Godless and Pro-Life
I was sent an interesting link (hat tip to Nate Winchester) for Godless Pro-lifers: http://www.godlessprolifers.org/home.html
Boy, this sent me walking down memory lane. The introductory paragraph reads:
A nontheistic and nonreligious opposition to the life-denying horror of abortion
I’m James Matthew (Matt) Wallace, aka The Compleat Heretic. I’m both a Secular Humanist atheist and a pro-life advocate. All too often, I fear that I’m the only nonreligious person who opposes the genocide of abortion used as a birth control substitute. Accordingly, I have created this web site as a virtual rallying point and clearinghouse for all atheists, agnostics, and other “godless” people who call themselves “pro-life.”
Though I am a Republican and a conservative (both social and economic), I intend for this site to be nonpartisan and nondiscriminatory.
My comment: Brother, do I feel your pain. I was exactly in your shoes not long ago.
Those who are curious can look at the very first entry on this journal, which I wrote the day I started keeping a journal:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2003/03/on-infanticide/
And on the same day, this article on how many ideals I had in common with my hated enemies, the Christians. http://www.scifiwright.com/2003/03/i-must-be-the-only-christian-athiest-i-know/ The article references the GILMORE GIRLS, which gives you an idea of its age.
And, one day after, an article on how Robert Heinlein had me utterly fooled for nigh unto 35 years. I was simply taken in by clever rhetoric and a sense of humor, and an appeal to my youthful pride. http://www.scifiwright.com/2003/03/fooled-by-heinlein-for-40-years/
Very slowly and very painfully I realized that, as a rational, logical, unemotional atheist, the logic and reason of the universe was on the side of the conservatives, the people whose philosophy was based on reality and long-gathered experience, and that the clamoring, yammerhead radicals who promised a new society based on science and reason were addicted to emotion, fuzzy thinking, ad hominem, and self-contradiction, and that their devotion to reason was a pose and an insolent hypocrisy.
I realized that logic is on the side of keeping your baby alive, and that on the side of baby-killing was nothing but a desire of selfish men for guilt-free and consequence-free fornication.
The abortions performed for medical reasons or due to rape or incest are negligible, and only raised as rhetorical points by those wishing to abort for convenience of fornication.
The logic of telling mothers that their true freedom and true rights rested solely on the Crime of Medea, their freedom to slay their offspring, eludes me. It is merely an attempt to elude nature, and to blank-out the consequences of one’s acts, particularly, the sex act, and requiring the rest of law and custom to go along with it.
At the time, I was a thoroughgoing fan of Ayn Rand and an avowed Libertarian, so, to me, it was a simple matter of logic: One is not supposed to blank-out reality, elude, escape, or play pretend on this or any topic.It is self defeating to use reason to elude reason.
Merely redefining words to pretend that the baby in the womb is not a member of the species of his parents is beneath contempt, or pretending not to know when life begins: all textbooks on biology before Roe v Wade were unambiguous on the point, nor was their any controversy (nor, among honest folk, is there now). By definition, if it is not alive, one needs no medical procedure such as aborticide to kill it: by definition, if it is not a baby, you are not pregnant. Reality says that oaks make acorns, ducks make ducklings, humans make babies.
The most egregious example of this phenomena, where anti-abortionists talk biology while pro-abortionists talk gibberish, was at a science fiction panel. I asked a pro-abort that if an organism were growing in Mommy’s womb and had XX but not XY chromosomes, what it a female, yes or no? How indeed could this organism be female but not be homo sapiens? It was like saying one could have a living room without a room, or a house attic without a house. One cannot have an existing property without the object in which that property exists. Mr. Doublethink assured me that the organism was only POTENTIALLY and organism, and that having XX chromosomes did not put you into the class of objects “female” but rather meant you were POTENTIALLY female, which is the same as having no sex at all, and no properties, and ergo no object in which those properties inhere, and ergo no right to live.
And by merely calling the Jew an ‘untermensch’ we find, voila, he is no longer protected by the ancient laws of the Koenig and Kaiser of the Germanic Reich, because he is no longer legally a ‘person.’ And if you write the word ‘petrol’ on a can of tomato soup, you can pour it in your automobile fuel tank, and all will run smoothly. This is what they tell themselves is scientific thinking: and we who say water is wet and fire burns, we are merely superstitious bumpkins to them (even if we have degrees and doctorates they lack).
