Time for an anecdote:
When I was young, in the days before STAR WARS when only a small and happy band of what are now called geeks read science fiction, I actually believed the propaganda recited by such figures as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov that the science fiction readership was smarter, more interested in ideas, more insightful than the general public.
Several things diminished my faith in that bit of flatter over the years. Once was a science fiction convention where I served on a panel with some gray haired member of the old guard, a fan from the days of John W Campbell Jr.
The topic of abortion came up. I asked him only about the scientific facts of the question without inquiring into his moral stance. I asked him, for example, if the “fetus” (his terminology, not mine. He did not know that the word refers to a stage of development, not to a species of organism) were alive. He said no. The fetus is potentially alive, not actually alive.
He did not know the scientific definition of life every High School student knows. I forbore from asking him how the allegedly nonliving organism managed to grow, etc.
I asked him if the fetus had an XX or XY chromosome pair? In other words, was the fetus definitely male or female?
He said no. A fetus with XX chromosomes was only potentially female. Biologically and scientifically speaking, the organism in question was as sexless as an amoeba.
I asked him if a organism is halfway out of the womb, let us say the lower half is out, but the upper half is still lodged in the birth canal, is the lower half sexual but the upper half sexless? Would the cells composing her sexual organs, for example, define her sex? But the brain cells in its brain did not?
At the moment when the organism was exactly halfway out of the womb, was the organism a nonliving fetus from the middle up, but a living human being from the middle down?
The conversation moved to another topic, and I did not get an answer to this question.
I also did not get a chance to ask him if he had flunked High School biology.
This was the first time I met someone with absolutely no mental or intellectual integrity at all. He could not answer an honest question. He treated inquiry into his thoughts not as the inquire of a potential buyer willing to adopt his intellectual goods, but as personal attacks against him, slurs meant to wound his ego.
I have, of course, met many people with no interest in philosophical or scientific matters, but never someone hitherto who both had strong opinions on the topic, but no desire, not even the slightest, either to be or to appear serious, sane, honest, forthright, or persuasive.
The wonders of the Internet have since exposed me to a whole army of such beings, scientifically minded people who do not know jack about science, wordy philosophers who hate philosophy, intellectuals who despise the intellect, so my shock is much less these days.
They want to talk but not to think. They want to win the debate, but not to perform the work of going through the debate.
The mystery is astonishing.
At first, one naturally concludes that such creatures are stupid.
And yet they use long words and are possessed, some of them, with degrees or awards. They can balance their checkbooks and drive a car and even write novels, so clearly it is not blank stupidity.
Next, one naturally concludes that such creatures are willing worshipers of pure evil, deliberately malign, sadists hoping for the death of children, the elderly, the victims of communism, eager to see poverty and slavery and all the ills which naturally follow from their positions.
And yet, in their personal life, many of them are compassionate and generous and charitable, so clearly their advocacy for abominable evils is not because they themselves love evil.
Next, one wonders if it is pure hypocrisy, merely play acting. Perhaps they only advocate naked evil in terms of nauseating stupidity and unconvincing lies because it is method acting. They think that their peers demand and force them to say these wicked and idiotic things, and so they say them while pretending to believe them, but deep down they do not actually believe them.
On some level, they are aware that what they say on one topic at one time contradicts what they say in another airtight compartment of their mind, but, thanks to the wonders of Doublethink, and their fear of Big Brother, the blatant contradictions between the two compartments never are brought into contact.
And yet, no, they talk the same way in private as in public, and many of them devote their lives to the promotion of things like killing babies by countless millions. It is not play acting. There is no Big Brother. They are speaking Newspeak as their native language, not because anyone pressures them into it. It is not hypocrisy, or, at least, it does not seem to be deliberate, something of which they are aware.
Next one wonders if it is merely insanity: some combination of split personality syndrome and full blown psychosis.
And yet, amusing as the theory might be that Leftism is a mental disease, clearly these people are oriented as to time and place and person, and they know the moral nature of their acts and can control their impulses. The act and talk like insane people, but they are not insane.
Finally, one wonders if they are possessed by the Devil. Because on any topic outside the specific ones of their neurosis, one can have a reasonable conversation. The moment anything related to the specific topic crops up, it is as if some weird and unclean spirit possesses them, a spirit who cares nothing for facts, logic, humanity, and reason, but who only exists to accuse and accuse and accuse whomever is asking the creature questions. The spirit has two modes of argumentation: ad hominem and straw man.
