27 Comments

I'm interested that you assume anyone who holds the position that abortion at any stage ends a life 'is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with.' That's quite a sizeable brush stroke, as is allocating political opinions (I'm not American, though from context I think you might be? No offence intended either way...).

I think some of the fuzziness around this question derives from the use by many activists of terms like 'child murder', because it unnecessarily forces a debate over whether a fertilised ovum is a 'child', which indeed becomes ridiculous rather quickly. A classic case of rhetorical shorthand taking on a life of its own (no pun intended).

A consideration of whether or not abortion ends a life (a more useful framing) makes ensoulment, as you imply, the only sensible binary we can discuss. Funnily enough, this was exactly the thought process that led me to the personal conclusion that all abortion does in fact end a life. Fewer than five years ago I was a firm 'safe, legal, and rare' advocate; however, I was also agnostic and very far from practising any kind of faith.

The most effective and beautiful explanation I ever heard about why sexual morality matters is this: that conception is the only moment at which man directly co-operates with a divine act of creation.

Naturally, not everyone believes this. But here's my rationale: if someone believes in the soul as immortal, and therefore believe that people who have left their physical bodies at the moment of death still exist as disembodied souls, I'm not sure why they would struggle to believe that the infamous 'clump of cells' cannot be the host of a created soul. Is the argument that it requires more physical space? Does it require a specific organ to inhabit?

Believing in the soul, and believing that the intellect is a faculty of the soul (per Catholic theology, YMMV), and observing that very young children quickly begin to exercise their intellect within their limited capacity – which rapidly develops as they grow – leads us hopefully to an agreement that a young baby already has a soul. Unlike the angels, created in a single instant as fully formed intelligent spiritual beings, we mud-based life forms need a little more time to develop. This is not controversial.

But if we accept that the soul, existing in the body, remains subject to this biological process of growth and development, the question of when exactly this soul deigns to enter the physical form becomes no less ridiculous than the question of whether or not a fertilised cell is a child. Why would it not be at the moment of conception? What exactly is it waiting for? And how certain can you be of that? Certain enough to risk ending a life?

'People who think like that are, frankly, hostage to a rigid belief system that looks at morality as a set of absolute laws, which they will mercilessly enforce even while they crush others and cause misery. It is the character trait of the holier-than-thou personality type that is quick to lecture everybody about morals...'

Am not!

Expand full comment

Much of the vitriol around the abortion question relates to the legal requirement for hard, binary distinctions between human and not human, which as you point out it is obviously inappropriate. There's a continuum from blastocyst to newborn baby with a soft, fuzzy transition somewhere in the middle.

The obvious resolution is to drop the legal binary, and adopt a legal continuum. At one end is a baby, termination of which is murder and should be treated as such. At the other is the just-fertilized egg, termination of which is the moral equivalent of shedding a skin cell, and which should therefore carry no penalty at all. In between an escalating cost could be imposed, in the form of an abortion tax, rising from what is in essence a nominal fine as for littering, to a fine appropriate to a severe traffic violation, up to a financially ruinous levy. Such a system would, I think, strike most people as basically fair and reasonable.

Expand full comment

I would agree that there is very much a religiosity about the woke, complete with faith in the not-scientific, but it is much more like the Inquisition than Gnosticism. Gnosticism didn't become a major religion largely because it is a way of being more than infrastructure for global domination. The Gnostics were mostly peaceful. Now give the woke the kind of power the inquisition had and see what happens.

Expand full comment

The other side of the charge of Gnosticism is the *content* of the special knowledge reserved to the elite: that being the corruption of the material realm. The historical Gnostics rejected material embodiment as irrevocably tainted by the evil of the false creator. Salvation comes through a kind of ascetic renunciation of *this world*.

Which is an odd position to square with secular, atheist, materialist doctrines that center themselves in a vulgar aestheticism of sensation-seeking. IIRC he's trying to draw on Eric Vogelin's writings, which have interesting things to say on this topic, but I'm not sure the meat is there to connect the "woke" ideologies to classical religion and its heresies.

