BTW, does anyone remember Andrea Yates? “She believed that the children would be tormented and perish in the fires of hell unless they were killed,” Dr. Melissa Ferguson testified.
-Commenter, A Mom
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While in prison, Andrea stated she had considered killing the children for two years, adding that they thought she was not a good mother and claimed her sons were developing improperly. She told her jail psychiatrist: “It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren’t righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.“[59] She also told her jail psychiatrist that Satan influenced her children and made them more disobedient.[60]
-Wikipedia Article; Andrea Yates (Bold type mine)
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A Mom,
Yes, I remember reading about Andrea Yates. To be brutally honest, the thinking behind her actions is the root moral premise of ALL philosophies which do not ultimately place man’s life at the center of morality and truth (which makes man’s life the only objective and categorical standard of both). And what is the root moral premise behind these destructive philosophies, as a function of their root metaphysical premise? Simple:
The death of man, not his life, is the solution to the problem of evil.
Here are just a few examples:
* Marxism = The individual must be ruled; must be compelled to group integration, governed absolutely by the state. Why? Because the individual inexorably trends towards greed and exploitation, as a function of his root metaphysic. Individual man IS greed, racism, oppression, and selfishness.
* National Socialism/Socialism/Fascism: The individual must be ruled; must be compelled to group integration, the utopian ideal embodied and governed by the state. Why? Because purity is defined by the group– the workers, the people, the disadvantaged, the advantaged, the wise, the racially pure, etc.–never the person. The individual thus has no definition, no meaning, no purpose as a function of his root metaphysic. Individual man IS nothing and no one.
* “Orthodox” Protestantism of ALL varieties/Catholicism: Man must be ruled, compelled to “right thinking and behavior” by the church authority divinely selected to “stand in the stead” of God. Man must worship at the cross, the instrument of death, to remind man of death’s perfect moral outcome. Why? Because the death of self is God’s great command, and His divine example in the crucifixion. The individual IS totally depraved; he IS evil incarnate. Pursuit of self then is man’s greatest vice. The “church” alone possesses the keys to God’s kingdom; they are not found in the individual because that which is absolute evil (man and his life) cannot be coupled with that which is absolute good (God). Man must be purified by integration into the collective church as ruled by God’s divine and divinely inspired proxies.
* Tribalism (which is Racism, cultural-ism, fad-ism, trend-ism): The individual must be ruled. He has no meaning outside of the tribe; no relevance, no purpose. He is solely defined by his integration to the tribe and its collective psyche and ideals. Alone and pursuing self, man is a “Wigger”, an “Uncle Tom”, a “house nigger”, a “Wannabe”, a “poser”, a “traitor”, a “Jew/Nigger/Gay lover”, thinks he/she’s special, a “freak”, a “geek”, a nerd, a bleeding heart liberal pussy, a greedy white supremacist capitalist pig homophobe…and on and on and on. Why? Because man’s instincts are always evil, always contrary to nature, and always subversive. Integration to the tribe is the only way to keep his existential immorality in check. Death of self in service to the trends of the tribe, whatever they may be, is the plumb line for man’s worth and righteousness. Why? Because man IS selfish waywardness, which is exploitative by nature.
Need I go on? Of course not. You get the point.
Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity, if I read the article right. That would be funny if it was not indicative of the intellectual blindness and rational lethargy which plagues this nation to a terrifying and astonishing degree.
Crazy?
No. Not with respect to her religious reasons for murdering her five children. She was as doctrinally fucking pure as they come. The doctrine of ALL Christian orthodoxy, I submit and as far as I can tell, terminates at the conclusions Andrea Yates arrived at right before she drowned her innocent babies. She was in the position, and by that I mean mentally, to carry them out, and so she did. Far from being insane, her actions are entirely rational with respect to the doctrine. Death is man’s greatest moral good. Man MUST die in service to the absolute truth of God’s sovereign and all determining WILL, and the sooner the better. If children are innocent until the age of reason and responsibility, mercy demands they be murdered before that time. That way, they can avoid the great probability that they will not be arbitrarily elected by God to heaven (for narrow is the road, after all, the Bible says) and thus burn in the fires of hell for all eternity for being the depraved reprobates they are. Any loving mother would and should do the same for her children if the logic is taken to its deadly consequence.
And if children are born depraved, then their murder is their just punishment. Surely God cannot condemn the righteous woman who snuffs their lives out in an act of reverence for God’s justice, which must be fulfilled, especially if she is wise and clairvoyant enough to see the inevitability of their plunge into rebellion. The children were rank and pure sinners, and they got what they deserved. How can any mother who venerates God’s moral perfection so gratuitously by murdering the fresh affronts to His glory be reprimanded or categorized as insane for merely meting out the punishment which Divine purity demands? God should never be opposed by that which is depravity incarnate, especially that which is so freshly and purely evil: the children, who are naturally the most selfish of all human scum. They aren’t even able to make a pretense to good or to give nod to God’s glory. All they see is SELF. And that SELF is nothing but sin in its most uncut and perfect form.
