Vacation time

I will be on vacation until August 18th. My next blog ectry will be on that date. Check back then. I hope you're having a good summer.

Mark Pickup

Unspeakable conversations for good atheists

I heard about the death of American disability rights attorney, Harriet McBryde Johnson (50), early last month. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/opinion/12thu4.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin). She was born with degenerative neuromuscular disease and was a fierce opponent of euthanasia and proponent of disability rights. On these two points we were on the same page. She was also a vehement atheist. On that point we were in utter disagreement.

I first encountered Harriet Johnson in 2003. She wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine called "Unspeakable Conversations" after meeting controversial Princeton bioethics professor, Peter Singer. (See http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9401EFDC113BF935A25751C0A9659C8B63). He has proposed, among other ghastly things, killing disabled newborn children.

After Unspeakable Conversations was published, the publisher of the New York publication The Human Life Review invited me to respond. My essay was published in the Spring 2003 edition of The Human Life Review, under the title :Unspeakable conversations for good atheists". The text of my lengthy essay is below.

It is my prayer that Harriet McBryde Johnson met Jesus Christ before she died on June 8th 2008, and gave her life to His tender care. Now my essay re-published.

Unspeakable Conversations for Good Atheists

For more than ten years, people with disabilities and incurable illnesses have lived in the cross-hairs of modern Western culture's intolerance of imperfect human life. The champions of euthanasia, assisted suicide, abortion and infanticide have steadily gained ground. What was once unthinkable (killing the unwanted, sick and disabled) has become fashionably speakable in academic circles. It was a grim milestone when America's prestigious Princeton University gave a permanent platform to Peter Singer to promote his ideas of killing babies born with disabilities and "euthanizing" disabled adults with severe cognitive impairments. Whoever came up with the title "Unspeakable Conversations" for Harriet McBryde Johnson's New York Times Magazine article is decades out of date.

Johnson's rambling article was an achievement of public education about travel frustrations and indignities for the disabled. It was not, however, a significant contribution to the ethical discussion about the value of people with disabilities in a progressive, advanced society. Sadly, Johnson missed a wonderful opportunity to help the New York Times' vast audience see that people with disabilities are equal and important members of society.

Johnson seemed awed by Singer's celebrity, his "good company" and his superficial Aussie charm. Poor Ms. Johnson--even the Devil is charming. Wait! As she tells us many times, she is an atheist: She doesn't believe in God or the Devil. Atheism seems to be the only point of consensus between her and Singer.

No Moral Scale

If there is no God, no grand designer, then, in the final analysis, we are nothing more than products of cosmic chance, descendants of primordial slime. Words like right, wrong, better, worse, meaningful and meaningless are themselves meaningless. They are words that assume some objective standard by which ideas and behavior can be measured and judged. Thought itself is a chemical reaction or a collection of electrical impulses in the brain. Nothing more. Morality is meaningless to a chemical reaction, just as the electricity driving my computer cannot be judged as right or wrong. Thought simply occurs, like the spread of ripples after a pebble is thrown into a pond.

What's this nonsense about "ethics," "philosophy," and human value? Human rights? Equality? Drivel. Morality? The fiction of religion! We simply exist until our life is extinguished. If there is no God, then there's no moral scale.

And yet, when Ms. Johnson says, "I didn't expect to straighten out Singer's head" she must have a concept of distorted thinking which can be measured against straight thinking (which she presumably has). Could it be that Ms. Johnson believes more than she is willing to admit perhaps even to herself?

Peter Singer definitely has a belief system: He believes the universe has no purpose and that lesser minds like Aristotle were wrong to think it does. [1] Singer believes, with all his heart, in the pointlessness of the universe. And so we find ourselves back at the utter meaninglessness of everything: philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge, music, love, language, and communication have no purpose.

According to the belief system of Peter Singer, even his own words, ideas, and beliefs are meaningless. Followed to its absurd conclusion, this belief system goes nowhere. Life is hard and then you die. If you accept this, all further discussion is pointless. (If the reader feels as if he is spinning in circles, that's because Peter Singer's central premise is circular.)

So why, if the universe has no purpose, do we find Singer in the vanguard of the animal-rights movement? Surely, in that case, animals have no purpose either. Why does he make a preposterous exception to bestow purpose upon animals while man, and the rest of the universe, have none? But in reading Peter Singer, you quickly find that it's not that animals would be elevated above the status of humans --humans would descend below the status of animals.

When Johnson was confronted with this aspect of Singer's world, she refused to enter it. When she was asked, "How can he place so much value on animal life and so little value on human life?" her response was this:

"That last question was the only one I avoid. I used to say I don't know; it doesn't make sense. But now I've read some of Singer's writings, and I admit it does make sense-within the conceptual world of Peter Singer. But I don't want to go there. Or at least not for long."

New Dark Age

But we must go there, Ms. Johnson! We must peer into the abyss of his thinking, with its poisonous vapors rising, intoxicating us, and enticing us into a new Dark Age. We must critically examine the implications of Singer's infernal world-view--then recoil in horror and reject his thinking. Far better that than to allow his alluring logic gradually to take over the collective public mindset. His ideas have the capacity to turn progressive societies into jungles of predators and prey, oppressors and oppressed.

Genuine progress is found not in ideas but in the lives of people--even people Peter Singer would discard.

And that brings me to a central point that Harriet Johnson would not address. Singer operates in an historical vacuum. He rejects the towering foundational concepts of America, his adopted country--especially the "self-evident" truth that all people have "certain inalienable rights," which include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That blazing Declaration of Independence does not say people have a right to happiness-only the right to pursue happiness. But it does not allow arbiters to decide which people are qualified to pursue happiness. It does not allow any individual to decide that another person's chances of happiness are so low that his life should be extinguished-thereby denying him the first right mentioned in the Declaration: the right to life.

