Abortion 'rights': Know well what we are killing!

Are we a science-based society? Photo by Pavel Danilyuk from Pexels

By the late 1800s it was the American Medical Association that led the charge against abortion, based on the scientific evidence about the human qualities of the child in the womb. 

It is important to recognize that in all the debates about foetal development over the centuries since the beginning of the Christian era all reputable leaders and theologians in the history of the Church have always taught that abortion is a form of homicide and a serious sin. It was obvious that intercourse gave rise to the new human person and so it was clear that the unborn child's human dignity had to be acknowledged. Along with fostering respect for women, Christians transformed pagan society by emphasising the dignity of children, unborn or already born.

That human life begins at conception is not a matter of faith or doctrinal definition but of the evidence of our senses and science.

The Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1974 "Declaration on Procured Abortion" has this to say on the scientific aspects:

From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with [their] own growth. [They] would never be made human if [they] were not human already.”

To this perpetual evidence ... modern genetic science brings valuable confirmation. It has demonstrated that, from the first instant, the programme is fixed as to what this living being will be: a man [or woman], this individual-man[/woman] with [their] characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization is begun the adventure of a human life, and each of its great capacities requires time ... to find its place and to be in a position to act.

The Church's 1987 "Instruction on respect for human life in its origins" titled Donum vitae expands and makes a more explicit statement on when the spiritual soul combines with the material body to become one entity the demand recognition if its dignity. It states:

This teaching [of the 1974 document] remains valid and is further confirmed, if confirmation were needed, by recent findings of human biological science which recognize that in the zygote resulting from fertilization, the biological identity of a new human individual is already constituted.

Certainly no experimental datum can be in itself sufficient to bring us to the recognition of a spiritual soul; nevertheless, the conclusions of science regarding the human embryo provide a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of this first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?

Thus the fruit of human generation, from the first moment of its existence, that is to say from the moment the zygote has formed, demands the unconditional respect that is morally due to the human being in [their] bodily and spiritual totality.

The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and, therefore, from that same moment [their] rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life. [Source]

The Church teaches that it is because scientific evidence supports the reasoned conclusion that a human individual with a personal presence is present at or immediately after conception that each human individual should be treated as a person from the first moment of existence. 

This is why Catholics are so strong in their opposition to abortion. It's not because the Church has made a doctrinal declaration independent of whatever scientific information is available on the matter, but rather, it is pointing to the scientific reality and telling its members and all people of goodwill: "Do what the facts decree." 

This is one area among many where Catholics uphold the findings of science, whereas "progressives" deny science or blatantly ignore it on their pursuit of a self-centered "right" necessitated by sexual promiscuity ("Self-indulgence up to the very limit of hygiene and economics" - Huxley's Brave New World).

The self-absorption of so many in society is evident from a member of the up-and-coming elite, the valedictorian at her Dallas high school's graduation: 

I have dreams and hopes and ambition. Every girl graduating today does. We have spent our entire lives working towards our future, and without our input and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us,

I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter.

I hope that you can feel how gut-wrenching that is, I hope that you can feel how dehumanizing it is, to have the autonomy over your own body taken from you.

There is not much room in that perspective for the needs of a young being inside the woman with no other protection than their mother - and remotely, society and its moral strictures and laws.

On the other hand, we get a clear idea of what we are talking about with regards abortion by considering the case of Richard Hutchinson's survival after being born four months before due date. The baby had a gestational age of  21 weeks and two days, recognised by Guinness as the world's most premature baby to survive. Meanwhile, the survival rate of babies born early continues to climb. 

Many who consider themselves "progressive" promote abortions in the second trimester, (which covers Richard Hutchinson's timeframe)  and even till late in the third trimester (see here). Polling found that 23 percent of Americans say abortion in general should be legal in all cases, while 33 percent say it should be legal in most cases. 

These figures point to a toxic society, where the belief exists that it is an abuse of personal "rights" if consequences of unrestrained behaviours rebound on the actors. Fortunately it's only a minority who hold it, but the belief is certainly abroad that it is a woman’s right to end the life of her fetus at any stage of a pregnancy.

One reason for the confusion among many women is their acceptance of the slogan that, as one 2015 magazine column argued, "Gender Equality Is Not Possible Without Abortion". Absurdly, the column rails at the reality of sexual differences, but the reasons for abortion presented highlight the fact that women's struggle needs to be mounted, not against innocent life, rather within the economic and social spheres so that equal pay is universal, where recognition is given comprehensively to the needs of both parents to allow a reasonable work-life balance, that there is better healthcare and much more that would reduce the burden of childcare. 

This is the direction in which the "women's rights" brigade should be driving its campaigns. As has been pointed out by other writers, it's far easier for political parties to push for a raft of cultural "reforms" than it is to tackle the power bloc that is the corporate sector in order to recover, by way of better pay and benefits, the investment society has made and that companies have reaped, leading to bumper profits and outlandish executive pay.

Another serious matter here is that there is no reason for abortion in cases of foetal abnormality, writes Alexandra DeSanctis in The Atlantic. She states:

To argue for abortion on the grounds of fetal abnormality amounts to defending the selective killing of human beings with disabilities or terminal illnesses; whether these abortions stem from callousness or misplaced compassion makes little difference to the life at stake.

DeSanctis cites a physician's evidence about the lack of need to abort late term babies:

In cases of third-trimester abortion for “fetal viability” exceptions, meanwhile, it should be obvious that no fetal deformity or disease is cured by killing the afflicted unborn child. Consider this testimony from Omar Hamada: “I want to clear something up so that there is absolutely no doubt. I’m a Board Certified OB/GYN who has delivered over 2,500 babies. There’s not a single fetal or maternal condition that requires third trimester abortion. Not one. Delivery, yes. Abortion, no.”

DeSanctis faces off against the "progressives" and the money-makers like Planned Parenthood whose abortion centers sell babies' parts to pharmaceutical companies and researchers:

This is why the abortion-rights movement has long relied upon euphemisms to obscure the unpleasant truth about the right they advocate. Phrases like women’s rights, the right to choose, and reproductive freedom dominate their advocacy, along with dismissive jargon like clumps of cells.

