Here’s Meredith Lowell, the main character in a very weird story.
Excerpt:
Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where a magistrate judge ordered her held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a hearing next week, court records show.
[…]Investigators say the FBI was notified in November of a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery offering $830 to $850 for the hit and saying the ideal candidate would live in northeast Ohio, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the court on Friday.
The affidavit says an FBI employee posing as a possible hit man later began email correspondence with Lowell, and she offered him $730 in jewelry or cash for the killing of a victim of at least 12 years but “preferably 14 years old or older” outside a library near a playground in her hometown.
“You need to bring a gun that has a silencer on it and that can be easily concealed in your pants pocket or coat. … If you do not want to risk the possibility of getting caught with a gun before the job, bring a sharp knife that is (at least) 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone and/or slit their throat to kill them. I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes,” says an email reprinted in the affidavit.
She told the undercover employee she wanted to be on site when the slaying took place so she could distribute “papers” afterward, the affidavit says.
[…]Reprinted emails also say Lowell wrote that she sees nothing wrong with “liberating” animals from fur factory farms and laboratories since “soldiers liberated people from Nazi camps in World War 2.”
She also criticized a new aquarium in Cleveland – saying “it is wrong for animals to be taken against their will and put into their (equivalent) of a bathtub” – and research by the Cleveland Clinic, where she said animals should be “liberated and put somewhere where they are not tortured.”
The graphic campaign and exhibit “Holocaust on Your Plate,” devised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, juxtaposes 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.
The exhibit opens Friday in San Diego, California, and went up Thursday at the University of California at Los Angeles. It also is posted on a PETA Web site, http://www.masskilling.com, which calls for support for the campaign from the Jewish community.
The comparisons prompted an angry statement from Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League national director and a Holocaust survivor.
“The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent,” the statement said. “PETA’s effort to seek approval for their ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights.”
Lisa Lange, PETA’s vice president of communications, told CNN’s “American Morning With Paula Zahn” on Friday that the idea for the public relations effort came from the late Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, she said, wrote: “In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka” — a death camp in Poland.
Lange said the campaign is appropriate because “Nazi concentration camps were modeled after slaughterhouses.”
One more thing about PETA. PETA is not a pro-life organization. Every single animal rights person I have ever spoken to is pro-abortion. I find it so weird that an organization that worries so much about animals has nothing at all to say about protecting humans.
The Guardian reportsthat Peter Singer is having second thoughts about some aspects of his moral philosophy. In particular, he now has doubts about whether preference utilitarianism provides satisfactory moral advice about climate change. (As the reporter puts it, “preference utilitarianism can provide good arguments not to worry about climate change, as well as arguments to do so.”) Singer is also now open to the idea that moral value must be grounded in something objective; and though he is still not inclined to believe in God, he acknowledges that a theologically-oriented ethics has the advantage that it provides the only complete answer to the question why we should act morally.
This is progress, though it seems to me that Singer’s conception of moral objectivity is dubious. Apparently he would ground our knowledge of objective moral truths in “intuition.” As I have said before, this is bad methodology, at least from an Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law point of view as I understand it. Moral intuitions track objective moral truth in only a very rough, general, and mutable way. Practically they are useful – that is why nature put them into us – and they might provide a useful heuristic when philosophically investigating this or that specific moral question. But intuition does not ground moral truth, it is not an infallible guide to moral truth, and it should never form the basis of a philosophical argument for a controversial moral position.
So Singer has finally become aware of the the difference between relative morality and objective morality, but he’s still not clear about moral epistemology and moral ontology, which comes up so often in William Lane Craig’s debates. Even if we know right and wrong through our moral intuitions, we still have to need a designer of the universe to say how it ought to be, if our intuitions are referring to a real design for the universe, and for us.
Well, still – at least Singer is making progress. But he’ll never be able to arrive at a rational conception of morality on atheism.
Jürgen Habermas is one of Europe’s most prominent philosophers today. Another fact about Habermas: he’s a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. Yet he highlights the inescapable historical fact that the biblical faith has had a profound influence in shaping civilization. Consider carefully his assessment:
“Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than just a precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and a social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”
[…]This isn’t surprising. Intrinsic human dignity and worth make sense if we have been made in God’s image rather than being mere molecules in motion. Biblical theism has the metaphysical capital to sustain the concept of human rights. Our law courts and legal system assume that humans don’t simply dance to the music of their DNA. The criminal’s excuse (“Your honor, my genes made me do it”) flies in the face of what we all know of human nature and our presumption of moral responsibility. Human value and moral agency make better sense if we have come from a supremely valuable being beyond nature. We certainly have no rational justification to anticipate the emergence of intrinsic human dignity and worth if we are simply the products of mindless, deterministic, valueless material forces in a purposeless cosmos.
