WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE “SANCTITY OF LIFE” IS REPLACED BY “QUALITY OF LIFE” NOTIONS?

How has humanity been enabled to commit horrid atrocities in violation of our human endowment of compassion? For one thing, our beliefs are able to stifle the conscience.

Viktor Frankl, was a Holocaust survivor and a psychiatrist. He wrote about the inevitable consequences of Darwinian materialism:

• If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (Richard Weikart, “The Death of Humanity”)

The theory of evolution has been able to bury the idea of “equality before God” and the “sanctity of life” in favor of eugenics, the Darwinian creation. Eugenics has also been able to reshape our vocabulary so that murder is now the “removal of unwanted tissue” and the Holocaust as the “improvement of the human race.”

Historian Richard Weikart had written about the fruits of eugenics:

• As I have shown in considerable detail in my book Hitler’s Ethic (2009), Hitler and his minions were not amoral beasts who desired power purely for the sake of power. They truly believed that the detestable acts they were committing would benefit humanity by improving the human species.

The National Socialists often proved that ideas and beliefs give birth to actions. Weikart continued:

• Soon after coming to power in 1933, they began sterilizing hundreds of thousands of disabled Germans they identified as “inferior,” “defective,” or “unfit.” Then they proceeded in 1939 to mass killing of the disabled, murdering about two hundred thousand in Germany in five years (and untold thousands more in occupied territories).

What the National Socialists had performed was merely what other social Darwinists had already begun for the “betterment” of the human race. In 1943, the head of Hitler’s SS, Heinrich Himmler, described this genocidal “betterment” as the work of “honest, decent” people:

• “One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else . . . . Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture: apart from that it does not interest me.” (Weikart)

In a godless and amoral world, biology is everything and the removal of defective human biological life-forms becomes the unassailable conclusion of “reason.” Therefore, Weikart wrote:

• According to Nazi ideology, positive traits such as loyalty, honesty, diligence, and thriftiness; or immoral characteristics, such as greed, deception, sexual promiscuity, or laziness, were biologically ingrained.

If this is so, why not remove defective and inferior biological types, as the herder culls out defective cattle! Weikart argued that the same biologically-based conclusions could also be reached from considerations of nurture, our upbringing. Whether biologically determined or socially determined, the human is still an amoral creature exclusively the result of nature, nurture, or both:

• Following Marx’s philosophy, communists believed that human behavior is shaped primarily by the economy. Instead of race warfare, they engaged in class warfare to “exterminate the bourgeoisie as a class,” as an early leader of Lenin’s secret police put it. Some of their methods were remarkably similar to the Nazis’: one-party state, suppression of civil liberties, secret police, and concentration camps. (Weikart)

If this godless account of humanity is true, why should the State not mold us according to its design as it would any machine? If God doesn’t exist, then the State can assume the role of God to decide who and what has value. However, if God does exist, then we need to inquire into His design. Accordingly, each human is created in His likeness to share in His nature. Therefore, each one of us is sacred and must be treated as such, as a responsible moral agent who has His moral truths imprinted upon our conscience.

However, Western society often fails to see the implications of the rejection of the “sanctity of human life.” Weikart therefore wrote about this deterioration:

• We have effectively undermined all human rights, because now we can decide which humans have rights and which do not. We decide which human lives are valuable and which are valueless, or even of “negative value,” to borrow Ribbert’s pathetic terminology. However, the recent progress we have made in fighting racism and in providing assistance to those with disabilities has blinded us to our moral deterioration.

In Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” he based his human-rights case upon God-given moral absolutes:

• “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Consequently, any law that degrades humanity into amoral machines, fully determined by genetics and environment, makes them into objects to be thrown into a toxic waste dump once they are deemed valueless or dysfunctional.

This is the inevitable conclusion of the materialist worldview of evolution. In “The Meaning of Evolution” (1950), evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote:

• “Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.” (Weikart)

As we think, so are we. If human rights are just social inventions, they are just our arbitrary and ever-evolving creations, to be given or retracted according at the will of the State.

Once the godless materialist killed God, he elevated himself to assume God’s role as the creator of human rights. However, as Jesus had warned, our vain attempts lead to the degradation of humanity:

• “For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”(Luke 14:11)

We sought to make ourselves gods, but, in the process, we made ourselves machines having, at best, a limited shelf-life.