The key point in this horrible, horrible affair is that at every stage of pregnancy, abortion is the taking of a human life. 

Men realise this, too, but are often sidelined:

BBC News delved into the issue in a 2019 investigative piece, in which reporters spoke with men who desire a larger say in whether or not their partners could abort their preborn children. As one post-abortive man told the news outlet, "I tried everything, I offered to marry her, to take the baby myself, or to offer it up for adoption.” Another spoke of deep-seated shame, depression, and regret, explaining: “Men are meant to be protectors, so there is a sense of failure—failing to protect the mother and the unborn child, failing to be responsible.”

A national [US] web-based study of post-abortive men supports the idea that abortion is traumatizing, reporting that “4 out of 10 men experienced chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms . . . 88 percent feeling grief and sadness, 82 percent guilt, 77 percent anger, 64 percent anxiety, 68 percent isolation, 31 percent helplessness, 40 percent sexual problems.” A director at the Institute for Pregnancy Loss noted the study and called a woman’s right to abort despite her partner’s unwillingness, “unequal protection under the law”.  

Some pro-life men have experienced abortions of their own and joined the anti-abortion movement after coming to terms with the psychological damage done to them. One such man shared his story with a pro-life organization, explaining that his lightbulb moment came years later:

“I've become far more enlightened on the procedure, realizing there's an all-too-real human dimension to the process. Long after the abortion was carried out, the emotional fallout continues, at least for me. I still occasionally have sleepless nights, thinking about what we did and why. . . . Who was the child we never knew? Would he have been my son? What would he or she be like today, at 20 years of age? How would I justify either of my teenage daughters having never been given the chance to be the remarkable young ladies they've become?"

Other insights by the article writer are that:

Despite popular insistence that abortion is a vital tenet of gender equality, the reality is far more complicated, as both men and women consider the societal implications of giving a woman the right to “opt-out” of pregnancy. 

The pro-life perspective stands out in comparison to the others, which focus largely on how to even the playing field between men and women to achieve reproductive equity. Rather than eschew responsibility for pregnancies, anti-abortion groups argue that both men and women are best served by accepting full responsibility for any life created during sexual intercourse. This worldview examines humanity not from a lens of equity but from one of personal responsibility and respect for the existence of human life.

Abortion is, as we have seen, the killing of a human being. The death of the child is the result of a decision to opt out of parenthood. Recognising that there are cases of the mother's severe hardship or health difficulties that call for a heroism beyond most people in carrying a baby to term, the fact remains that the decision to abort is often a matter of avoiding disruption to one's lifestyle (I'm thinking that this applies to both the mother and father), or an escape from embarrassment. Humans are better than this!

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All you need for achieving meaning in life

Madonna in the "Material Girl" video

The years since Madonna's 1984-5 hit "Material Girl" have seen a compounding of the superficial and manipulative mentality that she portrayed in the song and video: "I'm a material girl 'cause everybody's living in a material world". Though trinkets and sparkle might not be what appeals today, there remains a focus on the "right" clothes, appearance, possessions and behaviours, even politically correct beliefs, as the source of happiness. 

But if the focus today is on what we can see and touch and taste, there is also the unsettling feeling that the foundations are cracking with regard the global culture's central principle of grabbing whatever each of us can of the world while we can. In other words, there are troubling doubts that possessions, power, and fame are where happiness lies.

That unsettling feeling is prominent within the populations of the developed world, though the glitz of the material world enthralls many who are climbing out of poverty. The negative results include alienation from the family, community groups and society as a whole, leading to mental illness and suicide.

Some mental health facts:

💢 In 2019, there were an estimated 51.5 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with some kind of mental illness. This number represented 20.6% of all U.S. adults.

💢 The prevalence of mental illness was higher among females (24.5%) than males (16.3%).

💢 Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of any mental illness (29.4%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (25.0%) and aged 50 and older (14.1%).

💢 Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of serious mental illness (8.6%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (6.8%) and aged 50 and older (2.9%).

The Mental Health America organisation states that youth mental health is worsening, with 9.7% of youth in the U.S. having severe major depression, compared to 9.2% in the previous dataset.  Even before Covid-19, the prevalence of mental illness among adults was increasing. In 2017-2018, 19% of adults experienced a mental illness, an increase of 1.5 million people over the previous dataset.

Furthermore, suicidal ideation among adults is increasing. The percentage of adults in the U.S. who are experiencing serious thoughts of suicide increased 0.15% from 2016-2017 to 2017-2018 – an additional 460,000 people from the previous dataset. 

Therefore, it's worth exploring why alienation and depression and meaninglessness take hold of so many in any society. 

One component is the "Is this all?" factor. That European society was moving ever more quickly to a this-world mindset was clear to Aldous Huxley when he wrote Brave New World in 1931. In his futuristic novel where everyone is conditioned, even in the test tube, Huxley has the Europe controller trying to prevent his population from independently looking at the purpose of their existence. He worries that a new research paper on that topic...

...might make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal [of life] was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

Concern over the lack of a transcendental perspective has continued from Huxley to John Harris, a Guardian columnist, who has written a piece titled, "How do faithless people like me make sense of this past year of Covid?" He was writing after a year of lockdown as a person without a belief in God - "the sudden fear of serious illness and death, and the sense of all of it being wholly random and senseless":

Like millions of other faithless people, I have not even the flimsiest of narratives to project on to what has happened, nor any real vocabulary with which to talk about the profundities of life and death. Beyond a handful of close friends and colleagues and my immediate family, there has been no community of like minds with whom I have talked about how I am feeling or ritualistically marked the passing of all these grinding weeks and months. 

Even now, with restrictions soon to be lifted, the chance of any shared reflection on the last year’s events still seems slim. Secularised societies do not really work like that. And Britain is a perfect example, as proved by a prospect that somehow feels both exciting and absurd: a return to shops, pub gardens and “normality”, and people being encouraged to make merry as if nothing has happened. 

