield (and a sword?) beside us.
Agreed, Archbishop Chaput is more my cup of tea, he speaks to me in a way that Beck does not. Agreed, worshipers of the American idol have an obstacle to their salvation, their road may be longer and more arduous. But might not a middle-man like Beck, while perhaps not equipped for the entire journey (a Virgil to their Dante), be the inspiration that points them ultimately in the right direction?
Many of us Americans are deeply interested in the Christian roots of Western civilization. Many, many more Americans are concerned about topical matters — ruthless secularization from on high, soft despotism, cultural rot — because they have to send their kids to school today, where they will be learning, literally, God knows what. While it is certainly true we must defend civilization (can I say “Christendom”?) at her corroding foundations, it is also true we must defend her at the tops of the walls, which are being breached directly and with impunity. Both are dangers made acute by our negligence.
Count me as one warrior glad Mr. Beck is manning the ramparts, perhaps even a touch barbarically. We want him on that wall. We need him on that wall.
The divisive remarks of Mr. Carter and Rev. Moore (referred to in a previous post) are true enough in a strategic sense, but we must also consider the tactical. What Christian would argue against placing his Lord unabashedly and unmistakably at the center of any revival? Such is the purest proclamation of the Gospel there can be. In fact, let the United States fall if that prepares the way for our Lord’s coming again in glory. There is no dispute and no real confusion about our priorities.
We should not regard one rally’s necessary emphasis on civic piety to represent a desire to replace faith in Christ with Mammon. It simply was not the the topic of the day. We should not fiddle with doctrinal trifles as the church burns.
You do what you’re doing. Archbishop do what he does. Beck do what he does. Squabble later. What would the St. Paul, the original evangelist do? Check Romans 12:4-8. Maybe the constitution is as divinely inspired as that epistle. I seriously doubt it. Either way we do agree that the epistle is. Focus there. Build on that.
What unites us — THE LORD JESUS, WHO IS CHRIST! — is surely more interesting than what divides us.
August 31st, 2010 | 1:46 pm
Astronomy developed from astrology. Chemistry developed from alchemy. Both modern disciplines even still use many of the terms of their forebearers. But neither astronomy nor chemistry depend on the disciplines that birthed them.
Western society developed from Christian principles, true. But a separate case needs to be made that it depends on Christianity for continued existence. (Absence of Christianity, even absence of theism, does not imply ‘moral relativism’ as the only possible alternative, for example.)
August 31st, 2010 | 1:47 pm
Erin: I won’t get into a discussion of moral relativism here because first, counter what you assume about me, that is not my position (for reasons that have nothing to do with religion or Christianity), and second, it will take us far afield and I suspect end up not being very relevant at all. I’ll only say that my point with the “judge not…” line is that there are elements in Christianity that could be used to argue for moral relativism, just as there are elements that could be used to argue for absolutism, for democracy, for separation of church and state, or for the mandatory and morally obligatory burning of oxen on the Sabbath — there are, in fact, elements in Christianity that could be viewed as the foundation of just about any modern practice or system of thought, both good and bad, just because Christianity was the dominant religion of most of the developed world for a very long time. Consequently most great thinkers were Christian. But to say that their greatness derives from their Christianity is to confuse and conflate correlation with causation.
The reason why the nature of Western culture is not “distinctly Christian” is precisely because the values you describe are not distinctly Christian. Justice, Prudence, Temperance and the others, are Buddhist, Jewish and Muslim values (just for example) as much as they are Christian, while Greed and Pride aren’t values or “good things” in any serious religion I’m aware of. In fact, a whole lot of humanist atheists value Justice, Prudence and Temperance, while disliking Greed and Pride, and they don’t have to appeal to any religion whatsoever to hold those values. It is that fact that makes it very difficult to seriously take the claim that a movement away from Christianity would be a movement away from the moral fabric of Western society. Why not claim that the fabric of Western society is dependent on the maintenance of belief in Buddhism, or of humanistic atheism just as well?
To Pentamom: Fair enough. I don’t doubt that separation of powers was an evolving idea that morphed gradually into its current form, with many interim states. But certainly the crusades, inquisitions and other power struggles of those times have no unique claim to fame as being more important than any other part of that trajectory of change. If we want to trace the real origins of separation of church and state using the very broad logic you apply, they must be in the first pagan tribe that ever separated the duties of Shaman and Chief. Certainly, this is hardly something that Christianity was “uniquely” instrumental in bringing about.
August 31st, 2010 | 2:22 pm
I kinda got a kick out of Beck at first, but you can only take so much imploring. I would say 95% of his gig consists of imploring people. But I think he’s filling a very important emotional vacuum in our social discourse, because when you think about it, people like to be implored and none of our other pundits do that.
August 31st, 2010 | 2:26 pm
… and in reading the comment exchanges above, is it not clear where our efforts must be placed?
The poison is in the water, and we’re squabbling about whether to make the tea sweetened or unsweetened.
“It takes a very peculiar, modernized and unorthodox — if not entirely dishonest — understanding of Christianity to claim that democracy or the separation of church and state have their roots in Christian values.” Full stop.
This is what passes for scholarship, for higher-order thinking, for the way, the truth, and the life. He is a minority on this board, but out there — you know, where it matters? — we are subject to rule by this crude, belligerent, ahistorical, risible, Howard-Zinnian claptrap. Our lack of engagement is their win by default. Without people like Beck bringing, say, von Hayek to Amazon No. 1, we will not have a shot. Our isolation will have us speaking in such an refined accent that our patois will have become another language to the man on the street.
Beck! Chaput! Carter! Moore! Bring it in, boys! Huddle up. The play has been called, from above. Now execute it.
August 31st, 2010 | 2:51 pm
You seem to be missing an important point: that nature abhors a vacuum. Beck’s show became important because he pushed important stories that the mainstream media wanted buried. He finds himself a leader because of a want of leadership; he did not usurp the post.
August 31st, 2010 | 3:09 pm
Mr.Carter’s remarks immediately make me think of the black nurse in Patch Adams,”You’ll be so full of yourself you’ll need a cup under your $#% to catch the excess,”. Chaput is always a must read for me….but he hasn’t put 500,000 plus @ Washington proclaiming a need to get in line with the word, either. You can talk or you can lead, Mr.Carter. Blather only goes so
far toward action.
August 31st, 2010 | 3:16 pm
Hello, Anonymouse,
You wrote: “In fact, a whole lot of humanist atheists value Justice, Prudence and Temperance, while disliking Greed and Pride, and they don’t have to appeal to any religion whatsoever to hold those values. It is that fact that makes it very difficult to seriously take the claim that a movement away from Christianity would be a movement away from the moral fabric of Western society.”
It is very easy to take seriously the claim that a movement away from Christianity alters the moral fabric of society and much, much more. In fact, only extremely devout, fanatical atheism could keep one from doing so.
Theism-based government, such as the U.S. Government was originally according to its Declaration of Independence, leads to a radically different situation for humanity than does completely secularized, atheistic government. In the former case, humanity bestows upon the state the right to exist, and has a duty to alter or abolish the state when it ceases to fulfill its purpose. (Read the Declaration of Independence again if you haven’t done so lately.) In the latter case, the state bestows upon humanity the right to exist, withdrawing that right when it sees fit, as in the legalization of abortion-on-demand, euthanasia, Jew-gassing and so on. In the former case, it is not Caesar’s to bestow or to withdraw the inalienable rights of humanity; it is his only to protect them. In the latter case there is no such thing as inalienable rights – rights are created, bestowed and withdrawn by Caesar as he sees fit.
The government the founders created could carry out its purpose, founded upon theism at it was, and also tolerate atheism. It cannot do the reverse: fulfill the purpose for which it was created – to protect the inalienable rights of humanity – with atheism as its foundation: If humanity is merely the product of a mindless, purposeless process which quite accidentally spewed us forth, then there is no such thing as inalienable rights; we are just animals with greater intellectual capacity than other animals; we have no more intrinsic, inalienable rights than does a cow. Cows get butchered. With completely secularized, atheistic government there are no inviolable ethical principles limiting the actions of those in power as they “do what they know is best” to those who aren’t.
If you can’t see the difference between these two situations, “Take care, then, that the light in you not become darkness.”
August 31st, 2010 | 3:29 pm
david Chaput is always a must read for me….but he hasn’t put 500,000 plus @ Washington proclaiming a need to get in line with the word, either. You can talk or you can lead, Mr.Carter. Blather only goes so
far toward action.
To be honest, I sort of took it for granted that people knew that being able to get “500,000 plus @ Washington” isn’t that significant. Remember the “Million Mom March?” The one where 700,000 women led by Rosie O’Donnell came to Washington to protest gun violence?
If you can’t remember that one don’t worry. It didn’t mean much. Like Beck’s rally, it was an event to promote the speakers and raise awareness/money for a cause. But it had not longterm effect.
Anyone that lives in DC can tell you that at least one such rally occurs every year. They mean nothing.
But as I said before, the biggest problem isn’t with Beck but with gullible Christians. You said that Beck was proclaiming that we need to “get in line with the word.” What “word” is that? The Book of Mormon?
Either Beck is calling people to embrace his religion or he’s telling people to embrace some vague notion of God that fits with civil religion. Neither is proclaiming the Gospel.
Mormons belief is incompatible with orthodox Christianity. The reason they are able to mix nationalism and religion is because their church believes that the Constitution (and the founding of America) is divinely inspired. The way some Christians are embracing Beck’s concepts, it makes me wonder if they aren’t simply becoming Mormon-lite.
For example, the fact that you think Beck is doing work that is more significant than Chaput is disturbing.
August 31st, 2010 | 3:38 pm
Harry – Are you sure that no non-theistic case for rights and democracy and so forth is possible? I can’t agree: http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/07/12/universal-morality-and-the-morality-of-the-universe/
(Oh, and it’s interesting that you would lump “Jew-gassing” in with the evils of “secularized, atheistic government”. Hitler wasn’t an atheist, he was a sort of quasi-Christian semi-Pagan who thought Jesus was an Aryan. And the virulent strain of anti-Semitism that ran through Germany since before Luther’s time was plenty of motivation for the Holocaust – certainly for the religious rank-and-file that carried out the day-to-day operations.)
August 31st, 2010 | 4:06 pm
“..representative government and the separation of powers; freedom of religion and conscience,” The sort of things that many Popes in the 19 cen condemned.
August 31st, 2010 | 5:01 pm
To add to what Ray said, is it not immediately dubious when the same religion that for centuries was used to justify anti-Jewish pogroms of all types and in many nations could be touted as not just a way to prevent “Jew gassing”, but THE ONLY way?
Oh, I know, I know. Those other Christian anti-Semites were just getting the gospel wrong. It’s really “the good guys” — the good Christians — who get it right. But both sides have plenty of bible quotes to justify them. Isn’t it, in the end, such a simpler explanation to say that some people do good and others do bad, and that neither really have religion at their source — just exactly the same way that atheists can be good and bad people.
August 31st, 2010 | 7:31 pm
Hello, Ray, Anonymouse,
The negative consequences of Christendom failing to abide by its founder’s standards are indeed significant. The consequences of the demise of Christendom and the rise of completely secular, atheistic governments hostile to theism have been an utter disaster, mitigated only by what inadvertently remains of Christendom. Haven’t you noticed that all the blood baths of recent history have been perpetrated by governments hostile to theism? And that these governments acknowledge no higher authority?
