The Speak Life Podcast, sharing Jesus in everyday life. In the news this week, the issue of sex-selective abortions has once more been highlighted. A new prenatal test can uncover a child's gender as early as eight weeks' gestation, and many parents have been using this information to determine whether their child lives or dies. Wait, no, no. That that kind of sounds a bit odd. Oh, I see my mistake. I I called the unborn a child. No, um, this BBC headline sets my mind at rest. Uh, labor calls for ban on early fetus sex tests. Yeah, that's right. I forgot. Uh we don't decide whether our child lives or dies. Who does that? We decide whether a fetus lives or dies. Gotta admit, that does sound a heck of a lot better. Dodged an ethical bullet there. Uh the article goes on. Uh, this non-invasive prenatal test, NIPT, is used by the NHS to test for genetic conditions. Uh, but people can pay for it privately to discover a baby's sex. Hang on. I thought it was a fetus. Now it's a hang on, now it's a baby. Is anyone feeling a little bit crazy about that? I mean maybe maybe the unborn are babies. Like, come to think of it. I I don't say to my pregnant friends, you know, how's the fetus? You know, how's your clump of cells? Have you felt your product of conception kick yet? Uh just changes things. Don't you think? I I've just got this funny woozy guy, yucky. I mean, because if it's an unwanted clump of cells, let's get rid of the cells, right? And if it's a product of unwanted conception, let's clear up the mess. But if it's a baby, starting to feel a little bit queasy about killing her. I mean, it's it. It, right? Except that it has a gender, right? Pronouns are hard these days. We can kill products of conception, we can kill fetuses. These days we've even found ourselves killing babies. But thankfully, we have found it within ourselves to draw the line of killing little baby girls.
SPEAKER_05Because it definitely feels a little bit feeling just in that I don't I don't know what to call it. I want to say wrong, but I don't want to get judgy. Um baby girls is the bad kind of killing.
SPEAKER_06You know? But oh no, look, the shadow minister for equalities agrees with me. Oh look, Labour MP Nas Shah said it was morally wrong, see, for people to use the test to abort pregnancies based on the outcome. Good. You know, we we mustn't abort because of the child's agenda. That is morally wrong. Well, I'm glad someone's finally had the guts to say that, because I've kind of been feeling conflicted about that whole killing little girls thing. So Ms. Shah goes on in the article. NIPT screenings should be used for their intended purpose to screen for serious conditions such as again.
SPEAKER_04What is that feeling?
SPEAKER_06The equality shadow minister says that if they have XX chromosomes, they are our precious little girls who are worthy of all protection. If they have an extra chromosome, terminate with extreme prejudice. Because you know that even before this non-invasive test, 90% of parents who discover Down syndrome in their babies. I mean fetuses, sorry, fetuses. 90% of parents who discover Down syndrome in their fetuses do in fact abort. And that percentage is only set to rise with the advent of this test recommended by Naz Shah, shadow minister for equality. So let me see if I get this right. It is bad screening to eliminate on gender. It is good screening to eliminate on disability. That's a good use of the screening test. I can't put my finger on it, but I I I think I see the logic because you know, a couple of years ago we filmed a Christmas video of those with Down syndrome. I can't help but think it's it's those people that the test is designed to screen out. And that is the good screening. The bad kind of screening, the screening that is based on gender, has been called gendocide. That is a powerful word for it, right? Screening out those according to gender is gendocide. Genocide, that is that's bad, right? So what should we call it when we screen out those according to their genome? I know. Let's call it genocide. Genocide. That's it, isn't it? It's it's genocide. But it's a good kind of genocide, right?
SPEAKER_04Thanks, Nas. I was starting to feel a little bit you know mad and queasy, but with the help of these antennas, I think we've cleared them out. Yay, good genocide. I'm Glenn Scrivler, and this is Speak Life. You're watching the live class.
SPEAKER_07We've been having lots of problems with our videos uh that we've been playing through our system. We're not quite sure why they're all juddery. Yeah. All of a sudden, because we're not doing anything different from what we've done before, so. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06We'll get there. Yeah. We'll get there, and uh we will release uh a non-juddery version of that. Of the monologue. Of the monologue, the genocide monologue. The good kind of genocide.
SPEAKER_07No, no. Yeah. What's that movie you were referencing? It just reminded me of Hotshots part part duh. Duh. Where the guy turns to the camera and he goes, War. It's fantastic.
SPEAKER_06Genocide. You don't want the wrong kind of genocide. No, you need the good genocide. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad that Nasha Shadow Minister for Equalities. Yep, she's on it. She's on it. You know. Didn't you say something as well, like she's the Shadow Minister for Equalities and wasn't she? She was banned from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism. Right, yeah. Not saying there's a link. I'm not. I'm just saying. Oh my dear. She said things about the Jews and now she's I'm not I'm not drawing the link. I'm just you know, when you Google her name, those are the Those are things that come up.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Well, so I was I saw that article yesterday on the BBC News over breakfast about, you know, this um you know prenatal screening over gender and how, you know, the Labour Party say you should ban people who want abortions based on the gender. Um and obviously, I mean it it's crazy that we're at a point where people would even be thinking along those lines, but um of wanting to do it, not ban it. Um the thing that immediately pops into my mind though is just it seems bananas that we're living in a society that says um you can screen a a a fetus, if they want to call it that, a clump of cells, as many people would want to call it, you can screen that clump of cells for gender and find it out at however many weeks. Eight weeks, just yeah. But yet gender is a social construct assigned at birth and is fluid and can change. Yes. So, you know, if you were a bought a little girl, you'd want to say, but surely by society's views, I mean they might identify as a boy.
