What an excellent piece. You are right that little has changed, except perhaps consideration of the "right" to kill even the newly POST-born...a la Princeton's Peter Singer.
Not coincidentally, and very much related to the article,his Master's thesis was "Why should I be moral?"
Augustine,
Indeed ... Peter Singer: Heinrich Himmler as celebrated professor.
(I do hope that picture is fake.) There's no way to follow such a brilliant post. Except, perhaps, with a song. No beer.
"Breathe for me," they haunt my prayer
with infant dreams of drawing air.
I shake with sharp and sudden fear.
I shrink because the knife is near.
I feel a light initial blow--
but to the death my dreams don't go.
If you could only hear and see
the interest group that lobbies me--
whose privacy is not a right,
whose lives will end before tonight--
how quickly you would mark the ruse:
a woman's right to plan and choose.
A century beyond our own
will marvel at the evil done:
the terror and the salt and blood
in clean suburban neighborhoods;
the killing of one child in five
while you and I were here, alive.
One: One cannot assume law is from God. Athiests can have laws based on ONE: Custom, because custom is the way society pragmatically encodes what works. and TWO: based on Justice, the innate conscience. Again, there are arguments that conscience is encoded in our DNA to enable the species to survive.
The fact that infanticide and indirect killing of the elderly usually ceases as soon as the society is rich enough to feed the less strong suggests that innately people recoil from these practices...Pearl Buck relates how Chinese women cried as they told of killing their girlbabies in time of famine, and as a doctor, I have had women cry about having to have an abortion, and in Africa, a woman who cried in telling me the story of how her newborn twins were killed (in a tribe where twins usually died of malnutrition so they were considered reitualistically cursed, and killed in the old days).
Given the sorrow of these women, one suspects that if they had a choice, the children would have lived...
Two: Cannibals are given a bad reputation in the post.
Cannibalism is usually of two types: ONE: in severe famines, where people eat to live and no other food is available.
TWO: Ritualistic cannibalism...ONE: To celebrate that you overcame your enemy. TWO: Eating relatives bodies as part of the burial custom. THREE: as religion, to get strength from the dead person...
Cannibalism may or may not involve killing...often in famine, and in the New Guinea tribes that let women eat part of the dead, it is a ritual of one already dead.
In summary: Human nature recoils at unneeded, coldhearted killing.
Kathy,
That photo is fake in the sense that he's not eating a baby. It's what passes for art in some places. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ca...nibal/
fetus.htm
Gross. Thank you!
Nancy, I don't know whether I recoil more at your coolly pragmatic outlook, or at your naivete in this age in which MANY abortions are performed because a woman wants to remain fashionably thin, or at your expression "Cannibals are given a bad reputation."
Oh, darn, and I thought I was so clever and original when I came up with the same notion on a thread over at Open Book a while back.
(The sad thing is, I was taken seriously by some posters...)
I also suggested Christopher Reeve and Ronald Reagan should have been harvested for parts while their bodies still had some value when they and their next of kin made it clear that they felt it was civilized to make use of eitherwise useless members of society. Who needs embryos when you've got big strapping guys?
Wow, this is someone who read "A Modest Proposal" a little too literally...
Wow, Nancy. I hope you keep your distance from me.
Commenting by HaloScan