RE: Abortion, it was once put to me that a thing can be a right, and it can also be exercised well or badly by the individual bearing that right. Part of the issue with the debate around abortion is this need to search for a PRINCIPLE, in bold all caps, that decides the matter independent of any situation.

That's not realistic in most any circumstance where we have to decide what is best to do against many different sources of reasons for (not) acting, though you wouldn't know it from the crass legalism that passes for "moral debate" today.

Expand full comment
Feb 4, 2023·edited Feb 5, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

Hi! I happened upon this blog just now. The linked article on the history of abortion teachings in Catholic thinking is very nice definitely helps inform the decision-making of someone who is on the fence about the morality of abortion and their own religious belief.

There is, however, one bad-faith or careless statement in the article. It makes the point that Catholics are 22% of the country, but Catholic hospitals are "One in six" beds, and that number "grew by 22% since 2001" (article is from 2020). The implicit argument being, Catholics are a minority holding the health system hostage, but 1 in 6 ~~ 17%, and if that's "22% more than 2001", that means that in 2001 it was ~~ 14% of beds, which is a large growth but perhaps not so much over 20 years. The argument by numbers on its own doesn't bear out. It might not have any bearing on the rest of the article but this sort of imprecision and sorta-lying with numbers really irritates me.

Again, it doesn't meant that hospitals SHOULD be beholden to any faith, or that there is some rule that hospitals should have religious representation proportionate to religious representation in the country. But if the number of Catholic beds is a problem at all, you don't need the relative number of Catholics; if you are just finding faith-based healthcare a problem, address that. The implicit numbers argument is no good.

Expand full comment
Jan 16, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

Classifying ‘woke’ (race Marxism) as a gnostic (a)religion has historical merit. It posits an world created by an evil principle (racism as all-permeating). This surface-level world is opposed by a good principle (anti-racism) which can only be perceived by the acolytes, the woke. To bring the world over to the good, the evil world has to be destroyed in its entirety (the eschaton). After that, paradise.

You are correct that this construct lacks any god. It has the structure of a religion without the central tenet. I therefore prefer to call it an areligion but am not too satisfied with the term.

As for abortion, here’s one of my anecdotes (Luc, you will know this). Before reunification West Germany had a very strict abortion law (no abortion unless the foetus wasn’t viable or the mother was about to die). As a consequence, women who wanted an abortion had to go to more liberal jurisdictions, like the Netherlands. To fight this, then interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble (pre assassination) ordered the West German border patrol to have (usually single) women returning from Holland examined by an official obgyn (Amtsarzt). At gunpoint. If it was determined that they had had an abortion, they were prosecuted. An estimated 5000 women were de facto raped by the West German government.

Expand full comment
Jan 8, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

I have several comments relating to your piece, an editorial critique if you will.

The first being we all have different beliefs and opinions, all of which have flaws, all of which have at best a tenuous grasp of our perceptions of reality. It is expected that we will have differences of perception and therefore differences of opinion. To disagree is to simply have a difference of perception and opinion. I do think it would be better, if one wanted to have a true conversation about differences of opinion to leave the ad hominem in the edit bin. Your disparagement of Christian conservatives as "right-wingers" was unnecessary. Are they all "tea-baggers" too? I think the point could have been made without that.

Additionally when discussing the choices to be made about a pregnancy you wrote, "... a society should be able to talk about such issues and find some compromise (which seems to have been possible for a long time until recently) without one side screaming...". Agreed, a society should. But when has it ever? The assumption that it 'should', does not make it so, and therefore is a false premise to begin the quest for one's position.

And lastly, you stated, "Wokeism is a sort of mimicry, ersatz religion, and to my mind, a central aspect in its development is its atheism/materialism." So isn't that a form of religion? It may not be founded on centuries of dogmatic doctrine, or vast libraries of literature, or heralded in great architectural proclamations of dominance (although there are many ways to make those same connections of today's 'woketopians" and the marxist governmental dialectics), but isn't your statement essentially inferring that is is a religion, albeit one of shallow roots and short history?

Notice I am not arguing your opinions. The topics of abortion and religion are historically intense and generally best left to thoughtful personal discussions and not anonymous keyboard warrior battles. I do think that many of your opinions could have been made more persuasive with a bit of patient editing.