SPEAKER_06They might identify and and I think that's the smart move, okay? So any any young people listening, if you are pre-born, um I I wouldn't ordinarily recommend this, but for you guys, please just you know try to try to transition. Um identify as male and you'll be fine. Absolutely fine. Just don't whatever you do be disabled. Uh because we can't protect you anymore. Sorry about that. Unless you identify as as non-disabled, and then I don't know. Who knows? Who knows?
SPEAKER_07But I wonder though, do people see do people see how these things do cross over, you know? Yeah. Or whether for some people they're just looking at this issue and going, well, there's one thing over there, and the you know, this trans transgender thing is a completely different thing. Well the gender identity stuff is completely different. You're going, well Right.
SPEAKER_06And but and then the sexuality thing, which I mean I mean, certainly the gay community has not always had a united front on this question, but at the moment it seems to be you're born that way. Right. Yeah. You're and and no doubt we are just six months away from discovering the gay gene and you are born that way, right? So that is absolutely a fixed, you know, you know, natural physical, biological state. Your gender is totally fluid, even though it's written into every single cell of your body. Yeah. Um and then if you have an extra chromosome, sorry. Yeah. You don't qualify. That's you know. And so what's what's interesting is that I think the issue of screening for Down syndrome um does uh hopefully evoke something of a moral conscience in our culture. Like there is some stirring of, oh, I don't know what that feels like, but it's oh this weird kind of woozy, maybe it's wrong. Like when we start to talk about screening out uh an entire population.
SPEAKER_07I don't know if there is though.
SPEAKER_06Right. We've kind of moved on. Like two years ago, Sally Phillips did the the uh A World Without Downs documentary.
SPEAKER_07I think I'm not sure, I think most people wouldn't give it a s almost would give it uh well, I was gonna say wouldn't give it a second thought. Um I'm sure that w uh you know if you're in that situation, you know, you don't just go, fine, straight away, you know, let's abort. But I don't think the maybe the average person just hears, you know, and we want to screen out things like Down syndrome and they go, Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm not sure people do kind of go, ooh, bulk at it.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, because two years ago that that documentary came out and it was a massive talking point. But now two years later, this is when they're actually implementing that non-invasive prenatal test. Right.
SPEAKER_07And who's the guy because I mean uh I think the kind of stuff that pricks people's conscience a little bit is like seeing things like that video, like the he came down where you're seeing people who have Down syndrome.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Um and but then there's there's the MP, isn't there? I don't know if he's an MP or who he is, I don't know his name. Okay. Who's got Down syndrome. Okay. And he's spoken in Parliament, right? I'm not sure, you know, House of Lords or House of Commons, I'm not sure. Probably Commons, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_07Um but he's kind of stood up and talked about this, hasn't he? And saying, like, you know, trying to wipe, you know, people like me wouldn't be here. Right. And stuff. And I think when you see stuff like that and it kind of humanizes it for people, then it kind of but when you just read an article about generic you know, generic Down syndrome child number forty-two.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure people do. And then Naz Shah kind of says, Oh, we draw the line at gender side. But the reason why we have these is to screen out Down syndrome, and that's just dropped into the article. No comment has made it on that. You know, it's not I'm not picking up on what other journalists are saying about that. I'm just picking up on this one sentence that's dropped in, where she basically says the bad kind of screening is for gender, the good kind of screening is for Down syndrome, and let the chips fall where they may. And it seems like the the big kind of ethical dilemma we were having two years ago has just totally been forgotten. These NIPT um tests that can be done at eight weeks of gestation, they are now just going to be rolled out in the coming month for this, and yeah, and so fine, let's let's go the way of in the Scandinavian countries that have brought in this NIPT thing, 100% of parents abort. 100%. So, like in Iceland you just can't find people with downs anymore. Yeah. You know. So is this a way of maybe starting to talk to people about the abortion issue? Like, can we can we find common ground with people? Um, I mean that was that was one thing we were trying to do in 2016 when we did the Christmas video, he came down. We were trying to again enter into a world in which everybody's got Down syndrome. I don't know if you've seen it, he came down, um, but in fact, why don't we why don't we play the clip and um and you can see what we're talking about?
SPEAKER_01Of all she goes through, it's not her plan, it's God's plan. She just goes with it. She's humble, she's calm, she's reassured by the fact that everything's gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_08I think she would like she's not like a chance.
SPEAKER_06So that that was our attempt in in 2016 to to again humanize the issue and and show an entire world where the shepherds and the angels and the three wise men and and Jesus himself all have an extra chromosome. And um and I just I I think it it's a way of showing it it really is a gospel issue in that the gospel is all about the Most High who stoops down to become the little guy, um, the weak, the one who needed protecting. And in his kingdom, uh it is all about the the toppling of those on their thrones and the lifting up of those who are lowly. And I just think this this whole idea of screening people out of our populations is the very opposite of that. It's it's it is the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest. Whereas the gospel is the the sacrifice of the strongest for the survival of we the weakest. So are are there ways that we can be heard on this issue that are kind of gospel-shaped? Because it's it's difficult, isn't it? As soon as you you you talk about this issue, it's just it's a a very tense culture clash moment. And how do you how do you make sure that you don't come across as just a moralist? How do you actually how do you actually make it a gospel thing? What do you reckon? Paul, solve solve this problem for us.