The spirit has one expression: a bored sneer. It makes one noise: a chuckle or gargle of disbelief.
Well, obviously this last theory is a bit fanciful. If the life-hating Left were actually a coven of dark-cowled diabolists who had sold their collective minds and souls to the Devil, they would display a hostility to organized religion in general, and to Christianity in particular, and to Catholicism most of all; and pepper their works of fiction and nonfiction with endless insults, distortions, historical errors, calumnies, sneers, and vitriol.
They would boo mentions of God and Jerusalem at political rallies, and cheer for the deaths of innocent unborn children and helpless coma victims. They would hate mankind, and adore the vices, sexual or otherwise, which destroy mankind and the dignity of man.
And, like vampires, they would remove even innocuous crosses and crucifixes from public places, tear down images of the Ten Commandments, dunk the cross of the Savior in urine and force taxpayers to subsidize it as a work of art, but be very deferential, even encouraging, to Mohammedans, Socialists, and other enemies of the Church.
They would denounce insults to the Prophet of Islam, and overreact with fascination and love toward any flimsy story which insulted Christ, penned either by untalented writers like Dan Brown or talented writers like Philip Pullman.
They would be fascinated by heresies, false gospels, or scraps of Fourth Century manuscript at variance with Church teaching about Christ.
And if they were possessed by the Devil, the Accuser, everything out of their mouths would be an accusation, an attack, a character assassination.
And yet that does not describe the Leftwing mainstream, does it?
Oh. wait…
Well, I am sure the demonic possession theory to explain how wise and kind people can speak and vote to suppose foolish and malignant evils has some flaw in it. I just cannot see what it is at the moment.
In any case, the event of meeting a well read grayhaired man who thought that primates did not have a defined sex at conception was sufficient to shrivel the Heinleinesque confidence that science fiction readers were curious about science.
Of course, all that was happening was that the man in my anecdote was subordinating his scientific learning to his political ideology, much like a Young Earth Fundamentalist will explain away or ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence of the age of the cosmos out of deference to a flatflooted literal reading of the Book of Genesis. The man was selling his mental honesty in return for a comforting zealotry.
The impulse is a religious one, or, rather, a pseudo-religious one, used by heretics who cannot reconcile faith and reason, and so think it wise or laudable to sacrifice reason on the altar of faith.
The gross irony is that, in this case, the man thought he was being reasonable and scientific. In reality he was a science worshiper rather than a scientific thinker, borrowing the prestige of science for what was ultimately a cult belief.
He would certainly have been willing to accuse other heretics of sacrificing reason to blind faith, and would be unable to answer the historical fact that the orthodox assert no division between reason and faith since St Thomas Aquinas wrote in the so called Middle Ages. Or, rather, his answer would be a cold sneer and that odd hiccup of disbelieving laugh their spirit uses to answer for them.
The problem to me seems primarily philosophical, that is, rooted in their most basic assumptions of what reality is and how the cosmos works. In the modern Leftist dogma, the only truth is that there is no such thing as truth; logic is merely a trap and an imposition; science is racism and worthy of contempt, but for some reason environmentalism and infant stem cell research is not quackery but science and worthy of respect; morality is bigotry; reality is fluid; beauty is in the eye of the beholder and only vehemently jarring ugliness is authentic and admirable; and words are meaningless; and justice is the will of the stronger.
In all basic philosophical disciplines, metaphysics, ethics, logic, ontology, epistemology, semantics, aesthetics, politics, either partial neglect or total contempt for the discipline is a dogma of the Left.
There are four stages of the degeneration of philosophy once decapitated of metaphysics: the stages go from a perfectly reasonable disinterest in philosophical things in the name of practicality or political, to a fanatical elevation of politics to a cult status, to a fanatical elevation of mysticism and irrational romanticism, to stark nihilism and moral relativism and the abolition of man.
The classical liberal is an example of the first; the socialist is the second; the Shavian or fascist is the third, along with various New Age cults; the postmodernist is the final and end stage.There are variations within each school, too numerous to mention.