Yes, the Jews were persecuted by the Christians over the centuries. The rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of civilization resulted in their nearly being obliterated from face of the earth. I am part Jew and have relatives who died in Auschwitz. I have thought about this a lot. It is clear to anyone who looks into it with an open mind that formerly unthinkable Nazi policies only became thinkable after the “enlightened” rejected the Judeo-Christian foundation of civilization. See *The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution* by Dr. Henry Friedlander. It is interesting because Friedlander is a Jew who insists he is not “anti-abortion” and gives no indication at all that he is a friend of Christianity or the Pro-Life movement. Even so, I find him a very good historian and his book makes it apparent that “Jew-gassing” as a social policy was only possible with a completely secularized, atheistic government not restricted by any higher law or any acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth of any and every human being.
August 31st, 2010 | 7:48 pm
[i]“Representative government and the separation of powers; freedom of religion and conscience,” The sort of things that many Popes in the 19 cen condemned”[i/]
PIUSXXX, yes they did, somewhat.
But they certainly did not do so Ex Cathedra. Popes have been on both the correct and wrong sides of certain political issues throughout history.
As for any Pope speaking out against freedom of religion and conscience, I would appreciate if you could provide some sources or links to the Popes that engaged in such actions.
August 31st, 2010 | 8:43 pm
“The tragic schisms in the Body of Christ are the cause [sic] of theologians obsessing about arcana”
Oh, puh-leeze. If that were true, the only people in schism would be theologians obsessing about arcana. From where I sit, the overwhelming majority of people in schism are rank and file who are largely theologically clueless. Fit that into your scheme. And you want to see all of them unite in a political fervor around… what? The deposit of faith entrusted to the Apostles? Perhaps something a little less authoritarian & olde-fashioned sounding?
The basic difference between Chaput & Beck is that Chaput says we need to be conformed to the truth,whereas Beck says we just need to agree on who the enemy is. Only one of them is right.
August 31st, 2010 | 8:52 pm
As I noted, Germany wasn’t hostile to theism, just any theism that opposed Naziism. They happily fostered a quasi-Pagan mythology.
Pretty much all the others didn’t have any tradition of Western values to start with (c.f. my “astronomy vs. alchemy” comment above) and drew on a ‘tradition’ of communism (hardly the only alternative to Christianity). In addition, a lot of the ‘body counts’ actually came from rejection of neo-Darwinian evolution and the forcible embrace of Lysenkoism. (Starvation’s what happens when agricultural reality doesn’t match ‘worker’s science’.)
There’s also the factor of improving technology leading both to more people, and more effective ways to kill many people. (Look at the Albigensian crusade – would either side have hesitated to use nukes if they’d been available?)
As to Friedlander’s book, I’ll put it on my list. But to reiterate – what if it were possible to have “a completely secularized, atheistic government [that acknowledged] the intrinsic worth of any and every human being”? I’ll grant that’s difficult for many to imagine, but that’s not quite the same thing as proof that it’s impossible.
August 31st, 2010 | 8:58 pm
Anonymouse gives me pause. To be sure, correlation is not causation, but lack of correlation definitively disproves causation.
He seems to be lost in the inquisitions and the Crusades. One wonders what he thinks of Lepanto or Poitiers. More importantly, I wonder that he has not examined the revolutions that attempted to minimize religion: the French, Russian and Mexican, for example. Thousands, millions killed for the sake of a state that would have god in lower case. Religious heresy is not the only heresy that has been prosecuted. Read further, Anonymouse, you’ll find some of your suggested alternatives to Christianity do not even correlate.
I yield to the fictional Mr Holmes, “One you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, must be the truth.”
August 31st, 2010 | 8:59 pm
I am certainly not on board with everything Anonymouse says, but he is absolutely right that things like “representative government” and “the separation of powers” have nothing to do with Christianity. Archbishop Chaput has a long history of artfully turning Roman Cathlicism into the very sort of civic religion which is even now being derided on adjacent FIRST THOUGHTS threads; and he has been quite successful at snookering a large percentage of his readership into believing that he is dispensing Gospel truth with clarity and balance.
Folks, this is not wisdom and it is not Catholicism. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, prince of philosophers and a doctor of the faith, the ideal form of government, Christian or otherwise, is most certainly a monarchy. That’s a far cry from the “representative government” thing the Archbishop is pushing. And as for the claim that “the dignity of the human person” is a unique accomplishment of Judeo-Christian values, that was rather soundly challenged by David Goldman a few weeks ago in his Spengler blog.
In fact, those who are most vocal in pushing the “dignity and democracy” meme are usually the very ones who are implicitly or explicitly hostile to Christianity and its uncompromising truths. For anyone who has been paying attention, this ought to be obvious by now. After all, this conflict is the very substance of the Culture Wars we have all spent the last 40 years living through.
The Archbishop is not helping the cause when he speaks like this. What he says sounds good to modern ears; the only problem is it isn’t true. Sadly, I think most people are still missing the forest for the trees.
September 1st, 2010 | 9:32 am
Harry: Are you seriously suggesting that the mass maltreatment (of all sorts) of Jews could only result from an atheistic government? I don’t even have to go to the Nazis, although I disagree with your claims there. How about the Jewish pogroms endlessly executed during the Russian Empire (Christian Orthodox), or the Spanish Inquisition? Just read the Wikipedia entry on pogroms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
The vast majority of those were executed by theists, and specifically Christians, like it or not. Again, I don’t think this was *because* of their Christianity in particular. Christianity just happened to be the dominant religion at the time, and the Jews weren’t members. However it is at least incredibly clear that these governments’ Christian ethics and beliefs didn’t *prevent* them from executing these kind of acts.
Mike Melendez: Giving a religious person pause is probably anyone can ever hope to do, so I might already be satisfied. However, what is the lack of correlation you’re talking about? Between what and what? Atheism and morality? I never claimed there was such a correlation — I don’t think atheism necessarily makes anyone more moral. The point is just that neither does religiousness, Christian or otherwise, lead to morality. And certainly, it is hardly the *only* way for a society to be moral. That doesn’t mean there can’t be plenty of ways — Christian, atheist, whathaveyou — for societies to be immoral, though.
As to your list of revolutions, all revolutions are bloody. I could add to your list the American revolution, which led quite quickly to the separation of church and state (something Britain still doesn’t technically have). None of these revolutions were primarily about “putting god in lower case”, but about changing the form of government — and it is not, by the way, accidental that in wanting to give “power to the people” God ended up getting shunted off. The main enemies of equality have often been various churches, whose clergy is often more educated and more powerful than the public, and for whom power-equalizing systems and revolutions were not beneficial.
September 1st, 2010 | 9:45 am
Well said King.
The Archbishop & Beck have somewhat different styles and presentations. But one common message was to think for yourself, and not be lead by those who would pat you on the head, and tell you they are looking out for you.
To Joe Carter, remember what Jesus said to the Apostles when they complained that a man “who was not among us”, cast out demons in His name. Reflect on that for a while.
September 1st, 2010 | 11:03 am
Hello, Ray, Anonymouse,
Ray wrote: “Germany wasn’t hostile to theism, just any theism that opposed Naziism.”
Anonymouse wrote: “Are you seriously suggesting that the mass maltreatment (of all sorts) of Jews could only result from an atheistic government?”
I am saying what the Nazis attempted to do was unprecedented and was only possible because of their complete rejection of theism. They were hostile to the ethic that was the foundation of Western Civilization. And what was that? Here is an excerpt from an editorial, A New Ethic for Medicine and Society, that appeared in the September, 1970 issue of California Medicine that I think fairly sums up what that ethic was as applied to government and medicine:
The Nazis had discarded that ethic. Curiously, Dr. Malcolm Watts, who wrote the editorial, seems oblivious to the disastrous consequences of this Nazi social experiment that had taken place only a few decades prior to his announcement of the arrival of a “new” ethic, yet he seems to understand the serious ramifications of discarding the old ethic and substituting it with a new one:
Actually, it was being rammed down society’s throat by a handful of people who were a self-appointed “elite” group certain they knew better than the rest of us. Again curiously, Dr. Watts admits that deception is necessary in order to successfully replace the old ethic with a new one:
Contemporary state sanctioned killing of innocent human beings as a matter of social policy is an aberration today as it was when implemented as Nazi social policy. The old, theistic ethic is here to stay, and society is beginning to see the media-manufactured bigotry towards the child in the womb for what it is: nothing more than ugly, vile, lethal propaganda that makes Joseph Goebbels look like an amateur. Every day more and more women come to understand how they have been deceived and manipulated. Hell hath no fury such as will eventually be unleashed on the perpetrators of this disaster by a generation of women who have been victimized by it.
To sum up, the choices are government that acknowledges God’s authority or one immoral, inhumane, genocidal catastrophe after another. This is because, as history repeatedly demonstrates, when Man wants to “rise to great heights” and become like unto God, he always sinks into the depths of depravity instead. It is not a very original sin.
September 1st, 2010 | 11:15 am
Something that is intrinsically true would of course be known to all persons of good will on earth. Fundamental intuitions of goodness are available to all who seek them. They are valuable in and of themselves; in other words, they are “self-evident,” as the American founders dared to say. While they are fundamental to religious belief that is consistent with right reason, they appeal to just that – right reason apart from religious doctrine. This is, as I see it, the genius of the American founding. It can be understood by everyone. No religious commitment or creed was necessary in order for this nation to be built on this bedrock. Glenn Beck may be trying to excavate, as best he can, the rock on which we stood.
September 1st, 2010 | 12:18 pm
harry –
Various Nazis held a hodgepodge of many religious beliefs, from paganism and occultism to weird Aryan Christianity and so forth. And, again, most of the rank and file were Christian, acting to kill the Jews who were ‘guilty of Deicide’. I don’t see how we can fruitfully continue this without it descending further into “Nuh-uh! Uh-huh! Nuh-uh! Uh-huh!”
C.S. Lewis called this sort of thing, this premature resorting to psychological analysis, “Bulverism”. As he put it, “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong.”
Based on a lot of reading and thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that a brain is a necessary condition for being a person (whether it’s sufficient is a separate question). While a blastula – or an anencephalic baby – may be living human tissue, they aren’t a person any more than a liver is a person. (But note… the brain forms pretty early on in development.)
Telling me “everyone really knows” different isn’t particularly convincing. (What do you think of atheists who claim that the religious really know they are fooling themselves?) Instead, find a problem with my argument, and/or make a better argument.
September 1st, 2010 | 12:42 pm
In the “culture wars” in which we are engaged, Glenn Beck can be viewed as an agent planted by the Humanists to placate the believers in Christ. He appeals to those Christians that seek to build Christ’s kingdom on earth. His Humanist thinking is revealed in his approach towards gay “marriage” which is based on a rational perspective rather than a divinely revealed Christian perspective. This type of thinking seeks to undermine the authority of the Church.
Beck’s appeal is mostly to Protestants because they have long ago abandoned the more mystical aspects of Christianity. Their literal interpretations of the Bible are based on a type of rational thinking that grows out of the Enlightenment. Christ’s teachings are always spiritual even when speaking about earthly reality. Many who heard him misinterpreted what he was saying because they did not perceive this, even among his own disciples.