SPEAKER_07Come on. I don't know, uh in in honesty. Um like you say, it's one of those topics that is so um what's the word uh explosive, isn't it? When you talk about it. Yeah. It's some people find it very difficult to have any kind of any kind of conversation about it or a civil dialogue. I mean I don't know necessarily about how you make it a a gospel issue, but I mean I think just as we look at you know that the the stuff they're saying with these screenings, you know, there's stuff where it would seem to me that even just a basic science is pushing you more towards a personhood at a younger stage in the in the growth of the child, you know, rather than it being a clump of cells. Right. You're saying, well, if you can say this is not just an it, a clump, it's a he or a she at eight weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But is it is he or she alive? Is this a life then? And and I just think there's avenues there that you could push down just from that side of things.
SPEAKER_06But science is on your side there.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I mean I read an article, I can't remember what it was now, but a guy was saying he wondered whether in a hundred years' time he felt science was pushing us that way. That we see life really starts earlier than we think. Um and in a hundred years' time he said he wondered whether people would look back and just be shocked that we would even have considered that think that these babies weren't alive and were doing what we were doing.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_07Um but on the back of science, you know. Yes.
SPEAKER_06So I think so. I mean I I I did a video when I was in Australia. Um I was just flying out of Australia, and the airport in Sydney is right next to Botany Bay, and Botany Bay is where Captain Cook first made landfall as he was, you know, exploring the great southern land of Australia. And, you know, he's writing in his diary, he was, you know, he was looking through his optical device at the aboriginals on the shore. And from his distance and through his murky optical device, he couldn't figure out whether they were brown skinned or they had brown clothing on, but he saw signs of life, signs of civilization. They were cooking, they were washing, they were hunting, they were fishing. Um so he kind of saw that they were human civilization, but he didn't see it in HD. And there's lots of different tellings of the history of Australia and whether when the white man came it was settlement, or when the white man came it was invasion. Um so I'm wading into the history wars in this. But let's let's do a telling of the history that says, okay, James Cook looks through his telescope, he sees life, and it's it's a bit murky, and he doesn't quite know, but he probably sees enough to know these are fellow human beings, fellow members of the human family. Um, but actually, here's one telling of the history is that the white man looked on the Aboriginals and looked on the land of Australia, and they said, No, it's Terranullius. Terranullius, a Latin term meaning there's nobody home. Like, this land is for the taking. Um, there is no prior human claim to this land, therefore, we white men, we can stick a flag in it and it's ours. And like we all look back on that, and we would all say, if that's what happened, then that is horrific. Um and yet you bring that forward to today, and what we have is people looking through optical devices at what is clearly a member of the human family. And as those optical devices get better and better, and more and more HD, surely we are seeing that this is not the genome of the mother, this is a distinct genome, and it is a human genome. This is not a clump of cells, this is a life, and it is a life that is distinct from the life of the mother, and therefore we're not just dealing with the mother's right to choose. We've got two human beings we need to deal with. And let's not look into the womb and say it's Terranulius, right? Let's not look into the womb and say this is an empty place that we can, you know, have sovereign rights over. Um, because that's just imperialistic colonialistic nonsense, right? And so you're like that's one way, that's one analogy, I think, um, that we can kind of use. Um and I just I just think I think more and more I used to be of the of the view that that things like abortion uh sort of moral issues and just distractions from the gospel. Um and I think more and more I'm thinking, like, if the gospel is about sin, then that sin is not abstract. There are actual concrete sins that are the sins for which Jesus had to die. And I know that abortion is not in any way, shape, or form like the the unforgivable sin or the worst of all possible sins. But here is a test case of an entire culture that is kind of nodded and allowed an evil to sort of go on in its midst, and no. No one's particularly bothered about it. And you just think, well, that's kind of the Bible's view of humanity.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. And the thing is though, you know, we watched that video the other day of this this guy talking about, you know, 22 reasons not to believe, you know, and he says, he just drops one of, you know, very quick, they're all pithy and they're not, you know, he's basically having a laugh most of the time. Yeah. But he's just like, you know, number whatever, the Holocaust, number, and then he moves on.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07And so he clearly looks at something like the Holocaust and says, This is a great evil. Right. And he's saying, Well, that proves there's no God. The fact that he thinks there's a great evil, but yet here we are in a society that after the Holocaust said, you know, never again, never again would we allow someone or anyone to uh dehumanize human beings to the point where we think it's okay to kill them en masse.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_07Um and we'll go, no, that's terrible. Never again, never again. Right. All the while having abortions, 180,000. Saying they're not people.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_07You know, uh these aren't humans, they're not they're not babies, they're not alive, etc. etc. Yeah. Um or they've got Down syndrome, or you know, so it's so the disabled people, we get rid of them as well. Right. Um It sounds a bit like that other thing. Gypsies, gays, dis you know. Right. You just think, how can people not see the the similarities there, the parallels?
SPEAKER_06But Peter Hitchens has a chilling quote about this, and I don't usually use it because to say Peter Hitchens is then to lose a lot of people's kind of sure. He's an extreme case. He's an extreme case, but on this issue, I mean he he said um uh let me see if I can kind of uh remember his words. He says, we don't need to guess what we would do if we lived in a culture that um that had a holocaust. We don't we don't need to guess whether we would have been courageous enough to stand up against that kind of uh injustice. We don't have to guess about whether we would do something. We live through that kind of culture and we do nothing.
SPEAKER_07Yep.
