No wonder he was afraid of doctors - or, The formula: redefine, then wrong

Warning: this story about a Holocaust survivor makes for harrowing reading.

You read that, and even if you affirm the Biblical truth of the total depravity of all mankind, you blanch. How could someone treat another human being like that? How can one human regard other humans as objects, lab rats, things to be used?

But then we know that this has been done in slave-cultures; we know it was done in our own. Blacks were defined as less than fully human. Therefore, they could be bought and sold, and used as tools. Nor was that a new attitude. I remember when studying the Greek word doulos ("slave") decades ago I happened on a statement by Aristotle, that (from memory) a tool was a doulos apsuchon, and a slave was an organon empsuchon — that is, a tool was a slave without life, without a soul; and a slave was a tool with a soul.

Then my mind drifts to a video I happened on yesterday, which horrified me. I look at a lot of videos, keeping an eye open for Hither and Thither and Monday music. This one was supposed to be really, really funny.  I could really, really have lived without it.

I gather a guy's girlfriend broke his stereo or something — I am not going to look for it again to get the details right. So for revenge, he "pranked" her, fooling her into putting a spoonful of cayenne pepper into her mouth when she thought she was doing cinnamon.

She screams in pain, and he laughs and laughs and laughs. It is clear that she is both hurt and scared, and he just can't stop laughing. I bailed before it was done, because frankly it just horrified me. I hope someone is telling her to get away from that creature. As for him, I hope... well, I hope the sorts of things you'd suspect a guy would hope for such a creep.

But it's pretty apparent to me that she's not fully-human to him... or if she is, that fact doesn't carry much weight. She's certainly not anyone for him to cherish, respect, protect — in short, love like a man should love his woman. Some redefinition has gone on, some squelching of soul, of whatever remnants of conscience he has.

Then we end up where you knew I was going. Abortion. First time I saw my little eight-week-old unborn Josiah in a sonogram, that little white heart-blob beating, beating, beating, one of my first thoughts was, "Good Lord — doctors and nurses know this, they see this, and they still do abortions?"

Because abortions are every bit as brutal, as inhuman, as monstrous as anything Mengele did, or this idiot subhuman was doing to his girlfriend.

Worse. Jews had theoretical options, some few escaped. Some slaves also escaped. That girl had options. She has options. I hope she knows that.


Babies? No options. None. The very soul of vulnerable helplessness.

In all but a statistical handful of cases, they've been invited into existence by a willing act. (Even when not, they are not the offenders, they merit no punishment.) There's nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do.

The lesson?

Define as sub-human, and you can do as you wish.

It's simply another dark fruit of our first parents' rebellion. "You shall be as gods," was the sales-line, and they fell for it as has every child they've ever produced by natural conception. So we just re-define what God has already defined, and feel free to sin against it.

Diabolical.

It's why we as a race stand in need of such a radical Gospel, calling for radical repentance, radical conversion, and radical schooling in God's ways.