Harris seeks to make sense of the pandemic's sickness and death, and to grow from the experience - but "secularised societies do not really work like that." No wonder depression sets in. He envies those who have faith:

In the first phase of the pandemic, there were clear signs that a lot of us needed much more. Across 95 countries, Googling the word “prayer” increased by 50%, surpassing the level associated with Christmas and Ramadan. In April 2020, a service led by the Archbishop of Canterbury from his kitchen table drew 5 million viewers, described by the Church of England as the largest congregation in its history.

And since then, as churches, mosques, synagogues and temples have been at the heart of some communities’ Covid experiences, the symbols and rituals of religion have made very visible comebacks. They were seen again in last week’s doorstep vigil, complete with candles and massed silence, for the people lost to Covid.

He tells how English and Continental societies coped with the Black Death. The people had Church supported guilds and fraternal groups to help each other, and  “did not cease thinking in terms of community and rebirth”.

Today, a mixture of individualism and collective denial leaves many of us without the ideas or language to conceive of Covid like that. And besides, even if we wanted, once rules allow us to try and make shared sense of our recent experiences in the company of others, where would we do it? “When it comes to mortality, we have relatively few social institutions that allow us to talk about it, and see each other through it,” said John Sabapathy, a medieval historian at University College London.

Through decades of secularisation, cheered on by irreligious liberals, not nearly enough thought was ever given to what might take on the social roles of a church. 

That's what Harris's column goes on to discuss - where people can come together to avoid loneliness and alienation and depression. 

But this post is not intended to promote Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, where people "use" religion to buoy their own ego or a well-being still steeped in individualism. The point here is how important God is to the life of any and every human, that absolute truth can be found with God, that we know through personal experience that God loves each one of us.

A religious, specifically a Catholic narrative about what we are here on earth for, about the purpose of life with all its challenges, is given in this reflection on the August 1 Bible readings at Mass:

Is your life aimless?  Do you feel life is worth living?  Or would you prefer to die not because there is a better life in the next world but simply because this life with all its struggles, challenges, sufferings or even pleasures is meaningless?  The scripture readings today invite us to reflect deeper on how we are living our life.  Most of us just drift through life, existing but not living fully.

When we do that, we are no better than animals, eating, sleeping, enjoying and working.  We do not have a purpose, a goal, an orientation.  Even if we do have, does it really bring us true happiness or just an illusory and transitory contentment?  St Paul urged the Christians in Ephesus, “I want to urge you in the name of the Lord, not to go on living the aimless kind of life that pagans live.”

What would you consider to be an aimless life?  An aimless life is one that thrives on pleasure and physical fulfilment only.  Many of us are contented with this level of living.  All we seek in life is to provide pleasure to the body.  Our primary concern is food, comfort and excitement.  We are sensual, materialistic and consumeristic.  That was the way the Israelites behaved in the first reading. 

At any rate, very few are contented with what they have, even the richest man on earth.  We want more and more.  We are never contented, for the moment we have it, we get bored, and to keep us going, we find new objectives and new hobbies to entertain ourselves.

Nevertheless, it is not surprising how we respond to physical and material needs.   Even the crowd that followed Jesus in the gospel sought for food and pleasure as well.  They were not interested in Jesus except what He could do for them in terms of physical and material security.  But they were not truthful to themselves and their real intention of seeking Jesus.  

They just wanted to make use of Jesus for their temporal needs in life.  They did not look further than just material satisfaction and physical liberation from the Romans.

This is where Jesus is inviting us to seek something more than mere material and physical needs.  Whilst they are essential for us to live, they cannot give us life, for as St Paul would say, “the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”  (Rom 14:17) Jesus said to the people, “Do not work for food that cannot last, but work for food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you, for on him the Father, God himself, has set his seal.”  

One of the reasons why many successful and rich people find life empty and meaningless in spite of their wealth and fame, is simply because once our body is satisfied, our spirit seeks something more.  This itself is a clear proof that we are not just constituted of matter, but we have a soul, since nothing on this earth that is material can satisfy us and even if it does, it is only temporary.  In fact, when we are rich and well to do, when our comforts are met, we find ourselves living in a vacuum.  The soul is thirsting for something which the body cannot satisfy.

So what is it that causes us to feel empty, especially when we are successful, have a reasonably comfortable life, a good career, good health and have sufficient money to live on? Did the people stop complaining after God gave them meat and bread to their hearts content?  The truth is that Israel’s complaints against God never ended.  They were always greedy and the word “enough” did not exist in their vocabulary, like ours as well. They failed the test that God set for them, which was to trust Him and His divine providence.  

So what is causing us to feel empty is to think that if we have plenty of money, our life would be fulfilled and we will have no more suffering or worries or fears in life.  If we go by all the TV serials, the rich often live very complicated lives simply because when we are wealthy, we are not too sure who our real friends are.

Saint Augustine writes in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You."

Happiness and fulfilment can come only when we have meaning and purpose.  This can only be found in God and then expressed in cultivating wholesome relationships and doing works of charity.  If our meaning and purpose is found in this life, then it cannot sustain us for long.  If we think that getting an academic degree can fulfil us, then the moment we attain it, life has no longer any meaning.  Then we will always be creating meaning for ourselves by setting one goal after another.

 But no matter what achievements we arrive at, when we actually arrive, it becomes an anti-climax.  This is why meaning and purpose can only be found in God, for we can never fully fathom God since God is in us and above all.  As the Lord told the Samaritan woman who was also seeking the fulness of life, that she must search for the living water instead.  (Jn 4:10-15) Only God can quench the thirst in us.

The consequence of our union with the Lord is to belong to His body, the Church, which means also that we are in fellowship with His people, living together as one, caring and supporting each other in faith and love.  And indeed, it is when we are in good relationship with God and with our fellowmen, that we find meaning.

To receive this Bread of Life, we only need to believe in Him.  This is the work that is required of us, not our good works or any other works.  When they asked the Lord, “What must we do if we are to do the works that God wants?’ Jesus gave them this answer, ‘This is working for God: you must believe in the one He has sent.'”  In other words, faith in Jesus is to allow His Spirit to work in and through us.  We do good only because His Spirit inspires us and empowers us to do so. 