I have been reflecting recently about these and other matters from a Catholic perspective at my site which you can find here:
http://publicvigil.blogspot.com/
I look forward to your comments.
September 1st, 2010 | 1:10 pm
[...] Joe Carter cited an interesting passage from a recent address by the Catholic Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput: [...]
September 1st, 2010 | 1:14 pm
Harry: Putting aside all the quotes of some pro-life doctor from 1970, and your personal rant against abortion, the fact is you are simply factually wrong. You are wrong, as has been pointed out to you, in two ways: One, the Nazi regime was not, either implicitly or explicitly, atheistic. Hence, the claim that “only an atheistic government could commit such crimes” is blatantly wrong. A non-atheistic government could and did commit them.
Two, being Christian does not seem to at all prevent people from acting unethically. Many many Christian governments committed crimes as brutal and inhumane as the Nazi regime. Popes, for centuries, were power brokers and military leaders. While Christians like to claim that their religion puts holds that every life has equal value, that vast majority of Christians have never lived that way. Christian societies have perpetrated and perpetuated some of the grossest and worse power imbalances and injustices in history, both against their Christian members (for example, peasantry and servants, who essentially never had any rights and were treated not entirely unlike cattle, while kings ruled by supposed Divine Right), as well as other communities like Jews, Muslims and atheists. Powerful Christian figures (like all other powerful figures) have strangled democratic and pluralistic movements at times when they ran against the interests of the Christians in power.
So, a government being Christian is neither necessary (point one) nor sufficient (point two) for an ethical “traditional Western” society.
I’d like to point out that the article you quote is from 1970. It promises, as many on this forum are promising now, the inevitable decline and collapse of our society as it moves away from Christianity. And I’d like to ask, is that collapse really here? I see no signs of it. Putting rose-tinted glasses about the past aside, the fabric of our society is hardly worse than it was in the 70s. Gay marriage is legal in a bunch of states, and life in those states is completely unchanged by it (except for those gay couples who can now marry). Unlike what your good doctor predicts, the medical profession, for example, hasn’t become dramatically less humane in its treatment. The institution of medicine hasn’t implemented some new standard wherein it’s perfectly ok for doctors to treat friends and family while refusing care to anyone else. In short, all the doomsday predictions Christians have made about what would happen to a society that moves away from Christianity haven’t happened. That’s not mysterious, and it’s not because some great rapture or punishment is yet to come. It’s simply because the fabric of our society wasn’t dependent on belief in Christianity in the first place.
September 1st, 2010 | 1:26 pm
Just to correct myself, point one above doesn’t speak to the necessity of Christianity for morality. It is, rather, further evidence that being Christian (or theistic) is not sufficient for being ethical, as the Nazis were theistic but unethical.
To put this in logical form, your claim is: Societies are ethical if and only if they are Christian. So, 1) if they are ethical then they are Christian, and 2) if they are Christian then they are ethical.
The first statement is false — Christianity is not necessary to be ethical — because there are plenty of ethical atheistic societies, with most of modern day Europe and Scandinavia being a great example.
The second statement is false too — Christianity is not sufficient for being ethical, for the two points in my previous post.
Sorry for double-posting. I just want to clear my mistake and be rigorous.
September 1st, 2010 | 4:35 pm
John W. Gillis wrote:
If that were true, the only people in schism would be theologians obsessing about arcana. From where I sit, the overwhelming majority of people in schism are rank and file who are largely theologically clueless. Fit that into your scheme.
“[T]heologians obsessing about [important] arcana” lead “the overwhelming [theologically clueless] majority” into schism. How many in Eastern Orthodox pews even knew what the filoque was or cared to the point of revolution about yeast in the Eucharist? These are not trifles, and yet they are not on the typical parishioner’s radar screen. Likewise sola scriptura and sola gratia, likewise the early Christian heresies.
Entire peoples converted or reverted, the hold-outs were marginalized and anathematized, and history moved on. It wouldn’t occur to even the most pious peasants that one had to make up one’s own mind on issues dimly understood so that he’d know which church to attend. No, the bishops made decisions and brought their flocks with them. And in most cases, life proceeded just as it had the day before for the typical churchgoer.
If Beck were calling on us to rally around The Book of Mormon, Carter (and Moore) would have a point. No, Beck made an appeal to universal principles against those who would say such principles do not exist, have been outmoded, or are irrelevant to our modern life. Is Beck’s call all that’s necessary for an individual’s salvation? No, of course not. But it is a step in the right direction.
Setting Chaput against Beck anticipates future conflicts that may not occur over esoteric principles that are largely incidental to the real thriving of Christendom. It’s intramural and destructive. It’s friendly fire.
Count me as a Chaputian in the great smackdown of The Bishop vs. The Talking Head. If only His Eminence would have me. As commenter Joe DeVet reports above, however, the good bishop would have none of it: “The only fan club worth joining is that of Jesus Christ.” Magnificat anima mea Dominum. For those with ears to hear, Beck was preaching the same message.
There is plenty in here for the typical Christian to disagree with, if you’re looking. Why are you looking?
I’m afraid that the shock jock’s recovering-drunk style forms the substance of his critics’ condemnations, and they are quick to dismiss without ever taking him at face value. Did Beck demonize someone at the rally? “Beck says we just need to agree on who the enemy is”? Where did he say or imply that? Did Beck ascend to the podium to make a Mormon case against trinitarian doctrine? Does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints believe that? Does it matter? How much of the critique against his project (and indeed the man himself) is sheer extrapolation?
We Christians are called to evangelize. Smart Christians pick their spots. Aggressive Christians thump the bible and roll down the aisle. Trained Christians pen scholarly essays. Famous Christians rally hundreds of thousands. Different styles for different audiences. Same message: “Christian, remember your dignity!” (St. Leo) That message is not incommensurate with “American, remember your dignity!” and only those spoiling for an unnecessary fight with his brother would insist it so.
September 2nd, 2010 | 8:48 am
As Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, said in his sermon to the Catholic members of the Bundestag:
“This kind of politics that declares the kingdom of God to be the result of politics and distorts faith into universal primacy of the political is by its nature the politics of enslavement; it is mythological politics…
“To renounce the mythical hopes of a society free of domination is not resignation but honesty that maintains men and women in hope. The mythical hope of a do-it-yourself paradise can only drive people into fear from which there is no escape; fear of the collapse of their promises and of the greater void lurks behind it; fear of their own power and its cruelty.
“So, the first service that Christian faith performs for politics is that it liberates men and women from the irrationality of the political myths that are the real threat of our time.
“It is of course always difficult to adopt the sober approach that does what is possible and does not cry enthusiastically after the impossible; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason. The cry for the large-scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passion of morality and adopting the pragmatism of the faint-hearted. But, in truth, political morality consists precisely of resisting the seductive temptation of the big words by which humanity and its opportunities are gambled away. It is not the adventurous moralism that wants itself to do God’s work that is moral, but the honesty that accepts the standards of man and in them does the work of man. It is not refusal to compromise but compromise that, in political things, is the true morality.”
September 2nd, 2010 | 9:10 am
Hi, Ray,
You wrote:
In any populace there are individual adherents of many different belief systems, most of which, except for the beliefs held by the majority, are inconsequential in terms of the policy of their government. In the case of Nazi Germany it appears the majority fell into one of two camps: those intimidated into silence and those for whom the state had become their god. Nazi Germany is a classic example of the disastrous consequences of the deification of the state. Yet there were those who boldly spoke out against the regime. One of them was Catholic Cardinal Clemens von Galen. Here is an excerpt from his sermon delivered on Sunday, August 3, 1941, in Münster Cathedral, in which he risked his life by openly condemning the Nazi euthanasia program.
The Nazis showed their appreciation of his remarks by beheading three of the Cardinal’s parish priests.
As for when human life or personhood begins, the former can be easily determined, the latter, personhood, cannot. From conception the child is obviously alive since it is growing, it is obviously human as it is the offspring of humans. Human life begins at conception. Personhood under the the law is not necessarily related to one’s being human, as corporations are legal persons. Human life, regardless of whether it meets the requirements of any of the many different proposals as to what really constitutes a “person” is still just that: human life. Taking the life of an innocent human being is wrong. If we can’t agree on that, then, as you said, “I don’t see how we can fruitfully continue this without it descending further into ‘Nuh-uh! Uh-huh! Nuh-uh! Uh-huh!’”
You wrote:
There are those who realize human life begins at conception and those who don’t want believe that but can’t explain why it isn’t so.
September 2nd, 2010 | 10:57 am
Centralization of power, and identification of “the state” with an individual – sure. Actual worship of the state? Less certain. Believing the state was carrying out the will of God? Absolutely. Whatever Hitler believed, it’s well-documented he claimed to be carrying out God’s will. A lot of courageous people disagreed, as you note… but not all of them were religious, either.
A human liver cell is alive, and by this definition is certainly “human life”. But it’s not a human being – note you skipped a step, jumping from one to the other. Consuming enough alcohol to kill a few liver cells isn’t murder, even though they are ‘human life’, because they don’t form a human being.
I linked to an argument where I made the case that, absent a human brain, an embryo can’t be a person, a human being. I’ve tried to “explain why it isn’t so”, but you haven’t engaged that.
There may not be an exact dividing line between ‘personhood’ and ‘not-personhood’ – in the same way that there’s no exact dividing line between ‘day’ and ‘night’. But the existence of twilight doesn’t make it impossible to say that some times are definitely ‘day’ and others are unambiguously ‘night’.
At some point after the brain starts to form, a person comes into being. When? I dunno. But I can be sure that, before the brain forms, there isn’t a person there.
September 2nd, 2010 | 1:25 pm
Anonymouse,
You wrote:
Pro-life doctor? Dr. Watts was accused, and rightly so, of preparing his colleagues to accept as inevitable the “new ethic” which was to replace the old. He was intellectually honest about this being momentous, but I think you have confused that intellectual honesty with his being Pro-Life. He wasn’t.
As for my remarks being a “personal rant against abortion,” it seems to me the fundamental problem that Glenn Beck and others are attempting to address but have not yet sufficiently articulated is the deification of the state. The deified state always ends up sanctioning the killing of innocent human beings. “Legalized” (actually, taking the lives of innocent human beings is intrinsically illegal) abortion-on-demand is a major manifestation of our transition from a state explicitly formed to protect our God-given, inalienable rights to one that pretends to have the authority to bestow and withdraw those rights.
Either we acknowledge God is God or pretend men are gods. Choosing the latter immediately raises the questions, “Who gets to play God with the lives of the rest of us? Federal Judges?” and “Why does Man playing God always end in the annihilation of some segment of the human family?” Choosing the former leaves no questions such as these, as we have already been clearly told, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Yes. Yes. Yes, Anonymouse, Christians have gravely sinned in the past. That is not news. It demonstrates only that failure to abide by God’s commands leads to disastrous consequences. What you don’t point out is that letting Man play God doesn’t really lead us to disaster, it is a disaster itself and imposes its lethal consequences upon us without our being led anywhere. History clearly demonstrates this. Haven’t you noticed that godless regimes (making themselves gods) have brought about the annihilation of vast segments of the human family on an scale unprecedented in human history? The sins of religion are completely overshadowed by such crimes.
