Liberalism’s most fundamental tenet is Protagoras’s dictum that “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that in the atheistic world of liberal-progressivism the human mind is the only limitation on conduct. This implicit moral relativism opens the way to totalitarianism and its tools: thought police, secular education, genocide, abortion, and eugenics. Scientism is invoked, like medieval alchemy, as liberals’ license to control all aspects of nature, from human behavior to global weather.
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Christine Rosen, in a Wall Street Journal review of “Better for All the World,” by Harry Bruinius, writes:
“In 1927, physicians at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg sterilized a young woman named Carrie Buck. Although doctors at state institutions across the country had performed sterilizations before, Carrie’s case was unusual. Her sterilization had received the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell, the court upheld the state of Virginia’s right to sterilize, forcibly, so-called feeble-minded individuals. “It is better for all the world,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for the majority, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Holmes concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.....”
“In 1924, Congress passed an immigration-restriction law based on eugenic principles, assuming that certain national groups possessed better “germplasm”—or heritable traits—than others. Progressive politicians, intellectuals and religious leaders supported eugenics, seeing in it an enlightened, scientific attempt to cure humanity’s ills.”
Be it noted that ‘religious leaders’ supporting eugenics were the Social Gospelists, of whom I noted in Truth:
“Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism. Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century. Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity.
“Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him. The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.”
To use today’s New York Times’s knee-jerk phrase, at the turn of the century and into the 1920s “all the world’s scientists” supported eugenics, as did the nation’s leaders, from Teddy Roosevelt on down. Only ignorant yokels who doubted Darwin’s authority, people who believed in God-ordained sanctity of life, could be so obtuse as to stand in the way of ‘progress.’
Today Justice Holmes’s logic is cited as a justification for abortion, making it in effect a variety of eugenics. Abortion advocates tell us that the practice reduces the numbers of children who would otherwise end up on welfare rolls or turn to criminal activity. Liberal-progressives whose delicate sensibilities quail at the thought of imprisoning, or ineffably, executing criminals, find it so much more hygienic just to eliminate them very early in life, out of sight and out of mind.
The common thread in atrocities such as eugenics and abortion is liberalism’s faith in ‘progress’ as a purely secular and materialistic ‘thing,’ which is summed up as ‘conquest of nature.’ The definition of ‘progress’ is thus confined to material goods and hedonistic license under an all-powerful government that regulates economic activity and encourages indulgence in sensual appetites as the socialist version of Marx’s opium of the masses.
C. S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man” put ‘conquest of nature’ into proper perspective. He wrote:
“ ‘Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science.....In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?.... What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.... No doubt the picture could be modified by public ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding [i. e., eugenics], must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones.... Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.... Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”
Human embryo stem-cell research and cloning are next in line.
Novels like “Brave New World” and “1984” are accurate representations of the ‘progressive’ world in which liberal-socialists seek to stifle the voices of believers in the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States.
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