We must realize and admit that there were scientists back then who had no qualms with creating and discarding embryonic human individuals, and their values guided the careful manipulation of public understanding, causing the people to tacitly accept the values of the scientists without weighing those values against our founding values ... our tacit accpetance led to the values of the scientists becoming the expressed values of this nation! Will we also allow cannibalism to be the expressed value of this nation? MHGinTN
But I would move INCLUDE the focus off of scientists and onto the true movers and shakers. RightWhale
Evidence for MHGinTNs' claim.
Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity In addition to the ascendancy of biological determinism, an important step in legitimizing the killing of the weak, the infirm, the terminally ill, and the incompetent was the shift in ethos among medical doctors and psychiatrists several decades prior to WWII. Historian Robert Proctor has argued persuasively that the Nazi experiment was rooted in pre-1933 thinking about the essence of personhood, racial hygienics and survival economics and that physicians were instrumental both in pioneering research and in carrying out this program. In fact, Proctor is adamant that scientists and physicians were pioneers and not pawns in this process. By 1933, however, when political power was consolidated by National Socialists, resistance within the medical community was too late. Proctor notes, for example, that most of the fifteen-odd journals devoted to racial hygienics were established long before the rise of National Socialism.
Rebecca Messall -- The Evolution of Genocide My greatest mistake as a pro-life person was in thinking Roe v. Wade arrived by itself. I didn't want to link abortion to other controversial subjects, which scared or confused me, detracting from the obvious atrocity of butchering a living, unborn child. Because of my narrow focus, I ignored the horrific world-view and the socio-political-financial machinery fueling abortion.
I realized that evolution by natural selection has been the fundamental pro-life issue since Darwin himself. His argument that biologically inferior people threaten to deprive intellectually superior people of food and resources established a scientific-sounding rationale for genocide, which is used today by the abortion-based population control and family planning establishments, as well as others bent to this day on improving the race by laboratory methods.
The "Baby Doctor," Benjamin Spock, On Darwin And MoralityDr. Spock concluded that this moral blindness that produced many of our modern social problems was the direct result of modern secular teachings resulting from Darwinism, Freudianism, and other humanistic philosophies. In Spock's own words, the major reason for our most serious social problems was the weakening of the influence of religion that resulted especially from the influence of Darwinism and our increasingly secular society:
How Does the World View of the Scientist & the Clinician Influence Their Work? Does the world view of the scientist influence his work as an investigator conducting research and as a clinician treating patients? Many scholars in the history of science would answer that question with a resounding "Yes." Some, like Thomas Kuhn in his widely quoted "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," have argued that the scientific process is less than an objective critical empirical investigation of the facts. They claim the work of scientists is greatly influenced by their culture, by social and psychological environment, by what Kuhn calls the "paradigm"--that is to say, the preferred or prevailing theories, methods and studies of that particular discipline, and above all by their world view--their specific beliefs about "the order of nature." Kuhn writes that two scientists with different views of the "order of nature" . . . see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction . . . they see different things and they see them in different relations to each other." And we might add that they tend to see and to accept those data that conform to or make sense in light of their world view. So evidence exists that the world view of scientists and the presuppositions that view implies may influence not only the problems scientists choose to investigate but also what they actually observe and fail to observe.
Gallup Poll Special Reports - Public Opinion About Abortion -- An ... The sharp difference between religious and non-religious Americans is even more apparent when their support for abortion is collapsed into the two summary categories: those who favor abortion in all or most cases and those who favor it in only a few cases or no cases. Two thirds of very religious Americans (68%) think abortion should be legal in few or no cases, almost exactly the same as the percentage of non-religious Americans who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases (71%).
