The Week in Review... Or, To Hell in a Handbasket

I received a warning this week that a person with whom I was to have a conference detested the words “damn” and “hell”—would publicly explain that he was a Christian and would hence never brush against that untouchable pair (as if to do so would disqualify one from being a Christian). I happen to know that this same man employs other four-letter words on occasion. I also know from painful first-hand experience that he is no stranger to scathing sarcasm and bullying manipulation of the facts. So I ask you: is one only bound when one swears by the altar’s gold rather than the altar? Is one not indeed bound simply when one says, “I will do this,” without swearing by anything?

A younger man (and hence more deserving—for a little longer—of indulgence) brazenly maintained in one of my classes this week that babies conceived in a test-tube (actually a Petrie dish) do not have a soul. I was aghast. I tried to pose him a hypothetical which assumed a degree of technological sophistication beyond what we have now, but not greatly so. Suppose that a woman were raped and then murdered by a blow to the head, that her body were put on life-support in a vain attempt revive her brain, that sperm fertilized egg in the meantime and she conceived in this vegetative state, that doctors discovered the pregnancy just as they were about to pull the plug, and—finally—that the tiny embryo were placed and grown to healthy maturity in an incubator. Would the resulting baby have no soul? The child would have been conceived through a violent homicide, and in a corpse. No matter how unsavory or clinical or unlawful the circumstances of conception, can any breathing human being ever have the right to say of another, “He has no soul”? How can a Christian, of all people, claim to have that right—a professed believer, that is, in spiritual reality and the unlimited importance of every individual to God?

I say that I tried to pose this enigma… but never got very far with it. The youth in question would only stick his nose up in the air with a smirk, shake his head as if the rush of air past his ears might drown my words, and repeat, “Life is a gift from God”… meaning, apparently, that if man should actually collaborate in the creation of life, no such gift would be involved. Those among us with souls were conceived by accident, or at least without any specific planning. The rest of us bore our way to Hell muttering “damn” as we pass test tubes under Bunsen burners.

I might add, on the subject of students, that I invited two large classes of Bible Belt college freshmen to discuss the spiritual implications of fusing robots with humans if they so desired—that they must not present scriptural citation as an argument, since they should not presume their audience to consist of co-religionists, but that they could certainly apply the principles of their faith to the construction of an objective case. None accepted my invitation, though I know from remarks made in other circumstances that most of them consider themselves believers. They could not fathom my proposal. How can you REASON from religion? If you cannot saturate your audience with scriptural citations, what else could you possibly say from a scriptural perspective? What is faith, at last, but a blind adherence to certain inherited commandments? The brightest of one bunch observed that imbibing moral truth was like learning the childhood lesson of shunning a hot stove’s burner. Even she could not see that doing good by way of avoiding punishment for transgression is mere cultural conditioning—that it only exemplifies the utilitarian endeavor of keeping individuals in line so that society may function smoothly.

We are turning into barbarians. Neither faith, nor reason, nor law can keep us from it. Urban masses are arranging bus convoys to the houses of AIG executives who received bonuses, their class hatred having been fanned to a bonfire by our president and his entourage. Fathers are putting their sons on strict weight-building programs—supplemented with drugs legal and not so legal—to secure coveted athletic scholarships and, just maybe, the really big money of professional sports. Women under thirty may be overheard in my university’s corridors talking about luring a fifty-something male with a good job and no attachments to the altar—long-term, high-return prostitution. Congress has undertaken the repeal of the very partial ban on Partial-Birth Abortion. A Catholic bishop in Mexico blames the U.S. for the drug wars along its southern border because U.S. citizens are buying the drugs and selling the guns (as if Nation X would bear no responsibility for sending lucre-hungry mercenaries into a neighboring nation being racked by a civil war).

Meanwhile, a commercial represents two gray-suited bureaucrats (of either gender, naturally) biking to work through a maze of oddly traffic-less skyscrapers as they discuss cell-phone service; and in the next frame, joggers on an idyllic, deserted beachscape have the same conversation as the sun sets. The inane liberal pipedream of a universal leisure class that visits Starbuck’s daily and gets colonoscopies monthly has at last merged with cynical capitalist claptrap that shows everyone hooked up to the latest must-have technology. Why would we ever need DEPTH in this new world of perpetual games and good health—a world where our leader rates college basketball teams and appears on Jay Leno? Even our faith carries a huge dollop of whipped cream.

Just keep tripping. If they let you carry your laptop onto the cattle car, you can imagine yourself on the Orient Express—or maybe on a journey to another planet.