There is no scope for additional degeneration after utter nihilism and blank unreason: once all philosophy has been rejected, there is no philosophy to be employed to promote any some more degenerate form of philosophy.
Different Leftists are at different stages of the degeneration, but cluster around the lower, and agnostics of the Right are at different stages of degeneration, but cluster about the upper. The four stages are different pathologies of the same underlying sin of lack of mental integrity, an unwillingness to use and follow reason, a studied unwillingness to think.
The classical liberal does not want to think about religion, or, rather, he is content to let each man follow his own conclusions and conscience provided he disturbs not the public peace.
This is a honorable and even a laudable stance, given the violent implacability hanging between orthodox and heterodox factions, and the evils incumbent upon coerced faith. But it does involve a loss of integrity, because it makes the Church private rather than communal.
The first stage is characterized by a benign neglect of all things intellectual and religious at least as far as public and communal actions, and a concentration on matter of the appetites: acquisitions of material goods, attraction to beautiful women or fair works of art. It tends to be Deist in expression, even if not in name.
The second stage reacts vehemently against the indifference of the first by taking some lesser matter, usually a political party or economic theory, and with a dry and remorseless intellectualism, unhindered by history, pragmatism, logic or thought, and elevating that matter to the status of the communal spirit.
That such elevated material in the modern age is uniformly materialistic, secular, and nonsensical does not detract from the fundamental religious longing which prompts it. Communism is an idolatry, an attempt to create heaven on earth as doomed as the desire of the architects of the Tower of Babel. This second stage is the primacy of the intellect, particularly of untested and untestable theories, over the common passions and common conscience of mankind.
The third stage reacts vehemently against the communal spirit and the deadly intellectualism of the second stage not by bringing the intellect back into the bounds of reason but by rejecting it altogether. What is created is a new form of mysticism, a primacy of emotion over reason, a desire for either the Eloi gods of New Age light and sweetness or the Morlock gods of blood-drinking fascism, race supremacy, and other nonsense. George Bernard Shaw and his talk of a ‘Life Force’ that directs mankind, the Pacifist movement of the 1930′s and 1960′s, and Frederich Nietzsche are all examples of the primacy of emotion over reason.
The final stage rejects all theories as being merely ‘narratives’ or partial truths, or stark untruths told by the oppressors to enslave or sedate the oppressed. It reject both the dark and bright romance and emotion of the third stage, and the cold and arid intellectualism divorce from reality of the second stage, and the consuming realism divorced from the intellect of the first stage. For the sake of peace, it ceases all conflicts by declaring no victory possible and no prize worth seeking; and declares all arguments lost because no words have meaning.
Hypocrisy is its leitmotif, and its driving passion, tyranny is it preferred means, and death its goal: because obviously you cannot have an argument, if you think words lack meaning, with someone who thinks words have meaning: all you can do is shut him up. Death is its goal because if life is meaningless and life is suffering the best way to medicate life is to sedate and then extinguish it, nor to burden the world with additional people and their pollutions both spiritual and physical. The best sedation is endless clamor and distraction, television, gambling, sexual adventures, political crusades, and the ever popular Two Minute Hate directed against anyone who is in not fully in line with this fourth and final stage of total rational shutdown.
Naturally, based on a single conversation, I cannot tell where the man in my anecdote slips on the slippery slope of the four stages of philosophical corruption, but he had already made the crucial, irrevocable step of rejecting mental integrity in his thought and talk.
It might have been out of a sense of benign neglect, like a first stage thinker, or because it contradicted an intellectual ideology he worshiped, as a second stage thinker, or because his emotions told him a different story to which he clung in Promethean defiance of truth, as a third stage thinker, or because of intellectual exhaustion and despair and hatred of all philosophy, as in a final stage thinker.
But once you are on the slope of rejecting reason and philosophy, metaphysics and theology, the rejection of all other forms of reasoning, scientific and otherwise, is both a temptation and a great attractor. I will not call it inevitable, but I will say there is a strong intellectual current running that way, rushing toward the waterfall.
And yet, the philosophical explanation does not explain. Even supposing these creatures gave away their powers of reasoning, their desire for honesty, their distaste for hypocrisy, in order to achieve whatever comfort or conformity or camouflage from their own remorseless conscience they seek, why would they deliberately pay the price?
