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TeacherAide The Great Connection SESSION 13 ILLUSTRATING
THE POINT How significant is
the influence of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer? Marvin Olasky writes: The New York
Times, explaining how his views trickle
down through media and academia to the general populace, noted that "no
other living philosopher has had this kind of influence." The New
England Journal of Medicine said he has had "more success in
effecting changes in acceptable behavior" than any philosopher since
Bertrand Russell. The New Yorker called him the "most
influential" philosopher alive. Don't expect Peter
Singer to be quoted heavily on the issue that roiled the November 2, 2004
election, same-sex marriage. That for him is intellectual child's play, already
logically decided, and it's time to move on to polyamory. While politicians
debate the definition of marriage between two people, Mr. Singer argues that any
kind of "fully consensual" sexual behavior involving two people or 200
is ethically fine. For example, when I
asked him last month about necrophilia (what if two people make an agreement
that whoever lives longest can have sexual relations with the corpse of the
person who dies first?), he said, "There's no moral problem with
that." Concerning bestiality (should people have sex with animals, seen as
willing participants?), he responded, "I would ask, 'What's holding you
back from a more fulfilling relationship?' [But] it's not wrong inherently in a
moral sense." If the 21st century
becomes a Singer century, we will also see legal infanticide of born children
who are ill or who have ill older siblings in need of their body parts.
Question: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically
to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children?
Mr. Singer: "It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached
view, [but] they're not doing something really wrong in itself." Is there
anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a
massive scale? "No." When we had lunch a
month after our initial interview and I read back his answers to him, he said he
would be "concerned about a society where the role of some women was to
breed children for that purpose," but he stood by his statements. He also
reaffirmed that it would be ethically okay to kill 1-year-olds with physical or
mental disabilities, although ideally the question of infanticide would be
"raised as soon as possible after birth." These proposals are biblically and historically
monstrous, but Mr. Singer is a soft-spoken Princeton professor. Whittaker
Chambers a half-century ago wrote, "Man without God is a beast, and never
more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness," but
part of Mr. Singer's effectiveness in teaching "Practical Ethics" to
Princeton undergraduates is that he does not come across personally as beastly.
Citation:
Marvin Olasky, "Blue-State Philosopher," World (12-27-04)
pp. 32-33 THE
MORE YOU KNOW During the
conference, Dangerous Liaisons: Substance Abuse and Sexual Behavior, sponsored
by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University,
180 participants from the mental health, law enforcement, and university
communities concluded that alcohol is more closely associated with crimes of
sexual violence than any other substance. Specifically, alcohol use by the
offender is present in 30-90 percent of all rape cases; alcohol use by the
victim is present in 46-75 percent of all rapes. Drinking by the victim—but
not by the suspect—has a direct bearing on whether a suspect will be arrested
and brought to trial, and an offender convicted and sentenced. The conference's
conclusions closely followed a four-year joint Rutgers University–University
of New Hampshire study published in the February 2002 Criminal Law
Bulletin. It concluded that drinking by the victim in the hours leading
up to the incident is the single most important influence on a verdict,
resulting in a not-guilty decision in almost every case in which it occurs. UNH researcher
Douglas Koski said jurors view drinking as a "credibility issue, which
leads them to focus on the 'reasonable doubt' standard given them.…Witnesses
who drink, including the victim, are perceived as less believable than those who
do not." Linda Fairstein,
another conference participant and chief of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit for
New York County, stated, "In rape trials, we are faced with having to prove
that intoxicated victims are credible 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' It is one
thing to 'blame the victim' and another to say, 'We can't prosecute because the
victim has only a vague recollection of the events.'" Koski added that while research "points
anecdotally to the notion that victims are occasionally disabled by 'date rape'
drugs," such incidents are "overwhelmed by cases in which the
voluntary ingestion of alcohol is interwoven in the facts of acquaintance [rape]
cases."
Citation:
Wendy Lee, Director of Communications, NCASSF at the University of New Hampshire The percentage of female readers of Today's
Christian Woman online newsletter who admitted intentionally
accessing Internet porn: 34
Citation:
"Dirty Little Secret," Today's Christian Woman, (Sept/Oct
2003), p. 59 I
THOUGHT I HEARD YOU SAY “We ought not trust our nature, our flesh, no matter how spiritual we think we are.” - Citation: Jim Smith, Leadership, Vol. 12, no. 1. The fruits of the
Holy Spirit are, it seems to me, largely fruits of sustained interaction with
God. Just as a child picks up traits more or less simply by dwelling in the
presence of her parent, so the Christian develops tenderheartedness, compassion,
humility, forgiveness, joy, and hope through "the fellowship of the Holy
Spirit"--that is, by dwelling in the presence of God the Father and Jesus
Christ his Son. And this means, to a very large extent, living in a community of
serious believers. Citation: Robert C. Roberts in The Reformed Journal (Feb. 1987). Christianity Today, Vol. 32, no. 10. There is an eagle in
me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in
the mud. —Author, poet Carl
Sandburg (1878–1967) |