There will, for all practical purposes, always either be “gods” or “God” ruling over us. The fundamental question contemporary society needs to address is “Who shall we let rule as a god over us?” God? Or Man? The answer is a “no-brainer” if one considers who it is that insists we not kill each other, and who it is that always insists it is actually legitimate social policy to kill innocent human beings. We can choose God and accept that there will inevitably be failures to live up to His command “Thou shalt not kill,” or we can just accept the claim of mere mortals playing God that killing innocent people is legitimate – and hope we don’t become the victims of whatever the current, state-sanctioned, lethal bigotry happens to be. Surely you can see the difference. Fifty million innocent children whose executions were sanctioned by the state would tell you there is a difference if they were able to do so.
Others who have read this far,
The Christians will eventually realize they are in the exact situation the Church was in in its infancy. Will Caesar be our god or will God be our God? Caesar has a necessary and legitimate role to play in society. That role is not to play God. To let him do so is just as idolatrous now as it was then. It will, no doubt, cost the Church as much now as it did then to put Caesar in his place – that cost will be far more than losing our tax exempt status. Glenn Beck (God bless him for unceasingly pointing out there is a fundamental problem – somebody needed to do that) doesn’t seem to quite get it. Archbishop Chaput, it seems to me, understands exactly what the problem is. Thank God.
The Church is currently faced with taking action or accepting annihilation – which seems to have been the case more often than not throughout its history. The annihilation of the Church is impossible, so action will inevitably be taken. Another Pope Urban II may be hidden within our ranks somewhere.
September 2nd, 2010 | 2:52 pm
Harry: Your entire premise that societies ruled by “man” are ok with the killing of “innocents”, while societies ruled by God are not is entirely bunk. Other than abortion, which is an issue where there is huge disagreement (despite what you apparently think) about whether it actually does count as the “killing of innocents”, you have no other examples about the immorality of ungodly societies compared to godly ones. When someone points out to you that societies ruled by God have killed just as many innocents as all other societies, you discount that evidence because those societies “didn’t count”. Those are the ones that either, as you claim for the Nazis, didn’t *really* believe in God, or as you claim for all other violent Christian societies, did believe in God, but were misguided in some unspecified way. You haver basically set up a claim that cannot be falsified — if a godly society is good, you’re right, and if a godly society is bad, you’re still right because, by fiat, that society isn’t *really* godly. Religious people are awfully good at setting up their positions to be impervious to any sort of evidence, and you’ve done a pretty masterful job of it here.
What actual evidence is there that, even on average, godly societies are better or more humane than ungodly ones? Surely, you would cite as evidence the illegality of abortions in godly societies and the frequent legality of the practice in ungodly ones, but that is going to have little sway with anyone who doesn’t see the issue as murder or genocide in the first place. The overall quality of life, level of happiness, longevity and economic prosperity, tolerance, impartiality of the legal system, human and civil rights, etc. are all at least as high in modern ungodly societies (including the United States, which like it or not, is a nation with strict separation of church and state, and is therefore “ungodly”), as in countries with mandated state religions or those that are explicitly Christian — for example, most Latin American countries have Catholicism somewhere in their constitution as a privileged religion, which does not prevent them from regular police brutality, institutional corruption, and other sorts of problems at every level of government. Again, I am not claiming their Catholicism *causes* these problems, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be doing anything to *prevent* them.
What is the evidence, other than abortion (since that evidence completely doesn’t count in my books), that godly societies are more moral or ethical than ungodly ones? Surely, there must be some evidence other than this one abortion issue, if your thesis is true.
September 2nd, 2010 | 9:05 pm
Joe, didn’t say Beck and Chaput were anywhere
close to even the same animals. I have no time for mindless OPIONIONS. Winners win
and loser lose. Talkers talk and doers do.
Have a great day;
September 2nd, 2010 | 10:46 pm
@King: Schism is not the same thing as heresy, and I would argue that schism is rarely if ever brought about by doctrinal differences – arcane or not. Schism is not really disagreement over what is right, but over who gets to decide. Schism, in other words, is political.
Where you see Beck identifying a baseline of shared religious value to promote moral common cause, others see a lowest common denominator appeal to cheap religious sentiment for the sake of building an emotionally-fortified political consensus.
There is certainly a place for developing a universal and ecumenical culture of righteousness, and I don’t doubt Beck’s sincerity, but I am uncomfortable with the ten-cent answers of a vague religiosity – especially one cloaked in martial sentimentality. Modern traditionalists tend to view godlessness as the great threat to righteous order, but godlessness is an extravagant sham. The real threat is, always has been, and always will be, idolatry.
September 2nd, 2010 | 10:48 pm
“Based on a lot of reading and thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that a brain is a necessary condition for being a person ”
Ray, I’d suggest continuing to read and think, because you’re not even in the ballpark. Your assumption is categorically mistaken. Personhood is an ontological status, not an accident conferred upon some prior substance after completion of some requirements criteria.
The ontological status of a thing is dependent upon what the thing “is,” not what is “has.” To extend the Lewis language you referenced, it deals with the “what,” not the “how.” In fact, it is absurd on its face to suggest that any “thing,” in order to be “the thing,” must first have or possess this or that other thing. “The thing” cannot possibly possess this or that unless it already exists to possess it! A person cannot “have” a brain unless the person exists apart from and prior to the brain.
A person does not need to have a brain to be a person, he simply needs to be (TO BE!) a person – he needs to exist as a being of personal nature (like… a human being). A person only needs a brain to be a person with a brain.
BTW – if you can’t differentiate between an organ and an organism, I’d have to seriously question the quality of all this reading you’ve exposed yourself to…
September 3rd, 2010 | 12:33 pm
Hi, Anonymouse,
Being asked, in effect, what difference Christianity makes is like being asked to explain why civilization is better than savagery – there is so much to say it is difficult to even know where to begin. I will limit myself to a few points.
There was a time when ordinary people would go to an arena to be entertained by watching people brutally murdering each other. Remember, this “entertainment” wasn’t a simulation by actors or computer graphics – it was the real thing. What kind of a cold-hearted society would find that entertaining? Those stone-cold hearts were warmed and transformed into hearts of flesh by Christianity. Such “entertainment” ended as Christianity transformed society.
What was wrong with such “entertainment” to begin with? It was legal. Caesar sanctioned it – end of discussion. That truly was the end of the discussion until Christianity established that there was a higher authority, one to which even Caesar was accountable.
The very notion of intrinsic human rights possessed by any and every human being, and Caesar’s obligation to protect those rights, sprang from Christianity placing inestimable value on each and every human life, due to the love God had shown everyone by suffering a brutal death for our sakes. Such behavior by a “god” was completely unexpected and shocking, as was his insisting that whatever we did to the very least human being, he would consider as having been done to himself on a great day of reckoning where our eternal fate would be determined. It became evident that only God, not a “god” would behave that way or propose such things.
The benefits to society of this new way for one to see another, seeing the other as one whose worth is such that it drew the Supreme Being down to Earth and onto a cross – are innumerable. Does knowing one is a friend of the king affect one’s behavior towards that person? So does believing that person, and every other person, is of incalculable worth to the King of Kings, Who will one day hold you accountable for the way you treated others.
Modern notions of what is commonly considered due to anyone and everyone weren’t always common notions. Those who attack Christianity have usually forgotten it is the main reason, if not the only reason, many such notions even exist.
The contemporary rejection of God’s authority by Caesar takes us back to where we started: It’s legal. Caesar sanctions it – end of discussion. But, much to the dismay of atheistic, eugenics promoting elitists, it’s not the end of the discussion. Caesar simply has no authority to sanction the killing of innocent human beings. All but the most hopelessly dense come to realize that it is humanity that bestows and withdraws the government’s right to exist; not the other way around.
September 3rd, 2010 | 4:32 pm
Harry: In your own words, it is difficult to know where to start. Christianity is almost certainly not solely responsible for stopping the gladiatorial games. The economical decline of the empire had a whole lot to do with it. Constantine tried to ban them on Christian ethical grounds, but later reversed his own ban, which hadn’t stuck with the people anyway. If that counts in your books, you will be impressed to know that Marcus Aurelius — who was decidedly not Christian — tried to ban the games about 150 years before Constantine, only to have his ban ignored by his son Commodus. Clearly, Christianity was not necessary for valuing human life, as Marcus was a stoic and a polytheist.
Or maybe you’re referring to the Christian monk Telemachus who got out into the middle of the Colosseum and tried to stop the fight. Of course, the Christian crowd stoned him to death right then and there, but I know, I know… they weren’t *really* Christians by the circular and unfalsifiable logic that if they were, they couldn’t have done such bad things.
Ok, ok. I’ll throw you a bone. Arguably, Christian conversion did make Roman emperors more pacifistic and led to the decline of the gladiatorial games. But goodness, so what? I never argued that Christianity *couldn’t* make someone more moral or couldn’t have a positive effect on a society. Buddhism, humanistic atheism, Islam, Judaism and Zoroastrianism can all have positive effects on people and institutions too — as can starting to go for long walks in the afternoons — and I can cite historical examples until I’m hoarse if you want. I asked you to provide evidence that *on average* Christian societies were more ethical than non-Christian ones, and you haven’t even come close to doing that. My argument was that Christianity is neither necessary for morality — that one can be moral and ethical without Christianity, as Marcus Aurelius was — and that it wasn’t sufficient — that if one is Christian, one isn’t necessarily moral. You have given absolutely no argument against either of these claims. You haven’t even argued against the weaker claim that Christianity does not make people moral *on average* (different from and less strong than both necessity and sufficiency).
You cited one somewhat debatable example from the ancient world, of how Christianity may have been partly responsible for ending an unethical practice, and conclude from that example that Christianity is absolutely necessary in all cases for creating ethical societies — that no society can be ethical without it — and furthermore, that not only is it necessary to make a society ethical initially, but that sustained belief in Christianity is necessary for the society not to return to unethical practices (which doesn’t necessarily follow even if the previous parts had been true — as Ray pointed out, Chemistry wouldn’t have come about without Alchemy, but belief in Alchemy is no longer necessary to sustain belief in Chemistry). Do you see the enormous gaps in your argument?
September 3rd, 2010 | 5:22 pm
Hi, Anonymouse,
You wrote:
“My argument was that Christianity is neither necessary for morality — that one can be moral and ethical without Christianity … that if one is Christian, one isn’t necessarily moral. You have given absolutely no argument against either of these claims.”
That is because I haven’t made those claims. I never claimed that there can be no morality without Christianity. I never claimed that one who professes to be Christian is therefore necessarily moral. I never said that “Christianity is absolutely necessary in all cases for creating ethical societies — that no society can be ethical without it.” It is you who say it. Your post furiously beats up only your straw man.
There is a basic goodness in all humanity as it is the creation of a good God. Any human culture, Christian or otherwise, has indications of this basic, inherent goodness. There is also a tendency to depravity and selfishness is all humanity. That is what Christianity addresses.
Instead of displaying your prowess at crushing your straw man in a debate, why don’t you tell us whether or not you believe the state has the authority to sanction the killing of innocent human beings? And why? If you believe the state does indeed have that authority, why is that moral? If not, on what principles do you base that belief?
