Thursday, May 7, 2015

I'm Calling Harris Out As A Liar Until A Citation is Provided

I have been looking for a documentary source for the accusation Sam Harris made, to the effect that Christian missionaries in the New World would baptize infants and then murder them to send their souls to heaven and have found nothing.

Without him providing documentation I'm left with the belief that it is a sensational lie that he invented, himself.  Which, apparently, no one else would seem to have noticed.  Perhaps that is because in the neo-atheist period that Harris did so much to incite, no lie would seem to be too extreme or too absurd to not tell and be believed by people who consider themselves to be intellectually sophisticated, at least when those being lied about are Christians or Muslims. Though other religious denominations are lied about with abandon by atheists, lies told about other groups are more likely to be refuted, in my experience, at least.

Which is more than a bit ironic, considering that, in the west the main advocates for the killing of live born children in the modern period and up to today have been atheists.  I have documented, at the first of those links, from their own words, in their own books published as science, such heroes of many atheists as Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel advocating infanticide as a benefit to the general population.   In the inverted morality of atheist "ethics" from such as Peter Singer and Michael Tooley, murdering infants is considered as a form of salvation, for the infant, relief of a presumed bad life due to disability.  Even more than that, some of these "ethicists" propose that an infant not be considered a human being and leaving it to the discretion or just merely the choice of parents whether or not they want to be bothered with the child, allowing them to kill it up to a sometimes unspecified age.

Which brings us right back to the beginnings of the Christian era when it was only with Christianity becoming politically potent in the Mediterranean region that it became illegal to murder infants, infanticide by various means having been endemic to many local and even imperial cultures. The murder of disabled children was routine, that of girls about as routine.  It was in, first, the Jewish Law and later in Christianity that the practice was banned in many places.   It is still widespread and a major form of violation of rights committed against one of the most easily discriminated against groups in the world because they are not articulate and are powerless.  I would like to know of any organized atheist effort to oppose infanticide.  But, then, I'd like citations to support a lot of what the Sam Harrises of the world say.

Despite the tale told by Harris, in recent years it has been Christian missionaries such as those in Brazil who have met resistance when they tried to call attention to the practice of infanticide in some indigenous groups in the Amazon, though I don't think their decision to issue a video dramatization of the practice was the wisest way to do it.  I don't know enough about that particular group's history and motives to judge their missionary activity but I do know that opposing a traditional form of murder is a worth while thing to do.  I don't see that it is an old custom is a valid reason to not oppose it.  Just about every single thing that the concept of rights were considered over and struggled for addressed long standing customs and cultural habits of thought and life.  The idea that even the "untouched by modern thought" isolated cultures don't change all on their own and are some kind of living museum peopled by the people who live in them is ridiculous and condescending.

I mentioned a while back that I was reading about the history of the blood libel, which, I have to conclude, isn't unrelated to this issue.  I hope to be able to write about it later this week.

1 comment:

  1. Check the works of Prof. Otto Yerass.

    He seems to be a popular source for information in this "Information Age."

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