Faith in Jesus is what gives us fulfilment, life, love and joy.  Faith in Jesus means that we will live a life of love and self-giving to our brothers and sisters in the whole world. This is what St Paul said, “You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.”

 As a sidebar, I want to offer this observation by the same pastor, namely the Catholic Archbishop of Singapore, William Goh:

Why do some of us go through life without a sense of direction?  We just drift through life, trying to keep ourselves alive with some pleasures and luxuries in life.  But our life is meaningless.  We have no real purpose for our existence.  We work to keep ourselves alive and to make a living.  We might even appear to be active doing many things but without direction and coherence.  At the end of the day, we will be burnt-out with all sorts of activities, but achieve nothing substantial.

The Christian is different and distinguishes himself or herself from how worldly people live, with their selfish and self-centred values, contrary to the gospel of humility, dying to self, compassion, forgiveness and humble service.  This is the real challenge of being a Christian today, to have the courage to be identified as one.  What the world wants is for us to be identified with them.   The world wants us to absorb their worldly values so that we will not be a reproach to their self-centred lifestyle or be a conscience to society.

Today, the Christian message of freedom, marriage, sexuality, sanctity of life is being distorted, not just by unbelievers but even by false prophets from within our Church who want to please the world.

Therefore, the Christian has a sense of direction, an awareness of the need to be countercultural, a purpose in life that goes beyond the mundane, and seeks to pass on the good news that we can center our lives on a personal God, who is omniscient, omnipotent, infinite and loving.  

In conclusion, to come back to John Harris's column, here is a response from Richard Harries, a peer in Britain's Parliament, the House of Lords:   

It would indeed be good, as John Harris argues, to have more public spaces for communal activities, but that does not get to the heart of the issue. Those who meet in synagogues, churches, mosques, temples and gurdwaras all believe they have some insight into a reality not of their making – one which makes sense of life and gives hope even in times of despair. Great though it is to come together on the basis of a shared interest in football, motherhood, the local community or chess, this can be no real substitute for what religious people believe religion has to offer.

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United Nations: Human family faces an urgent choice!

 Crisis after crisis - a shared test for humanity, says Antonio Guterres. UN photo (cropped) 

The world is heading in the wrong direction and without change a breakdown in social order can be expected and a future of perpetual crisis, the head of the United Nations Antonio Guterres states in a report on the many global problems that are coming together to produce a "do or die" moment for human life on this planet.

His study,  Our Common Agenda, contains a grim list of stress points that highlight how the fabric of international well-being is unlikely to hold unless a combined effort is undertaken without delay.

However, the report, with its frightening outlook for humankind, seems to have been lost in a weekend where the news cycle was focused largely on remembering the 9/11 attack and sports events. That's a shame because its contents are compelling reminders of how the priorities of leading countries have created a furnace that is set to consume all that makes life on this planet possible.  

The introduction lays out our predicament:

We are at an inflection point in history. The Covid-19 pandemic has served as a wake-up call and with the climate crisis now looming, the world is experiencing its biggest shared test since the Second World War.

Humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: breakdown or breakthrough. The choices we make — or fail to make — today could result in further breakdown and a future of perpetual crises, or a breakthrough to a better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet. 

The United Nations was created after World War Two to manage conflicts between nation states. Today, it increasingly confronts issues across countries such as disease, poverty, migration, or climate change.

Our Common Agenda argues that: 

The coronavirus disease (Covid-19) is upending our world, threatening our health, destroying economies and livelihoods and deepening poverty and inequalities.

Conflicts continue to rage and worsen.

The disastrous effects of a changing climate – famine, floods, fires and extreme heat – threaten our very existence.

For millions of people around the world, poverty, discrimination, violence and exclusion are denying them their rights to the basic necessities of life: health, safety, a vaccination against disease, clean water to drink, a plate of food or a seat in a classroom.

Increasingly, people are turning their backs on the values of trust and solidarity in one another – the very values we need to rebuild our world and secure a better, more sustainable future for our people and our planet.

Humanity’s welfare – and indeed, humanity’s very future – depend on solidarity and working together as a global family to achieve common goals. 

The report's information on living conditions came from all around the world:

One message rang through loud and clear: the choices we make, or fail to make, today could result in further breakdown, or a breakthrough to a greener, better, safer future.

The choice is ours to make; but we will not have this chance again.  

 To look at the impact of the crises as analysed in the report:

The coronavirus disease pandemic has been a challenge like no other since the Second World War, revealing our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness. It has exposed human rights concerns and exacerbated deep fragilities and inequalities in our societies. It has amplified disenchantment with institutions and political leadership as the virus has lingered. We have also seen many examples of vaccine nationalism.

Let there be no illusion: Covid-19 may pale in comparison to future challenges if we do not learn from failures that have cost lives and livelihoods.

 What awaits us in the scenario of breakdown and perpetual crisis without concerted healthcare action:

• Covid-19 is endemic, constantly mutating

• Richer countries hoard vaccines, no plan for equitable distribution

• Health systems are overwhelmed

• No preparedness for future pandemics

• Some countries are poorer in 2030 than before the pandemic hit

 The scenario of breakdown and perpetual crisis without concerted environmental action:

• Owing to unchanged emission levels from human activity, global warming of 2°C will be exceeded during the twenty-first century

• Heatwaves, floods, droughts, tropical cyclones and other extremes are unprecedented in magnitude, frequency and timing, and occur in regions that have never been affected before

• The Arctic is ice free in the summer; most permafrost is lost and extreme sea levels occur every year

• One million species are on the verge of extinction, with irreversible biodiversity loss

• More than 1 billion people live with heat that is so extreme that it threatens their lives

 The scenario of breakdown and perpetual crisis without action to reverse destabilizing inequalities:

• Continuous erosion of human rights

• Growing poverty, and massive loss of jobs and income

• Public goods like education and social protection systems are underfunded

• Protests spread across borders, often met with violent repression

• Technology fuels division

• New types of warfare invented faster than new ways of making peace

The report states: 

Our best projections show that a stark choice confronts us: to continue with business as usual and risk significant breakdown and perpetual crisis, or to make concerted efforts to break through and achieve an international system that delivers for people and the planet. These omens must not be ignored, nor these opportunities squandered.  