Is it deliberate? All those I meet seem innocent, unaware, almost taken by surprise that anyone takes anything in life seriously, or thinks evil is evil, or lying is bad, even lying to oneself.
Sin in neither pleasant, nor rational, nor in one’s self interest, nor honorable, nor safe, and so the normal human motivations of pleasure-seeking, forethought, self interest, passion, fear and so on seem all to militate against it. Nor is sin an innocent mistake; it is the very epitome of what it means to betray innocence.
So why do we do it? Why do I?
I don’t know.
There is a mystery to evil mortal man cannot explain.
Hi, John! I have a question that might have been answered in an earlier post, or posts… but i’m wondering what exactly constitutes the Left? Is is a belief system, is there a “Catechism” of sorts for the left? If you have written an post about it, I’ve missed it, so I apologize.
Thank you!
Braden
Good question. My answer is here: http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/10/patersons-field-guide-to-the-left/
cool, thanks!
The leftist I remember was during a discussion of wearing burqas in which she said, as an argument, that she couldn’t imagine wearing one voluntarily.
To which I brought up the line about it was a good thing we don’t all think alike, think of the haggis shortage there would be — to which she actually retorts, “You could have mine.”
The question is not, of course, when the fetus becomes alive. The fetus is obviously alive. The question is when the fetus should acquire human rights.
To be fair, this confusion between “life” and “human rights” often occurs.
Ooh! Ooh! I know! When it’s skin turns white and it turns male???
To be even more fair, as far as Americans are concerned, the question of which living members of the species homo sapiens had human rights, that is, whether something aside from merely being human was required, was one we settled domestically with considerable bloodshed and cost during the Civil War, and settled abroad during the Hitlerian war.
No American, not even a Democrat, can say with the straight face that he wants the State to be the one who declares who is human with rights and who is slave without rights, who is human with rights and who is untermenschen without rights.
For this reason the pro-infanticide argument concentrates on the logically absurd position of proving the human baby is not human. They never argue that the human baby is a human being who, because he is weak and voiceless, has no rights.
Now, with Peter Singer, that is changing, or the declaration that humanity is bestowed by the fiat of the mother.
The Left is becoming more and more obviously pro-slave and pro-Nazi in their position as time goes on.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Although from context your meaning was plain, this bit stuck in my mind: “…who is human with rights and who is untermenschen WITH rights.” You plainly meant to say “…who is human with rights and who is untermenschen WITHOUT rights.”
Just wanted to remind you some orcish liberal might seize a chance to beat you over the head with such alleged contradictions or confusions.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Correction made. Thank you.
I don’t think the abortion argument above works. By the definition presented, my cheek scrapings are an organism which should be awarded all of the rights of a human being.
Do you actually do not know the difference between an organism like a baby and a group of cells like a cheek scraping, and if your Highschool Biology teacher gave you a passing grade, I suggest suing her for malpractice.
Of course, everyone “actually” knows the difference. What we have here is the phenomena I describe: a perfectly smart person saying something unbearably stupid, a perfectly decent person saying something absurdly wicked and vile. This is an example of the dogma of a political or cultural “cult” overriding the findings of science.
I didn’t say I didn’t know the difference. I said I didn’t think your argument worked, and I resent you insulting my education on that account. You may well be able to insult my education for other reasons, but let’s see.
The cheek cells are intuitively and morally not a human being. However, they meet the definition you listed in your anecdote, which was that they were alive and clearly had XY chromosomes. Can you give a scientific definition for a human being that includes a fetus but yet excludes cheek cells and other things that we clearly don’t want counted as human beings? I think this is more difficult than you’ve made it out to be.
See below. http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/10/science-hatred-in-science-fiction/comment-page-1/#comment-82065
A fertilized egg has, in the common course of nature, the power to morph eventually into a wise old woman with grandchildren. That is, it contains the principle of its own growth and development. Cheek scraping do not.
They are not even “alive” except insofar as there was an organism from which they were scraped. And they do not by nature remain alive once they have been scraped. They do not comprise an organism and have no natural tendency to act together as an organism does.
This is something that was once known by students.
