Innocent Blood part 2000

One of the real distinctives of a Christian, as distinct from a ''progressive'', worldview has to do with moral differences. The more or less 'official' view is that we are, somehow, better people than our ancestors; that as a rule moral issues are products of conditions external to the individual, such as nutrition, poverty, literacy, inclusiveness, etc., and therefore we can of our own experience and wisdom create an ideal society. As one motivational type of years gone by had his adherents chanting, ''Every day in every way, we are getting better and better and better''. The Christian view is rather different. We believe that human beings are inherently flawed, that the flaws - we call the situation ''sin'' - are present by birth in every human being (the single exception being a rather extraordinary one) and that barring a miracle cure, this will be true throughout all human history. It's an old fight.

Sometimes something catches one's attention, something that leads to something very like despair at the human condition.

I've grown up in a society that regarded the Third Reich, the Nazi regime in Germany headed by Adolf Hitler, as being the worst society ever. We can compare bad ones later. We know, for example, that even before they took power, the society accepted some of their beliefs. Among those were that some lives were more worthy than others, and that some lives were better terminated. (If that sounds uncomfortably like Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, it should. They were friendly.) And that led in turn, inevitably, to evaluation of children (and adults too) and decisions over whether to 'cull the herd'. This sort of thing became part of the list of charges in the Nuremburg Trials that sent several of them to the gallows.

Now I see in the Sunday Times out of London, an article titled ''Doctors: let us kill disabled babies'' which is a serious proposal from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology advocating in favor of ''active euthanesia'' for the ''overall good of families''.

I would have to suspect that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Mengele - and Sanger - seem to have won that argument. Perhaps we owe an apology for that little gallows incident if we are seriously proposing to admit that their idea was a good one. Particularly if we go beyond consideration into full-blown acceptance, and thence to common practice. It will, I predict, be justified under some sort of ''for the good of All'' boilerplate, and opposing it will be considered some sort of 'hate speech'.

I've never cared much for the Catholic idea of classifying sins. That's a worthy subject for a whole series of posts, if not a book. But they're not totally wrong. The pattern they describe is pretty evident: pride, greed, lust, and envy. We seem to have them all through the history of our race, which brings me back to the worldview issue that began this post. The sins of human beings just seem to repeat. We don't have any fewer today than those that Calvin or Luther or Paul of Tarsus saw. Or Jeremiah for that matter. I'm not sure quite where the shedding of innocent blood falls in there, but it's at least as old as the worship of Baal and Moloch.

This isn't 'progress'' as I define it. It's just the same old thing come around again. The difference is that we have recent experience of where it leads, so we have not even the bad excuse of not knowing better.

I'll go out on not too much of a limb here, and predict that this does not please God. Then again, I doubt seriously that this was one of the objectives of those proposing this policy.