Wesley Smith is not only our Discovery Institute colleague — he’s also a hero. That’s two reasons why it is so delightful to be able to announce the launch of his new blog, Human Exceptionalism, at National Review Online.
No one has done more than Wesley to bring home the very practical consequences, in the most powerful moral terms, of the Darwinian-materialist picture of the world. His subject matter is not theoretical stuff but the gross crimes against our own humanity that result — and are doing so right now — when a culture increasingly turns to a conception of man that see us as nothing more than animals. That’s what Darwinian evolutionary theory is all about at the end of the day, isn’t it?
You can put your cat or dog down when it becomes too expensive or troublesome to keep caring for their illness, so why not human beings as well? This is the horrible perspective behind what is sometimes called by the euphemism “death with dignity.”
Wesley is a fantastically, enviably productive writer so it can be hard to keep up with him. But as I’m writing, his current top story is about the euthanizing of Dutch patients with psychiatric and dementia illnesses. The trend has now spread to Belgium and Switzerland. I know from very recent personal experience that this way of thinking, supposing that a person with even early stage Alzheimer’s disease should have a “right to die,” is not unknown in our country. And where personal attitudes lead, the law can easily follow.
Wesley observes: “Here’s the moral of the story: Once a society agrees that some suicides are good, the categories of the killable never stops expanding.” So we see the logic of Darwinism working itself out. The outcome is a culture of death. Please do follow Wesley Smith’s important Human Exceptionalism blog at NRO from now on, as we will.