I saw your comment below, but my reply was to John’s comment. To your comment, I would state that by your definition, a sperm and egg that are still separated (have not yet joined to create a zygote) are alive. By their own devices, supplied with nutrients, they will mature into an infant, child, teenager, adult, or senior. Are you willing to call a non-joined sperm and egg a human being?
Students used to know how to create a self-consistent argument as well.
By their own devices, supplied with nutrients, they will mature into an infant, child, teenager, adult, or senior.
No, on their own, supplied with nutrients, they will eventually expire. They will develop in the way you describe only if combined.
Neither an egg nor a sperm has a complete genetic code. They are human gametes, not human organisms.
I fear I do not see how your argument can be made if you know the difference we are discussing. My argument that an organism, an offspring of a human being with an XX chromosome, is a human being and female, is not refuted, nor even addressed, by a counter example of a skin cell, which is not an organism. The skin cell does not fulfill the High School biology definition of life.
As best I recall, the characteristics if living things includes:
1. homeostasis (self sustaining)
2. specialization of parts
3. metabolism (uses energy)
4. irritable (reacts to environment)
5. growth
6. reproduction
Now, your question has no relation to what was being discussed, that is, it is irrelevant, unless the question assumes that a cheek scraping is the same as a single celled organism, i.e., self sustaining. That is an error which betrays an ignorance of basic biology.
Or was your objection merely that my statement was ambiguous? It was not ambiguous in context. I was not arguing with a man who had a definition of human beings different from mine: I was arguing with a man who both claimed his definition was the same and who claimed that organisms are not members of their species or members their sexes while in the womb, but only potentially so. He and I were not arguing about whether crystals or viruses are considered living things, or the cells of a dead man’s hair which grow in the tomb.
I was assuming the comment was meant to be relevant. If not, then perhaps your knowledge is plenteous, but not to the point here.
No, you cheek scrapings are not an organism, but a tissue. They do not by their own nature have the power of growth and development, let alone morphogenesis. They will never on their own devices, supplied with nutrients, mature into an infant, child, teenager, adult or senior.
Mr. Wright didn’t give a definition of a human being, though. Indeed, he was cut off before finish his line of questioning.
The other person said that fetuses are neither alive nor have gender. A human being, a fetus and cheek scrapings are all alive and (in one sense) have gender.
Thus Mr. Wright’s actual point, which is that the other person’s political beliefs made him contradict scientific fact, works perfectly. What you say he was arguing, he wasn’t (or at least hadn’t completed that part).
This may be pedantic on my part, but this is becoming a pet peeve of mine–
You mean sex, not gender.
It is also a pet peeve of mine, and it is not pedantic, merely correct. Gender is about grammar; sex is about biology. Words have a gender. Sex is a physical, mental and spiritual characteristic of an individual who is one of bisexual race.
It is unfortunate that ‘the sexual act’ or simply ‘sex’ as a verb was the chosen Victorian euphemism for copulation, because nowadays it becomes giggleworthy when someone says that virgins have sex but amoeba do not.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Then it would be more correct for me to say “X copulated”? I see what you mean so I’ll try to use that kind of formulation.
Sean M. Brooks
No, the one is not more correct than the other, to the best of my knowledge.
Saying “gender” (which is a part of speech) when you mean “sex” (which is a part of biological, psychological, and spiritual reality) is, however, a mistake, and a politically correct one. All I was saying is that it is an understandable mistake, because we need a convenient word to distinguish sex (male or female) from the sex act (virgin or married).
Dear Mr. Wright:
Many thanks! I am tyring to avoid mistaken and Politically Correct use of the word “gender,” etc. So, “sex” when you mean the act of sexual intercourse is still more or less correct.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Yes, and I agree completely with Mr. Wright on that. The other person’s arguments were illogical, as Mr. Wright shows by his counterexamples.
I was assuming (possibly incorrectly) that Mr. Wright had a scientific explanation for what a human being was, and if so, I’d like to hear it. It’s something I’ve been struggling with, and it’s clearly not just something that’s ‘alive’ or has XX/XY chromosomes. However, you’re right, he never actually said he had a definition — only that the other person’s attempts to define what a human being was were illogical.
I certainly have my religious view of what makes a human being — a human being has a soul and my cheek cells certainly do not — but I don’t have a scientific one. Does anyone here have one that is self-consistent?
What do you mean by “soul”?
