By Judie Brown
No, I am not going to write about old gangster movies and the lines some actors used. I wish I were!
Instead, I am paraphrasing a comment made by a college student who was recently interviewed by Students for Life of America.
The subject was sentience—a concept that, according to Professor C. Ward Kischer, has arisen from psychologists who have tried to relate muscular movements to willful or protective behavior. In other words, it is a manner of communicating, as for example the case of the preborn child who flinches when his body is threatened by an instrument of abortion.
The recent interview with this student from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville tells a different story about the perceived value of sentience. When asked by an interviewer if he agrees with the premise that two-year-olds can be killed (infanticide), the student says:
I’ll buy that. . . . Without communication, we have no way of knowing if you’re sentient or not. I mean it’s no different than this tree. It’s alive, but is it sentient? I don’t know.
While this may sound extreme, we need only check the history of our opponents to discover that not only is this not extreme, but in some quarters, including the classrooms and writings of Princeton University’s Professor Peter Singer, it is quite an acceptable line of thought.
Singer has defended his statements that disabled babies should be left to die, and has written this about sentience: “I don’t think that sentient creatures have a personal interest in continuing to live, unless they are also self-aware beings.”
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but this sort of thinking is nuts! That’s why organizations like American Life League and our Culture of Life Studies Program, not to mention our effort to shut down Planned Parenthood, are so vital. We cannot let the secularists win the day, or, more importantly, the minds and souls of our children.
Arguments like Singer’s and the Tennessee student’s are totally flawed. They are based on the false premise that a human being can only be respected and his human dignity protected if he is deemed by others as able to contribute to society or communicate with others. So not only are the preborn and newborn subject to cruelty and death under such a construct, but so are the disabled, the vulnerable, the comatose, and others who for any number of reasons are not able to communicate.
But what is most troublesome about such ideas is that they deny God and His role in the creation of each and every human being. They deny the reality of the natural law.
It is, in fact, the fundamental position of secular humanism that believing in God does a disservice to humanity.
And on the question of ethics, secular humanists teach that “ethics is autonomous and situational needing no theological or ideological sanction.”
Do you see where this is going? Well, it is going to hell! Because quite literally if young people like those in generation Z and the millennials are only taught the secular humanistic way of approaching human dignity—including abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and so on—their opinions will be shaped in a wayward manner.
But we can change that! We have the tools of truth. Won’t you help us use the arrows in our quiver—the programs we have developed—to teach our children the beauty of the human person, of truth, and of living according to God’s law?
Let’s do this and defeat the twisted view that either you communicate or you die!