What’s Wrong with the World

Even if you were merely reporting on what is wrong with the world, I think it is intrinsically worthwhile to meditate on the depravity of man in general and just how far our society has fallen in particular. So tank you for your valiant efforts in this regard. Although I have never commented here before I read this blog often and just thought I would show my appreciation in the cheapest and most inane way possible.

Hmmm. Why do I suspect trolling, here, via fake praise? Of course it isn't intrinsically worthwhile to meditate on the depravity of man. In fact, those of us who do have to think about that must always be on the lookout that we neither succumb to despair nor encourage it in others nor become bitter nor love to meditate on evil merely for the sake of it. Our aim should always be constructive. We speak of evil because we love the Good. Evil is a privation. The Good is what we serve.

I doubt he's trolling. Skeggy is a regular commenter at the Orthosphere.

Okay. I didn't know that when I posted the response. It was just a somewhat odd comment. I apologize if I misjudged you, Skeggy.

I only meant that by noticing and being reminded of the fallen state of man, we must at the same time see the need for a transcendent good and the grace he can bestow upon us. There are many stories in the sayings of the Desert Fathers where acknowledging the sinfulness of the world caused aspirant ascetics to seek solace in God. So perhaps I was mistaken and meditations on the depravity of man are only instrumentally good. You needn't apologize, it is the internet and there is plenty of cause to be suspicious. In fact, you have my apologies for being so obtuse. I know I can be a bit eccentric and idiosyncratic, but I am grateful for your work all the same.

Your comment about remembering how broad the support for death is is on point. Willingness to kill the vulnerable extends well beyond the womb, and we must be on guard against it.

Holland, always one of the avant garde countries for killing (Belgium being another), has also just declared, via its medical association, that infanticide is perfectly legitimate to put the baby out of the parents' misery, so to speak. You see, when babies are judged to be "life unworthy of life" and have either ventilator assistance or food and fluid withdrawn, the ensuing dying process will be quite traumatic for the parents. In the ventilator case, which is somewhat shorter, the baby will gasp for breath and so forth, which is very distressing to those watching. So we should just kill them faster by lethal injection for their parents' sake.

I bet you €5 that if someone with a MD walked up to the baby and plugged it with a 9mm, which would actually be merciful compared to this hideous process, they'd get a visit from the police and a day in court...

Somewhat related, I read an article today about sociopaths who are aware of their sociopathy and try to cope with it and actually somewhat real, normal people. Stuff like this makes you wonder what point there is in having a concept like sociopathy since the greater society in the name of conscience claims the ability to do what should be unconscionable.

Your comment about remembering how broad the support for death is is on point. Willingness to kill the vulnerable extends well beyond the womb, and we must be on guard against it.

One of the battlegrounds the pro-life movement has not embraced is the right of self-defense. I think a lot of this is because many pro-lifers are uncomfortable with the idea of giving solid ground to kill people for violent acts. Many also have a muddle-headed vision of violent felons as merely wayward children of God rather than as free moral agents who have chosen to commit a particularly grave evil with devastating consequences for an innocent. For a lot of Christians, their understanding of God's grace becomes a millstone around their neck in protection of life in this regard because they are taught that as fellow sinners they have to worry about the soul of even the most committed evil individual who has no intention of abstaining from severely harming the innocent.

I bring this up because you'll typically find this view of self-defense co-existent with a belief in euthanasia and infanticide in societies that embrace it. While the pro-lifers may not embrace the latter, their unwillingness to embrace a robust defense of life on all fronts from the manifold forms of the culture of death holds them back. It is a severe compromise with the values of their society.

Fortunately in the US, at least, many red state pro-lifers are coming to this conclusion subconsciously if not consciously as witnessed by the increasingly defiant adoption of castle doctrines, stand-your-ground laws, more liberal gun ownership laws for law-abiding citizens, etc. We need to establish a cross-cutting principle: at no time except self-sacrifice to save life should life yield to death.

Mike, I certainly agree that a traditional Christian ethic which is non-pacifist and permits self-defense (and war, for that matter) provides a more unified and intellectually satisfactory pro-life view. For one thing, the distinction between guilt and innocence is crucial to the pro-life view, yet it is difficult to make much of this distinction when one doesn't permit self-defense. The left's view is an unhealthy combination of sentimentalism and ruthlessness. If a pro-lifer says that abortion or euthanasia is wrong because it is killing a human being, the pro-choicer will immediately bring up various self-defense scenarios, usually mingled in with other utilitarian scenarios, in an attempt to undermine the absolute deontological prohibition on killing the innocent. The endgame is throwing us into a total utilitarian view in which anyone may be killed under the right circumstances, which needn't include his deserving to be killed. A young person not prepared to make the relevant distinctions may get sucked into this slough of utilitarianism before he knows what's happening. Not wanting to rule out self-defense but at the same time feeling strange about abortion and euthanasia, he may just come to embrace all of them but for the wrong reasons--namely, on the fuzzy grounds that sometimes you just have to kill somebody for the greater good, but that you should always sorta feel bad about it, which makes it okay. A worldview that is well-grounded in the distinction between good and evil, innocent and guilty, can help to prevent this sort of mental rot.

On the other hand, I'm quite willing to make common cause with pro-lifers who are also pacifists.

I bet you €5 that if someone with a MD walked up to the baby and plugged it with a 9mm, which would actually be merciful compared to this hideous process, they'd get a visit from the police and a day in court...

Sure, because guns possess the absolute Manicheean property of evil. Plus their use is icky. A pillow over the face might very well be a different matter, though.