It is not a definition of human that is in question. It is the definition is species. I say that an offspring of any species is a member of the same species: so, if an oak tree is a member of the kingdom ‘vegetable’ then a sapling cannot be a member of the kingdom animal. If a gosling can only grow to a goose and never to a fox, then a gosling is not a mammal but is a bird, no matter what the law says.
Species is not a characteristic that develops at adolescence. Indeed, the definition of the word “species” means that which stays the same in an organism through all stages of development.
The Left wish to pretend that they accept the Christian notion that all men, regardless of any worldly characteristics, are men and have the rights of men, but they wish also to adopt the fascist idea that some men are under evolved or under development and therefore are under-men, aka ‘untermenschen’ or, to use the Antebellum equivalent term, ‘nigger.’ The Left wishes to pretend they are not denying human rights to some humans by pretending some humans are not humans.
My argument was only that I did not want for a scientifically illiterate crackpot to have the right to define which men were “human” and which men were ‘untermenschen’ and ‘niggers.’
If you are offended that I use the ‘n-word’ here, keep in mind what makes that word so offensive is that it is only used my a man who pretends his fellow man is not his brother. A mother who kills her child in the womb is doing worse than that. She is pretending her child is not her child, not anyone’s child, not human, not alive.
It is an offensive word. The word ‘fetus’ when used not to refer to a stage of development but used instead to make a baby not seem human is even more offensive.
In our current society, at the moment, our laws have decreed that all unborn children are ‘niggers’ in that they can be killed without anyone even awarding them the dignity of being called human, or given a name, or a Christian burial.
Dear Mr. Wright:
I’m reminded of two things: first, Dante’s statement in his INFERNO that the damned have lost the good of the intellect. And secondly, of St. Paul’s lament in Romans that he (and we) have to war with our wills/bodies, desiring to do good even as we do evil.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
It’s ironic that you talk about abortion in this post; just this morning I glanced at a letter, in our local alternative entertainment weekly rag, to Dan Savage, self-anointed sex guru, Professional Public Gay Man and Christian-hater. It was from a young woman who had discovered her boyfriend was strongly opposed to abortion and was “shocked”, because she found his position “abhorrent, ignoring hundreds of real-life factors” and was seriously considering breaking up with him over this; she had written to Savage to ask for advice.
I don’t know what Savage answered because I stopped reading at that point, finding myself unutterably depressed by the notion that somebody could consider wanting to protect an unborn human being’s life, no matter what “factors” applied, to be an “abhorrent” position. I imagined saying to this woman, “Listen, all those factors would still apply if the baby was a one-day-old newborn, yet you wouldn’t countenance killing the baby at that point for a second”…. except then I remembered the recent academic paper by Briggs et al. arguing that infanticide could be justified on precisely the grounds you justified abortion, and became even more depressed.
I like to believe I could endure outright persecution for my beliefs from laws and strangers, and watching the world backslide into antinomianism, I don’t doubt we all may yet have to in my lifetime. What depresses me so bitterly about this is the thing Christ Himself warned us about: that He would set brother against sister, friend against friend, husband against wife. The idea that people I like and respect could despise me with an utterly clear conscience for only a few key points of belief, with no regret, is literally agonizing — especially since by neither personal instinct nor religious obligation can I bring myself to assuage that hurt by returning the hate.
But the reason we do it is the same reason we do any sin: we think that we can escape the suffering of deprivation or obligatory sacrifice by closing our eyes, just for a moment, to truth, or by taking advantage, just for a moment, of someone else’s pity. All sin is pride, in that it is saying, “What I want is more important than reality itself, or anyone else’s wants or needs.” Were we saints, we would be unable to sin because we would be in such communion with God that such a position would be literally incomprehensible to us; but we separated ourselves from God and thus became able to imagine ourselves as separate from, and more important than, Reality.
Wise words. Thank you.
Knowing as I do many clearly righteous people who support abortion under certain circumstances, who view it as an sometimes necessary evil, rather than as a positive good to be considered at all times, I have concluded that as with many evils, pro-death voters do so by falsely weighting good.
To explain – with almost any act, there are good results and bad ones. For example, if I murder my grandfather, I get my inheritance sooner and don’t have to pay for his old-age care.
