Sentience, Atheism and the Culture of Death

Often, when in dialogue with a person who supports abortion-on-demand, I hear an appeal to the fetus' lack of sentience. It's troubling, I think, that people use sentience as a criterion for deciding whose life has value. But sentience is also, often, tossed about as if it means something more like sapience or intellect. And atheists will regularly appeal to their own sentience (meaning their own intellects, I assume) as the sole arbiter of right and wrong, in all its universals. It is inconceivable to them that their minds aren't capable of understanding all there is to understand.

For the record, sentience is simply the capacity to receive sensory impressions.

Indeed, as Webster defines it: feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought

All dogs are sentient. Mice, too. Ants as well. Fish. Birds.

Too often, atheists appear to think of themselves as capable of knowing all that is possible of being known, so that it's literally inconceivable to them that a higher form of intellect than their own might exist, though that that certainly moves one beyond mere sentience. I again have to wonder, though, why, given the gulf between the intellect of a man and a lower mammal, it's so inconceivable to them that in the vast reaches of the universe there might be intellects that dwarf their own.

But of course if there are intellects that are to theirs what theirs is to a cat's, that would mean that such intellects could understand truths that atheists couldn't even begin dimly to conceive.

Indeed, isn't it a kind of magical thinking on their part to put themselves on that kind of pedestal? The absolute limits of the universal possibilities of the mind reside in you? Really?

Anyway, it's hardly a semantic quibble to observe that sentience means nothing like self-reflection. Since sentience comes up several times in atheist discourse, in particular as the cut-off point for who lives and who's disposable, it would seem to me to be morally imperative to know what the word means. And to note that sentience never saved a cow or a spider. It's odd to make it THE primary criterion for why older human lives are more valuable than younger lives.

I still come back to the observation, which atheists more or less confirm all the time, that it is inconceivable to many atheists at some level that there could be ANY intelligence, material or divine, that could be so much greater than their own that it could perceive and contemplate truths that their minds cannot. I don't have to rebut that viewpoint; they're certainly welcome to it, and they may very well be right: they may, as human beings, be the absolute zenith of all possible intellects in all possible worlds. I simply find the alternative notion--that for all humankind's glories, it's easily conceivable that there are other intelligences far, far greater than our own--more persuasive.

I do think there is a religious worldview behind these two positions, of course. In the view that if it can't be explained to an atheist's complete satisfaction it must not be true, there is a distinct species of pride. (Never mind whether one sees pride as a virtue or a vice.) In my view, that I don't assume that the human mind is capable of understanding all there is that could be understand by a mind, and I don't assume that all that can be perceived is certainly perceptible by the handful of senses I've been graced with, there is the opposite emphasis on humility.

Pride and humility, two very different approaches to any problem.

File Under: Atheist Exploitation and Wrongheadedness

An atheist writes: "40 non-atheists injured when tornado hit boy scout camp in Iowa. God sure knows how to treat his own"

Christians were never aware that they were mortal and could die in natural disasters or epidemics until after the Enlightenment lifted the veil. Before, it would literally have stunned a believer to discover that, say, a plague, or a great fire, or an earthquake could kill believers. No one ever thought of that, and no thinkers have ever explored the topic.

I suppose these are the assumptions in your post.

Otherwise, YOU would be faced with the problem that Christians have ALWAYS known that they would die, that they weren't magically preserved from death, even in the first generations of the faith. And if that's the case, if no one ever expected to be magically preserved or immune to the shocks of the world, and yet the church grew and grew with converts, then isn't it rather wrongheaded to ascribe to believers a belief they NEVER held so you can say AHA! YOUR GOD FAILED YOU.

I submit once more that it is your resentment of a God who isn't despotic enough for you that has soured you on religion.

In the News

Unrelated in every way but one: they speak to a double standard in the modern West.

In Canada, homosexual activists have launched a legal campaign to persecute the magazine Catholic Insight. The claim is that the orthodox Christian position that homosexual sex acts are sinful ought to count as hate speech and so be subject to prosecution. To date, according to the magazine's web page, legal bills defending the small magazine against homosexual activists using the Human Rights Commission to suppress free speech have totalled over $20,000--quite a sum for a small magazine.

In recent years, Human Rights Councils have been used to punish a printer for not accepting an order to print gay-themed materials, a Catholic men's group for refusing to rent their meeting hall out for a lesbian wedding, and the city of London, Ontario, was fined 10,000 dollars when its mayor declined to promote a gay pride day.

So much for freedom.

On the other hand, the respect that various anti-church groups so vociferously--even histrionically--demand has not yet inspired anything like a feeling of reciprocity. It never occurs, it seems, to people demanding sensitivity and respect from others that they ought themselves to show sensitivity and respect. Far from it. Christians must, by law, celebrate gayness in all its forms or face punishment; but Christians and Christianity deserve not even a minimum of civility or decency in their treatment.

Hence, story two: An art exhibit at Cooper Union. To quote the AP story:

"One of them depicts a man with his pants down and a crucifix in his rectum. A Latin caption says, 'The day I became a Catholic.' Another painting shows rosaries with male genitalia, and a third a man with a halo and erection."

So there you have it. The most vile, transgressive, pornographic assaults on believers and the faith are perfectly welcome, and any criticism of them brings out charges of censorship. (Stupidly, of course, since a critique by private individuals hardly amounts to censorship.) Meanwhile, ACTUAL state censorship works hand in hand with homosexual activists to shut down media organs that express traditional morality in civil, reasoned language.

A world turned upside down, truly.