About a decade ago I was on an e-mail list with a doctor, then in his residency. He told a story which I've probably told before of one of his evenings on duty. A baby was deliberately delivered at about 18 weeks' gestation. The baby was a wanted child, but the mother's water had broken, and induced labor was the "protocol" in such cases, followed by giving no assistance to the baby for breathing, because it was allegedly too young to survive. The child breathed room air for two hours before dying, but it was taken from the mother so she wouldn't be distressed by the gasping. The doctors, however, were distressed by the gasping, and one (female) resident said she wished she could put a pillow over the baby's face and get the whole process over with. She was sharply rebuked by a nurse on duty. Eventually the baby was returned to his mother's arms to die.

The resident on the list gave us the moral of the story: Keep your baby with you in the hospital. He was quite serious. I think he had some doubts as to whether anything would have been done if the doctor had actually smothered the baby, at least if she had been careful not to do it in front of that particular nurse!

The baby was a wanted child, but the mother's water had broken, and induced labor was the "protocol" in such cases, followed by giving no assistance to the baby for breathing, because it was allegedly too young to survive. The child breathed room air for two hours before dying, but it was taken from the mother so she wouldn't be distressed by the gasping.

The hypocrisy of modern America. We squawk about human rights as we slaughter the unborn. We fret about profiling at the airports as we arrest people without warrants and rendition them to be brutally tortured in other countries.

I think this says it right:

Between legalizing abortion and the government dismantling of marriage, the USA has now officially entered Sodom and Gomorrah territory. I wouldn't put too much confidence in that "God bless America" notion. The best-case scenario is that He's not paying attention. Following American politics these days feels like watching Gibbon on fast-forward; an imperial decline and fall measured in years rather than centuries.

I think he had some doubts as to whether anything would have been done if the doctor had actually smothered the baby, at least if she had been careful not to do it in front of that particular nurse!

If there be any doubt that even most Christians are brainwashed, ask yourself what would have happened if the father found out, grabbed the doctor and beat her to death in front of the rest of the staff in a fight of righteous fury that his child was murdered by a doctor. In most civilizations, including most Christian ones, the state would have winked and nodded at him for doing so. Today, pro-lifers would be falling all over themselves to denounce him even if it happened right in front of him.

(And again, for the mouth-breathers who need it to be spelled out for them, this is a hypothetical scenario not advocacy of any act).

For what it's worth, being against the death penalty and being pro-life were always considered hand in hand at my High School, and I've seen this attitude in other places on the internet as well. Capital punishment, bizarrely to me, was considered part of the pro-life movement. In fact, my theology teacher would accept anti-capital punishment essays when asked for pro-life essays, and I'd see posters hanging up around the school. It was just taken for granted that they were part and parcel.

** I should add that the point of calling them brainwashed is that their natural response of righteous, animalistic fury at the thought of someone actually doing this is suppressed by years of "ethical training" to suppress such feelings and coldly defer to the law. There is virtue in overriding our basic natures for higher purposes, but not to the extent that we simply shut them off. Civilization is supposed to offer a superior conduit for human action with respect to human nature after all. A civilization that cannot understand and even sympathize with human nature is hardly human. In a sense, it's actually sociopathic. Certainly psychopathic in that it is completely out of touch with reality.

MA, I'm afraid that's all too true in Catholic circles, and it is incorrect. For that matter, it's even incorrect in Catholic teaching, which does _not_ treat the death penalty as murder but does regard euthanasia and abortion as murder.

The way the death penalty is handed out in the US actually is a pro-life issue due to the high number of overturned cases. Prosecutors who withhold exculpatory evidence in capital cases almost never face even termination from their jobs, let alone disbarment or prosecution (despite the fact that this is a prosecutable offense).

Conservatives have done a very poor job of advancing laws at the state level to ensure that the death penalty is applied correctly and that government agents involved are severely sanctioned when committing ethical or legal violations in cases where it is applicable. That's done a terrible number on our ability to advocate for it and given the Left a mountain of false arguments to use against it on principle.

For what it's worth, being against the death penalty and being pro-life were always considered hand in hand at my High School, and I've seen this attitude in other places on the internet as well.

MarcAnthony, this attitude is largely (but not exclusively) the result of JPII (and cronies) choice to push resistance to actually using the death penalty in any and all actual cases, even when they ever so carefully and minimally accepted the principle that the death penalty is inherently just and moral. This was an example of the highest people in the Church choosing to push a personal, prudential point of view as if it were the official teaching of the Church. While JPII only BARELY avoided teaching that his personal position was the official teaching, he did come right up to the very edge of saying it, and moreover he let cardinals and bishops say it for him repeatedly, without ever trying to correct them. See Cardinal Avery Dulles' 2004 article on the subject for the correction, in which he explains quite clearly that the JPII position is a prudential position on which it is perfectly licit for Catholics to disagree with him.

I say this, by the way, with immense respect for all JPII did in so many other areas. There is nothing wrong with saying he was brilliant on most things but made a serious mistake on this issue. St. Thomas Aquinas did that, but Catholics still praise his philosophy and theology to the hills.

Conservatives have done a very poor job of advancing laws at the state level to ensure that the death penalty is applied correctly and that government agents involved are severely sanctioned when committing ethical or legal violations in cases where it is applicable.

Mike, I agree that we do a pretty poor job of it. I wonder, though, how much of that is due to being stuck behind a justice system that is gravely deformed by defective underlying principles (such as that of highlighting the "adversarial system" as if it were a bedrock principle, instead of a useful mechanism, or that of allowing judges rather than lawmakers or juries to decide limits on allowable kinds of evidence) and terrible precedents. Which is the chicken and which is the egg?