With abortion, there are positive results for the mother, assuming the baby was inconvenient or embarrassing. People who approve of abortion-style murder are simply ranking the convenience of the present, articulate, sad, and presumably sympathy-inducing mother, and not considering the invisible (till it’s aborted), speechless, and possibly only “potential” baby. It requires logic and clear thinking to see that the baby is in fact a baby and that you are killing an innocent person with an abortion. Emotionally you can just rely on “my poor daughter! Why should she be punished by making one mistake?” These emotions are even effective on people who pride themselves on their logic, like John’s unnamed SF guy.
To counteract this rule of emotion, one method is to to manipulate emotions on our side. For instance, by showing the dead fetus, it is obvious to any observer that it is a dead baby, not a dead non-human organism. By explaining that the baby in the womb smiles, sucks its thumb, and dreams, you demonstrate its reality. By showing the horror and remorse of mothers who killed their own unborn, you show another side to the story.
The irony is that of course when pro-life people use emotions to bolster their fundamentally logical point, we get accused of being illogical and emotional and not being rational like the death eaters. I think this is where Satan creeps in.
Hi, Sandy Petersen:
I’m reminded of the movie called JUNO. In it, a teenaged girl had sex and predictably became pregnant. After some hesitation, Juno decided to get an abortion. As she was going to the abortuary she met a pro life demonstrator who asked how far along she was, Juno said about two months. The other girl then stated the child already had FINGERNAILS. Apparently, that stuck in Juno’s mind because as she was starting to fill out the forms at the abortion mill, she remembered about her child having fingernails. Suddenly, she had a change of heart and dashed out of the baby killing factory.
Sean M. Brooks
“The willful selection of a lesser good over a greater good” has been used as a definition of evil. It’s a pretty good one.
I like that a lot. It strikes me it could also be rephrased as a test for those who think “enlightened self-interest” is all that’s needed for society to function: “If the ‘greater good’ isn’t in practice going to be good for me, then why should I choose it over a lesser good which is?”
Or as C.S. Lewis phrased it: “Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?”
Some news people have recently pointed out the interesting fact that while the Liberals are all up in arms over an extremely poorly made movie making fun of one religion the top play on Broadway is making fun of another religion with universal acclaim, praise, and attendance by many luminaries such as the Secretary of State. One example from the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently you have never seen Trey Parker’s and Matt Stone’s treatment of Mormonism before in South Park or in their film Orgasmo. And reading the plot progression, I fail to see any offense. I think the part of the missionary embellishing the Book of Mormon with science fiction add-ons because he never bothered to read the Book is pretty funny.
Screaming madmen blowing up babies don’t make for great comedy generally and can get you censored as they did when a Muslim group told them they could end up like Theo van Gogh.
But fresh naive missionaries, clean cut and all smiles in barbaric Africa (or barbaric Los Angeles as in Orgasmo) that writes itself.
I think the point of the column is that the LDS Church responds to such irreverence with a cleverly worded, mild rebuke, whereas a great many Muslims respond with riots and murders to something so minor as a Danish political cartoon or an obscure film that may only exist as a trailer.
What certainly is a fact is that Liberals decry any insult to Islam and make not a peep when Christianity is insulted. We have many, many examples of this, whether or not this particular musical is a good example.
I am aware of all that, of course. I just didn’t think The Book of Mormon musical was a good example. The South Park creators tend to compliment the Mormons more than deride them.
You are sort of correct; they know a lot about Mormons so when they make jokes the jokes are closer to reality then what many news anchors and papers present about Mormons. They also respect Mormons quite a lot and know that they can say things that are quite offensive without Mormons or the church being that offended or getting that upset at them. Here is an interview where they explain there position.
That doesn’t mean that presenting the story of Joseph Smith in a fairly insulting fashion. It just happens to be a lot less offensive then what is usually presented and mormons tend to believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Thanks for the link! I already knew their position from their SP episode All About Mormons, but as I am a huge fan of SP I love to read behind the scenes.
In their writing you could be a lot worse off… you could be Catholic…
MSNBC’s continued employment of a decent portion of their staff with no major outcry is probably a better example.
Gotta love the timing of things sometimes. I just finished The Golden Age trilogy, and this post is a pretty good commentary (no spoilers here) on the ‘bad guy’ of the series.