And finally, if God is sovereign, and we define “sovereign” as “in control of all things”, and as the determining force by which all that happens was able to happen and did happen, then the murder of Andrea’s children is a moot point, morally speaking. For how can we declare any action immoral when by doctrinal definition all things which come to pass MUST be as a direct function of God’s will? The answer is we cannot. The children who were elected to heaven will still go to heaven; the children who were elected to eternal torment in hell even before their birth will still go to hell. Each group will be utterly cast into its pre-ordained place. The lives they might have led are irrelevant at best. For their lives would have offered them nothing in the grand scheme of God’s sovereign will. Not that they could have lived them. The fact that they were murdered by their mother is proof that they were never meant to live in the first place.
Dear readers, this is not hyperbole. I dare anyone to dismantle my reason by appealing to orthodox Christian ideals.
Andrea Yates was not insane. She was acting in perfect accordance with the doctrine of the church today. She just had the will and wherewithal to see it through. And any orthodox Christian who condemns her is a hypocrite. You believe the same things. The only thing that makes you different is your unwillingness to practice your doctrine as it demands in its consistent form. You are either then a coward, a rebel, or are ignorant of what you really believe. You are either afraid, stiff-necked, or blind; and none of these makes you righteous according to your beliefs. I will say it again: any Christian who concedes “Original Sin”, the “Fall of Man”, “Total Depravity”, God’s divine control and determinism, or the existential inability of man to do good of his own free will and yet condemns Adrea Yates is a full-on hypocrite, and is twice as evil in their beliefs. Their only hope is that they are wholly unaware of what they believe; but I confess that the chances of intellectual laziness (and the resultant complacency with the pervasive influence of evil) being excused because it is argued that it was due to forces outside of their control…well, they are exceedingly slim.
And if you are reading this article, you have no chance to make this excuse before God. You are morally and intellectually obligated to investigate your beliefs and follow the breadcrumb trail to the logical conclusions.
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Andrea Yates’ perfectly SANE (i.e. internally rationally consistent) doctrinal rationale looks like this:
Death is the answer to life; because man is by existential nature “fallen” and his life is certain to be full of torment and suffering and guilt. Therefore, death remains the supreme moral and final solution for man’s problems. Man is evil incarnate; man’s birth the source of all existential and universal ills. Pursuing the destruction of man is the moral obligation.
I did an article a while ago dealing with this very thinking. The idea that we should just kill babies so that they’ll go to heaven instead of risking that they should grow up and not believe in Jesus, thus damning themselves to hell for eternity. The logical flaws in this argument are massive, and unfortunately no one really seems to see them.
Without going into the finer points of my article(s) the fundamental assumption behind the assertion that babies should be killed in order to avoid damnation is just what I said above: Life is too risky to be lived. Life is fraught with evil, and as commenter, Tom over at SpritualTyranny stated, even if you don’t believe that man’s nature is depraved surely man’s environment will inevitably coerce man into inexorable and irresistible sin. Following this thinking backwards to its logical premises, the idea is that this sin-compelling environment is a direct function of man’s, not the world’s, existential evil. Again, man’s life represents the sum and substance of all that is evil and all that causes suffering. Destroying man saves the world from his utterly evil existence, and may even save man. From what? From himself. Do you see then the fundamental problem with Tom’s argument? Man’s environment is a direct function of man’s sin, not the other way around. Man caused and causes the environment to fall and languish, man’s environment is not the culprit. Man corrupts the environment; the environment does not corrupt man. The environment doesn’t influence man to sin; man’s root existential depravity exploits the environment as a natural consequence. Man is the root evil, the source of universal corruption, not the world around him. Eliminate man and the environment is not longer fallen. It regains its lost moral perfection and purity. Kill man, save the environment.
So, disregarding Tom’s non-logic, the real argument being made is: Kill the babies as a means to save them from their own existence, which by their nature demands absolutely that they will do evil, reject Christ, and be damned. And all of this simply because they were born. And rather than allow them to live the life that they were by definition created to live, murder them as a solution to their first and fundamental problem: being.
In conclusion, I would like to appeal to my philosophy as the panacea for the madness which is so overwhelmingly pervasive in the world today: All of this dissipates when we concede that human life and the perpetuation of the SELF of man is the single standard of truth and morality. Then life becomes the solution, never the problem of evil.
The only way evil is repelled is if PEOPLE are allowed to LIVE in order to confront it with better ideas. Ideas and beliefs that venerate man’s existence as the pinnacle of God’s creative GOOD. Any other philosophy WILL logically conclude with death as man’s primary moral obligation. Period.