Mr. Brog, in his In Defense of Faith: The Judeo-Christian Idea and the Struggle for Humanity, concedes that Christians have committed horrendous crimes in the name of theology but sets out to prove that Judeo-Christian beliefs gave the Western and, ultimately, entire world its most important spiritual value: an obligatory reverence for life.
Mr. Brog advances his argument in a series of historical vignettes. He introduces Tacitus, the Roman senator and historian, who (in his major work, Histories) describes the Jews as wicked, stubborn and lascivious and lists the Jewish beliefs he finds most revolting – especially, he says, the belief “that it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child.” The Romans were “proud practitioners of infanticide.” As were the Greeks. As were the other nations of the ancient world.
The value we place on life is a values judgment, ever evolving. What was established (life is sacred) can easily be torn down, and one could argue, has been substantially in recent years. Over to you, Tacitus!
There is an assumption in sections of our culture that abortion is progressive, that history is moving inevitably towards greater acceptance of abortion globally. But legalized abortion is not in any way a new or a recent phenomenon. Abortion was legal in many ancient societies, including that of Rome. Not simply abortion, but infanticide. The killing of babies was common.
An extensive study of a mass burial at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley suggests that the 97 children all died at 40 weeks gestation, or very soon after birth.
The archaeologists believe that locals may have been killing and burying unwanted babies on the site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.
At this particular site, Sheppard Frere claims in his work Britannia that these children were not only victims of infanticide but were the unwanted female offspring of the slave-run establishment. The site is now believed to have been a brothel. There are interesting parallels between these gruesome practices and those of today, as Roman infanticide led to the deaths of many more girls than boys, boys being considered more valuable. So to consider abortion as progressive, when it is a legislative regression to a time when the value of life was bound up with a perceived worth based on gender, wealth and power, is incorrect.
Infants were not considered to be human beings until about the age of two and were not buried in cemeteries if they were younger than that.
Life. Who knew I’d be sitting here writing largely about contentious Canadian social issues? At one point, not too long ago, I wanted to be a foreign affairs guru, yes, guru, or perhaps an academic: get a PhD in German history and teach.
Clearly I’m not doing that, but I always read German history with interest.
So I might pick up this book, The year that changed the world, the untold story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall:
The good historian is a myth buster. Michael Meyer is a very good historian. As Newsweek’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe in 1989, he watched the world turn on a dime. The myth he busts in this book concerns the contribution the United States made to the collapse of communist regimes that year. Some Americans want to believe that those regimes crumbled because of White House manipulation — clever diplomacy backed by raw power. In fact, American meddling was rather benign and, during that fateful year, conspicuously ill conceived.
Good historians are myth busters where myths need busting. Otherwise, good historians read primary sources and eye witness accounts and do vast amounts of archival research to tell the story of what happened. There is no need to denigrate the role of Ronald Reagan or the United States in bringing down the Berlin Wall, and that story line is not at odds with the rest of what the review describes. Certainly the thousands of people on the ground played a critical role, certainly the Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt… Few to none think that Reagan’s rhetoric alone brought the wall down (myth creation so that then a clever reporter can bust it?) but many Eastern Europeans (in particular those who already escaped and were now living amongst the socialist chattering classes in downtown Toronto) found it truthful and inspiring that someone like Reagan would speak out against The Evil Empire.
The bottom line is that people like myself are not going to stop until, at the very least, unborn children have more value than a Canadian kidney,” he said.
Dr. Sneddon went on about kidneys, too, as he argued the pro-choice side of things. (see the comments section)
[He] relied heavily on an analogy of a mother whose son needs her kidney to survive, and that she has the right to deny her son her kidney as her rights to her body part trumps his.
Now back to embryonic stem cell research. Contrary to what Bill Clinton thinks, the embryo is a fertilized egg, and the the earliest form of human life. How do their rights get trumped in the name of scientific research? Even if there had been any sort of success story regarding embryonic stem cell research — and I’ve been looking, believe me — how would one person’s, say, cerebral palsy treatment justify destroying an embryo to harvest its stem cells?
Clinton really kills me when he suggests that using those embryos which would otherwise stay on ice indefinitely for medical research is a pro-life position. Running scientific experiments on human beings is what Hitler did! Should we then say that it was more noble that these humans — the Jews — be used for the advancement of science rather than be sent straight to the gas chamber? That is, in fact, how the doctors in Auschwitz justified experimenting on human beings.
It was really a way of exploiting a human resource which they deemed to be already lost. They thought. “Well, they’ll be dead tomorrow, so let’s use them today.” (2:32 into the film)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. While most of us will never come close to being as brave and unflinching as he was, we can all look to him for inspiration. The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it’s stronger than corrupt ideologies. Let us never forget that.
There are a couple of exhibits on in Ottawa now that I’ll definitely want to see. One is at the National Art Gallery, 1930s: The Making of ‘The New Man’ and the other is at the war museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The Hill Times cites Ann Thomas, a curator at the National Art Gallery who says this: (subscription only)
Everybody has something to learn from both of these exhibitions and I think… that it’s good not to see these as sick moments in history but to look at the world today as it is, to look at our own society today, and to ask questions about our society and whether we redress these issues in the right way, whether we are moving beyond this kind of behaviour en masse, you know? I think it’s really easy to look back and go, ‘uh that was so terrible,’ and to feel as if we would never ever repeat anything like that and that we are so pure and untouched by evil ourselves and I think it’s always a good exercise, to be able to look and sort of learn something.”
True enough. And for the purposes of this blog, that is why abortion is not private—one woman may abort a Down’s Syndrome baby, but if enough women do so, suddenly we are all walking in that new world, where people with that disability don’t exist. Same goes for sex selection abortion. No, we’re not pure and untouched by evil. Eugenic practices are happening right now, but we don’t generally have the courage to face up to it.
Today’s Post also has an article by Michael Coren about how the socialist left popularized eugenics, contrary to what many believe.
From the WebUrbanist, 12 monuments to women. I’m good with Queen Victoria (the ultimate have-it-all woman; she had a busy career and a busy family life way back before work-family balance was in fashion) and Molly Pitcher, not sure about the Red Light woman, and somewhat intrigued by the others. An interesting feature to ponder on a nice, warm evening.