Another point that undercuts objective morality and human dignity given naturalism is that many naturalists themselves see the logical outcome of their own metaphysic. Naturalism, they argue, simply lacks the metaphysical equipment to account for objective moral values. Many naturalists admit that natural material processes without God cannot bring us to moral responsibility and human dignity and worth. These features of reality—which we routinely assume—don’t square well with naturalism. Here’s a sampling of key naturalists on this topic:
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities….There are altogether no moral facts.” Indeed, morality “has truth only if God is the truth—it stands or falls with faith in God.”[5]
Jean-Paul Sartre: “It [is] very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him.”[6]
Bertrand Russell believed that “the whole subject of ethics arises from the pressure of the community on the individual.”[7]
E. O. Wilson locates moral feeling in “the hypothalamus and the limbic system”; it is a “device of survival in social organisms.”[8]
Jonathan Glover considers morality a “human creation” and calls on humans to “re-create ethics.”[9]
We could add lots more leading naturalists—J.L. Mackie, James Rachels, Peter Singer, and the like; these acknowledge that nature can’t get us to objective moral values and human dignity.
Indeed, thoughtful atheists understand that there is no concept of “ought-to-do” in an accidental universe.
In order to have a robust notion of morality, you need five things:
beings with objective moral value
objective moral duties
free will, in order to make moral choices and be responsible for them
ultimate significance for your actions
proportional rewards/punishments for your actions
Atheism grounds none of these. Christian theism grounds all of them. So, moral behavior is not rational on atheism. What atheists do is look around at the customs and conventions in the time and place where they exist and they mimic their neighbors. If they can escape the consequences of being caught, or avoid being caught, then they rebel against the conventions of their neighbors. The motive for conforming and not conforming to these arbitrary conventions is the same – pleasure. Nothing is really right or wrong in an accidental universe. There is no way we ought to be, we just try to feel good, and complying (or not) with the arbitrary expectations of society in the time and place where we are is just another way we try to feel good.
Atheists think that moral prohibitions are like changing fashions or culinary preferences. In some societies, slavery was wrong. In others, it’s right. There is no REAL objective truth about whether slavery is right or wrong, on atheism. And that’s why you can see a lot of people who reject God killing unborn children today – which is actually WORSE than slavery. Everyone who is pro-abortion today would have been pro-slavery when slavery was still being practiced. That’s atheist morality. Do what makes you feel good, and use force to avoid being judged and punished by your peers. Survival of the fittest. There is no such thing as objective human rights on atheism, or the right to life.
Several objections show the inadequacy of utilitarianism as a normative moral theory.
First, utilitarianism can be used to justify actions that are clearly immoral. Consider the case of a severely deformed fetus. The child is certain to live a brief, albeit painless life. He or she will make no contribution to society. Society, however, will bear great expense. Doctors and other caregivers will invest time, emotion, and effort in adding mere hours to the baby’s life. The parents will know and love the child only long enough to be heartbroken at the inevitable loss. An abortion negates all those “utility” losses. There is no positive utility lost. Many of the same costs are involved in the care of the terminally ill elderly. They too may suffer no pain, but they may offer no benefit to society. In balancing positives and negatives, and excluding from the equation the objective sacredness of all human life, we arrive at morally repugnant decisions. Here deontological and virtue ethics steer us clear of what is easier to what is right.
Second, in a similar way, utilitarianism denies the existence of supererogatory acts. These are acts of moral heroism that are not morally obligatory but are still praiseworthy. Examples would be giving 75 percent of your income to the poor or throwing yourself on a bomb to save a stranger. Consider the bomb example. You have two choices — throwing yourself on the bomb or not doing so. Each choice would have consequences and, according to utilitarianism, you are morally obligated to do one or the other depending on which option maximized utility. Thus, there is no room for acts that go beyond the call of morality.
Third, utilitarianism has an inadequate view of human rights and human dignity. If enslaving a minority of people, say by a lottery, would produce the greatest good for the greatest number, or if conceiving children only to harvest their parts would do the same, then these could he justified in a utilitarian scheme. But enslavement and abortion violate individual rights and treat people as a means to an end, not as creatures with intrinsic dignity as human beings. If acts of abortion, active euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and so forth maximize utility, then they are morally obligatory for the utilitarian. But any moral system that makes abortion and suicide morally obligatory is surely flawed.
Finally, utilitarianism has an inadequate view of motives and character. We should praise good motives and seek good character because such motives and character are intrinsically valuable. But utilitarianism implies that the only reason we should praise good motives instead of bad ones, or seek good character instead of bad character, is because such acts would maximize utility. But this has the cart before the horse. We should praise good motives and blame bad ones because they are good or bad, not because such acts of praising and blaming produce good consequences.
It would be nice to see Peter Singer in a debate with J.P. Moreland. Moreland could move him along in his thinking, I’m sure.
While the Kermit Gosnell story is still being ignored by the mainstream media, I though I would investigate the groups who promote abortion.
