I will be the first to admit that I can always improve in all sorts of areas. Thus I hope your concerns about me are backed up by prayer for me, which would in fact be most helpful, and is indeed something I always covet.

As to your two complaints, it seems in both cases I did not say this was certainly the case, but I merely surmised, and asked questions. In that sense, is there really any difference with what you are doing here to me: asking questions and making speculative accusations, wondering if I am guilty of being hypocritical and judgemental? Isn’t that, well, being judgmental as well as hypocritical? Are you not “casting judgment” – as you put it – on me right now?

And we may differ on the issue of judging anyway. But I have written that topic up elsewhere, eg.: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2008/10/08/thou-shalt-judge/

And how exactly do you think one can do “5 minutes of research on Google” on this topic? Do you actually believe there is a website devoted to starlets’ abortions, complete with info on how many, when they were done, what method was used, what trimester, and so on? Sorry, but this is just not something most Hollywood types – or anyone for that matter – splash around on websites for the entire world to see and do reserach on!

But thanks for the comment. As I say, I can always do things better, and your criticisms have been noted. Keep praying for me.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

Bill, your comments about media complicity were killer. I couldn’t agree more. But your blog’s tag line says that you’re concerned about “… the decline of civility, the denial of truth and the elevation of unreason.” Don’t you think that you’re being a) hypocritical, and b) judgmental with statements like the following?

“I do not know anything about the star of Heroes, but if Hayden Panettiere is like most Hollywood types, it is quite possible that she may even have had an abortion or two herself. Even if not, she may well be firmly in the pro-abortion camp, as most of the left-leaning, secular Hollywood folk are.”

Surely it would be far more civil, truthful, and reasonable to do 5 minutes of research on Google to find out whether this is even close to the mark, rather than publish suppositions.

Ditto this: “… because that issue is the trendy, lefty flavour of the month, and because it gives young starlets a chance to prove they are more than blonde bimbos, but may in fact have a conscience, and are willing to be involved in social issues of the day.” Once again, would it not be more civil, truthful, and reasonable to give these “young starlets” the benefit of the doubt before labeling them conscienceless bimbos? It may be that you are completely accurate in your suppositions, but that is all they are: suppositions, and prejudiced ones at that. Inclusion of such statements in your article weakens the point and makes all Christians targets for being called bigots.

I speak as a hypocrite myself – someone who is still learning this lesson (the hard way) – but that doesn’t mean that we as Christians shouldn’t strive our hardest to be squeaky clean when it comes to giving other people the benefit of the doubt before casting judgment.

Paul Gear

A few quick responses. Having an emotional reaction to something may not be amiss, as long as it does not stand alone, but is informed by, and grounded in, fact and rationality. I would think, for example, that if a person is not emotionally moved by, say, Auschwitz, then there might be something awry with that person, or with his moral compass.

The point here is why some people get so emotionally moved by the destruction of baby seals or dolphins, but don’t seem to give a rip about the killing of unborn babies.

As to potentiality, the issue here is whether the fetus is a human being, or simply a potential human being. (A human fetus is both alive, and human, so those are not the issues.) The short and simple answer is that the fetus is not a potential human being, but a human being with great potential. I expound on this more fully in other articles in this section.

So I obviously greatly disagree with Singer and his definition of what it is to be human, and/or how he defines personhood. Whether it is such a thing as sentience or some other arbitrary marker of personhood, this becomes a slippery slope wherein we can relegate certain classes of people to non-personhood, simply based on various functional or utilitarian criteria.

Better to assume the inherent worth and dignity of all people, based on who they are (a theist would say they are made in the image of God and of great worth), than to make artificial designations of who qualifies as a person.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

– If I react with horror to a picture of a torn dolphin, or to a picture of a torn foetus, should that emotional reaction count for anything, morally speaking?

If so, how much should it count? Are emotions good moral reasons, or reliable moral indicators?

Or should it count for nothing?

– If one thinks that emotional reactions do count, does that open the door to relativism? Can Hayden Panettiere say that she’s not being inconsistent in caring more about dolphins than foetuses because she’s more horrified by damage done to dolphins?

– If one thinks that emotions don’t count, then on what basis should one care about either dolphins or foetuses?

– Amanda writes, “Do pro-choice animal rights activists argue that abortion is OK because it doesn’t involve a ‘sentient being’ or one with a fully developed consciousness, or something like that?” The Peter Singer answer is “yes”. He wants to claim that, up until a certain point, a foetus can’t feel anything; and up to another point, it’s not self-aware and doesn’t have any future-directed interests. On this basis he thinks that an adult chimp has more rights than a newly-born human child.

Of course, I don’t think most animal activists believe the same thing.

– Maybe an important issue is potentiality. If Hayden Panettiere thinks that dolphins are more developed than foetuses, and she gives that a reason why she cares more about the former than the latter, maybe that’s consistent.

But what if you asked her: “Do they have the same potentiality?”.

– How much should potentiality dictate how much we care anyway? Should we care less about beings that have less potential? Should we care less about old people at the end of their lives, or handicapped people?

Ken Masterman, Alberta, Canada

My guess is that the double standard stems from selfishness. To acknowledge that killing the unborn is wrong is to acknowledge that you must then continue with an unwanted pregnancy, and either raise or adopt out the child. And, sadly, many people are unwilling to change their lives to accommodate the new life they have created.

Tim Baker

(Do pro-choice animal rights activists argue that abortion is OK because it doesn’t involve a “sentient being” or one with a fully developed consciousness, or something like that? I would honestly love to know the reasoning there.)

Amanda Fairweather

23 years ago Randy Stonehill wrote a song called “Stop The World” in which the first line is:
“Well it’s OK to murder babies but we really oughta save the whale”

I actually found myself looking at some anti-smacking sites yesterday (I had forgotten that such ideas existed) and in the midst of one Australian blog,
www.philosophyblog.com.au/arguments-against-corporal-punishment/
I found these pearlers:

“If we’re going to talk about damage to children, let’s see what we’re talking about. More information can only be good.”
and
“the counter-assertion of the “rights” of the child against the “rights” of the parent.”
I found myself amazed by the familiarity and irony of it…

This blog showed ridiculously obvious examples of extreme child abuse and used them as an argument against smacking – even when limited to at most a few open-hand smacks to hands and bums as last-resort discipline. You simply can’t inflict the kind of injuries shown that way. But I’d venture a guess that many of the very same people (not necessarily the blogger) who are anti-choice on so-called violence perpetrated on the “small and fragile” are also ‘pro-choice’ about abortion.

It seems to me that many increasingly popular modern ideas are marked by the inability to modify personal philosophies in the light of clear logical inconsistencies. Why are people not aware that they are being taught what to think rather than how to think? I couldn’t help but wonder how the same people would react to pictures of post-aborted fetuses, not even remotely an exaggeration (unlike the images on that blog) and far, far worse a travesty. It would be interesting to juxtapose those images with the dolphin-savers to try to get the point across.
Sure, save animals and stop violence against children, but don’t try and simultaneously sell me abortion as civilized. It’s backward and selfish and barbaric.

Mark Rabich

Yes, your point is well taken. There is always hope, even for a recalcitrant media!

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

We must not despair (it is, as Chuck Colsen said, ‘a sin, because it denies the sovereignty of God’) instead we should hope and pray and lobby and even litigate to pursuade them to actually do their job, which is to bring order by exposing the wickedness in our society.

Dale Flannery