SPEAKER_06And I just think, wow, um you know, the Holocaust is like, you know, just this slam dunk argument, you know, just you know, it it it is this evil that everyone can, you know, agree to as evil. And yet what do we do? We just we just live through a culture in which we eliminate the weak so that the strong can make you know stronger, wiser choices. Um and does the gospel have anything anything to say to that? Like my thoughts on on abortion, they I mean they used to turn to places like uh Psalm 139, where it says, um, you know, what does Psalm 139 say? Um from my mother's womb. You formed me in my mother's womb, you know. Um and and or Psalm 51, you know, surely I was sinful from birth, sinful from my time, my mother conceived me. So I used to go back to the Psalms and kind of say, Well, I'll see, life begins at conception. But more and more I'm I'm going to Jesus to inform my thinking on the on the subjects. Number one, um, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. So the the beginning of Jesus' life as a man was conception. Right? So you go straight to Jesus and you say, okay, Jesus became like he became a man to use the generic use of the word man. He became a man to save men. You know, he's he became one of us to save hum humankind. He became a single cell in Mary's womb to save single cells. He became an embryo to save embryos, he became a fetus to s to save feti. Um such a rubbish word. Why you know the only reason we use that word is to distance ourselves morally from whatever that fetus thing is. It's a horrible like let's distance ourselves from the baby that's in that call that baby the fetus. You you know you're gonna do something harm if you dehumanize it first in your language, you know. It's like it's like calling immigrants a swarm of immigrants is coming towards Europe, and like everyone rightly says you can't dehumanize people and call them a swarm because as soon as you start speaking of them in an inhumane way, you're gonna start treating them in an inhumane way. Well, what do we do? We call the unborn fetuses, right? But so that's the first thing. When when I think about Jesus, I I think he became he became an embryo to save embryos, right? He he became what we are that we might become what he is. So I I go to Jesus and I go to the cross. So 1 Corinthians 1 says, You can have this theology of glory where you think about wisdom and strength, but we preach Christ crucified. That's the that's the wisdom of the cross and the the the strength of the cross that actually looks to despised weaklings like us and lifts up despised weaklings like us. And I just think if if that message is going to have any implications, and if that message is going to impact anyone in the concrete, um it's it's hard to go past the unborn as people who are and it's hard to go past the disabled unborn as those who are weak and in most need of provision and protection. And I think a theology of the cross is what informs that. Um So I I I don't know, I think there are ways of bringing bringing the gospel to bear on this issue. Um So yeah, we've had some uh great comments already on here, and I've lost all of them. Um So hello Gail Denise, hello David Sweeney, hello Chris Dempsey. Who's Roger? And hey Roger. Who's Roger? Who's Roger? Say hello, Roger. My dad's called Roger. Okay. Oh, maybe maybe they're calling you. A pass.
SPEAKER_07Your dad. Maybe, because that's a stage I've reached.
SPEAKER_06I open my mouth and my father comes out. Isn't that oh, you know. Doesn't that happen when you start you you'll make a joke to the waitress in the in the restaurant and you're like, oh dad, it's dad human. Oh no. Yep. It's happening! So I'm really sorry I've lost the the comments. Some great comments I was gonna read out.
SPEAKER_07Anyway, um well we've I've got them here, if you want. Oh, what do you got? What do you got? Uh well, Gail Denise said, How can we care for people if we have none who need our care?
SPEAKER_06Right. Yeah, we talk about a compassionate society, but we don't want anyone who needs that compassion.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_06And we almost think it would be bad for people to have needs. You know, Sally Phillips, when she did her documentary um on uh A World Without Downs, she interviewed this woman who had had an abortion because her child was found to be with Down syndrome. And so she had an abortion and she was un you know, unrepentant about it. She didn't didn't regret her decision, even though Sally Philip Phillips was kind of showing her like footage of this gymnastics kind of star this who had Down syndrome and showing her all these inspirational stories of people with Down syndrome who's who'd gone on to triumph. And she said, Yeah, but they looked like they'd had to struggle quite a bit to get there. I don't want my baby to struggle.
SPEAKER_07Oh yeah. And I mean So yeah, I mean, there was this idea that we shouldn't have to struggle or anything. But I mean, just like you, I mean, you obviously when that woman watches the the kind of able-bodied Olympics, she just go well, they just but there was no effort for them. They just Mo Farrah just he just ran, didn't he? And I'm sure he never did any work for it. It was never a struggle.
SPEAKER_06But isn't it interesting? Like we wanna we want to eliminate suffering per se. And we never we never think about oh what about a struggle towards a goal? What about going down into the valley of the shadow so that you can come up to feasting joy at the end, which is the gospel story. We used to think that was cool, but now we just want the smooth, let's just watch Netflix till we die.
SPEAKER_07And even if it's not specifically a struggle, like I mean, I saw Ravi Zacharias talking about you know a woman who had this condition where she couldn't feel pain, or her daughter couldn't feel pain and stuff. Right. And actually how he was saying, you know, the the issues that have caused in her life, not being able to feel pain. Yeah. Um you know, you don't know if you've trodden on a nail, you know, you you can actually do quite bad damage to yourself because you don't realise something's hot or burning or whatever. And and he was saying, you know, if we can see that even in those with our kind of finite minds, that pain and suffering can have a purpose that can be useful for us in some way. Right. He said, you know, imagine you know how much more God has got a perspective on how some of this might stuff be in the w might be in the world and whatnot. But yeah. But we're just like, it's all bad, it's all wrong, you can't have any possible good.