The support for abortion comes entirely from the secular left, especially from the Darwinists, the feminists and the global warming alarmists. Let’s take a look at each of them.
“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
Unsurprisingly, Myers is “pro-choice”. But Myers’ advocacy of “choice” goes further:
“…I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion…”
“Pro-abortion”? Even committed pro-abortion zealots don’t generally endorse abortion explicitly, except to assert the right to ‘choice,’ as if one were choosing a salad dressing rather than deciding to take a human life.
Myers:
“[I] would like to encourage more people to abort…”
Meyers is considered to be one of the more rabid atheistic evangelists operating today. But there are tons of virulent atheists operating on the taxpayer’s dime in the university.
The denial of basic human rights by the pro-abortion population control thugs is expanding. My colleague Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke quotes Peter Singer, a utilitarian atheist-Darwinist ethicist at Princeton, who has denied that young children meet the standards for personhood and has stated that many intelligent animals ought to have more rights than young children.
Singer:
“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would . . . be right to kill him.”
“Maybe the law has to have clear bright lines and has to take birth as the right time, although maybe it should make some exceptions in the cases of severe disability where parents think that it is better for the child and better for the family that the child does not live…The position that allows abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances…If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life.”[emphasis mine]
This is where the ideas of Kermit Gosnell are taught to students – in the left-wing universities. Singer and Meyers are committed atheists, committed Darwinists and radically pro-abortion. Atheism has killed over 100 million people in the last 100 years. Atheism is the repudiation of objective morality. When you repudiate objective morality, you get mass murder. Sometimes through abortion, sometimes through DDT bans, sometimes through revolutions and wars, and sometimes in the Gulag. These are things that are natural on atheism – survival of the fittest. Kill the weak. That’s their view. And when people like Grosnell go off to college, that’s what they learn.
Feminists in government
First, it’s important to understand that third-wave feminism, (hereafter “feminism”) is one of the movements that brought about abortion.
Excerpt:
A growing movement in America, spearheaded by Sarah Palin, is pro-life feminism, This attempts to decouple feminism from abortion rights, arguing that you can believe in a woman’s right to be empowered without believing in her right to abort. Its proponents report a groundswell of support among young women looking to reinvent their mothers’ ideology.
But you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology.
[…]As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.
Actually, first-wave feminism, which I agree with, WAS pro-life. But today, what people mean by feminism is third-wave feminism, and third-wave feminism requires abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy.
Which political party supports that third-wave feminist view?
“Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I am committed to protecting this constitutional right. I also remain committed to policies, initiatives, and programs that help prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption,” the president said in a statement. “And on this anniversary, I hope that we will recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”
“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. . . .”
That’s feminism – the official view of the Democrat party.
Philadelphia, where Kermit Grosnell practiced, is DOMINATED by Democrats at all levels of government. It’s very similar to Chicago in that respect. And the state had a Democrat governor for the longest time as well.
Ask yourself why you are not hearing about which root causes and whose rhetoric are to blame for this four-decades-long massacre — just the tip of a blood-soaked iceberg defended by the predators of Planned Parenthood. You know the answer: If it doesn’t help the Left criminalize conservatism, it’s not worth discussing.
From the conclusion of the grand jury report: “It is not our job to say who should be fired or demoted. We believe, however, that anyone responsible for permitting Gosnell to operate as he did should face strong disciplinary action up to and including termination. This includes not only the people who failed to do the inspecting, the prosecuting, and the protecting, but also those at the top who obviously tolerated, or even encouraged, the inaction. The Department of State literally licensed Gosnell’s criminally dangerous behavior. DOH gave its stamp of approval to his facility. These agencies do not deserve the public’s trust. The fate of Karnamaya Mongar and countless babies with severed spinal cords is proof that people at those departments were not doing their jobs. Those charged with protecting the public must do better.”
And she has also written about how Obama’s science czar is a proponent of eugenics and coerced abortion. This man was appointed by Barack Obama. This is the Democrat view – they LOVE abortion. And some of them even love infanticide.
Obama himself voted twice against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.
Obama also likes to give speeches to Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States.
[Planned Parenthood] took home $85 million in “excess of revenue over expenses” (a nifty way of saying profits) and had an operating budget of over $1 billion for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, according to its latest annual report. Included in that budget was $350 million in “government grants and contracts” (an equally nifty way of saying your tax dollars). An increase in the number of abortions performed helped fuel the profits.
Abortion is a very profitable business, and the pro-abortion politicians subsidize the abortion industry with taxpayer dollars, including dollars from pro-life taxpayers, in exchange for political contributions to their campaigns. Yes, the contributions go almost entirely to Democrats.
Global warming alarmists
Here’s an article that explains what global warmists think about people having babies.
Excerpt:
Couples who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the British government’s green adviser warned.
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.
He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.
A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.
“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
Democrats what to use government to promote abortion in order to stop global warming.
WINTERY KNIGHT 