Dostoevsky: When men stop believing in God, they will believe anything.
I was alerted by Nat Hentoff about an assertion made by Peter Singer–as reported in the Catholic Eye–at a Princeton conference around the abortion question, in which he claims that human beings don’t possess full moral status until after the age of two. I checked it out for myself. Yup. From my transcription of Panel II on 10/15/10 (press “Event Videos,” 20101015-panel two, to link to access streamed session):
Q (beginning at 1:25:22): When discussing at which point after birth we would give full moral status, you gave…a legal or public policy point about practicality… Forgetting the practical or public policy questions, if a person is a self aware individual and self awareness isn’t conferred by birth, and we use mirror tests to determine self awarness…at what point do you think an infant would pass the mirror test and therefore be self aware and be considered a person.
Singer (beginning at 1:27:18): … My understanding is that it is not until after the first birthday, so somewhere between the first and second, I think, that they typically recognize the image in the mirror as themselves…Really, I think this is a gradual matter. If you are not talking about public policy or the law, but you are talking about when you really have the same moral status, I think that does develop gradually. There are various things that you could say that are sufficient to give some moral status after a few months, maybe six months or something like that, and you get perhaps to full moral status, really, only after two years. But I don’t think that should be the public policy criteria.
If you declare a human being to be intrinsically unequal–which is what denying full moral status to young children does–it can’t help but promote discrimination, and must eventually affect public policy and law once anti equality attitudes become widely accepted. I mean, that is how slavery was justified–that people with black skin did not possess full moral status. A different, but certainly odious, outcome would similarly result by denying full moral status to children before the age of two.
That point aside, what did Singer say the public policy should be, which is just a way, in my view, of weaseling out of the implications of his beliefs. Starting at 56:22, after stating he no longer holds that an infant does not have a right to life until 1 month after birth because it is “not a practical suggestion,” Singer says:
Maybe the law has to have clear bright lines and has to take birth as the right time, although maybe it should make some exceptions in the cases of severe disability where parents think that it is better for the child and better for the family that the child does not live…The position that allows abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances…If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life.
The last comment is very telling. Abortion was once widely disdained, and was nearly universally illegal except for medical reasons. It is now broadly accepted because our perception of the value of fetal life changed, and is legal throughout most of the West. If we accept Singer’s views that children, perhaps past the age of two, do not possess full moral status, it would similarly change our perceptions about their lives, and ultimately lead to horrible practices and a concomitant change in public morality and law.
The Netherlands and its infanticide permissiveness further illustrates this process. Dutch doctors commit infanticide and nothing is done about it by authorities, even though it is technically murder, even though doctors have publicly published the guidelines they use in deciding which babies to kill. And there is already talk about full legalization of infanticide–which was the incremental method used to move general euthanasia for those age 16 and up to full legality in the Netherlands.
We need to hear very clearly what Peter Singer advocates, and understand the consequences that would flow from accepting his brand of utilitarianism. Then, we need to run in the opposite direction and fully embrace human exceptionalism. That is the only way to protect the lives of the weak and vulnerable specifically, and more broadly, guarantee universal human rights.
MATRONA OF MOSCOW: SAINT AND WONDERWORKER
The direction of our contemporary world is becoming clear to all. We are heading towards a world which rejects as unfounded all traditional values and beliefs. This new world is based on secular values and materialism.
Atheism and the rejection of God should not be a path leading us back to paganism (“that path has become a historical impossibility”). Nevertheless, modern practices, like abortion and assisted suicide, are disguised pagan (human sacrifice) practices.
Truly, “He who is not with Me is against Me;” Matt. 12,30. Those who are not with God are against Him; they are on the demons’ side.
GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED ATHEISM AHEAD:
IDOLS, DEMONS, ATHEISM AND THE LAST JUDGEMENT
The Demon of Child Sacrifice & The Valley of Slaughter
This is profoundly disturbing. I’ve often wondered if there was a mystical element to abortion, does the evil one need the blood of innocents for his own sustenance?
The atheist, unbeknown to him because of his overweening arrogance, subjects himself to ideologies that appear compassionate on their face but in fact hide great cruelty and portend great suffering.
But…
The Gospel overthrew a world caught in the clutches of this barbarism (The world was turned upside down — Acts 17:5-7), and there is no reason why we should not fight its reemergence once again.
We have to trust in the fact that the Word of truth (and we have to figure out how to speak properly in this new age) commends itself to the conscience because, when preached, reveals Christ who is the Truth. The apostles did not possess degrees from Princeton, but their words turned the world upside down.
The acts of the Apostles should strike the modern man as something impossible to comprehend. Under the pretext of education, we have reached such a darkness of ignorance, blindness and inability to properly grasp what the evidence shows: their extraordinary and inconceivable achievement. Not only didn’t they posses a degree from Princeton … they did not use cars, airplanes, mass media, internet or armies to conquer the world. Christ’s instruction to the Apostles was: “Go Like Lambs Among Wolves”. What they had on their side was God and the grace of His Holy Spirit.
In the Acts of the Apostles (16:6-7) this text reads:
Today, these passages are almost incomprehensible to us. Is really possible for people to sense God so openly? We have departed from the simplicity of the original Christian knowledge and filled our minds with worldly, useless and even destructive knowledge. Today, the ignorance of the Faith among people (many Orthodox included) is appalling!
Apostle Andrew, the Holy and All-Praised First-Called