If You See This Man, Do Not Let Him Near Your Children. Especially Infants

This is Peter Singer, and he is dangerous.

Let me explain.

On Wednesday, I will be doing a continuing educatrion seminar for health care providers at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. It's titled, "Worldview, Healing and Spiritual Care" and it's on how worldviews shape medical decsions.

Getting ready for this foray into medical ethics made me look back at some things I did a few years ago for what we call our Summer Bible Institute. That year, 2005, was on "Worldview Boot Camp" and this man, Peter Singer came up in the context of naturalism.

What is naturalism?

Naturalism can be defined negatively as being opposed to all that can be called “supernatural”—the existence of God and miracles. Broadly, this includes secular humanism and atheism. Scientific naturalism refers to the view that only scientific knowledge is reliable and that science can, in principle, explain everything.

Naturalism is not new. Some ancient Greeks were proponants of naturalism. Thales of Iona advocated atheism. Atheism requires some form of evolutionary theory, so Anaximander produced one, believing that human beings were descendants of fish. (Sorry, apes.)

Human beings are therefore merelty the cleverest animal. Not surprisingly, both Athens and Sparta practiced infanticide. Infants were killed if they were the "wrong" sex, or smaller than hoped for, not “just” for birth defects. Mt. Taygetus in Sparta was used as a execution location for these “inferior” infants.

The modern "Greeks" are with us in the person of Peter Singer (among many, many others). In 1983, he wrote,

Once the religious mumbo-jumbo surrounding the term "human" has been stripped away, we may continue to see normal members of our species as possessing greater capacities of rationality, self-consciousness, communication...than other members of any other species; but we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species, no matter how limited its capacity for intelligent or even conscious life may be. If we compare a severely defective human infant with a ... dog or pig ... we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities.... Species membership alone ... is not relevant.... Humans who bestow superior value on the lives of all human beings, solely because they are members of our own species, are ... similar to ... white racists...

Far from being the ravings of a marginal figure, Singer is an honored member of the Princeton faculty and is widely considered the most influencial ethicist of our time.

Over at a good blog I just came upon, Barry Carey's With All Your Mind, we read of Dr. Singer's latest naturalist rants:

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has once again made clear his standings on the concept of human dignity. On Friday, 1/26/07, in a piece in the NY Times, while discussing the case of Ashley, a severely disable girl, he stated the following:
Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?

In his book, Practical Ethics, he opines:

The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings… This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings.

Singer’s views are considered radical by many and illicit outrage by some. I, of course, am among those who consider his viewpoint outrageous. However, I at least give him credit for being consistent with the argument supporting abortion.

In contrast to the view of Singer is the Christian view of human dignity. In the words of Al Mohler, whose blog alerted me to Singer’s comments:

Christians believe that every single human being possesses full human dignity because every human being is made in the image of God. A worldview that denies the existence of God and thus denies the reality of the image of God has to come up with some other explanation for human dignity — one that lacks essential dignity. Thus, in this worldview, the humans that are thought to deserve dignity are recognized as having it, while others are denied the same.

All I can do is say Amen to Al Mohler, Barry Carey. And I can say, keep this man away from your kids. Far away.

The Power of Simple Goodness

I was just a kid. Well, a college student all over 20 years of age, and on the trip of a lifetime. I went to a small church-related college in West Virginia, Alderson-Broaddus College, and that school for years had a European Term option. Just after Thanksgiving, 1977, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life and flew to New York and then on to Europe via Iceland. I learned all about jet lag and discovered for the first time what it was like to be a foreigner.

We were based in Austria, studying German and 20th century European history Monday through Thursday morning. That meant that virtually everyone took off Thursday afternoon to grab a train to points all over (everyone had a Eurail Pass).

In January 1978 the entire group traveled down to Italy: down through the snowy Brenner Pass into the Po Valley and on to Florence. After several days there, we went on to Rome.

One thing on our schedule was having an “audience” before the Pope, which at the time was the ailing Pope Paul the VI (he would die in August of that year). Now at the risk of offending Catholic readers of Temple City Life, you have to understand that I was a 20-year-old Baptist kid from Ohio, and that Pope Paul wasn’t anything approaching the cultural figure that John Paul II would soon become. My impression was that of an old, old man with a simple message.