Effect of Darwinism on Morality and ChristianityHistorians have documented meticulously the fact that Darwinism has had a devastating impact, not only on Christianity, but also on theism. Many scientists also have admitted that the acceptance of Darwinism has convinced large numbers of people that the Genesis account of creation is erroneous, and that this has caused the whole house of theistic cards to tumble:
If the Bible was wrong in the very first chapter of Genesis, then the veracity of the entire enterprise was called into question. Evolution was not just a scientific idea, it was a bombshell . . . welcomed by atheists, feared by theists
Is this pessimistic, antitheistic, and nihilistic view of humans widespread? One researcher claimed that "ninety-nine percent of the scientists whom I met in my career . . . support the view expressed by Dawkins [that anyone] . . . who denies evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked" (Rörsch, p. F3). This oft'made claim is totally false: an estimated 10,000 scientists in the USA and about 100,000 creation scientists in the world reject Darwinism, and hold instead to a creation worldview (Bergman).
Darwin and the Descent of Morality Quite aside from Darwinism as science, which it is not, Darwinism itself leads directly and inevitably to Social Darwinism, an extremely destructive philosophy with suitably destructive social impacts -- impacts that have become increasingly apparent in our culture in recent decades with the rising dominance of Darwinism in our public schools.
It is a costly pity that we as a culture have not achieved the clarity of thought and found th courage to say to Darwinism, simply, "Show me", and if it cannot, "Get out of the classroom!" It hasn't (shown us), it won't and it cannot, Folks. When do we give this scientific quackery a decent burial? 1 posted on 11/28/2001 10:21 PM CST by Phaedrus
What's Wrong With the Science Establishment? The American Eugenics Society outlasted the other eugenics groups and, in late 1972, decided to change its name to Society for the Study of Social Biology (SSSB).* This group still exists; it is an affiliate of one of the key science groups; and many of its members still pursue traditional eugenics areas such as population control and genetics. Yet the Society's current president recently claimed that "the whole concept of eugenics is as foreign and distasteful to us as it is to anyone else."4 He and other Society leaders declare that the group now has nothing to do with eugenics. To call such statements puzzling would be a vast understatement.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science ("the Association" or AAAS) is the prestigious group that in 1975 accepted the Society for the Study of Social Biology as an affiliate.
Established in the 1840s, when science in the United States was a tiny enterprise, the Association now has a staff of 300, includes nearly 300 scientific and engineering societies as affiliates, and claims about 140,000 individual members. One need not be a laboratory scientist, or an engineer, in order to join; the group also accepts "science educators, policymakers, and interested citizens." Perhaps more "interested citizens" should join and keep an eye on what this powerful group does. It is deeply involved in science education, as Rebecca Messall noted, and it also has substantial influence on Congress. Its large headquarters is conveniently based in Washington, D.C. Besides its lobbying operation, AAAS has eight fellowship programs that place scientists and engineers on congressional staffs and in governmental agencies such as the State Department.5
Alan Guttmacher, the physician who led Planned Parenthood and had been vice president of the American Eugenics Society, certainly agreed. Advocating "the wisdom of carrying out safe non-discriminatory abortion," he said it would lead to "a rather dramatic drop in birth rate," and declared that: "We must become pragmatists. In order to meet the population problem, we have to overcome some of our squeamish ethical concepts."
THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW The Posthumous Application of Negative Eugenics
Ironically, it was Donohue’s Stanford University and Levitt’s University of Chicago (along with Harvard, the institution that published their peer-reviewed study), that first gave birth to the eugenics movement in the United States.21 It began with the formation in 1906 of a blue ribbon Committee on Eugenics of the agricultural American Breeders’ Association. Members included the Chancellor of Stanford University, a University of Chicago sociologist and expert on crime, a Stanford biologist, and a Harvard geneticist.22 The purpose of the committee was to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race" and "to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood."23 A few years later a sub-committee on criminality was created which included Charles R. Henderson, a University of Chicago sociologist.24 The most prominent leader on the Eugenics committee was Charles B. Davenport (previously an instructor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago), who would become a central figure in the eugenics movement. A movement advocating a hierarchy of humanity, eugenic research was spearheaded by academics at these, and other, Ivy League institutions.
The inevitable conclusion of the Donohue-Levitt study is that abortion is a legal choice and a necessary evil.
Four Models of Western Religious Thought
|
|
||||
Source |
Humanist Manifesto I & II |
Writings of Marx and Lenin |
Writings of Spangler, Ferguson, etc |
Bible |