Over 250 protesters greeted bioethicists Peter Singer's first class at Princeton. Singer says parents should be able to kill their disabled newborns, and says that people with cognitive disabilities should have fewer rights than the rest of us. Associated Press story
Nathanson Hand of God Silent Scream He describes how the science of fetology had advanced due to ultra-sound and other techniques. The "Silent Scream," which shows one of the very last abortions performed in his clinic, was the fruit of that technology.
Dr. Nathanson not only left that culture with its massive cover-up, but began to battle against it. He started that battle as an atheist who had become convinced by scientific evidence. But the evidence was about human life and therefore the fifth commandment "Thou shall not kill." That he himself had violated that commandment not once but thousands of times was indeed a heavy burden. By facing the personal meaning of the moral law, he was quickly carried to the question of God. He began reading the great Christian authors and as he did so, the evidence for Christianity mounted.
The final chapter describes how he went from atheism to Christianity. In reading it, I was reminded of another great convert, C.S. Lewis. As a young university professor he was quite comfortable in his atheism. But then, because of some good influences, he began to try to live the moral law. Things began to unravel. He did try to be moral and at the same time to cling to his atheism. But in the end says Lewis, "God checkmated me." The same happened to the author of "Hand of God." His autobiography not only analyzes the greatest moral issue of our times, but gives a searing picture of one soul caught up in that struggle.
Why Abortion Isn't Important In fact, when I first learned that the Doctor Exsecrabilis Peter Singer was now somewhat of a fan of bestiality,2 I caught myself being not nearly as surprised as I thought I might be: surely this was the logical working out (by a thinker who satisfies G. K. Chesterton’s definition of a maniac—not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything but his reason) of a moral position that had already been poisoned decades ago by those first thoughts about whether morality is all about costs and benefits, and whether the job of modern moralists was to overthrow tradition and replace it with a brand new morality for our brand new times.
Here is one of the (to my mind) greatest philosophers produced by England in the last century, telling people-especially other philosophers-that sometimes it is better to walk away than to argue. Why? Because a person's conscience can become so corrupt, and lead to such equally corrupt rationalizations, that to engage them in serious argument about those rationalizations is both pointless-being unlikely to have the slightest impact on their thinking-and, what is worse, dangerous-bringing the thinker of good will into serious danger of having his own conscience perverted by the sophistries of the other.