Before going to the report's positive scenario, one element that needs to be factored in is that of solidarity: 

Everything proposed in this report depends on a deepening of solidarity. Solidarity is not charity; in an interconnected world, it is common sense. It is the principle of working together, recognizing that we are bound to each other and that no community or country can solve its challenges alone. 

It is about our shared responsibilities to and for each other, taking account of our common humanity and each person’s dignity, our diversity and our varying levels of capacity and need. The importance of solidarity has been thrown into sharp relief by Covid-19 and the race against variants, even for countries that are well advanced with vaccination campaigns.

No one is safe [from the virus] until everyone is safe. The same is true of our biodiversity, without which none of us can survive, and for actions to address the climate crisis. In the absence of solidarity, we have arrived at a critical paradox: international cooperation is more needed than ever but also harder to achieve.

Through a deeper commitment to solidarity, at the national level, between generations and in the multilateral system, we can avoid the breakdown scenario and, instead, break through towards a more positive future.

Now for the scenario of breakthrough and the prospect of a greener, safer better future. First, that of a sustainable recovery from our present crises:

 • Vaccines shared widely and equitably

• Capacity to produce vaccines for future pandemics within 100 days and to distribute them globally within a year

• People in crisis and conflict settings have a bridge to better lives

• Revised international debt architecture

• Business incentives are reshaped to support global public goods

• Progress to address illicit financial flows, tax avoidance and climate finance

• Financial and economic systems support more sustainable, resilient and inclusive patterns of growth

Second, the positive outlook for healthy people and planet based on solidarity:

 • Global temperature rise is limited to 1.5°C

• All countries and sectors decarbonize by 2050

• Support provided to countries heavily affected by climate emergencies

• Just transitions to a new labour ecosystem are ensured

• A functioning ecosystem is preserved for succeeding generations

• Communities are equipped to adapt and be resilient to climate change impacts

Finally, with trust and protection the scenario looks like this:

 • Strong commitment to the universality and indivisibility of human rights

• Universal social protection floors, including universal health coverage

• Universal digital connectivity

• Quality education, skills enhancement and lifelong learning

• Progress on addressing gender, racial, economic and other inequalities

• Equal partnership between institutions and the people they serve and among and within communities to strengthen social cohesion

Which brings us back to solidarity, specifically the search for the common good by way of a social contract:

A strong social contract anchored in human rights at the national level is the necessary foundation for us to work together. It may not be written down in any single document, but the social contract has profound consequences for people, underpinning their rights and obligations and shaping their life chances. It is also vital for international cooperation, since bonds across countries do not work when bonds within them are broken.

The inequality, mistrust and intolerance that we are seeing in many countries and regions, heightened by the devastating impact of the pandemic, suggest that the time has come to renew the social contract for a new era in which individuals, States and other actors work in partnership to build trust, increase participation and inclusion and redefine human progress.

The deepening of solidarity at the national level must be matched by a new commitment to young people and future generations, to whom the opening words of the Charter of the United Nations make a solemn promise. Strengthened solidarity is long overdue with the existing generation of young people, who feel that our political, social and economic systems ignore their present and sacrifice their future.

We must take steps to deliver  better education and jobs for them and to give them a greater voice in designing their own futures. We must also find ways to systematically consider the interests of the 10.9 billion people who are expected to be born this century, predominantly in Africa and Asia: we will achieve a breakthrough only if we think and act together on their behalf for the long term.

To support solidarity within societies and between generations, we also need a new deal at the global level. The purpose of international cooperation in the twenty-first century is to achieve a set of vital common goals on which our welfare, and indeed survival, as a human race depend. Notably, we need to improve the protection of the global commons and the provision of a broader set of global public goods, those issues that benefit humanity as a whole and that cannot be managed by any one State or actor alone.

Just as the founders of the United Nations came together determined to save succeeding generations from war, we must now come together to save succeeding generations from war, climate change, pandemics, hunger, poverty, injustice and a host of risks that we may not yet foresee entirely. This is Our Common Agenda. 

As part of the effort to rebuild trust among particpants in each society, the Common Agenda urges tax reform locally and internationally:

A reformed international tax system is needed to respond to the realities of growing cross-border trade and investment and an increasingly digitalized economy while also addressing existing shortcomings in fair and effective taxation of businesses and reducing harmful tax competition.

The G20 has agreed on a new international tax architecture that addresses the tax challenges arising from globalization and digitalization and introduces a global minimum tax for corporations, with a blueprint in place for broader implementation under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The internet:

The internet has altered our societies as profoundly as the printing press did, requiring a deep reimagining of the ethics and mindsets with which we approach knowledge, communication and cohesion. Along with the potential for more accessible information and rapid communication and consultation, the digital age, particularly social media, has also heightened fragmentation and “echo chambers” [listening to only like-minded views]. Objectivity, or even the idea that people can aspire to ascertain the best available truth, has come increasingly into question. 

 Some facts and figures relating to the need for investment in social protection, meaning public welfare:

• The wealth of billionaires increased by over US$3.9 trillion between March and December 2020, while 4 billion people are still without any form of basic social protection.

• 92 per cent of African women are in the informal economy. This keeps them outside of social security systems.

• A total of $78 billion would be needed for low-income countries to establish social protection floors, including health care, covering their combined population of 711 million people.

The rationale for social protection is given here:

Social protection systems have demonstrated their value during the COVID-19 pandemic, saving lives and backstopping economies at large. Without the surge in State-provided social protection, economic damage could have been far worse. This is also the case for previous crises. We must not lose this momentum. A new era for social protection systems would be a foundation for peaceful societies and other measures to leave no one behind and eradicate extreme poverty.

I urge States to accelerate steps to achieve universal social protection coverage, including for the remaining 4 billion people currently unprotected, in line with target 1.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals. While the types and modalities of coverage may vary, at a minimum this means access to health care for all and basic income security for children, those unable to work and older persons.

