Deadly Designers
The spiraling advances of modern technology have offered Americans a myriad of personal choices. They can design their own homes, automobiles and according to a recent Newsweek Magazine, their own children. Some people design their own funerals, with comfortable coffins, memorable music, and pictorial histories of their earthly lives. Throughout the last 150 years, a gaggle of social planners has been designing coffins for billions of unnecessary human beings!
In March of 1995, Pope John Paul II issued his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, or the Gospel of Life, which cogently addressed the emerging world threat to human life. He warned of a new cultural climate that gave crimes against life a new...even more sinister character. Since many of the pagan practices of ancient Rome: homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, the occult, adultery, sexual indulgence, and infanticide had returned to contemporary culture with a savage vengeance, the Pope's argument is self-evident. The Pope also lamented that the consequential rejection of the Catholic Church and its teachings had caused man to lose his sense of man, his dignity and his life.
Like Gods
The culture of death stands in direct contrast to the Gospel of Life, as established by 2000 years of Christianity and its saintly designers which included the Blessed Mother, St. Paul, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Leo, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Accordingly, the culture of death had its deadly designers.
Franciscan friar, William of Occam (1285-1349), who was best known for Occam's Razor, the philosophical principle that states: the simplest explanation is always the best answer, serves as a good starting point. According to Connecticut University professor Robert Phillips' book, Last Things First, Occam was a proponent of nominalism, the belief that rejected essences, universals, or absolutes. To deny the transcendent was to deny truth. Without objective truth man becomes the source and the measure of all truth with an incessant need to become like gods just as the Book of Genesis had forewarned.
Occam's philosophy systematically undermined the principles of natural law as illustrated by the leading theologian of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. According to Occam, God was no longer understood as a Rational Being as Aquinas had taught. Man could perceive God, only by faith, not through nature. Occam's thinking swept Europe, preparing Western society for the Protestant Revolution, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment would effectively erase God from the epicenter of the universe. Without the foundation of Thomistic Natural Law, the intimate connection between human nature and God's law was severed. Under the banner of human autonomy, an enlightened elite used Occam's teachings as the foundation for its long march through Western culture.
Lucifer's Notebook
In their new book, The Architects of the Culture of Death, Donald DeMarco and Benjamin Wiker have identified and classified many of the major designers of the culture of death who measured morality on their own terms. Their reliable book chronicles the impact of a new set of social planners from the early 19th century through modern times, whose jaded vision of mankind was dedicated to replicating the pagan philosophy of what may be called secular man. The architects of death came from many diverse fields, a variety of different backgrounds and upbringings. The common thread that bound them all together was a unified rejection of Christianity and the dignity of the human person.
In planning a society absent of God and His acolytes, the architects of death borrowed a leaf from Lucifer's notebook. Their acts of personal rebellion against the culture of life, especially God's creation, have provided the intellectual foundations for a secular society where man was God and the innocent were often dependent on the mercy of man. The authors arrived at the same realization that author E. Michael Jones did in his 1993 book Degenerate Moderns. According to Jones, these social revolutionaries, who included many of the same people, such as Freud, Kinsey, and Mead, wanted society to morally diversify so that their incest, homosexuality, and promiscuity would not seem to deviate from the traditional norm. They wanted their iconoclastic thinking and immoral behavior to become a vitalizing and inexhaustible tributary to the cultural mainstream. As Aristotle's Ethics revealed, men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.
A Dance Without Meaning
When St. Thomas More wrote his pamphlet Utopia in 1516, he as dramatizing the impossibility that mankind, shackled in a deeply flawed human nature, could ever achieve a Heaven on earth. According to DeMarco and Wiker's book Architects of the Culture of Death, Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a Secular Utopian, whose ideas led directly to the murder or imprisonment of millions of people in the 20th century in direct defiance of More's inner logic.
The authors other group, the Will Worshipper delighted in the power of the human will set against God's Divine will. To them the human will needed to follow Lucifer's lead and rebel against God. In his 1819 book The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer despairingly viewed the world not as the result of a designing deity but of a meaningless dance of blind forces put into motion by accident. Good and evil did not exist, only pointless indifference. Life was but a fruitless exercise, dominated by self preservation and the sex drive.
Designer Genes
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an avatar of the death designers who had undermined the belief in the innate dignity of man. Not only was Darwin an eugenicist but he was also a racist and a moral relativist. He wanted to replace over1800 years of moral teaching with a new evolutionary relativism. He clearly rejected the natural law and wrote that morals were acquired through social habit and were not an intrinsic part of human nature. Darwin believed in the survival of the fittest and the extermination of the less fit races by the more advanced nations.
Darwin's evolutionary theories served as a catalyst for three generations of Sex Planners. Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) was also an eugenicist who founded the National Birth Control League ostensibly to alleviate poverty She planned to accomplish this by eliminating unwanted babies through birth control and predictably abortion. Planned Parenthood has carried her lethal legacy into the 21st century.
Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) was the director of the institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. His books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female greatly weakened the bonds of personal chastity and sexual restraint in the United States. Under his centurions of academic freedom and the sanctity of science, Kinsey revolutionized the way men and women behaved in the bedroom. Based on faulty, unscientific and dishonest methodology, he created a false picture of the state of sexual mores in America.
Kinsey, who still enjoys icon status, was an atheist who loathed religion, especially for the constraints it put on his own sexual behavior. A closet homosexual, Kinsey raised his personal perversions to the status of scientific research on the college campus, lending it a legitimacy that he would never have achieved in the public world. His infamous case histories, including many with prison inmates, whetted the carnal appetites of millions of Americans by liberating them from their consciences.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was a cultural anthropologist, who Time Magazine called The Mother of the World. In 1928 she published her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, which made her an instant success and endowed her with the aura of public legitimacy. From her studies of the sexual habits of primitive peoples, she concluded that Western morality was artificially contrived and harmful to human personality fulfillment.