September 3rd, 2010 | 6:57 pm
Harry –
If you’d read the link I gave, you’d know I’ve addressed this: I suspect that part of the problem is that we’re looking at the question wrong. I think consciousness isn’t a static ‘object’; it’s an active process. Consider wind – what is wind, exactly? It’s something air does. Is a tornado an object, or is it a process that happens within a particular volume of air? I think the mind isn’t something the brain has or creates – the mind is what the brain does. Or, as Frank Zindler put it, “To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car.”
September 3rd, 2010 | 7:27 pm
Hi, Ray,
John W. Gillis said that, not me.
Anyway, how do you respond to John’s point that a particular organ is not the essence of the organism?
It seems to me if an organism is living, which is obviously the case from conception onwards, and that organism is obviously human as it is the offspring of humans, it is was from its beginning human life, regardless of the state of development of that human life’s other attributes. I just don’t see how one can get around it. Human life begins at conception.
September 3rd, 2010 | 7:28 pm
Harry:
You just wrote: “I never claimed that there can be no morality without Christianity.”
This is in contrast to what you wrote before:
“It is very easy to take seriously the claim that a movement away from Christianity alters the moral fabric of society and much, much more. In fact, only extremely devout, fanatical atheism could keep one from doing so.”
“…his book makes it apparent that “Jew-gassing” as a social policy was only possible with a completely secularized, atheistic government not restricted by any higher law or any acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth of any and every human being.”
Here you are saying, that such bad policies could ONLY have come from an atheistic society, and thus could NOT have come from a Christian society.
If evil policy -> (the arrow means then) atheistic society
Therefore, by modus tollens, if not atheistic society (that is, a theistic and particularly a Christian one, in your view) -> not evil policy.
That’s the role the words “only possible” play in your above post. If it’s not what you meant, you ought to have been more careful in your phrasing.
You also just wrote: “I never claimed that there can be no morality without Christianity.”
And in your directly previous post, you wrote: “Modern notions of what is commonly considered due to anyone and everyone weren’t always common notions. Those who attack Christianity have usually forgotten it is the main reason, if not the only reason, many such notions even exist.” You then proceeded to argue that if Christianity were removed, we would go back to being savages. This sounds really an awful lot like a claim that Christianity is, in fact, necessary for morality.
I’m glad that you now call these positions a strawman, because as we can now hopefully agree, they are false — but they were indeed your positions a few short posts ago, and not something I invented.
I’m glad you asked what alternative there is to a God-given moral code. That creates some space for real discussion rather than the “my religion is the best” type of zealotry we’ve been playing with up to this point.
My own answer to this is that governments absolutely do not have the right to impose arbitrary and inhumane laws. But the reason has nothing to do with any decree from any deity.
My thinking on this has, for a while now, followed the philosophy of John Rawls. It is essentially just a fancy version of the Golden Rule — do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. I don’t think I can explain Rawls better than Wikipedia, so I’ll just copy and paste:
“What principles of justice would we agree to if we desired to cooperate with others, but would also prefer more of the benefits, and less of the burdens, associated with cooperation? Justice as fairness is thus offered to people who are neither saintly altruists nor greedy egoists. Human beings are, as Rawls puts it, both rational and reasonable. Because we are rational we have ends we want to achieve, but we are reasonable insofar as we are happy to achieve these ends together if we can, in accord with mutually acceptable regulative principles. But given how different our needs and aspirations often are, how can we find principles that are acceptable to each of us? Rawls gives us a model of a fair situation for making this choice (his argument from the original position and the famous veil of ignorance), and he argues that two principles of justice would be especially attractive.
We would, Rawls argues, affirm a principle of equal basic liberties, thus protecting the familiar liberal freedoms of conscience, association, expression, and the like… But we would also want to ensure that, whatever our station in society, liberties represent meaningful options for us. For example, formal guarantees of political voice and freedom of assembly are of little real worth to the desperately poor and marginalized in society. Demanding that everyone have exactly the same effective opportunities in life would almost certainly offend the very liberties that are supposedly being equalized. Nonetheless, we would want to ensure at least the “fair worth” of our liberties: wherever one ends up in society, one wants life to be worth living, with enough effective freedom to pursue personal goals.”
The reason societies ought to be fair — and this is Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance argument — you imagine that societal roles (who is rich, poor, white, black, intelligent, stupid, ill, healthy, politically powerful or marginalized, etc.) were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned to. Then you arrange society accordingly. This simple rule leads to democracy, probably to some form of meritocracy, and to freedom from political tyranny or arbitrary “killing of innocents”, as you put it. It seems to me to require only belief in the particular, somewhat (not absolutely) rational and reasonable nature of humans and not in any laws made by any sort of God.
It also seems like a rational, reasonable and coherent theory, which is inherently more appealing to me than something that posits an entity more powerful than me, who makes my only motivation to be good the carrot and the stick — heaven if I behave, and hell if I don’t. Humans, I believe, can and should be moral of their own decision that being moral is fair and right and necessary for the happiness of themselves and of others — not out of fear of punishment. A person who is moral because God will give him heaven if he is and hell if he isn’t, is no more moral than a child who refrains from stealing cookies because he knows that he’ll get one for dessert later if he’s good and get sent to bed without dinner if he’s bad.
September 3rd, 2010 | 8:07 pm
Oops — I messed up some of the copy-pasting in my previous post. I quoted you saying the same thing twice in both the necessity and sufficiency components, which obviously makes no sense. The first quote should be you saying,
“I never claimed that one who professes to be Christian is therefore necessarily moral.” This is the issue of sufficiency.
The little bit with the modus tollens transformation is what addresses that. The other quote there should go to address the second part, the issue of necessity. That is, this quote: “It is very easy to take seriously the claim that a movement away from Christianity alters the moral fabric of society and much, much more. In fact, only extremely devout, fanatical atheism could keep one from doing so.”
Should go after: You also just wrote: “I never claimed that there can be no morality without Christianity.”
That illustrates, of course, precisely how you did claim that Christianity is necessary for morality.
Sorry about that — mea culpa.
September 3rd, 2010 | 10:58 pm
Harry –
I think you’d find this interesting:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
Among other things, it makes the point that the murder rate in England is now about one fortieth the rate it was in the 1300s. Very few people argue that England is more religious, let alone more Christian, now than in the fourteenth century…
September 3rd, 2010 | 11:07 pm
Whoops, Harry, John, sorry for the misattribution. In any case…
No particular organ is the “essence of the organism”… but specific organs have unique functions. Only the heart can carry out the process of pumping blood. Only the stomach and intestines can carry out the process of digestion.
And only the brain can carry out the process of cognition and consciousness. We transplant hearts and livers and arms and faces and so forth without changing the person. If it were necessary, you probably wouldn’t object to having a heart transplant to save your life (I’m guessing; seems to be true of most people). You’d still think of yourself as you.
But seriously now – would you accept a brain transplant? What if your spouse accepted one. Would the person who came off the operating table still be them?
September 3rd, 2010 | 11:37 pm
Try this short reading list to help decide on whether Judeo-Christianity, not just Christianity, introduced the spiritual principles that made the Western world greater than all the static worlds of the Orient and the Far East:
“Without Roots, the West, Relativism,Christianity, Islam.” by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope, and Marcello Pera, philosopher, politician and (lovable) atheist.
“The Victory of Reason, How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success”
by Rodney Stark.
Incidentally, Glenn Beck’s thrust is towards a spiritual awakening which is vastly more vital than a mere religious revival. Beck must be especially sensitive to the notion of spiritual principles since he admits he is a recovering alcoholic and so is likely to be practicing the spiritual discipline of the 12 Steps.The primacy of the spirit in the Catholic Church is what lets it surmount all the dreadful sins of its earthly leaders and keeps the Gates of Hades from prevailing.
September 4th, 2010 | 12:04 am
“The main enemies of equality have often been various churches, whose clergy is often more educated and more powerful than the public, and for whom power-equalizing systems and revolutions were not beneficial.”
@Anonymouse: You talk a lot but don’t say a lot. You claim the playing field on ethics is level and then you make this statement. Like I said you need to read more history, particularly of the revolutions I mentioned. This was the claim of all three. None of them brought equality. And I wasn’t referring to deaths from battle but rather things like the guillotine and the firing squad, not to mention mass starvation due to central planning.
The American revolution, somehow avoided those deaths but it wasn’t due to separation of church and state. Perhaps it had to do with the leadership being the wealthy, so instant equality wasn’t their goal.
Regarding American separation of church and state, you also need to read your history. We were distinctly a Christian nation but specifically Protestant until WWII. Some states had state religions well into the 1800s.It’s open for debate but I think the slow expansion of political equality has stood us in good stead. We all had a chance to get used to it and figure out what it meant. Unlike France, for example, we didn’t suffer through an emperor, a restoration and a second emperor. Unlike Mexico, we didn’t experience a single party (PRI) for 50 years. The process, of course, is ongoing.
Returning to separation of church and state, reread the Declaration of Independence and remember who gets the lion’s share of credit for its writing. Then read a bit of the gospels and see if you can find the story around “Render unto Caesar”. Modern “separation” is not directly related to either origin but an invention of 1947. Over time it has become a club to cow religion for political reasons. Having come to adulthood during the joyous struggle of the 60s for civil rights, I believe modern ‘separation’ is leading us the other way with new elites and new definitions of the great unwashed, not to mention old ones like yours above. Martin Luther King, Jr was a sinner like all of us Christians but also a Baptist minister and not a politician.
If you examined your assumptions with more care, your conclusions would benefit from your logic.
September 4th, 2010 | 8:46 am
Hi, Anonymouse,
Again, I simply never claimed that there can be no morality without Christianity, and never claimed that one who professes to be Christian is therefore necessarily moral. You are entitled to your opinion that other remarks of mine, which I think are substantially different from making those claims, are the equivalent of making those claims.
Nor did I “argue that if Christianity were removed, we would go back to being savages.” Where did you get that?
Again, there is a basic goodness in humanity due to its being created by a good God that results in a built-in natural morality. There is also an inclination to depravity and inordinate selfishness in humanity. Christianity deals with this.
You wrote:
In order to avoid zealotry, one should be a Catholic because one thinks being a Baptist is best? Or one should be an atheist because one thinks being a Lutheran is best? One should hold the beliefs one truly thinks are best and be able to articulate why one believes what one does. That is not zealotry. That is common sense.
Does your “fancy version of the Golden Rule” result in the conviction that the state has no authority to sanction the killing of innocent human beings? Or does it not? You never explicitly stated your beliefs in that regard; the closest you came was saying, “governments absolutely do not have the right to impose arbitrary and inhumane laws.” Is state sanctioned killing of innocent human beings “arbitrary and inhumane”?
You wrote:
I certainly agree with you that fear of punishment and desire for reward are not the highest of motives for one’s behavior. For Christians the motive for their behavior should become a loving response to the love of God. Even so, it is certainly reasonable to take the possibility of hell into consideration. If one lives as though there is a God and an eternal reward or punishment for their behavior and it turns out there is no such thing, one has only lost a lifetime that might have been lived differently. If one lives as though there is no God and no possibility of eternal punishment and then finds out doing so was a mistake, one has ruined eternity for one’s self. Many people get started on their Christian journey by seeing it as the safe bet, and only later does their motive become a loving response to the love of God.
This is like a child who doesn’t ride his trike in the street simply because Dad had convinced him, via his behind, never to do that. His obedience is currently due to fear of punishment but one day he will understand the love and wisdom of his father and his obedience will become true consent and a response to his father’s love.
