Posted on 02/19/2026 6:31:26 AM PST by Heartlander
This past week, I read three things that offered a glimpse of how empty the modern notion of what it means to be human really is. The first was an email I received from a student at an Ivy League school where I recently gave a lecture on the desecration that characterizes this present age. He recalled how, a couple of days after my lecture, he wandered into a bar populated by intelligent, bright young things—students, lawyers, those who represent the professional, intellectual classes. While there he noticed that the television screens on the wall were not offering the usual fare of professional sports but rather pornographic movies depicting sex acts. As shocking as that was to him, even more shocking was the casual way in which the business of the bar went on as usual and conversations continued apace.
Pornography represents modern dehumanization. It represents the practical culmination of the logic of the sexual revolution by transforming the most intimate act of self-giving between two people in a committed, ongoing relationship into cost-free recreation, reducing sexual acts and those who engage in them to commodities for the cheap entertainment of third parties. And in this bar it had become no more than background noise to the mixing of cocktails and humdrum socializing. What was once the preserve of the sleaziest clubs in the most dubious areas of town can now be found in mainstream establishments, eliciting no more than a shrug of the shoulders or a roll of the eyes from the customers. Something once deemed holy was being profaned, and nobody seemed to care or even notice. One can only conclude that sex has been desecrated to the point where any vestige of its sacred significance has long since disappeared in the popular imagination.
The second was the First Things article by Baroness Philippa Stroud highlighting the catastrophic abortion rates in the United Kingdom and the possible reasons that lie behind them. What is clear from the phenomena that she describes is how abortion has become just another routine method of birth control. One in three U.K. pregnancies ends in abortion. Babies in the womb have become just one more medical inconvenience to be overcome via treatment. Life in the womb is no longer sacred and mysterious. It is analogous to a cyst, to be removed if that is the patient’s wish. That means—of course—that when the most vulnerable human lives prove inconvenient to those who are stronger, they too become one more medical inconvenience to be overcome via treatment.
That latter point is confirmed by the third item: The news that infanticide is, once again, being seriously considered in Canada. Philosophically, this is nothing new. Ivy League Princeton professor Peter Singer has been advocating this for years, making the legitimate point that merely exiting the birth canal does not magically change the status of children. Thus, if killing them in the womb is legitimate, there is no reason not to kill them outside of the womb. That is not a slippery slope argument. It is a consistent argument.
The Spectator article that drew my attention to this news includes a revealing comment from euthanasia advocate Jonathan Reggler: “Once you accept that people ought to have autonomy, once you accept that life is not sacred and something that can only be taken by God, a being I don’t believe in—then, if you’re in that work, some of us have to go forward and say, ‘We’ll do it.’”
Here is someone who understands the modern world and its theological implications for morality and, indeed, humanity. To translate into Nietzschean terms: Once you accept there is no God, you must step up and be God yourself, taking control of life and death. And that is not a hard sell. To assume godlike powers is to play the role of Prometheus, to feel that thrill of divine power, if only for a moment. And Canadian progressives have claimed that role with relish: Medically supervised murder has accounted for roughly one in five deaths in Canada for a number of years. But it is also ironic that man’s exceptionalism—his freedom—is precisely what allows him to treat life as something trivial and to reduce himself to nothing. Solzhenitsyn famously rooted the West’s problems in the fact it had forgotten God. On this point, Nietzsche was blunter: We have not forgotten him so much as killed him. And in killing God we came to glory in killing ourselves, both physically and, perhaps more significantly, metaphysically.
What all three of these texts witness to is that, when the Promethean act that makes us feel and act like gods reaches its apex, something ironic occurs: We human beings reach our nadir, degrading ourselves to nothing, with nothing much to say. Porn is now background noise, babies in the womb are merely clumps of alien cells, and infants are the objects not of unconditional parental love but of consumer taste. What must we conclude from all this? That we have truly used our godlike powers, our human genius, to make ourselves into mere handfuls of dust. And once we are so reduced, then even our acts of desecration become routine, matters provoking indifference or even boredom. Humans are exceptional, the only creatures who can ask of themselves: “Who are we?” The answer we have chosen to give is therefore deeply paradoxical: We are nothing much at all.
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God wants us to be humble and of dignity, yet we become in our minds and actions like gods, devoid of dignity or worth.
The ape of God.
Humans who become totally materialistic, end up totally inferior to animals.
Psalm 115 describes what happens to those who worship idols. It says they “become like them”.
I would posit that todays idols are inanimate concepts like energy, matter, time and chance. Those ruling concepts don’t react to humans like the wood, gold, and silver idols of the past.
Hence, modern humans who subscribe to cold, indifferent forces or things, as their governing principles, become cold and indifferent. With all of its chilling, and deadly ramifications.
Just sayin’
The unfortunate convergence of “acceptable” porn presented by Playboy Magazine and the birth control pill.
Humans are exceptional, the only creatures who can ask of themselves: “Who are we?” The answer we have chosen to give is therefore deeply paradoxical: We are nothing much at all.
Hedonism.
Maybe I have been listening to too much of the Epstein stuff. But I am finding many things I once thought interesting to even entertaining reads or views...suddenly very, very dark reflections of the world.
Last night, even watching Criminal Minds on the TV and the episode with Dante the rock-n-roll vampire, and episode repeat now seems to close to reality. I turned it off.
Sitting in silence I contemplated all the crazy ‘stories and conspiracies’ I have heard over the course of my lifetime. None seem so farfetched anymore.
The main thought I keep circling is...exactly how far has our own government really gone with propaganda and mind control on us? How did teachers go from instructors to indoctrinators? It really makes one wonder just exactly what did we learn from WWII?
bkmk
I am just posting this for the reference. Today I posted a purely philosophical question as a religious/personal post. It was banned in 5 minutes. It was a Christian post. Posted to the right cord. Just sayin…..
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