Then there is work:

Decent work opportunities for all are also needed for shared prosperity. With the nature and types of work transforming rapidly, this requires a floor of rights and protections for all workers, irrespective of their employment arrangements, as laid out in the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work. Workers should not shoulder all the risks when it comes to their income, their hours of work and how they cope if they are ill or unemployed.

Investment in sectors with the greatest potential for creating more and better jobs, such as the green, care and digital economies, is key and can be brought about through major public investment, along with incentive structures for long-term business investments consistent with human development and well-being.

The inadequacy of using gross domestic product to measure a nation's development success is expressed forcefully:

We know that GDP fails to account for human well-being, planetary sustainability and non-market services and care, or to consider the distributional dimensions of economic activity. Absurdly, GDP rises when there is overfishing, cutting of forests or burning of fossil fuels. We are destroying nature, but we count it as an increase in wealth. Such discussions have been ongoing for decades. It is time to collectively commit to complementary measurements. Without that fundamental shift, the targets that we have fixed in relation to biodiversity, pollution and climate change will not be achievable. 

"Women's work" is given due attention:

In rethinking GDP, we must also find ways to validate the care and informal economy. Specifically, most of the care work around the world is unpaid and done by women and girls, perpetuating economic inequality between genders. COVID-19 also had deeply gendered economic and job impacts that highlighted and exacerbated the trillions of dollars that are lost owing to billions of hours of unpaid care work performed every year.

Rethinking the care economy means valuing unpaid care work in economic models but also investing in quality paid care as part of essential public services and social protection arrangements, including by improved pay and working conditions (target 5.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals). More broadly, we also need to find new ways to account for and value the vast informal economy.

More facts and figures, this time relating to the transition to a green economy:

• Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels, chemicals and other pollutants is responsible for the death of 7 million people every year, costing around $5 trillion annually.

 • Shifting to a green economy could yield a direct economic gain of US$26 trillion through 2030 compared with business-as-usual and create over 65 million new low-carbon jobs.

The immediate task:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us in August 2021 that we are at imminent risk of hitting the dangerous threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the near term. Every fraction of a degree represents lost lives, livelihoods, assets, species and ecosystems. We should be dramatically reducing emissions each year, towards a 45 per cent reduction by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050, as made clear by the Panel, yet temperatures continue to rise. 

We should be shoring up our populations, infrastructure, economies and societies to be resilient to climate change, yet adaptation and resilience continue to be seriously underfunded.

Climate Breakdown or Breakthrough 

Climate change - Transforming food systems:

• Sustainable food systems and strong forest protection could generate over $2 trillion per year of economic benefits, create millions of jobs and improve food security, while supporting solutions to climate change.

In conclusion, the "Moving Forward" section points to the 12 elements that have guided this report:

This vision builds on and responds to the declaration on the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations, in which Member States made 12 critical commitments:

• to leave no one behind; 

• to protect our planet;

• to promote peace and prevent conflict;

• to abide by international law and ensure justice;

• to place women and girls at the centre;

• to build trust;

• to improve digital cooperation;

• to upgrade the United Nations;

• to ensure sustainable financing;

• to boost partnerships;

• to listen to and work with youth; and

• to be prepared for future crises.   

In the past, newspapers would have had the social responsibility - and the capacity - to do what I have done here, to mine an important international document in order to allow readers to develop their citizenship skills by becoming aware of what international leaders are saying about the needs of Planet Earth, and the care of the human family. I hope you found this material as informative as I did. 

Ω Here is the best news report I could find in a check of all the main news sources relating to this significant document. 

Ω The thrust of  Our Common Agenda is contained in the 2015 letter to the world of Pope Francis, Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home. See here.

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Yes, we do have a soul: What this means.

In the course of writing my previous post on the inability of neuroscientists to pinpoint where in the brain or its processes the human's intellectual and decision-making capabilities arise, it struck me that many people are likely to be unfamiliar with the concept of the soul, perhaps only knowing of  the term from its use in "soul music" or the saying, "It's got no soul!" (as in Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street").

Fundamentally, the soul is of central importance in understanding the human person because it endows the person with the dignity that we find in declarations of human rights and, generally, in claims that everyone must be treated equally and justly. 

The only way the human person can claim a dignity above the rest of the natural world, and an equality among peers, is through the mutual acknowledgement that each person has a transcendent character,  a quality that is beyond the material. This is often referred to as the brain-mind mystery, as discussed in that previous post.

In other words, if the person is held to be only of a material nature, then there is no solid base for the human to claim a dignity above any other element of the natural world, deflating any likelihood of  successfully creating a system of moral behaviour that would be upheld in society. 

We can see this breakdown of the moral order in Western countries with the secularization of the culture. This has led to the Godless principle that there are no boundaries on human behaviour. as expressed by US Supreme Court judge Anthony Kennedy in 1992: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." 

Neuroscientists, as we saw in my previous post, recognise that their research has shown the limitations of attempts to discover in the brain's functions the source of human consciousness, or of the power of reasoning, or of the independence of the will, which are what Catholics refer to as the spiritual faculties of the human person.

As well as making possible self-reflection, meaning our consciousness, the soul is where we exercise our intellect and free will, where we believe and love, sin, and yearn for goodness, beauty, truth, and for God.

What all of us are dealing with as we explore our human capabilities are features of human existence that have been puzzling people through all time. We have the ancients, then the Greeks and Romans, and the creators of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the varied array of animists over the millennia, who have laboured over the same matter, an awareness that the body is not all that we are. A typical example is the case of  the Dyaks and Sumatrans who, as anthropologists in what is now Indonesia found, bound various parts of the body with cords during sickness to prevent the escape of what animated the body. 

However, it is the Catholic doctrine of the soul that is most useful to examine because it enshrines the principles of ancient speculation, and is ready to receive and assimilate the fruits of modern research. 

First, this post will clarify what Catholics mean by the soul, and then it will provide some scientific insight into why there should be respect for its doctrine.

The human person is a single entity defined by material and spiritual components such that the spiritual soul is metaphysically the “form of the body” (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 362-368).