Well, he may have been old, but I was dead wrong about his message. I recall the passage he cited (in many languages). It’s from Romans 12:21:

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

It seems so simple, and at the time I remembered being distinctly unimpressed. I was wrong.

Let me explain it this way: what I’ve learned over the years is that there is virtually nothing as powerful as the doing of pure good.

Last November, I had a taste of this when our church delivered food baskets—really full Thanksgiving Dinners with a just out of the oven turkey—to about 40 families right before, actually the night before, Thanksgiving. I drew two of the more distant deliveries up in Pasadena and had a great time. It was just so joyful to do something entirely good, no strings attached. We also decided to deliver them in baskets people can use: new laundry baskets, which people were just as delighted to receive. One thing I’ve learned is that when money is tight, you don’t spend money on things like a laundry basket.

We did this with no desire to get anything in return. But here’s the really amazing thing: we had several of those families show up for worship the following Sunday. And they’ve stayed. Frankly, the experience of truly selfless deeds of good done on their behalf was so unique and delightful that they wanted to check these people out. I even baptized a couple of people from that ministry on the morning of Christmas Eve!

I was wrong about that aged Pope in Rome. The message of Romans 12:21 is timeless. One theologian reminds us that evil itself is a shadow, a kind of black hole of nothingness. That is, it’s the denial of good. But good is a powerful positive source. It was the goodness of God that sent Jesus to the Cross for you and me, and His goodness expressed through his people that has sent missionaries, built schools and hospitals and fed the needy down the centuries. Goodness is powerful. God’s goodness is the best. Never ever underestimate what simple goodness can do.

The Truth About Americans in Iraq

Ex-Presidents Lay an Egg: "New Baptist Movement" is Just the Old Tired Theological Leftisms

This past week, the so-called New Baptist Movement proposal put forth by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton sought to create a new, progressive (read liberal and compromised) voice for Baptists.

How we can take seriously Jimmy Carter, who recent anti-Semitic book on Israel caused members of the Carter center in Atlanta to resign, and how can we take Bill Clinton seriously who...well you know all about Bill. If these are the standard bearers of the Baptist witness in America...Lord help us

The inititive was directed mainly at Southern Baptists, but ABC officials such as A. Roy Medley jumped on the bandwagon. This was the same Roy Medley who ran off to Lebanon to stand shoulder to shoulder with Hezbollah after their summer conflict with Israel.

The inititive deserves the derisive rejection by all Biblical Jesus-followers, and all Baptists, north south, American, Southern and Transformational. Wisely, many Southern Baptists have already voiced their rejection of this travesty. Evangelical American Bapists must do the same.

Here I disagree with fellow-blogger Dennis McFadden, who wrote,

So what do we make of the upcoming meeting? While I am certainly no fan of either former president, Clinton for his obvious failures and Carter for his self-righteous disdain for anyone more conservative than himself, it is difficult to fault this initiative. SBC blogger Wade Burleson seemed to sound the right note when he wrote: "it would be difficult for me to criticize any evangelical Christian movement whose stated goals are to live out the gospel through doing justice and loving mercy."

Call me cynical, but I simply doubt the sincerity of the key participants. It seems to me to be more of an effort to recruit more people of faith for leftist causes. I'm not fooled, and I'm not impressed.

Is Holland Showing the Way?

An article in the current Weekly Standard discusses the emergence of a new and vital semi-underground church in the Netherlands. It is clearly an evangelistically post-modern church for a post-modern culture. In North America, we tend to think of the Netherlands as a spiritual wasteland of promiscuity and secularism triumphant. Yet there is reason for hope as the church assumes new forms. Read the article here.

Teddy Kollek, Ex-Mayor of Jerusalem, Dies at 95

No man has influenced the modern city of Jerusalem as much a Teddy Kollek, who died this past Tuesday. No one has changed the city so much a Kollek since Herod the Great--unless you want to count Emperor Titus, who destroyed the city and Temple in 70 AD.

Greg Marinovich/Associated Press

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MARILYN BERGER

Published: January 2, 2007

JERUSALEM, Jan. 2 — Teddy Kollek, who as mayor of Jerusalem for nearly three decades did more to build and develop the city as Israel’s capital than any other figure while still seeking to meet the needs of its Arab residents, died today in Jerusalem. He was 95.

The Jerusalem Foundation, the fund-raising organization he established, announced his death, saying it was of natural causes.

