Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | American Atheist Magazine

Culture of life or culture of death?

Article Excerpt
History ultimately is written by the victors. Even so, interim reports by the losers often survive long enough to allow one to reconstruct a picture of the probable facts of a given struggle. If Adolf Hitler had been victorious against the 'godless communists' and the secular Americans, it cannot be doubted that when he died at an advanced age he would have been loudly lauded by the Catholic Church--not just by the Bavarian and Croatian bishops who advanced his cause so aggressively during his actual lifetime, but doubtless also by a German pope whom he would have been able to set upon the Chair of Peter. The pope would have hailed Hitler as the greatest-ever Defender of the Faith. He would have eulogized Him for his triumph over unbelief, communism, and creeping secularism, just as the news media recently praised the late Pope John Paul II for having bloodlessly brought down the Soviet Union--without mentioning the role of Mikhail Gorbachev in the affair and tacitly assuming that the overthrow of a government without a god was goodness unalloyed.

When Hitler died, he too might have been accorded a funeral in St. Peter's Basilica, or the pope might have come to Berlin to preside over his requiem and obsequies. Hitler's pronatalist policies--ridiculed in the West in the joke that every time a German baby was born, Hitler would exclaim "Hotsie-Totsie! Another Nazi!"--would have been extolled as 'reverence for life,' and 'respecting the sanctity of life.' Hitler would have been enshrined in the propaganda pantheon as a hero in the 'culture of life' for his outlawing of abortion--even though we the victors know how profoundly anti-life Hitler actually was and the extent to which his deeds redounded to a culture of death.

Not surprisingly, Hitler's Catholic, pronatalist policies would also have ensured that there would be millions of people to flock to his funeral, just as in the recent case of John Paul II, where up to five million mourners are reported to have converged upon Rome "to say good-bye to the Holy Father."

Hitler's destruction of the Jews--if revealed at all publicly--could easily have been justified theologically by the well-known biblical 'fact' that the Jews were 'Christ killers' who still rejected his salvation. Out of consideration for the Blessed Virgin Mary whose son they had murdered, they had needed to be punished.

Just as we have been assaulted by inane chatter about probable fast-track canonization of Karol Wojtyla (a.k.a., Pope John Paul II), it cannot be doubted that had Hitler succeeded in his programs he would have been Saint Adolf not long after his natural death. (His apparently life-long celibacy and unfulfilled homosexual tendencies would have made him a perfect saint in any ecclesiastical era.)

Alert readers by now will have perceived the purpose of this thought experiment and will have inferred the intent of this essay. They will understand that I seek to show that just as Hitler would have been extolled as a 'pro-life hero' had he been successful in his career--even though in fact he was profoundly anti-life--so too the late pope is being praised for his 'culture of life,' even though his every action has redounded to the renunciation of life and a welcoming embrace of death.

Bodies and Souls

Nearly all the evil effects resulting from the advancement of Christianity in general and the career of Karol Wojtyla in particular can be traced to the prescientific notion that there are two parts to every person: a body and a soul. The body is ephemeral and perishable; the soul is eternal and immortal. The soul is entrapped by the flesh, and the needs and desires of the flesh must be resisted and rejected if they endanger the imagined future of the soul. The value of the soul is inestimable; the value of the body is modest--if not an actual liability that is negative in value in some cases. Because of Wojtyla's beliefs in the reality of souls and his after-life orientation, he fostered not only simple disinterest in the world of reality but promoted compound disinterest as well.

Death Is Better Than Life

Thus, death is valued more than life, and all life's actions are evaluated in terms of their impact on the after-life--that is, upon what is thought to happen when one's body is dead. Seen in this light, Christianity and its most public protagonist John Paul II can be seen as advocating a culture of death and rejecting a culture of life in any qualitatively meaningful sense of the phrase. Christianity is not just a culture of death, it is a death cult. Its 'culture of life' is actually a culture of afterlife--which even believers concede has death as a prerequisite.

Let us examine some specific cases where the pope's culture of death has served to degrade and demean the lives of millions of human beings.

Pronatalist Policies

Like his predecessors since the nineteenth-century discovery of the human egg and zygote, Karol Wojtyla could not follow the discoveries of science to their logical conclusions. Because he believed in the existence of an immortal human soul, he could not accept the entirely materialistic philosophy that is the basis of science. Whereas science provides no reason to suppose such an ectoplasmic entity exists and has no need for souls whatsoever, popes and the faithful sheep who follow them must suppose that somewhere in the nucleus or endoplasmic reticulum of the fertilized egg (zygote)...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!