SPEAKER_06And therefore, if and if our supreme goal is to eliminate all suffering, then we have to eliminate all sufferers. Right? Yep. So apply that, apply that to those with downs in the womb. Okay, we don't want them to suffer, right? Even though in every test they come out as the happiest people on planet Earth. Those with Down syndrome are the happiest. And if you know people with Down syndrome, you know what I'm talking about. Absolutely. This is this is not really our technology is not doing very well these days. Man, we've had a couple of weeks of uh of shockers. Face streak with the thumbs up. Send send laptops. Send laptops. If you have a faster laptop than our steam-powered one. And he's having to pedal really quickly over there. He's shoveling the coal in. Here we go. So what were we talking about? What were we talking about? Um Let's go back to the beginning. Start again.
SPEAKER_07Um where are my anti acids? We've done we're gonna talk about suffering. We're looking at some of the comments. Nick. I don't know how far we got before we broke up. Yeah. Um we were saying we both know who he is. Can't say his name. Yeah. Um No Arms, No Legs. Yep.
SPEAKER_06No worries. I think I thought that's the name of the video.
SPEAKER_07Is that his actual slogan?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. It might even be a book that he wrote, but it's definitely a YouTube video. Look up, look up. No arms, no legs, no worries. He's Australian, so yeah, no worries.
SPEAKER_07But yeah, we're saying that I've seen I've seen a few bits of his and I mean people at secondary schools and just seems to be really inspiring. And you don't look at this guy. And isn't he married? He's got kids and stuff as well. Like, I mean Yeah. And you just think, oh well, yeah, but if you if you could screen and see in the room this is what this person's gonna be like. Right, right, right. I think a lot of today's kind of view would just be, yeah, of course you terminate the pregnancy, and you just think Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_06Look, look at this person. And who do we think that we are that we're making that choice? You know? Like, because maybe maybe you see a s you know, you you you have a scan and you realize that your child has no arms or no legs, and maybe they go on to to live uh a really limited life. You know, and they and they're not Nick Vujic and they don't they don't travel the world and get married and all that kind of stuff. Sure. Um we don't we don't know which way it's gonna go, but who who do we think we are to make that choice? Whether they live or die.
SPEAKER_07You know. But there is just no like I say, there's no boundary to it really. Because I mean you just think at what a stage do you start to s you you you say, well look, we we can tell now because our science has advanced that actually your child is gonna have bad eyesight. You know? And people will say, well, of course, that's okay, they can still have a life because they have glasses and contact lenses. But these people with Down syndrome can have perfectly good lives, you know, with a often with a little bit of help. And actually there's plenty of people with Down syndrome, and people like Nick Vujchik. Voytachik. Voytachik. Well that's the phonetic.
SPEAKER_06Thank you for doing it. But they're having They're having very fulfilled lives.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah. Um and often very independently as well. Right. Um And that's the thing, when you have if there's no how where's your moral compass? Like where's the And what is true North?
SPEAKER_06Because true if true north is like how much pleasure they, you know, is stimulated in their synapses as opposed to the pain synapses, like that is such a reduced vision for for humanity. Um and this idea that pain is just a necessary evil and must be eliminated, uh, is so chilling. And and I think it one of the places it pops up is in evangelism, is that um you know the the problem of evil as we've come to understand it is is really only a kind of a 300-year-old problem. Like, like only around you know, 1700 there was a there was a Lisbon earthquake that just like decimated Portugal and like like en masse, you like thousands and thousands and thousands of people died. Um but uh but that was not the first earthquake that had ever happened, but people like Voltaire kind of grabbed hold of that and they were they then said, Good God, I think not. And it's only when you get to a certain level of civilization that people start to see evil as just this unconscionable thing that could not coexist with God. Um and and largely it's because we haven't had it so good, and we've never had it so good, and then suddenly you fall from the goodness that you have, and it becomes the most outrageous defeater for Christian faith. And more and more I'm seeing people like raise the Holocaust, boom! Like no answer because because we could we just have lost any category for meaningful pain or meaningful suffering.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um which is not to say it's a really glib, easy answer to say that you know, through the Holocaust you get X, Y, and Z. That's that's not the argument, but it's just that we've lost the entire category for meaningful, meaningful suffering, meaningful pain. Um so yeah, so one of the one of the upshots of that is that we we uh want to eliminate the sufferer, not just the suffering. And one of the upshots of it is that the suffering question becomes this intractable problem for the Christian that can never be solved. Which you go around planet Earth and actually most people suffer a heck of a lot more than us and believe in God a heck of a lot more than us. And the idea that suffering disproves God's. Don't come with your facts, Glenn. Facts don't care about your feelings. Um Gail Denise says, more ethnic cleansing. I think I've taken that out of context, Gail. Um I don't think she's calling for that.
SPEAKER_07Well, no, I think Gail said, didn't she, about uh what about gingers? You know, what about gingers? What about those with marks?
SPEAKER_06Exactly. Where'd you say and Mark Jennery, euthanasia is the same issue of not valuing life. It totally is. And I do wonder, we're gonna get into this when we um start talking about Sam Harris in a second, but I do wonder if in the West we're actually travelling east in our understanding of suffering.
SPEAKER_07Right.
SPEAKER_06So an eastern understanding um of of suffering is that life is suffering, and and suffering kind of comes from attachment to the world. Yeah, okay. And what you need to do is detach from the world, get rid of ego, and get rid of your false attachments to this transient thing called called the world, and then you will eliminate suffering. And in the end, nirvana is actually being so detached from everything that yeah, nirvana means gone. Being blown out like a like a candle, a flame, and you dissolve into the ocean of being like a drop of water in the sea, and the answer to suffering is non-existence and and caring less and detaching more from this world. And that's kind of what you do on Facebook, isn't it? You know, I'm always seeing these memes about you know, if you're in a toxic relationship, get out of it, man, because you don't need these other people, you don't need pain in your life, you don't need struggle. So love less, everybody. Make sure you love a lot less, and then you won't have so much pain, and you just detach and live by yourself, and you've got your little screen, and that's that's Nirvana, baby.