This phrase is defined by the Church. It means that a human body can only exist as a holistic and functional reality in the cosmos through the spiritual soul. And by corollary, it means that the spiritual soul holds all the material powers of the body in integral unity as human and personal. 

It is also Catholic doctrine that body and soul do not share the same genesis because matter and spirit are not one common order of existence. This need not imply any opposition between matter and spirit. Both matter and spirit are ultimately from God’s creative hand. The body comes from the parents, but the soul is fused with the body to be the "holistic reality" spoken of above (CCC 382). Another way this is described is that the soul animates the body, so that we are an ensouled body (rather than an embodied soul). 

The soul has a natural aptitude and need for existence in the body. But it is not wholly immersed in matter, because its higher operations are intrinsically independent of the organism. This "rational soul"  is produced by special creation and is of a higher order than the "vegetative" and "sensitive" souls that are part of the different levels of the purely material world.

Therefore, the soul is that component of human nature that is fully integrated with the body as with the individual and personal centre of control and direction, namely the intellect and will. In this, the body, with its inherited instincts, is acknowledged as integral to our thinking and self-determination, but it is not the full picture.

One writer goes into greater detail:

Our brains no doubt work on the same patterns as other brains in nature, but the human quest for knowledge is not just bounded by the needs of survival. We indulge in pure speculation and seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Our minds delve far beyond the things we can reach directly with the physical senses. We reach out to the very boundaries of creation and beyond. This is both the wonder and the burden of being human.

We also yearn for more than just the satisfaction of bodily needs. The human will and creativity faculty are a further witness to our freedom from the environmental harmonics of animal urge and instinct. We actively shape and develop the environment itself based on our own insight into the structure and patterns of Nature. At our best we do this in harmony with the laws of creation, enhancing the world with our own creative developments and inventiveness. Tragically, we can also break the laws of our own well-being and perhaps even the natural harmony of the planet we live upon. We are not supposed to do this, of course, but the fact that we can do so still demonstrates the transcendent power of the human spirit. No purely material creature could break the material laws of directional control that shape and define its very essence.

All of this shows that we are not just creatures who are controlled and directed. We are creatures who exercise control and direction. That is to say, we are not just matter; we are mind as well. Our fairly constant and active consciousness of our physical environment furnishes the foundational experience of what mind and matter are.

The writer goes on, offering this interrogation of evolution:

If it is true that evolution produces more and more powerful brains as it progresses, and this requires more and more control from the environment to ensure its meaningful and balanced behaviour, then, somewhere along the line, things must reach a natural limit. Nature could produce a supreme brain that was still within its control, but if things were to develop one step beyond that, then it would indeed have created something that was out of control and could not be given a programme of life - an animal that had no place or meaning in Nature.

Such a creature would be un-natural by definition. So, in fact, such an event could never happen - at least not on its own. Everything in the universe, including our own brains, is built up on this principle of control and direction, and Nature cannot break its own fundamental law without the whole process of the universe being undermined and coming to grief.

And yet evidently something has given us power over the physical environment, power to work out the laws of nature themselves and control them for our own ends, power even to destroy Nature itself with our technology if we are foolish enough. It looks like the impossible has actually happened. How do we explain this?... 

This ‘new power’ cannot be something material, something which arises from the organisation of atoms and molecules and electrical energies of the universe... Therefore it can only come from one other source. It must come directly from God. The human body comes about from the seed and egg of parents in common with other animals, but the soul is created immediately by God’s loving command and wise, eternal will. Whenever a new human life is conceived the soul must also be there. This is because the formula or pattern that makes up the human body makes no sense and has no place in Nature without the [soul] to hold it together and give it a meaning and a purpose.

All the preceeding gives some insight into the Catholic, and largely Christian, doctrine of the soul. But it would be a sin of omission if I did not add some information about the work of Christians in conducting and analysing research in the realm of consciousness and its transcendental nature.

A good starting point for futher information is the 2015 book The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason. Here, the author, Robert Spitzer, examines the research being done that highlights the "transphysical soul" and the "possibility and plausibility of [our ] transcendent nature and destiny."

One quote given in Spitzer's text is from Sir John Eccles (died 1997), the Australian neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize for his research on brain synapses. He did a lot of research into how the soul could interact with the material brain.  In a 1990 text he expressed his dismay at the boundaries set by some scientists in what they would accept as to the brain's capabilities:

The materialist critics argue that insuperable difficulties are encountered by the hypothesis that immaterial mental events can act in any way on material structures such as neurons. Such as presumed action is alleged to be incompatible with the conservation laws of physics, in particular of the first law of thermodynamics. This objection would certainly be sustained by nineteenth century physicists, and by neuroscientists and philosophers who are still ideologically in the physics of the nineteenth century, not recognizing the revolution wrought by quantum physicists in the twentieth century.

So it is not the Christians who are backward, but those with heuristic platforms that they will not shift from. Spitzer, a Jesuit priest and scholar,  updates Eccles' view with an overview of more recent scientific contributions, including that a "whole new area of biophysics is developing around  [the use of quantum theory]: neuroquantology".  

In concluding this post, I turn to a summary of Spitzer's extensive analysis of evidence for the soul: 

Father Spitzer's work provides [...]traditional and contemporary evidence for God and the transphysical soul. It shows that we are transcendent beings with souls capable of surviving bodily death; that we are self-reflective beings able to strive toward perfect truth, love, goodness, and beauty; that we have the dignity of being created in the very image of God. If we underestimate these truths, we undevalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny.   

References:

Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907-1912. Access here. 

Robert Spitzer, 2015, The Soul's Upward Yearning, Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason, Ignatius Press, San Francisco.

Faith.org.uk, "Body and Soul - Renewing Catholic Orthodoxy", Editorial, FAITH Magazine, March - April 2008. England. Access here.

Stephen Beale, "What Are We? Body and Soul…and Spirit?", Catholic Exchange, Access here. 

Photo by Monstera from Pexels. (Altered)

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Neuroscientists admit the brain still full of mystery

                                                                              Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

Two neuroscientists have new books out. In doing the publicity rounds they have shone light on where gaps exist in their understanding of the human intellect and will. The human brain means mystery. 