A Revolutionary Soul
Austrian physician and the founder of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) highlighted DeMarco and Wiker's section the Pleasure Seekers. Just as Marx had reduced economics to pure materialism, Freud viewed science, especially human behavior, as a purely materialistic form. Freud was a scientist with the soul of a revolutionary. He wanted to free mankind from its conscience through the elimination of personal guilt. He strove to replace religion, especially Christianity, with science. Belief in God was a childish superstition that most people discarded as they matured. His thinking had no place for sin, free will, or personal responsibility.
One of Freud's assistants, Wilhelm Reich, (1897-1957) brought an uninhibited sexual energy to Cultural Marxism. Reich had become obsessed with sex at an early age. As an analyst he realized that he could exert great power and control over his patients by undermining their sexual morals. In his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he revealed his belief that it was impossible to debate away the existence of God. Since Reich stressed getting people involved in deviant sexual behavior, the entire idea of God just disappears automatically. Since religion is where most people learn their moral principles, the absence of religion through illicit sexual behavior can have deleterious affect on the morals of an entire society.
Reich believed that man was fundamentally a sexual animal and that every child was the agent of social change. He understood that the way to destroy the family was through early sex education. Sex education courses became his main weapon in an ideological war against the family. Provocative courses that excited and attracted the sexually immature did untold harm to the moral social development of a generation of public school and even parochial students. By relieving the parents of their moral authority, increasing the incidence of teenage sexual activity and abortion, the road to social disruption was charted. A dedicated Cultural Marxist of the Frankfurt School, which produced Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, Reich was regarded as the Father of the Sex Revolution.
The Road to Auschwitz
DeMarco and Wiker's section on Death Peddlers coalesces very well with the Pleasure Seekers. When disease, injury or aging has robbed the body of its utilitarian value as a vehicle of sensation, in a society without God, it is perfectly logical, even laudatory, for the owner to terminate his or her life. For his highly publicized actions, Jack Kevorkian (1928—) became the notorious symbol of the assisted suicide movement. He believed that the lives of handicapped and terminally ill patients were not worth living. Like his intellectual forbearers in their section the Pleasure Seekers, Kevorkian and his acolytes promoted the sinister corollary of avoiding pain at all costs, even including suicide.
Using a primitive killing machine he designed himself, called a mercitron, Dr. Death assisted several sick, depressed and neurotic persons in killing themselves. Kevorkian and his kindred spirit, Derek Humphreys, (1930—), the founder of the Hemlock Society, have been largely responsible for an unprecedented shift in the American public's attitude toward suffering and death. Using the same rhetoric as the pro-abortion lobby, they have underscored the importance of a person's existential choice in determining whether to face the pain and suffering of illness and death or end their lives on subjective terms. This movement recalls the Nazis, who employed the infamous T-4 Program to rid German society of or life unworthy of life.
Another peddler, Peter Singer, who holds a chair at Princeton University, has taken abortion and euthanasia to new depths. He regards human beings on the same level with members of the Animal Kingdom. Singer can find no ethical basis for favoring the human species. The human preference for its own kind is to Singer a blatant form of speciesism, a politically correct term he equates with racism. In his 1990 book, Animal Liberation, he wrote Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some human beings. For example, in the July 29, 1999 issue of the Boston Globe, he stated pigs were more self-aware and had a greater right to life than a baby with brain damage.
On a similar note, the Nazis were often inhibited by the overt humanity of the Jews they persecuted. They found it necessary to depersonalize them as animals, vermin, or a lower form of human. Singer believes that all creatures hold the same worth and value whether they are eight feet tall, four feet tall or lie flat on their bellies. Singer eliminated the middleman on the road to Auschwitz.
Around the Corner
No issue underscores how far the culture of death can go than that of embryonic stem cell research. This debate aptly demonstrates that the struggle for control over life has reached a new and frightening dimension. The availability of adult stem cells, including those from the placenta, show that there is a morally acceptable way to fuse science and religious principle without bitter debate. The modern deadly designers have ignored the documented success of adult stem cell research in singular favor of embryonic stem cell research, without any sufficient evidence to support their bold prediction of a cure right around the corner.
The left's casual indifference and the maudlin parading of Nancy Reagan, J. Michael Fox, and the memory of actor Christopher Reeve before an emotional public is systemically evil. The truth beyond the leftist pandering is that there is no scientific evidence that embryonic stem cells can cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or spinal cord impairments. One can only deduce that something more vital than science and the curing of fatal and crippling illnesses is at stake. The internal controversy revolves around a life and death struggle to wrest God's creation from His loving hands.
Herod's Heirs
In the last century, the United States survived the external threats of Nazism and Fascism and later the internal threat of Soviet Communism. The new threat to American freedom has been cultural. The ungodly attitude that energized Nazism and Communism has transcended national boundaries and is readily visible within the internal machinations of the cultural Marxists who have infected America's government, schools and even some churches. As the heirs of Herod, these deadly designers will stop at nothing to remove the name of Jesus from the face of the cultural landscape. Americans must take positive steps to thwart this moral decline through prayer, free speech, public witness, and positive example.
One such step could be to learn about the Catholic Church's Project Rachel, founded in Milwaukee in 1984 to incorporate the living words of the Pope's encyclical on the Culture of Death. It encourages post-abortive women to face the physical, emotional and spiritual pain that has tortured their souls, sometimes for decades. Project Rachel has had great success in freeing many of these women from the self-loathing that accompanied their abortions. The counselors in this program reaffirm the Holy Father's plea that The Father of mercies is ready to give you His forgiveness. For further information check your white pages or call 1-800-784-2433
This item 6316 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