I listened with the same open-mouthed goggle-eyed awe one would listen to Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky, if Jabberwocky were serious rather than in play: it sounded like words, but it was not words. Twas brillig, and rather slithy at that. To that degree he was willing to prostitute his brain, and utter absurd lies and elliptical paradoxes, merely to defend the central and brain-warping evil of aborticide.
I came up with what I thought was a novel argument, which was, namely, that whether the baby was “human” or not, a parent has a duty to rear and protect the child, and that this duty exists from the first moment any act can tend to harm or tend to protect the child: for exactly this reason maidens are under a duty not to take drugs that might cause birth defects even in children not yet conceived.
Likewise, anyone concerned for the environment acknowledges a duty running to generations yet unborn. In law, a person does not need to exist, or be competent, or be known, to have a duty running to him: a tenant with a life estate in land may not ruin nor despoil the land, even if the heir of the property when the estate reverts is not yet born.
So I proposed that anyone claiming that laws should protect a child from abuse or neglect at the hands of his parents was acknowledging a parental duty of care; and that reality merely made it the case that there were chains of events one could set in motion before the child was born that could wound the child. Therefore the duty obtained from the first moment any act can be done that affects the eventual child; therefore the duty was prenatal. If maiming or lobotomizing the child prenatally was a violation of this duty, maiming it to the point of death a fortiori was a violation. And this was so whether the child was human or subhuman, alive or pre-alive, or however one characterized the condition of the child at the time of the act. The duty was not triggered by the existence of some quality, call it humanity, in the child, but only by the nature of parenthood and the nature of cause and effect.
And I found that no one would address my argument.
All I encountered were either ad hominem attacks against my character (made by people who did not know me, and were not in a position to assess my character) or the opposition would argue against Theism — and their programming of these robots of rhetoric was so strong that even after I told them I was an avowed and devout atheist, THEY SIMPLY REPEATED THEMSELVES.
The same thing happened when I argued that homosexuality was, from a Darwinian point of view, a sexual perversion. I argued biology and deontology, and they argued against the authority of the book of Leviticus. I would give a 40 page argument that made no reference to the supernatural in any way, either directly or by implication, and the opposition would say that no argument exists against homosex except for the religious bigotry of Bronze-Age Jews.
It was like a phonograph with a stuck needle. They could not argue their case; all they could do was parrot talking points, and, when shown those points were irrelevant, they did that thing in the mind for which there is no name, when you blank-out reality and pretend something didn’t happen.
It was not an argument, it was a mantra, a magic formula, a mumbojumbo meant like a rabbit’s foot to make real life go away.
And this was from the guys who claimed the utopia of pure reason was just around the bend, and that the theists were the paragons of silliness and superstition.
There area few decent and rational atheist out there, and Conservative atheists, and atheists actually devoted to cold, hard reasoning. But they seem to be getting fewer. The Dawkins and the aggressively stupid Atheists — let us call them fundamentalist atheists — are shouting you down and drowning you out.
But you are a small oasis in a very wide wasteland of blowing sand, my friends, for you are surrounded by would-be and play-pretend atheists who are not serious about what you believe, but merely pretend to have rational objections to theism because they want to escape the whisper of conscience.
And yes, obviously all atheists who are actually devoted to logic, clear thinking and right reason oppose prenatal infanticide, for the same reason they oppose suicide and murder. For an atheist, either human life has no value, or human life is the source and sum of ALL values.
If human life has no value, nothing humans do (including coming to conclusion about the value of human life) has value: it is a self-impeaching statement. The only other option for the atheist, who dismisses supernaturalism, is a natural source of value, and for humans that means human life.
One cannot regard reason as paramount without also regarding human beings (the only begins atheists know who can reason) as paramount. A due concern for the rights and duties of human beings will not allow for the intellectual hypocrisy, double-talk, and outright dishonesty involved in supporting the aborticide industry, pretending babies are not babies and duties are not due.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