SPEAKER_07I saw uh because I I used I saw a video um of a woman asking the Dalai Lama about suffering, and I'm trying to rack my brains now for what the exact question was she asked. But she said something about like um you know what what can I do when I have like negative thoughts and stuff, and he was basic and his basic response was just Remember that reality is not as it seems, so he was saying that's not the way it is, um, and stuff. Um and um But then I I was just thinking like but you know, you try applying that kind of thinking into um you know someone who's lost a family member. Right. Just remember reality is not as it seems, and you're like, well, this is rubbish ad rubbish advice.
SPEAKER_06So if you're grieving, we are very close from being able to have the kind of pill that might stop you feeling the feelings of grief. Right. Right? So you've just lost your mum, and you go to the doctor, and let's say you've had you've had a good couple of days, to be sad about it, but you go to the doctor and you say, Well, I'm I'm feeling really depressed. Um more and more, I think, in our culture, a doctor is primed to say, Well, let me alleviate that discomfort here, take a pill. And and what if there was a pill that could actually stop you feeling the feelings of grief? Now, the feelings of grief are deathly, horrible, horrific, hellish. You don't want to feel those feelings. And so, isn't it tempting to then take that pill and then you never grieve your mother? Right? And I this is this is the way that we're going, I think. I think it I think it's heading in a very eastern direction where we we can't imagine anything good about grieving, anything good about pain, anything good about suffering, anything good about actually training hard for the Olympics and getting a gold medal, or walking through the valley of the shadow because at the end there's feasting joy. Because we haven't soaked in the Jesus story for for long enough, we just we don't have that perspective on suffering. That yes, we're in the valley, but there's a good shepherd who joins us and who who who leads us out and meets us in that suffering. So don't just flee the suffering, cling to Christ in the midst of the suffering. That's that's the kind of the Christian response to suffering. But more and more as we're forgetting Jesus, it's just like, you know, beam me up, Scotty, give me the pill. I'll just I'll I just I just don't want to feel bad anymore. Um so anyway, this is this is one issue, and and so that and that's why I think kind of the abortion issue kind of fits into so much more than just the the issue of what do we do with the unborn. Um it's about a whole life philosophy and what what it is that we value as a culture. So maybe maybe there are ways of engaging this issue in a in a bigger way, and and maybe actually it starts to be an attractive vision when we say there's a church community in which we value the weak, we value the disabled, we have we value the little guy because God became the little guy for us. And maybe that starts to paint an attractive picture of the gospel. So, um we don't have a lot of time left um to look at uh Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. Um but let's let's do it quickly, um, and uh we can come back to Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson next week. Um you don't need to know anything about Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson. Um really, no. Not really. Um all you need to know is that uh Sam Harris is uh one of the four horsemen of the atheist the new atheist apocalypse, um, very anti-religion in all its forms. Jordan Peterson is uh a clinical psychologist, um an evolutionary psychologist, who is very uh enamored of the um uh the psychology of of Carl Jung and uh and very respectful of the religious stories that our cultures have been telling over the years, and says that there is much good to be found in the Bible, much good to be found in the Christian myth of Christ the Logos who entered the valley and and brings us some kind of salvation. So that's those two men, and they've had a series of discussions, series of debates in Vancouver, in Dublin, and in London. Um and I just thought that those discussions have been really interesting, they've interested me because I've kind of uh got an interest in philosophy anyway. Uh, and so we've done a couple of videos, we've done two already, we've got three more to come. And um, let's have a look at the the first clip, and I think it'll really um gel together with what we've been talking about heading eastwards in our conceptions of evil and suffering. This is Sam Harris telling us what he thinks about evil and suffering.
SPEAKER_00The reason why evil is susceptible to total deflation is if you agree with me, uh evil is a category of uh human misbehavior, human intention that we don't understand significantly at the level of the brain, but if we did understand it totally at the level of the brain, then every evil person we had in the dock at trial would be just like Charles Whitman with his brain tumor after he shot up uh everyone at uh the University of Texas, right? So like he he's at he's the prototypically evil mass murderer, but he's complaining about uh this chain that overcame his personality, and he thinks it would be good, it would be a good idea that after the cops kill me, you autopsy my brain because I don't know why I'm doing any of this, right? And lo and behold, he had a glioblastoma pressing on his amygdala, and all of a sudden it made sense of his behavior in a way that a full understanding of psychopathy or every other variant of human evil would make sense of it in a way that would be deflationary ethically. And then you would look at so then you'd look at someone like Saddam Hussein, or the the the worst evil person you could imagine, and you would say, Well, he's actually. Unlucky. You know, there but for the grace of biology, go I. Because if I had that brain, if I had those genes, if I had those influences that gave me those synapses, I would be just like him. Now, if you think there's some other element that gives us free will, and and now then you and I are disagreeing. That's a factual claim that's at variance with mine. But but if we are just on some level malfunctioning biological systems when we're being evil, then a complete understanding of evil would cancel that category.
SPEAKER_06You see, adopting Sam Harris's framework will abolish the category of evil. Um and at that point, I we we are heading towards the relativistic evil heading towards the relativistic swamp. Uh at that point we are heading towards the relativistic swamp. Uh that's what I say at that point. So um I think that does gel with what we've been talking about. What we've been talking about is our heading eastwards as a culture when it comes to suffering and evil. And Sam Harris is basically saying, yeah, um, the more you become an atheist, the more you become a determinist about things. Um because if actually all my psychology boils down to biology, or my biology boils down to chemistry, my chemistry boils down to physics, if I'm just quarks and leptons fizzing, then it's just like the billiard boards. Billiard billiard balls smack into each other, and if you had a greater great enough supercomputer, you could track the course of every billiard ball ever, and you know, it's it's set in stone, literally. Your your your destiny is set in stone.