Mr. Kollek, a former aide to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, became mayor of the small Jewish West Jerusalem in 1965 and nearly resigned after a difficult first year. But after Israel conquered the city’s eastern sector in the 1967 war, he threw himself into the project of a reunited Jerusalem and was re-elected five times before losing in 1993, at age 82, to Ehud Olmert, now Israel’s prime minister.

Mr. Olmert always chafed at Mr. Kollek’s reputation as an indefatigable fund-raiser, institution builder and preacher of coexistence, but he praised Mr. Kollek today, saying, “His name will always be an inseparable part of Jerusalem’s glory.”

The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called Mr. Kollek the greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod the Great. Mr. Kollek was a founder of significant markers of the modern city and state: the Israel Museum, the Jerusalem Foundation, the Jerusalem Theater, the Cinematheque, the Kahn Theater and other cultural institutions.

Uri Lupolianski, the current mayor, said today, “Teddy was Jerusalem and Jerusalem was Teddy” — a high compliment from a leader of the city’s ultra-Orthodox community, with whom Mr. Kollek sometimes fought.

Mr. Kollek was a man of will, charm and energy who loved being a friend of the rich and the famous, including Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, tapping many of them for money for his beloved city.

He was above all a Labor Zionist who set about trying to unite the two halves of Jerusalem the best he could. “He’d say, ‘I’d love the city to be empty of Arabs, but since they are here, we need to serve them, because if we treat them badly they will hate us more,’ ” said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian who ran Mr. Kollek’s office for two years in the late 1970s.

Within hours of Israel’s conquering of East Jerusalem in 1967, Mr. Kollek went to the military commander and demanded milk for Arab children. “He was the symbol of the unification of Jerusalem and he was considered pro-Arab,” Mr. Segev said. “But he was simply pragmatic.”
But Mr. Kollek felt he should have done more for Arab residents, said Yisrael Kimche, an urban planner. "He himself said he did not do enough for East Jerusalem,” Mr. Kimche said. “He did not bring equality in city services between east and west. He tried, but not hard enough."
In 1967, Mr. Kimche said, “the gap between east and west was vast.”

“Three times a week there would be running water in the east,” he said. “Many neighborhoods there did not have sewage or phone lines. Eventually, needs were mostly met, but there was never a budget large enough to cope."

Meron Benvenisti, who worked closely with him, said Mr. Kollek saw Jerusalem “in terms of Vienna, a mosaic of different cultures where the tension is benign, invigorating, not threatening to destroy the city.” But what Mr. Kollek called heterogeneous others, like Mr. Benvenisti, called dangerously polarized.

Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem has not been recognized internationally, and the 190,000 Jews who moved into it are considered illegal settlers by much of the world. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

In his 28 years as mayor, Mr. Kollek often worked 18-hour days, prowling the city and keeping his home telephone number in the public directory. He would often return home to a pile of little message slips taken by his wife, Tamar. Sometimes he would return those calls, even at 3 a.m., telling people that he would get their problems fixed.

Mr. Kollek was “someone who always wanted something to do,” Mr. Segev said.
“The worst thing that could happen to him was if a meeting were canceled,” Mr. Segev added, “and he’d wander around and pick up a paper from a desk and it became the most important thing in the city of Jerusalem for a moment.”

After 1993, Mr. Kollek devoted much of his time to the Israel Museum and to the Jerusalem Foundation, which he set up in 1966 to raise millions of dollars in private financing for city projects, including parks, sports facilities and the restoration of archeological treasures.
“He really forged the landscape of modern Jerusalem as we know it and he saw the museum as the jewel in that landscape,” said James Snyder, the museum’s director. “The idea of this modernist museum complex on the crest of Jerusalem was his, to build a great national museum for this new state.”

Mr. Kollek will be buried on Thursday in a state funeral in a section of Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl cemetery reserved for Israel’s leaders.

He was born Theodor Herzl Kollek on May 27, 1911, in a small village near Budapest. He was named after the Viennese founder of the Zionist movement. He grew up in Vienna, where his father was a director of the Rothschild bank.

“I came from a multiracial society,” Mr. Kollek once recalled in an interview.

By the age of 11 he was already a Zionist, and as the Nazis came to power, he organized an underground to smuggle refugees into Palestine. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 and helped found the Ein Gev kibbutz. That first year, he contracted typhoid five times and suffered several bouts of malaria.

