Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Is Violence and Murder "Progress"?

Here is another way in which the modern progressive left is self-contradictory and uses the language of "progress" to describe a regressive decline in culture and morals.

On the one hand it despises empire and attacks the West for its colonialism and imperialism. It sees the United States of America as a new Roman Empire and condemns it for being violent and oppressive to the poor of the earth.

On the other hand it interprets as "progressive" all moves to more and more killing of unborn children and infants and the hard core of the left supports Dutch-style indiscriminate killing by doctors.

But to see the abolition of abortion laws as "progress" is not progress at all; it is reversion to the worst paganism of the pre-Christian West. The following story from the BBC about a Roman era villa, which was likely a brothel where babies were systematically murdered, demonstrates this fact.

Tests on the site at Hambleden in Buckinghamshire suggest all died at 40 weeks gestation, very soon after birth.

Archaeologists suspect local inhabitants may have been systematically killing unwanted babies.

Archaeologist Dr Jill Eyers said: "The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it's got to be a brothel."

With little or no effective contraception, unwanted pregnancies could have been common at Roman brothels, explained Dr Eyers, who works for Chiltern Archaeology.

And infanticide may not have been as shocking in Roman times as it is today.

Archaeological records suggest infants were not considered to be "full" human beings until about the age of two, said Dr Eyers.

The "progress" that "progressives" want is really to regress to the violent, selfish, immoral, and evil past that Christianity has allowed to West to progress beyond. While condemning Christian and Western violence the direction in which the left is leading us is toward more violence and immorality.

One can only wonder what future cultures will think when they dig up our culture . . .

2 comments:

David said...

I was interested to read that BBC report as well, and disturbed by the inclusion of that final comment - what does it mean to say such a thing, even if "true"? Even if Romans (which Romans, I'd like to know) didn't consider babies to be full humans until two years old, the inclusion of this comment suggests a relativisation of the very different contemporary belief about babies. It's as if the killing of these children said more about ancient ideas of personhood than it does the fact that these children would have had zero status and were effectively waste products. Clearly those babies were not killed because they didn't quite fit a Roman image of what a full human being was, but because to the men who had sired them they were effectively rubbish. Children born to their own wives (or house slaves) would almost certainly have not been treated the same way, and not because of some arbitrary rule about what constitutes a human.

Peter W. Dunn said...

A couple of years ago we visited the Roman Coliseum. They said there were an estimated 4 million victims in this structure alone. Apparently, they did not consider as human the following: slaves, gladiators, Christians or any other condemned criminals. So the there actually was no cut off at age two from vicious and inhuman treatment. We learned also during our visit to the Catacombs that the Romans practiced cremation. I think I shall look into this subject.