SPEAKER_07Like Einstein said, didn't he, that if you could have all the information in the world at your fingertips, you could predict absolutely what was going to happen. Right.
SPEAKER_06Because it's just simple cause and effect. Simple cause and effect, all within nature, and there's there's no other element going on. It's just nature grinding along according to iron laws of physics. Um and if he's right about that, then I guess I guess determinism does follow. And but as he says, that is totally deflationary of this category of evil, because what uh why do you call it wrong? You know, you don't you don't call cogs in a machine that are just turning the way they must turn. That's not that's not wrong. It's not right. It's just is, you know.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and and if you follow it to its kind of logical conclusions, then you lose the right to to to bring any justice on wrong. Yeah. Because it's not really wrong. It's just stuff that happens. Um I know Sam Harris wants to push for kind of a even though he doesn't want there to be evil, he still wants to talk about that which is kind of good for you know, thriving of society or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But you've got to question why why are those things the good things? Yeah. You know, he's saying, well, that you know, yeah society should thrive like this or whatever, but why you've still got to find why that in itself is a good thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um, so Roger Marshall comments and says, Sam Harris is not a moral relativist. But the kind of moral absolutism he has in mind is scary. Yeah, good point. He definitely doesn't want to be known as a moral relativist. I mean, he wrote the moral landscape and he's written other books on moral philosophy, which is, you know, um the they are questionable, all of these books. But he definitely wants to do it because he doesn't want to, you know, drown in the relativistic swamp. Um, and that's what this comment video that that I did last week is all about. Sam Harris does not want to be a relativist. Um and he certainly doesn't want to go down that track towards nihilism. Um, but I do think as a determinist, um, it becomes very difficult to um it becomes yeah, it becomes very difficult to to keep any kind of category of good and evil at that point. You just end up talking about biological functioning and biological misfiring, um, which is not what any of us mean by good and evil. Yeah. And then Sam Harris makes the point, well, yeah, but you know, we're just in the West, and you go east and you go towards the you know, Buddhism and Hinduism, and that's that's kind of the way that that they operate. Um, but is it is it the way that we want to operate, and is it the way that we most naturally respond to the Holocaust, you know? Yeah. The friendly atheist is able to say the Holocaust, boom, right? Because that is another way of saying evil.
SPEAKER_07Um but you've got to burrow behind that, haven't you, and say, Well, you think it's evil. I well, I suppose we all think it's evil. Yeah. But why is that evil? Yeah. Why is it wrong? Yeah. You know, and people will say, won't they, oh well, you know, because you shouldn't hurt other people, or you know, it doesn't make people feel good if it, you know, if you do these kind of things to people. You say, Yeah, but it might make me feel good. Yeah. You know, if I was a Nazi, I might enjoy doing those things. I might get pleasure out of it. It might benefit my tribe of people.
SPEAKER_06And Sam Harris at that point says, Well, I don't I don't know how to I don't know how to communicate with you then. You're just insane. I don't know how to communicate with you. And you're like, yeah, well, insanity keeps on coming up in you know, human civilization. Yeah. And if your theory can't account for the insanity of the Nazi doing that, you don't really have a moral philosophy that's going to be binding on anybody. Last week we had a look at uh Alex O'Connor, who's the cosmic skeptic on YouTube, and uh and he said, um, of course there's nothing objectively morally evil about the Holocaust, but he says, I hope that I would be able to reason with the Nazi and tell them I'm not making this up, this is exactly what he says. He he says, I I think I could be able to reason with the Nazi and convince them that actually the Holocaust is not the best for the smooth running of their society, and if he agrees to that, then I've won I've won him over. And you just think, well, I'm not a Nazi, and you you haven't convinced me, Alex O'Connor. I don't think you could convince your way out of a paper bag, but you reckon you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna argue with and rationalize with the Nazi prison guard. That's a that's a good point, actually. Like everybody off the train. Reverse the trains, reverse the trains. Because but uh but of course it doesn't work as soon as the Nazi points out actually, we've made huge scientific advances through actually operating on the Jews. Even today, there there are scientific breakthroughs that have come through Nazi doctors um experimenting on the Jews. And there's a huge ethical debate about should we should we even like use that information. Right. Because it it's come from torture, essentially. Um but even today, you know, 70 years on, we're still we're still making scientific breakthroughs because we we tortured a small minority in the in the in the population. So there's there's there's the argument that the Nazi brings. There's nothing rationally wrong with that. There's just everything morally wrong with that. Morally for this. Yeah. You know, but there's no category for that with Alex O'Connor, no category for that.
SPEAKER_07It strikes me though that all these people who who who hold those kind of views, yeah, your um Sam Harris's and people like that, they if you if you keep pushing, you're you're gonna have to end up with that relative thing. But they just don't want but no one they don't want to live their lives like that. You know, they don't they don't want to wake up in a world where you know people wrong them and there is no recompense, there is no you know, justice or things like that. They still want all these things, yeah. But they just don't want well, they just don't want God in it, do they? They don't want an absolute thing above them. Yeah. Although it it's strange, because like you say, Sa in a sense, Sam Harris does want an absolute. He wants an absolute, but he's got no basis for it. Right. Right. Because he doesn't want to be relativist, he wants something.