September 4th, 2010 | 10:50 am
Hi, Frank,
You wrote:
Exactly.
September 4th, 2010 | 11:35 am
Hi, Ray,
You wrote:
I think you addressing personhood here. The question is whether human life begins at conception, and whether the law should sanction taking innocent human life. If the law grants legal personhood to lifeless corporations, then legal personhood is not necessarily related to any biological attribute or a state of consciousness. So, the personhood of a newly conceived human life is not really the point. The point is that human life should be protected by law. All of us are biological human beings at different stages of development. Consciousness increases as we develop and often diminishes as we grow old, or is abruptly ended as the result of some accident. It is as wrong to murder one who is currently in a coma, or is suffering from acute senility, or is merely soundly sleeping, as it is to murder one who is fully conscious and alert. Human life should be protected by law regardless of the abilities or inabilities associated with the state of its current condition or stage of development. This protection must begin when human life begins – at conception.
September 4th, 2010 | 2:42 pm
Mike: I may not be saying a lot, but we all have our sins :)
The US was not a protestant nation — it was a nation predominantly made up of protestants, while still practicing separation of church and state. The SCOTUS decision of 1947 only extended the same separation that existed in the federal government to state governments. It did not fundamentally alter the character of the separation of powers.
The “Render unto Caesar” bit can be interpreted in a very large number of ways, most of which have nothing to do with separation of church and state. Once again, Wikipedia to the rescue, about the myriad plausible interpretations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar…
But even if we decide to say that what Jesus really meant is some modern version of separation of church and state, like the kind practiced in the US, certainly Christianity did not have this influence on anyone for, quite literally, almost two millenia. It is a pretty tough sell to claim that Christianity is somehow directly responsible for the modern advent of separation of church and state given that gigantic time gap. Certainly, separation of powers was seen as a policy virtue only when societies started to become less — not more — religious and Christian.
And can you please explain what revolutions and their bloody nature are supposed to have to do with the relationship between Christianity and morality? I really don’t understand why you think that’s relevant.
I know you think Christianity is very important for maintaining the fabric of our society, but telling me that over and over in a few different ways isn’t going to be any more convincing than the first time you said it. You need to make a coherent argument as to why, and neither you nor harry, nor anyone else here has done that yet.
September 4th, 2010 | 3:30 pm
“If you’d read the link I gave, you’d know I’ve addressed this:”
Ray: No, you do not address my criticism at all. Whether you speak of the brain as an object (as you initially did here), or move the goalposts and speak of self-awareness as a “process,” neither can possibly be constitutive of the self, which must exist a priori in order for it to “have” the object or “do” the process. (That Zindler quote, btw, is beyond incoherent.)
Your rant is a 4,000 word collection of errors, logical fallacies, and sometimes bizarre non sequiturs. There are simply too many errors to address in a reasonable space of time. I will say, regarding Max, that in his innocence, the boy intuitively has a better grasp of reality than his father, whose perception of reality is naturally shaped by his motives and ideology. As they say, kids say the darnedest things…
Your basic argument, as I see it, is this:
Premise One: Personhood is self-awareness (intrinsically false i.e. self-contradictory – selfhood must precede self-awareness).
Premise Two: Self-awareness is a strictly organic function of the brain (false, but of little consequence under the circumstances).
Conclusion: A brain is necessary for personhood (false – even if Premise Two were correct, the preceding premise is fatally flawed).
Application: It is morally licit to kill human beings whose brain development has not reached the state of capacity for organic self-awareness (a savage monstrosity that can be rationalized only using tortured logic).
Your personhood is who you are – your self. Your humanity is what you are – your substance, or nature. Your abilities and characteristics and whatnot – even your most basic capacities – are all secondary to your fundamental reality as a human person.
The clearest way to see this, regarding the darkness of the abortion problem, is to answer a very simple series of questions: Do you have a father? At what precise point in time did your father become your father? At your birth? At some milestone in your brain development? When your mother said you could be born?
It is beyond any doubt whatsoever that your father became your father when you were conceived. That was his last contribution for quite some time. And the very moment he became your father, you became his son. You were a person from the moment of your conception – a person with a father. If your mother had procured an abortion – at any time during gestation – it is you, Ray Ingles, who would have been killed – regardless of whether you had yet been so named, or whatever you might imagine about the experience. “Potential” people don’t have fathers, because they don’t exist – they are only potentialities. Potentialities are intellectual constructs, not some guy’s son.
It is not just unique life that unquestionably begins at conception, it is personhood, which always exists in relationship to other persons (even in the Godhead!).
September 4th, 2010 | 5:34 pm
If you look up the provenance of that decision, I think you’ll agree with me it’s rather shaky. But that’s a distraction – you are arguing that the law as it stands now is at variance with reality. You can hardly knock me for arguing the same thing.
And yes, of course I’m arguing about personhood. I said so. To quote: A human liver cell is alive, and by this definition is certainly “human life”. But it’s not a human being – note you skipped a step, jumping from one to the other. Consuming enough alcohol to kill a few liver cells isn’t murder, even though they are ‘human life’, because they don’t form a human being. I linked to an argument where I made the case that, absent a human brain, an embryo can’t be a person, a human being.
When there’s any ambiguity, yes. History has shown that there actually is a ‘slippery slope’ when we start trying to define people as ‘not really human’. However – as I also said before – There may not be an exact dividing line between ‘personhood’ and ‘not-personhood’ – in the same way that there’s no exact dividing line between ‘day’ and ‘night’. But the existence of twilight doesn’t make it impossible to say that some times are definitely ‘day’ and others are unambiguously ‘night’.
At some point after the brain starts to form, a person comes into being. When? I dunno. But I can be sure that, before the brain forms, there isn’t a person there.
September 4th, 2010 | 9:57 pm
John W Gillis –
Don’t hold back or anything. :)
If someone thinks I’m wrong, I don’t take offense to them pointing it out. If I am wrong, I’d like to know about it. However, I do ask that you be careful about accusing me of dishonesty. You seem to have misunderstood me, though, so perhaps it seems that way to you.
The brain is an object. And consciousness, self-awareness, is a process that the brain does. I never said that self-awareness was something a person “had” or “did”. The self doesn’t “have” or “do” the process – the self is the process.
Consider one of the analogies I’ve presented, the tornado. Is wind something a tornado has? No, wind is what constitutes a tornado. You don’t have to have wind before you have a tornado – wind in a certain configuration is a tornado. But to have wind, you do need air. No tornadoes in a vacuum.
So when I say, “Personhood requires a brain”, I’m saying something like “a tornado requires air”. The very comment where I said that, I linked to a more detailed explanation – one that I drew upon later, when I said that personhood, self-awareness, is a process the brain does, in the same way a tornado is something air does.
At what precise point in time does ‘day’ become ‘night’? What if there is no sharp dividing line?
The potential for me certainly existed at that point. But if – humor me for just a moment – “I” am a complex dance carried out by my brain, then I didn’t exist at conception. At some point later in development, I did. When? Very hard to say with what we know now. Like ‘day’ and ‘night’, there may not be a precise moment when “I” came into being.
But just as we can say that there weren’t any tornadoes on Earth before it had an atmosphere, we can also say there was no person present in the gastrula that became me until there was a brain present. If I’m right, that is.
(BTW, I don’t say that self-awareness definitely is “a strictly organic function of the brain”. I explicitly noted that the brain may not be a sufficient condition – though I’ve seen no good evidence otherwise – but it’s a necessary one, so far as I can tell.)
September 5th, 2010 | 8:56 pm
Harry: Since we agree now that religion in general and Christianity in particular are neither necessary nor sufficient for a moral society — nor that it even increases a society’s morality *on average*, I hope you will temper shouts of woe and doom about the horrible consequences of our society’s secularization, or of all of the irreplaceable good Christianity has done.
I like your story of how morality can be instilled as fear of harsh punishment and later become an inner drive. It’s similar to Kohlberg’s (probably incorrect, but fun) story of the moral development of children. The only issue I have with it is that I see no need whatsoever for God in the equation. I have never been a religious person in my life, and I went through a similar trajectory growing up — first I didn’t steal because I knew dad would smack me, and then I didn’t steal because I realized it was wrong.
You wrote:
Does your “fancy version of the Golden Rule” result in the conviction that the state has no authority to sanction the killing of innocent human beings? Or does it not? You never explicitly stated your beliefs in that regard; the closest you came was saying, “governments absolutely do not have the right to impose arbitrary and inhumane laws.” Is state sanctioned killing of innocent human beings “arbitrary and inhumane”?
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, but I thought it was completely obvious from the Rawlsian position I espoused. Yes, absolutely, the state-sanctioned killing of innocent humans (or, in my opinion, not-innocent humans, for that matter) is morally wrong. The veil of ignorance argument leads to this conclusion quite naturally, from an entirely secular perspective. If you had to arrange society such that you did not know ahead of time which position you would end up in, would you arrange it such that state-sanctioned killings of innocents would be ok? The obvious answer is, of course not — you might end up being one of the innocents the state sanctions killing, and that would be bad and unfair.
And before you can yell “gotcha” with the abortion issue, let me remind you that we differ on whether we consider a fetus to be a human.
September 6th, 2010 | 12:28 pm
Ray, you are missing my point, which is that your basic premise is inherently self-contradictory. You are saying that self-awareness is a process, and that the self is the process. In other words, the self is the awareness of itself, which is logically incoherent. The self must be logically prior to awareness of itself – there is no way around that in a rational universe. The self can no more be the awareness of itself than a thing can be the reflection of itself.
No, there is no such thing as a tornado. A tornado is an intellectual abstraction that is used by intelligent creatures to communicate an idea corresponding to a natural phenomenon involving air, dirt, and whatnot in motion according to a particular range of possibilities. The air and the dirt are real; the tornado is nothing but an idea. Likewise, wind does not have real existence, but is an idea used to describe the phenomenon of air in motion. Unlike tornadoes, people have real existence, and are not mere ideas expressing phenomena. The self cannot be a process, because a process is merely perceived phenomena – it is an abstraction. It would be reductionist – but at least logically coherent – to call self-awareness a process, but the self (the subject) cannot be confused with self-awareness (subjectivity), as I’ve described above. That is your first and fundamental error – everything else if window dressing.
Again, there are no such things as day and night. Days and nights do not come into being. They are ideas used by intelligent creatures to manage their apprehension of time in a way that conforms to the experience of alternating light and darkness attributable to the rotation of the earth. They are perceptions, not realities. They are abstractions.
You are displaying either a fundamental inability to distinguish meaningfully between reality and perception, or you are insinuating that you think people are not real; that people are merely experienced phenomena, and do not really exist.