Creator of rights or religious "mumbo jumbo"?

How do inalienable rights come about? There must be something or someone above human law to bestow them, if they really exist. There must be a higher law, above any legislature, that creates inalienable rights. Rights granted by a government on Monday can be taken away on Friday, by a simple majority vote. And that would make the Declaration of Independence absolute nonsense.

It is ironic that Peter Singer uses his tenure at Princeton University to tear at the bedrock ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence. One of the signers of that august Declaration was a Presbyterian minister named John Witherspoon (1723-1794). He helped infuse that document and America's founding concepts with Christian thinking.

Witherspoon was Princeton's sixth President, a position he held until his death. In fact, Princeton University, originally named "The College of New Jersey," was founded (in 1746) by Presbyterians. Until 1902, every President of Princeton was a Christian minister. One of Witherspoon's predecessors was America's great evangelist and theologian, Jonathan Edwards. The irony is this: It is the intellectual freedom of that once Christian university that allows Singer to attack its underpinnings.

Peter Singer's destructive and stubborn ideas would sweep away Western legal traditions that have evolved over centuries; they would overturn moral refinements attained as a result of Western culture's embrace of the sanctity of human life. In his world view, a pig is more valuable than a disabled newborn infant, a chimpanzee more valuable than a Down's child. To Singer, these human lives are-to use a Nazi term-"useless eaters."

Twenty years ago, Peter Singer wrote an article for the prestigious magazine Pediatrics. He attacked the "sanctity-of-life view" as "religious mumbo jumbo." He said, in part:

"The philosophical foundations of this view have been knocked asunder. We no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation, made in the image of God, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing an immortal soul." [2]

Singer has even proposed conducting medical experiments on comatose people, for research purposes, rather than using animals. [3]

Dangerous charm

He is dangerous because he is "good company." He is provocative and engaging: with easy scholarly detachment, he makes the most odious and brutal ideas palatable. For more than twenty years he has been doing his considerable best to "knock asunder" the foundations of the "sanctity-of-life view." I believe Harriet McBryde Johnson's atheism blinds her to the dangers this poses to her and to all other disabled people.

She could have reminded the New York Times readership of the great moral principles laid down by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Witherspoon, and other American Founders, in the Declaration of Independence. She could have used its principle of the equality of human life as a rallying cry to the millions of people of good will who saw the New York Times Magazine article. But the moral principles which made America great have as their foundation the Judeo-Christian tradition. And that would be unspeakable conversation indeed for a good atheist.

Mark Pickup
NOTES
1. See interview with Peter Singer, "Living and Dying," in Psychology Today, January, 1999. Taken from Internet 28 March, 2003, (http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1175/1_32/53479124/p3/article.jhtml?term=).
2. Singer, "Sanctity of Life or Quality of Life," Pediatrics, July 1983, pp. 128, 129.

3. Living and dying,

Humanity's inhumanity to humanity

My blog entry for June 8th 2008, "Humanity's inhumanity to humanity" can be read at http://humanlifematters.blogspot.com/

Mark Pickup

The triad of Christian virtues

Can you imagine living in a loveless world? Some people actually exist in such a terrible place. It must be like living on a desert with no water. A loveless world is hostile to life and everything worth living for. Show me a man who wants to die and I will show you a man who lives in such a world. He has no faith, he has no hope, he has no love.

A man who has lost his desire to live has no sense of joy at knowing that God loves him -- or his despair has become so complete that he has ceased to care. His heart and soul have withered on the bleak, arid, and loveless landscape of his life. Can you think of a more desperate place of human desolation? To live without faith, hope and love is not life at all. It is hell on earth!

I read Saint Paul’s words to the Christians in Thessalonica:

“We give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope  of our Lord Jesus Christ, before our God and Father, … .” (1 Thessalonians 1.2-3).

It contains the triad of Faith, Hope and Love I just mentioned: You will find it running throughout the New Testament. Each of these virtues focuses on Christ and sits at the root of all authentic Christianity. They are critically important to having a life worth living. Faith, Hope and Love are known as Theological Virtues.

Faith in Jesus Christ is the source of our hope. This produces love for God and our fellow man; this prompts believers into action of good works which ultimately bring glory to God. Faith in Christ gives us meaning and purpose in life, or it should.

Saint Paul told us that love the greatest in this trinity of theological virtues. In his immortal passage about love (1 Corinthians 13), he said, “At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Love is the animating force found behind all creation.

The Apostle John told us that God is love. Love is the substance of Christ’s commandment: He said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13.34-35).

You and I were created for divine love. After everything temporal has been burned away, like chaff, it will be love that remains. Love that is united to God binds everything together in perfect harmony. That is why love is the greatest theological virtue.

In divine love, we find meaning and purpose to our lives. Hope wells up in the Christian’s heart and he discovers that this “hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5.5) But hope in what? The Christian “hopes in the glory of heaven that was promised by God to those who love him and do his will.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1821.) With God’s grace, this hope enables the believer to endure to the end.

The theological virtues of Faith, hope and love are activated through prayer. Without prayer they remain mere words, abstract, passive nouns. Without action, they remain ethereal concepts. Prayer ignites sterile words into action, giving them substance and making them concrete. Saint Paul spoke of a work of faith, a labor of love, and endurance in hope of Jesus Christ. Active virtue!

Virtues require responses from people. It is part of the creative partnership into which God invites Christians to be participants. They are necessary ingredients to ultimately knowing God fully in eternity just as God already knows us fully.

With Faith, Hope and Love, we do not despair of life, regardless of our trials. With these virtues, we may be cast down by circumstances of life … but not conquered.

MP