SPEAKER_06He wants he wants an up and a down on the moral landscape. Um and in terms of trying to make that calculation, Roger Marshall quite rightly says Sam Harris will invoke AI-generated algorithms. That's the way he's going to um measure the the well-being that this particular course will uh achieve versus the the the harmful being that this particular uh action will cause. Um but in in the debate, and uh and Roger, I I um would direct you to my first comment video from last week where I where I talk about this. Um Sam Harris admits that actually our our measurement um of well-being is dreadful, and and all measurements of of well-being are just not up to the task at all. Um so he doesn't, you know, so maybe one day there will be AI-generated algorithms that can calculate the utility of my various actions. We don't have that now, and then you've still got to have value judgments as to what it is that you value within that calculation. Yeah. Because it's one it's one thing to show up. It's one thing to show that, okay, suffering is a bad thing. What about the pleasure I feel in inflicting suffering? Right? I'm feeling pleasure in inflicting suffering, okay? And I do, and and I feel pleasure in gossiping, right?
SPEAKER_07There's a pleasure to how and and how am I going to balance those two things against each other, the pleasure and pain versus you know We we've all, at some point in our lives, we've we and we've maybe we felt justified at the time, and you know, maybe we were or we're not, but we've all kind of slammed somebody, haven't we, in front of other people? Like, squashed them and humiliated them. Yeah. And it's felt good, hasn't it? To be like destroyed them, put them in their place or whatever. Yeah. But of course, there's Yeah. Yeah. For them, suffering humiliation.
SPEAKER_06Where's my ant acids? Feels a little mad. And and and what is it that's going to weigh the various utilities against one another? You need a value structure, and that value structure is non-obvious. So Sam Harris cannot get from facts to values. He must have values first before he's even in a position to assess the facts. His entire project is backwards. And it's and that's been pointed out by moral philosopher after moral philosopher after moral philosopher. Sam Harris wades into moral philosophy two and a half thousand years late. As a scientist, as a neuroscientist, and he says, I don't think anyone's ever thought of this before. And he basically brings to the world Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, which was roundly critiqued in his own day, and it's been roundly critiqued for the last 200 years. And every single tenet of Sam Harris's moral philosophy has been catastrophically and devastatingly critiqued for two and a half thousand years. But he wades into this as a scientist. And he manages to get a bestseller out of it. And it's just. he owes moral philosophers a lot of money. Like he owes God a lot of money. He's earned so much money. As this neuroscientist who like he doesn't even engage. He doesn't even engage with Jeremy Bentham, who agrees with him, n nor does he engage with anyone who actually would critique his project. And so I I am very glad that these lectures, um not lectures, these debates, have become um prominent because Jordan Peterson is just pointing out stuff that moral philosophers have been pointing out since the Moral Landscape came out in 2010. And that that never gained any traction. But Peterson is at least able to hold Harris's feet to the flames and say your entire project is bankrupt. You can't, you can't even do the measurements, which are the very heart of what you think moral activity is based on, and and you don't know how you're gonna weigh different utilities against one another. It's just it's anyway. So, from that point of view, uh Harris fails, but I also think that Peterson fails. Um and next week we're gonna see uh why I think Peterson fails as well, and why I don't think Christians should throw their lot in with Peterson. Just because Harris is not right doesn't mean that Peterson is right, and that we should jump in with both feet with him. Uh and I'm gonna raise some cautions uh about that next week. So, there we are.
SPEAKER_07Great. There we are. And then we've got these videos coming out, haven't we? So you've got we've got two videos so far on Harris and Peterson. Um so what first one was kind of about the relativism stuff that we just talked about, second one's about Old Testament Wars.
SPEAKER_06Harris raises raises an issue, three issues really against the Bible. Old Testament Wars. Yep. That was yesterday's video. Tomorrow, uh uh slavery tomorrow or is it human sacrifice? Human sacrifice. Human sacrifice. And then on Friday we'll release a video on slavery. Slavery Fridays. Slavery Fridays. Human sacrifice Wednesday. S F. Thank God it's slavery Fridays. And uh and then the f and then on Monday we're gonna release a video on why Harris thinks too little of religion and why Peterson thinks too much. Too much. Yeah. Yeah. So if that's your bag, um get sharing those videos.
SPEAKER_07And the thing I would say as well is that you know, if if you've not seen well, you've not seen some of them, but if you've seen the the video kind of thumbnails and you've thought, oh I don't really, I'm not interested in Jordan Peterson, I'm not interested in Sam Harris, I don't know anything about it. Actually, particularly the Old Testament War one, the slaver one, the human sacrifice one. Yes. Um, those are kind of things that just there's stuff in there which doesn't matter whether you know these guys or the debates, it's just stuff that in conversation with people, you know, people will turn around and say, won't they, like, oh but doesn't the Bible condone slavery and doesn't God commit genocide and all this sort of human sacrifice? Yeah, what about Abraham killing uh you know being told to kill Isaac and stuff? Yeah. Um those are the kind of things that just crop up all the time. Yeah, all the time. So they're really useful just from that point of view.
SPEAKER_06So if anyone's ever asked you about Old Testament laws, wars, slavery, and human sacrifice, you have the answers! So get sharing. Bring it! Thank you so much, Paul. No problem. It's been a pleasure. It's been it's been it's been real. Sorry about the judderiness. Now, um, we will do a non juddery version of this on YouTube and then post it on Facebook as well. Yep. And this will come out as a non juddery podcast on Friday. Absolutely. So until then, like, subscribe, and keep speaking life. Enjoy the videos. Take care. Bye.