At whose conception? But wait… Huh? You think you are a dance? ROTFL! Would you be offended if I swapped a vowel? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Seriously though, again, a dance is nothing but an abstraction – it is not a real thing. Now, dances differ from the other phenomena you’ve compared yourself to in the sense that, while the others represent perceptions of nature, a dance is by definition creatively ordered; it is creatively ordered movement. In other words, it needs a choreographer (even if the choreography is improvised), and it needs a dancer (even if the dancer and the choreographer is the same). To speak metaphorically of random and non-expressional movement as “dance” might serve some poetic purpose, but it is obscurantist if it is intended to usurp the meaningfulness inherent in the term for the sake of respectability…
Nonetheless, it’s silly to be speaking of human beings as dances or tornadoes. Human beings are real, not phenomena; not phantasma. This shouldn’t need explication. It’s charming when babies playing peek-a-boo think that things they can’t see are no longer there. It’s less charming when older children display the same folly in assuming that anything outside of their experience must either be impossible or irrelevant – we usually respond by trying to convince them they’re not the center of the universe. But it is less charming still to see grown adults stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the difference between reality and perception, especially when the limits of perception are being explicitly manipulated to rationalize unspeakable evils.
You are your real self, not your perception of yourself. You were not created by your brain; you – brain and all – were created by your father – that’s what fatherhood means.
September 6th, 2010 | 7:32 pm
John Gillis: For someone who has apparently taken at most one or two intro philosophy classes, you might want to be a little bit more careful about accusing people of glaring and obvious fundamental errors in their reasoning and ROTFLing at their arguments. You are making a whole slew of assumptions without any attempt to justify them.
For example, please explain what is your criterion of being “real” versus “just an idea”? Why is the concept of a person “real”, while the concept of a tornado, or of day and night, “just an idea”?
Please spend more time making arguments and less time trying to win by ridiculing your interlocutor.
September 6th, 2010 | 9:18 pm
John W Gillis – You know what, you’re right. I have been guilty of at least some imprecise phrasing, and my thesis could be better formulated. But, first off:
Well, ‘tornado’ is a name for “a natural phenomenon”, but if you’re going to be so pedantic as to refuse to ‘dereference the pointer’ (to use computer-speak) and not allow me to use names to refer to things, then I don’t see much point in proceeding.
Sure, a tornado ‘exists’ on a different ontological level than dirt and air; it exists as a pattern and process of dirt and air. But to say that a tornado thereby doesn’t exist is obscurantist nearly to the point of solipsism. A lion exists on the same level, as a pattern and process of organic molecules.
I don’t like Philip K. Dick’s fiction much, but I think he made an excellent point when he said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” If a tornado or a lion were approaching you, I submit you would be rather unwise to disbelieve in them and say, “Oh, that doesn’t really exist.” Otherwise, very soon you might not exist anymore.
So, with that established, I’m perfectly willing to claim the same ontological status as a tornado or a lion – albeit rather more complex than either, hopefully more self-aware than each, certainly more verbal than both combined – as a pattern and process of more fundamental entities.
But a tornado isn’t a person, and a lion probably isn’t either. I contend that a ‘person’ is a process of the correct organization and/or sufficient complexity to exhibit the capacity for self-awareness. Is that clear enough?
Further, the essential features of this process happen – so far as we are able to tell – exclusively in the brain, and not in any other organs of the body. Even if the brain turns out not to be sufficient, and some other (e.g. nonmaterial) component is required for self-awareness, the brain has shown itself – by a long history of neurological research – to be necessary for the cognition and thinking needed for self-awareness.
Harry declined to give a definite answer, but I’ll ask you – would you accept a brain transplant? If your spouse had one, would you accept the person who came of the table as being the person you married?
If the rest of my body were destroyed, but my brain was kept alive by some complex machinery, I’d say that I was in dire straits, but still alive. On the other hand, if my brain were utterly destroyed but the rest of my body were preserved, I contend that I would cease to exist.
September 6th, 2010 | 11:13 pm
Hi, Ray,
Let me take another crack at it. ;o)
You wrote:
Fine. You can be sure. The simple fact is that millions of people aren’t sure of that and never will be. What constitutes a “person” just can’t be scientifically nailed down. Besides that, being a person under the law doesn’t always mean much. Until the 14th Amendment was enacted, some of those the Constitution referred to as persons could be owned, bred, bought and sold like animals:
What is needed is an acknowledgment that regardless of the various opinions of what a person is and what that means under the law, there are some self-evident truths that need to be considered:
- Humanity preceded the state.
- Humanity brought the state into being to serve itself
- The state exists for humanity, not humanity for the state.
- Humanity bestows and withdraws the state’s right to exist.
- When the state pretends to have the authority to bestow and withdraw humanity’s right to exist, humanity has an obligation to alter or abolish it.
This is not new thinking. Read the Declaration of Independence again if you haven’t done so lately. What or who is or isn’t really a “person” isn’t the point. The point is that either the entire human family is protected by law or simply being human isn’t enough to merit the protection of law, which endangers all of us. It is painfully obvious that every immoral, inhumane, human rights violating catastrophe involves those in power withdrawing legal personhood from the victims of their current bigotry, or legalizing treatment of them such that their being referred to as “persons” is meaningless, as in the case of slavery in the United States, and then dehumanizing them with propaganda. What is needed is an acknowledgment that every human life deserves the protection of law and any state that doesn’t acknowledge that has lost its right to exist and should be altered or abolished.
September 7th, 2010 | 1:29 am
Hi, Anonymouse,
You wrote:
Well, I don’t think it will really surprise you if I say I don’t think our agreement is quite as substantial as you seem to think it is. ;o)
Again, there is a natural, built-in morality in humanity. There is also in humanity an inclination to depravity and inordinate selfishness that Christianity addresses. So, all societies can have this basic morality, and all societies can fall into depravity. Christian societies do not fall into depravity to the extent that they are genuinely Christian.
Christianity’s radical insistence on the inestimable value of each and every human being is a continual pressure in Christian societies for reform where there is some segment of humanity that has been written off due to bigotry;it works to rid society of any practice that violates human dignity. It rid society of gladiatorial games. The only real way to do that was to destroy the demand for them, which is exactly what Christianity did. Consider this passage from the Confessions of St. Augustine:
You wrote:
Explain to me why a fetus is not human. I am always interested in how bigotry towards a segment of the human family will be articulated.
September 7th, 2010 | 4:57 pm
Disbelieve? What in creation does that have to do with anything I’ve said? I said a tornado is not a thing; it is an intellectual abstraction. It is not concrete. You can’t talk to it. You can’t distract it with raw meat or shiny objects. Nor can you pick it up and throw it – no matter how big you are. It is a description of circumstances, not something ontological which participates in being. A lion, on the other hand, is a thing – a living thing. It can be killed.
To suggest that a lion and a tornado share the same ontological status is absurd. A tornado really is the air and dirt. A lion is not the cells that make it up – it is a being (an organism). Even though it will consist of entirely different cells at different times, it will at all times be a lion, because it possesses the nature of a lion. And it will be the same particular lion – again, regardless of cellular inventory – from the moment of its generation as a unique organism of the lion species, to the time it ceases to exist as an organism (dies) – even though the physical structure will still be intact at that time, replete with living cells.
The language gets more than a little dicey here. First off, person and process are two very different kinds of realities – John is a person; bookkeeping is a process – so there’s no way to make this work, regardless of whether or not you’re ever able to produce a convincing-sounding metaphorical analogy for it. Your concept of person lacks a subject, which is the whole point of personhood (“the capacity for self-awareness” being an adequate placeholder for subjectivity, which is necessarily the defining characteristic of a subject, or a person). A process is not a subject. It is either a) a series of events, or b) the idea corresponding to a series of events.
More plainly, personhood is a characteristic of a certain kind of being – one capable of self-awareness. A person is a being of the right kind – a human being, for example. Abortion advocates often inadvertently stumble on this when they try to argue that a human fetus is not a human being, or not “really human,” or “fully human,” etc. But the assertion that fetal human organisms – that is, fetal human beings – are not human beings is absurd on its face. You may as well argue that green tomatoes are not tomatoes because they’re not red, and tomatoes are characteristically red. And this could all be a quaint academic squabble if it weren’t for all those dead … beings…
Processes are not beings. Beings can participate in processes, or observe them, or create them, but they can’t be reduced to processes to the exclusion of their fundamental, ontological existence. I can say that my life is a process – and that is true in certain literal and metaphorical senses – but it is I, the subject, who can say that about something I identify as mine. I am not the process of my life; I am the subject of it.
The brain transplant conundrum is a non-starter. I see not reason to anticipate that humanity will ever master the complexity involved, even at the banal, neurological level. Nor do I see any reason to doubt that the brain is such a constitutive aspect of the human organism at both the physiological and ontological levels that such monkeying – even if it could be pulled off technically – would result in monstrous consequences.
But the correlation between brain function and personal expression does not translate into neurological causation of personal being – that is completely upside-down logic. The person is the being, including all aspects of the organism (as well as non-organic reality, but I’ll leave that curtain drawn). A brain transplant would represent a radical violation of someone’s personal integrity, but you shouldn’t commit the fundie error of confusing meaningful metaphorical speech (“he’s not the same person,” meaning he has changed significantly) for literal truth (as if some ontological transmigration of persons or something took place). From an ontological perspective, I think people should be thinking harder about the whole organ transplant business anyway – we’re creating a viewpoint of man as a collection of commodified parts, which seems to strike against a proper sense of human dignity. In any event, I’m highly confident the result of any such attempt would be a corpse, not a “different person.”
September 7th, 2010 | 9:41 pm
But… a tornado consists of entirely different “air and dirt” at different times, too, yet retains “the nature of a” tornado. (Even more so for a waterfall or a river…) Just like a lion, its organization can be disrupted. (It’s more difficult with a tornado, sure, but a nuke would do it.)
You mean the time the pattern is disrupted to the point where it can no longer maintain itself?
Look, plenty of people have been convinced that there must be something extra special about life. Organic chemistry was originally the study of the chemistry of living things, and it was a major shock when Wöhler synthesized urea, an organic compound, from inorganic precursors. Later, J. S. Haldane insisted that no ‘mechanism’ could account for inheritance, but that was before we’d sussed out DNA.
Right now, the boundary’s been pushed back to cognition and awareness. Many people insist, like you, that no ‘process’ or ‘arrangement’ could possibly produce that… but if you look into neurology (a brief reading list follows the link that started this thread of discussion) you’ll find that damaging the brain damages awareness. If something else besides the brain is involved (and the window where that could operate is shrinking) the action of the brain is still a necessary component of the… process.
September 7th, 2010 | 9:48 pm
We’re engaging in a philosophical discussion, and you’re not willing to allow thought experiments? Oddly enough, I didn’t see you objecting to Mr. Carter’s thought experiments, at least one of which was equally fanciful:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/09/06/freezing-dead-fetuses-vs-freezing-live-embryos/
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/09/06/the-pig-that-wants-to-be-eaten-2/
You should let him know that he can’t draw any useful conclusions from such whimsies.
September 8th, 2010 | 3:17 pm
Harry: You wrote,
Again, there is a natural, built-in morality in humanity. There is also in humanity an inclination to depravity and inordinate selfishness that Christianity addresses. So, all societies can have this basic morality, and all societies can fall into depravity. Christian societies do not fall into depravity to the extent that they are genuinely Christian.
Since we are agreed that being a Christian society (at least, in the modern world, but through the vast majority of history as well) did not make a society more moral on average, your statement can be taken one of two ways.
You could mean that genuinely Christian societies are infallible when/if they exist, but are almost non-existent. Certainly modern American society didn’t stem from any particularly moral Christian stock — the British empire from whom Americans are an extended cultural offshoot committed as many crimes and atrocities as any other large empire, and so we must conclude they were never “really” Christian in the sense that matters for morality. In this case, we certainly have nothing to worry about if our society becomes less Christian — it was only ever nominally Christian to begin with. Whatever moral depravity we have now doesn’t come from any recent turning away from Christianity. If we’ve become secularized, we have only become in name what we always were in spirit.