Still, Mr. Kollek remembered life at Ein Gev as paradise. “We came to an empty land, we started growing trees, fishing on the Galilee,” he said. “You saw your dreams materialize.”

In 1937, he married Tamar Schwartz, whom he had met in Vienna. They had two children, Amos, a filmmaker, and Osnat, an artist. His wife and children survive him, as do five grandchildren.

Mr. Kollek was sent to England in 1938 to work with a Zionist youth movement, but he spent most of his energy getting Jews out of Nazi-occupied countries. In 1939 he went to Vienna carrying British entry permits for Austrian Jews. There he met a Nazi who seemed like a minor clerk, and after 15 minutes the official agreed to release 3,000 Jewish children from concentration camps.

Mr. Kollek said he never saw the man again until 1961, when the “clerk” was brought to Israel to face the charge of crimes against humanity. It was Adolf Eichmann.

In England, Mr. Kollek met David Ben-Gurion, who became his mentor. During the war, Mr. Kollek said, it became clear that “a country of our own was an absolute necessity to save the Jewish people from extermination.”

Mr. Kollek made frequent trips to Cairo, where he met Jewish soldiers serving in the British Army and used his connections to smuggle British arms to Palestine, then under the control of Britain. He was later criticized for giving the British the names of 1,000 members of the Jewish underground whose terror tactics were meant to force the British out.

“I’m proud of it,” he said later. “I’d do it again. The Jewish Agency, our government at the time, was respectable and on the way to becoming a state. We had one large defense organization, the Haganah.

“There were splinter groups — Stern, Irgun — who killed, blew up the King David, hanged British sergeants,” he added, referring to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

After World War II, Mr. Kollek was sent to New York, where he worked partly out of a telephone booth and partly out of an office over the Copacabana nightclub to arm the Jewish state-to-be for an expected invasion by Arabs.

As Israel neared statehood in May 1948, he helped smuggle weapons. In one day, he raised a million dollars in Mexico City to buy airplanes. There was a ban on arms exports to Israel, so dismantled airplanes, for example, were shipped as prefabricated houses. Help came from unexpected quarters, like the Irish dockworkers who, he said, “saw us as comrades in arms against the British.”

When Israel became independent, Mr. Kollek headed the American desk in the Foreign Ministry, then went to Washington as minister in the Israeli Embassy.

Mr. Kollek was a founder of the modern Israeli foreign intelligence service. Throughout the 1950s he was a liaison between Israel and the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. In 1956, he helped the C.I.A. obtain a copy of a secret speech that changed the course of the cold war. It was a denunciation of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, then dead three years, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. A copy of the speech went from Poland to Israel to the director of central intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, who gave it to his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who leaked it to The New York Times. It was the first sign that Stalin’s reign of terror might be over.

In 1952 Ben-Gurion summoned Mr. Kollek to Jerusalem to become director general of the prime minister’s office. In 12 years, Mr. Kollek became involved in everything from broadcasting to the Dead Sea Scrolls, from aid programs to desalination.

When Ben-Gurion left office, Mr. Kollek transferred his energies to the Israel Museum. He had nursed the idea from the early 1950s, when most of Israel’s leaders considered a museum of art a luxury the young state could not afford. But he argued that if Israel needed to absorb immigrants and build its military power, “it also needs expressions of culture and civilization.”
Ben-Gurion, then in retirement, urged his protégé to seek the mayor’s office in Jerusalem. Mr. Kollek’s son offered no encouragement. “What will happen if you win?” he asked. “You’ll be in charge of the garbage?”

When a coalition on the city council elected him mayor in 1965, he went to Jerusalem’s best tailor and ordered smart olive-green uniforms for the sanitation inspectors.

“I got into this by accident,” he said. “I was bored. When the city was united, I saw this as an historic occasion. To take care of it and show better care than anyone else ever has is a full life purpose. I think Jerusalem is the one essential element in Jewish history. A body can live without an arm or a leg, not without the heart. This is the heart and soul of it.”

Mr. Kollek never spoke perfect Hebrew, or perfect German or perfect English, Mr. Segev recalled. “In some ways, he remained an alien. But Israel is a colorful mosaic, and there was also a place for a stone called Teddy Kollek.”