Expand full comment
Jan 8, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

Very interesting to learn about the Church’s changing stance on abortion through the centuries - particularly that saints accrued miracles in some cases through abortion and that for some time ‘ensoulment’ was the delineation factor. Also interesting to note that for so long it was marked (for males at least) at 40 days as the Tibetan book of the dead puts ensoulment at 49 days and the pineal gland, considered by many to be the seat of the soul, forms at that same timeframe.

Expand full comment
Jan 8, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

NS Lyons uses (luxury) Gnosticism as a critique of wokeism to mean the upper middle class managerials (PMC) that have been throwing the working classes, producers, under the bus, while pandering to the global financiers and media-tech oligarchs that got rich from suburban consumerism.

Dirty jobs vs. etherealism-virtualism.

Virtualism is the emergent culture of digital capitalism and suburban consumerism. It is “otherworldly” in the sense of being detached from physical reality.

Traditional Gnosticism is metaphysics, renunciation of evil and sin. The most radical forms, in both Islam and Christianity, are seen as heretical because they don’t accept the need for formal religious hierarchy, rather they practice direct connection to Spirit. Kabbalah might be similar?

Expand full comment

I suppose I'm one of those unreflective, knee-jerk, dogma-repeating christian right-wingers, so maybe I could speak a word or two in defense of my fellow neanderthals.

"It is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with."

As a Baptist, I don't recognize any religious authority outside of the Bible, so this accusation misses the mark in my case (and I'm far from the only one). I suppose you could be referring to catholics, but if so, what of it? In their view (wrong though it is), the authority of the church is given by God and superintended by the Holy Spirit. In which case following that authority is a good thing, not a bad thing. You may not agree with that, and I don't, but then you should provide a reason why it's wrong rather than just sneering at it.

"Do Christian right-wingers seriously believe that there is no difference between some cells at conception and a baby?"

Well at the end of nine months, they tend to be a bit bigger and have more parts than when they started out, but then there's a lot of differences between a baby and man too. Morally speaking, no, there is no difference. A person is a person is a person, regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of whether your fingers have grown in.

If you view it any other way, you leave yourself with the impossible task of deciding exactly when a person becomes a person (call it ensoulment if you like). Make this transition as fuzzy as you want, you're stuck with the fact that one day it's morally permissible to kill this creature, and the next day it's not because he or she crossed some threshold into personhood (or at least right-to-life-ness). If infanticide is immoral, but flushing a fertilized egg is not, you have to draw a line somewhere, and anywhere you draw it will be wrong.

The only morally consistent position is the one proposed by the idiot dogmaticians. Before fertilization you have a sperm, which is dad, and an egg, which is mom. At the moment of fertilization is when you start to have a tertium quid, a new creature that's a combination of mom and dad, but no longer one or the other. That's a person, and killing people is wrong.

For the life of me I can't understand why protecting the weak and speaking up for the voiceless is such a horrible "rigid" and "merciless" thing, "crushing others and causing misery." From where I'm standing, I see a pro-life movement that stands up for both women and babies, seeking to do everything possible to help mothers in desperate situations, while compassionately and firmly insisting that killing babies (born or otherwise) is not the answer to our problems.

Some much more can and should be said, but I've already gone way past an appropriate length for blog post comments. Hope this helps you understand us a bit better. (And I am american although I live in Europe :)

Expand full comment

One of the tragedies of this time and place is that half-baked "intellectuals" such as James Lindsay are taken as "authorities" on the perennial great matters of human existence.

His writings (rantings) have more in common with P T Barnum whose was of course wrong - there are thousands of suckers born every minute and thousands who pretend or are suckered into believing that Lindsay is an authority on the perennial matters of human existence. He was/ is an atheist and as such even pretends to provide a unique understanding of God.

His New Discourses website is pathetic and boring.

There is nothing remotely new to be found there and he repeats the same simplistic stuff over and over again.

Expand full comment

Humans evolved as an intensely socially cooperative species with complex emotional bonds within kinship groups (gene pools). Social cooperation, eusociality, is a survival adaptation. People need meaning. Without religion, they make up stuff that is usually worse, to fill the vacuum.

Expand full comment