"I look at them unflinchingly and see meat"

For those who've been living in a cave, this story out of Philadelphia is lighting up the 'sphere and rightly so:

An abortion doctor in Philadelphia has been charged with eight murders, including seven babies who prosecutors say were born alive then killed with scissors.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, and nine employees from his West Philadelphia Women's Medical Society were arrested Wednesday. He and his staff also are charged with killing a woman who was given a lethal dose of Demerol.

The details are incredibly horrific and a true indication of how sick and demented one can become when their vocation is centered on killing the innocent.  There are a number of folks covering this in the kind of detail that should get wide play but for link filled brevity, see Kim Priestap's post at Wizbang.  She cuts through the haze on this and includes pics that should simply leave you reeling.

And speaking of reeling while bringing us back to the title of this post, Matteo takes us to Pharyngula, a site that touts itself as the world's best science blog, for related opinions from a tenured biologist who teaches at the University of Minnesota:

First, never quote Mother Teresa at me — she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to receive the accolades of the gullible. I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.

Secondly, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I'm a biologist. I've guillotined rats. I've held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I've used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I've opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I've been elbow deep in blood, I've split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I've extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I've scooped brains out of buckets, I've counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.

You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.

The only words that come to me when I read something like that are the words from Scripture describing God giving those who acknowledge Him not over to a depraved mind. 

If seeing dead babies unflinchingly as nothing more than meat isn't evidence for depravity, there is no depravity.  This biologist clearly shares the mindset of Kermit Gosnell. Might God have mercy on them and on those who think like them. 

I cannot.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Comments

[Locutisprime]

Rick, I believe the quips by the so called biologist say it all as it concerns how these people look at life.

Perhaps their world view of humanity as a God created wonder might change, were they to have their own hearts stabbed or their own eyes extracted for the scientific curiosity and amusement of others.

But somehow I think not.

I know of no one who would be interested in the fetid rot that is the inner workings of such sick and twisted minds.

These people are evil and one day they will be called forth to answer for their wickedness by the God that they curse and hate.

[tnxplant]

The current devaluing of human life is further evidenced by an interview that Lynne Rossetto Kasper conducted on her American Public Media program, The Splendid Table, which is broadcast on NPR.

On January 8, she allowed Paul Bloom, author of "How Pleasure Works", to tell her audience (in his NPR appropriate voice of narcoleptic condescension) how cannibalism is simply a cultural phenomenon, even a religious experience.

He also states that "To be a Christian, for instance, is to engage in certain rituals and to affiliate with certain people." (page 212) Is he trying to make a case for some sort of equivalence between the two?

This is supposed to be a show about recipes, for goodness sake! Will cannabalism be the next taboo to be done away with?

[Frank]

I've seen some terrible things during deployments, thank goodness articles like this actually turn my stomach - means I still have a soul.

How can a person view life in this manner and hold on to any semblance of humanity? I've seen soldiers get to this point due to war, they suffer and long to return to sanity. These tenured demons seem to relish the detachment.

Truly amazing that this person would only see life as meat. Folks like this dismantle flesh, label parts and observe the workings of life. They act as if they are responsible for the biological world when they are mere witnesses to God's wonders.

If humans are just meat then what basis for morality do they have? If life means nothing then there cannot be protest even if the detached souls themselves were caged and tortured. What sort of contortion would my thinking have to suffer to fully understand this sort of evil?

[chuck aka xtnyoda]

Frank... to your last question, "What sort of contortion would my thinking have to suffer to fully understand this sort of evil?"

I think it would be called dissociative disorder.

[BroKen]

C.S. Lewis talks about the trade off we make in Science; reducing things to the material and empirical. The return for that trade off is probably worth it most of the time. But when we use the technique on ourselves, well, the necessary result is The Abolition of Man.

That's why I grieved the loss of this beautiful line, a response to the Scientific world view, from the Dawn Treader: "Even in your world, my son, that is not what stars are (balls of flaming gas) but only what they are made of."

Oh, how we need to remember that we are more, that our neighbors are more, that a fetus is more than what it is made of; more than meat.

[RandomThoughts]

My first reaction was sheer horror at the depth of callous evil spouted by PZ Meyers. And then, after I collected myself, I began to feel sorry for him.

What a pitiable, wretchedly miserable soul, so disconnected from the humanity he purports to study. What a sad, sorry individual, perceiving only the decaying flesh and none of the gloriously eternal inherent in mankind.

[Jaks]

Your so called god is nothing but a tool of fear used against you. If you could possibly be objective and think for a moment that there is no such thing as god and religion is a farce, you would realize how you have been deceived. If it wasn't for fear of hell how many people would be religious, if it wasn't for indoctrination as a child how many, fear of life being meaningless, fear of all the atrocities committed in this world not having been some unseen plan. All your religion is, is a blissfully ignorant excuse/distraction to not having to work to fix the way the world is.

[BroKen]

Mr. jaks, if I might jump in here. Your comment is severly misinformed. To illustrate allow me to ask a few questions. Atheists have been around at least as long as Christians. Tell me, where are the atheist soup kitchens? Where are the atheist hospitals or universities? How many atheist drug rehab programs are there? How often do atheists visit the incarcerated to try to give them hope? If you can answer these questions, then we could move on to some really deep issues?