The Return to Moloch’s Furnace
26th May 2023
In 2017, Dr. Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago complained that the residual effects of Christianity were holding Western civilization back. How? It was Christian ethics, he said, that were preventing legal infanticide from making a comeback.
“The reason we don’t allow euthanasia of newborns is because humans are seen as special, and I think that comes from religion, in particular, the view that humans, unlike animals, are endowed with a soul,” he wrote. “It’s the same mindset that, in many places, won’t allow abortion of fetuses that have severe deformities. When religion vanishes, as it will, so will much of the opposition to both adult and newborn euthanasia.”
Many philosophers share Coyne’s views. Princeton bio-ethicist Peter Singer argues that only religious superstition is keeping us from killing infants, a practice he believes to be perfectly ethical. As he wrote in Practical Ethics: “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” For Singer, the baby-killing of our bloody pagan past is a source of nostalgia rather than horror.