Feb 10
5
Dr. Tiller Was Murdered
by Jason Stotts
Last May, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down by a religious fanatic in a church. The fanatic’s name was Scott Roeder and he defended his actions by saying that he was justified in the killing because Dr. Tiller was an abortion doctor who was “murdering unborn children” who could not defend themselves.
A jury, however, has reasonably concluded that Roeder’s actions were nothing less than premeditated murder. (Fox News)
This case deeply saddens me and I think that there are some very important lessons that one can learn from it.
The first is that the irrationality of faith is antagonistic to reason and civilized society as well as being a deadly danger. Faith can justify anything; literally anything. A person can have faith that they see their god and he tells him to kill a child or start a war. There can be no check on this if you admit faith as a valid method of thinking and acquiring knowledge: if you admit faith as a principle, the murderer is simply the more consistent adherent of his faith since he actually follows it. However, as Nietzsche says: “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
A somewhat different issue is that language can influence your thoughts. To refer to the mass of cells growing inside a woman as a “fetus” (correct) as opposed to an “unborn child” (incorrect) is an epistemological error. A child is a developing human that has reached the stage where it can survive as a discrete entity. That is, a child is something that can live by itself and does not have to be fed through an umbilical cord. It would be more correct to call it an “unborn baby,” but here too the critical distinction about the ability to live as an independent existent comes into play. It’d be better to think of it as “still developing into a” baby. However, until it has independent existence, it has absolutely no moral status. This is because it is a potential human and not an actual human until it is born and gains independent existence.
Religious dogma has perverted thinking here because it needs it’s god to give the developing baby a soul in order for it to fit into their framework of understanding. This “ensoulment,” to use the catholic term, is nothing but a fiction that is necessitated by their insistence upon the Platonic eternal soul that comes from their god. There is no evidence of a soul, it is an article of faith. However, on the religious viewpoint, once a being has a soul, it is a human. That’s just nonsense. However, for a religious person it means that a fetus is a person and has full moral consideration, since it is ensouled. I think the only logical conclusion is to deny abortions to religious people and let anyone else have free access to them.
The point, though, is that failure to have clear thinking can have deadly consequences and in this case a good man was gunned down senselessly by a religious fanatic whose mind was perverted by his faith.
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For a fuller account of my position on abortion, see my essay “Truly Pro-Life: Personhood and Abortion“.