In other words, it is false that maintaining Christianity is necessary for the fabric of our society on this view.
The other thing you could mean by the statement I quoted is the more radical view that any society that does so much as declare itself to be Christian, or whose citizens regularly attend church or engage in other Christian practices, is thereby made more ethical. Of course, this view is disproved by the vast majority of Christian history, as I hope we’ve come to agree.
Once again, you have given one semi-convincing example of Christianity making a society more moral — the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome. This happened over 2000 years ago, and if it is the only example you can come up with, I can only conclude that ever since then, no society has been “genuinely Christian” (in your words) and therefore Christianity has largely been irrelevant to the moral fabric of every society that has considered itself Christian in modern history.
You wrote:
Explain to me why a fetus is not human. I am always interested in how bigotry towards a segment of the human family will be articulated.
No. Sorry. I’m not going to engage in this conversation with someone who accuses me of bigotry in the same sentence as asking for an explanation of my position. I also have way too much to do to rehash pro-choice arguments that are publicly available on Google. If you are genuinely interested in why some perfectly rational and moral people might disagree with you about abortion, start with the wikipedia page on the abortion debate and follow some of the sources cited there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Personhood
I will say that I am consistently amazed by how Christians who consider themselves so humane — such great defenders of morality and human life — seem to care extremely little for the life, health and happiness of women who want to have abortions. While there is some disagreement about whether fetuses should be considered people, there is certainly no disagreement that pregnant women are people, yet for some reason their quality of life (and sometimes their life itself, in cases where pro-life advocates are against abortion even when the health of the mother is threatened) matters a whole lot less than the life or death of a single egg cell the moment after it’s been fertilized. I am infuriated by that, frankly. It’s the height of callousness, hypocrisy, and undeserved moral superiority.
September 8th, 2010 | 9:31 pm
Are you serious? Can you truly not distinguish between a being as-such and either the elemental particles of its makeup, on the one hand, or, on the other, the purely abstract intellectual conceptualization of inert elemental phenomena? We’ve all met people who can’t make out the forest for the trees, but I really can’t tell if you’re just pulling my leg or not…
BTW – have you considered how your cosmology (with people occupying the same ontological strata with animals, tornadoes, rivers, etc.) resembles those religions of the most base and superstitious primitives? They, too, rejected the evidence for God,and believed that irrational forces stood behind the world. They would have used a word more like “spirit” for what you call “process,” but I think there is considerable resemblance overall.
Of course brain damage damages awareness! The brain is the organ organisms use for mental processes! And if you poke a hole in your coffee cup, it won’t do a very good job of holding coffee anymore – does that mean coffee comes from cups? …But isn’t confusing the self with (self-)awareness precisely the error I called you out on two days ago, which you then made noises about abandoning as “at least … imprecise phrasing”? Have you repented of your repentance, or were you just ducking the argument at the time in order to set up shop elsewhere?
Do ya think? Plenty of people, no less? Look, if this kind of thinking truly represents your grasp on reality, and you’re not just fraudulently trolling for outrage from the Christians who frequent this site, then you may want to give your pal Oliver Sacks a call, and tell him you have a new bestseller for him, because the man who mistook his wife for a hat has absolutely nothing on the man who mistakes his wife for a pattern.
September 8th, 2010 | 10:50 pm
A difference in degree can become a difference in kind. Compare the set “|C|=2″ (the unit circle of complex numbers) with the boundary of the Mandelbrot Set. They are both – from one perspective – single-dimensional lines. But the Mandelbrot Set boundary is – quite literally – so complex it gains a whole extra dimension. There are patterns, and then there are patterns…
Okay, I’ve contended that items like humans and lions and are the the patterns and processes rather than the material components (since, as you note, the material components can be completely replaced and the pattern/process still exists). Then I note that some of these processes are self-aware, that some processes have a sub-process that’s aware of the whole… and that’s inconsistent?
I know you disagree, but… where is the “being as-such” if it’s not the organization of the materials we see? Help me out here. Just saying, “Is not!” is less than useful. It’s not the material, you concede that can be completely replaced without changing the “being as-such”… so what is it?
What if I don’t think less of my wife for thinking of her as a (fabulously, wondrously complex – and dare I say, beautiful) pattern, and instead simply have more respect for what patterns and processes can be?
September 8th, 2010 | 11:12 pm
John Gillis: You really are infuriating in how little you know and how much you pretend to know. Do you know the first thing about cognitive science or philosophy of mind? This particularly gets my goat because I’m a working research scientist in these fields. Your ignorance wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t coupled with the most astounding (and un-Christian) hubris.
read The Mind’s I by Dan Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter. Read just about any work in the field. You will quickly realize that thinking of the mind as a process and a pattern resulting from the particular organization of the brain is the dominant view among people who have thought about this at all. Certainly, there are interesting debates and contradictory opinion, but these arguments are themselves sophisticated and deep, and no one in the field (which has its share of religious people, by the way) has ever supposed that the notion was ridiculous or untenable on its face as you claim.
You wrote: “Are you serious? Can you truly not distinguish between a being as-such and either the elemental particles of its makeup, on the one hand, or, on the other, the purely abstract intellectual conceptualization of inert elemental phenomena? We’ve all met people who can’t make out the forest for the trees, but I really can’t tell if you’re just pulling my leg or not…”
Ridicule and incredulity are not a good way to debate. The fact that you still haven’t actually provided any argumentation for your position makes me further convinced that you don’t actually have any. Of course, ridicule is one place to run to when that happens.
September 9th, 2010 | 9:02 am
Hi, Anonymouse,
So, you are infuriated. I saw a picture of a big trash can filled with dead babies. They were big babies – late term abortions. I have held many a wiggling baby in my arms no larger than those in the trash can. Should one be infuriated by dead babies in trash cans? Or is the explanation that it is merely “fetal tissue” in the trash can sufficient? Or that one doesn’t “consider a fetus to be a human”? Do such statements deal with the situation realistically? I saw a picture of a truckload of inmate bodies taken in the Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation. Would calling the contents of the truck “adult tissue” be realistic? Or stating that one didn’t consider them human? Or would one making such statements be displaying his bigotry?
Nuremberg War Crimes consultant Dr. Leo Alexander pointed out that the Nazis “made a fetish of euphemisms” so they could deceive others and rationalize away what they were really doing. Deep down, they knew exactly what they were doing and they knew it was wrong. This was due to the basic morality built-in to all humanity I mentioned earlier. No doubt, their bigotry suppressed that basic morality and rationalized it away, but that didn’t eliminate their guilt. Bigotry may decrease culpability, especially when one has had it ingrained in them from their youth, but I don’t think one is ever completely exonerated by it because one has also possessed that basic, built-in morality from one’s youth.
That one is just making a “choice” or a “selection” is an effective euphemism because everybody wants to be free to make choices and selections. It works until others find out just what it is that one is choosing or selecting. “Selection” was a euphemism used by the Nazis. Nobody was killed at Auschwitz, Treblinka or Dachau, there were only those who underwent a process of “selection” in those places. The word “selection” is as innocent sounding as the word “choice.”
Let’s consider what is being chosen in a salt-poisoning abortion. The baby, being immersed in caustic salt solution goes into convulsions. It is obviously in tremendous pain. Have you ever gotten salt in an open wound? This can go on for a long time. It is like being submersed in a vat of acid and not being able to just drown in it. The umbilical cord keeps the child alive while he swallows the caustic solution and convulses until he finally dies. One can hardly imagine a more ghastly death. Does any human being have a “right to choose” to do that to another? That shouldn’t happen to a dog. Should doing such things to puppies infuriate us? How about to fetuses you don’t consider to be human?
I don’t think the women undergoing such abortions have the slightest idea what is really going to happen. The little they were told was about a “mass of tissue.” One woman told me she immediately felt her “mass of tissue” begin to thrash around after the injection of the salt solution, and, long afterwards, she was alone in the room when, to her horror, she delivered what was not a mass of tissue at all, but a very red, very dead baby boy. Does she have a right to be infuriated?
Do the parents who have others arrange abortions for their minor daughter without their knowledge or consent have a right to be infuriated? Their grandchild was murdered . They didn’t get the chance to discuss things with their desperate and frightened daughter. Sometimes these minor girls die of complications from the abortion arranged for them by strangers who didn’t have the common decency to tell the girl she should discuss her situation with her parents. So, the parents not only find out their grandchild has been murdered, but that their daughter lost her life in the process due to the “counseling” she received from total strangers. They shouldn’t be upset because those strangers didn’t “consider a fetus to be human”?
It is not like abortion didn’t used to be against the law. It did. There was a reason for that: It kills a baby. It is not like the “First, do no harm” ethic of Hippocrates, which had guided the medical profession for millennia, didn’t explicitly prohibit abortion, it did, as is clearly stated in the Hippocratic Oath. (The “First, do no harm” ethic of Hippocrates has been rejected by the medical profession only twice in modern history – today and during the twelve years of the Third Reich.) It is not like pregnancy wasn’t referred to as being “with child” from time immemorial, it was. It is not like all the states had legalized abortion and the Supreme Court finally, reluctantly went along with public opinion in Roe v Wade. The opposite was the case. The vast majority of the states had laws on the books prohibiting taking the life of the child in the womb that had been put there by the elected representatives of the people. The Supreme Court rammed their deadly “new ethic” down our throats. It is not like the physicians who lobbied for the anti-abortion laws in the 19th century hadn’t already determined that human life begins at conception, they had. It is not like some new scientific evidence was presented to the Roe court that disproved that, there wasn’t. All the new scientific evidence only confirmed it.
The propagation of media-manufactured, lethal bigotry creates dangerous bigots. That is the whole point of manufacturing it. Just like the Nazis paraded the most tragic cases of disability before everyone in order to make state-sanctioned killing seem humane, and then, having been given an inch, took thousands of miles, so the public relations arm of the child killing industry parades before the public the exceptionally rare “hard cases” and then proceeds to brutally dismember fifty million innocent, healthy children.
Since genuine bigotry to some extent mitigates one’s culpability, if it isn’t self-induced, it is a kindness to assume one is afflicted with it, instead of assuming one sincerely believes some segment of the human family isn’t really human and can be killed in spite of the protests of millions of people who know otherwise.
September 9th, 2010 | 4:06 pm
I recognize your anger and passion. I even share it – there are a lot more abortions than there should be, and far more late-term ones than there should be.
However, I do wish to point out that I’m arguing against late-term abortions. Indeed, I’m arguing against most mid-term abortions. It’s only very early abortions (within the first month) that I think clearly aren’t murder. (And even then, I’m not terribly fond of the idea. Most of the time, the conception shouldn’t have happened in the first place.)
And – as I said, I recognize that there really is a slippery slope when we start talking about who or what is “really human” – if you can’t clearly determine it’s not murder, then it shouldn’t be allowed. (Except for the case of risk to the life of the mother – you can’t force someone to risk their life for someone else.)
I recognize that you – that many people – are very sensitive about this topic, and rightly so. But be careful that you know exactly what you’re arguing about.
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