A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

My fearless prediction – slavery will be legal again in the US one day – UPDATE May 3, 2012

And not just in the US, around most of the world, slavery will be legal again.  Unless this culture stops its headlong descent into neo-paganism.

Do you think I’m crazy?  Have I finally lost it?

Let me explain my thinking.  I’ve been reading Iota Unum, as I have mentioned.  The brilliant Romano Amerio, the author, drives home one major point throughout the book: the foundational source of error in our society (and Church) is the replacement of the idea of God being the ultimate source of everything, including our very selves, with the idea of man, us, as the ultimate source of everything.  It’s the ultimate return to paganism, the triumph of the cult of man over the Cult of God.  We are our own “gods” now, as the viral trailer for the movie Prometheus shows:

It is upon this incredibly wrong, retrograde (philosophy has devolved 2000+ years in the last 100) idea that so many evils are founded.  The Cult of God posits that each human is a dependent creature, a creature totally dependent on God for every second of its existence.  The cult of man posits that God does not exist, and that each man is responsible for his own existence, the gift of some primordial goop that somehow formed out of other goop 4 billion years ago.  As such, each human being is no longer its own distinct creature with unalienable rights, because he is a child of God.  Instead, each creature has a relative worth dependent on how good they are (or might be), how productive they are (or might be), how much they cost (or might cost).  It is a utilitarian, dystopian view.  It is a nightmare.  But it is the view that is at the heart of the cult of man.

Without God, we are not each infinitely valuable souls belonging to a Supreme Being, but just cogs in a wheel, cost and productivity centers, numbers in an equation.

And that is how we get things like abortion.  And euthanasia.  And IVF, and stem cell research.  The entire pro-abort mentality is built around the concept of utilitarianism.  One of the key arguments in favor of abortion is that a mom’s life, or health, or mere convenience (which is the reality in the vast majority of abortions) is worth more than the “potential life” of her child.  Not only does this disregard science (that each person is a unique being from the moment of conception), but it completely disregards the inherent worth – the infinite worth – of the child, in favor of the mother, just because she happens to have a value perceived as greater by the world.

Indeed, in pagan times, it was the father, and not the mother, who got to decide which children would live, and which would be aborted, or even killed after birth (as some are arguing for, even today.  It’s amazing how all the ostensible sophistication of our elites is really just rank savagery).  But the mentality is the same.  In both cases, because of some perceived “good,” the rights of another human being – in this case, TWO human beings (both the baby and the father) have been trampled into nothingness.  For once the idea of a being’s absolute dependence on God has been lost, it is a short walk to the loss of the idea of each creature’s complete independence from another (and right to exist).

If a culture will accept killing babies for convenience, or killing old people to “save money,” or destroying the four dozen “imperfect” embryos and implanting only the blond haired, blue eyed, 6″ tall ones, how long will it be before it countenances one human being owning another?   In truth, slavery has never been totally abolished.  Yes, in those countries where the Christian ethos became predominant slavery was abolished (after a mighty struggle – our capacity for cruelty and barbarism is endless), and also in those locales where the Christian countries achieved suzerainty to one degree or another, as well.  But it has persisted in those regions that have resisted Christianity, quietly, often secretly, but it still goes on.  Most of the places still practicing slavery are majority muslim, with perhaps some among the rich in East Asia.  But slavery was an idea well established and practiced from pre-Christian times, and that is the point.  We’re headed back in that direction.

Oh, it probably as wanton and openly cruel as the slavery of the antebellum American South.  It will be more sophisticated, more nuanced. It may be genetically determined, like Huxley’s nightmarish Betas, Gammas, and Deltas.  But it will be just as real.  I don’t believe a society divorced from Christianity can avoid it.

There is nothing new under the sun.  It’s just the same tired errors repeated over and over again.

UPDATE:  I wanted to make a little clearer the relation between our dependence on God, and independence from one another, and how that relates to abortion and other inhuman crimes.  Those who, in essence if not in specific rhetoric, replace God as the Being upon which all life depends with a view of the human being as the source of creation and life, create a new dependency – given human beings “owe their lives” to someone else.  When we are all creatures of God, we are totally independent of each other, and owe our being (and allegiance) solely to Him.  When we replace God with man as the supreme being and creator, we replace that independence with a new dependence.  Thus, moms are the “creators” of their children and hold total control over their destiny, including the murder of that child if they see fit.  As I mentioned above, this supremacy is not limited to children who happen to still be in the womb – “ethicists” have been arguing now for several years that parents, women particularly, should be able to murder their children up to some arbitrary age because of the power they allegedly hold over them – the power of creator, of “god.”  It is a massive scandal, a hideous disfigurement of right reason and a return to neo-pagan barbarism. But it is the goal of the self-anointed elites.

See this.  This “englightened” new barbarian uses all the same, tired, “man as god” arguments the pro-aborts have used for years to justify their murder.  But he’s ostensibly a “faithful episcopalian,” and a member of Obama’s faith advisory panel.  Welcome to the new dark ages.  It’s Huxley’s vision writ large, in reality. 

What a nightmare.