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He is the presenter of a TV series, The Brain, shown on PBS, the BBC and elsewhere. In his latest book, Livewired, "he tells the story of brain plasticity: how your forest of billions of neurons reconfigures every moment over your life," as his website puts it.

So how do we maintain a personal identity while this material transformation is going on? What preserves our subjective consciousness over the course of our life?

In an interview, Eagleman lays out the basics to do with the brain:

What we’re looking at is three pounds [1.36 kg] of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. I’m here in Silicon Valley. Everything we talk about is hardware and software.

But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86 billion neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning.

[...] If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. 

As if expressing wonderment at the intricacy of that physical process, the interviewer, Andrew Anthony, states:  "Another mystery is consciousness." From one mystery, to another. The interviewer goes on: "Do you think we are close to understanding what consciousness is and how it’s created?" Eagleman replies with admirable humility:

There’s a great deal of debate about how to define consciousness, but we are essentially talking about the thing that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning. But as far as understanding why it happens, I don’t know that we’re much closer than we’ve ever been. It’s different from other scientific conundrums in that what we’re asking is, how do you take physical pieces and parts and translate that into private, subjective experience, like the redness of red, or the pain of pain or the smell of cinnamon? And so not only do we not have a theory, but we don’t really know what such a theory would look like that would explain our experience in physical or mathematical terms.

This points to consciousness being a spiritual capacity that humans alone in creation are endowed with. Eagleman brings out that element when exploring whether, in the future, it will be possible to "glean the details of a person’s life from their brains." His answer indicates his belief is that there is physical content that is ripe for the picking: "our computational capacities are becoming so extraordinary now, it’s just a countdown until we get there." 

However, and this is the most interesting part of his answer if we are thinking of the brain-mind dichotomy, he adds:  

Do we get to keep our inner thoughts private? Almost certainly we will. You can’t stick somebody in a scanner and try to ask them particular kinds of questions. 

That there is clearly something about our intellect and will that is beyond the physical is brought out in an interview with Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England.  His book, Being You, has just been published. This is how interviewer Tim Adams introduces his discussion with Seth:

For centuries, philosophers have theorised about the mind-body question, debating the relationship between the physical matter of the brain and the conscious mental activity it somehow creates. Even with advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques, large parts of that fundamental relationship remain stubbornly mysterious.

It was with good reason that, in 1995, the cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem” to describe the question of exactly how our brains conjure subjective conscious experience. Some philosophers continue to insist that mind is inherently distinct from matter.

So the interview is presented as a look at whether "advances in understanding how the brain functions undermine those ideas of dualism."

Seth's first statement does seem to support a form of "dualism" with his reference to what he calls "emergence":

The reason I’m interested in consciousness is intrinsically personal. I want to understand myself and, by extension, others. But I’m also super-interested for example in developing statistical models and mathematical methods for characterising things such as emergence [behaviour of the mind as a whole that exceeds the capability of its individual parts] and there is no personal component in that.

An example that Seth has given elsewhere is of someone having a pang of jealousy as a result of something seen or heard. Is that jealousy a spiritual or a purely physical experience? How to regard lust or greed, or kindness or compassion? 

Let's explore the interview some more as Seth sets up a study team at Sussex "as a multidisciplinary group, with pure mathematicians, psychologists and computer scientists as well as cognitive neuroscientists."

The starting point is: "The question of how to develop a satisfying scientific explanation of conscious experience."

Tim Adams: Presumably, the mind-body problem is never going to be entirely resolved?

Anil Seth: No, but I’d like to make progress. It’s the boring answer of continuing to do rigorous science [...] My approach is that we risk not understanding the central mystery of life by lurching to one or other form of magical thinking. While science might be a little bit slower, there is much to be done in a straightforward materialist understanding of how the brain relates to conscious experience.

Later in the discussion, Seth comments: 

The philosopher William James said: “Thoughts themselves are the thinkers.” I think that there’s a truth to that. It’s perhaps always a mistake to think of thoughts being produced or observed by a prior internal self. Thought is foundational to psychology, but it’s one of the things that’s hardest to study. You can’t control thought in the same way you can systematically manipulate perception in the lab. So I’ve tended to avoid investigating how the mind wanders and so on.  [My emphasis - BS]

Further on this topic:

But where do thoughts come from? I’m left a little cold by psychoanalytic explanations, which suggest there’s a subconscious trying to get in there and give you some thought that would otherwise be repressed. I think, to me, they’re the maximally abstract version of perception.

Is Seth saying that thoughts usually arise from our sensible experience, but turn into something of a spiritual nature? That fully corresponds with the Christian understanding of the body-spirit unity, the embodied soul or ensouled body, where there is unity of the two elements, but integrity of each individually, with the soul taking precedence because it is of a higher order as to capacity. 

Adams: One pivotal one in your argument about the how and why of consciousness is the idea that “I predict myself, therefore I am”. What is the “I” in that sentence?

Seth: It’s a collection of perceptual predictions. It’s a playful sentence. The “I” is deliberately ambiguous there – it says there is an experience arising of me being a single unified individual, with all these different attributes: memories, emotional bonds, experiences of body. For this piece of flesh and blood here, they seem to be unified – at least if I don’t reflect on it too much. 

Christians would say that the unifying factor is the simple nature the unified body-soul. Seth says that as yet he is agnostic toward the physical-spiritual unity, "the central mystery of life":

I’m agnostic about whether at the end of this programme of trying to account in physical terms for properties of experience, there will still be some residue of mystery left, something more to explain. 

How Seth's views are conflicted are revealed in the next exchange:

Have your thoughts [...] ever taken any spiritual swerve – in terms of the why of there being something rather than nothing?

It’s more that I think there’s hubris in assuming that everything will submit to a mechanistic programme of explanation. I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird. I want to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird. 

To parse that statement:

First, for sure it is arrogant to assume in the blinkered manner of much of science that the hard reductive principles of physical processes are the only ones to apply. 

Second, Seth acknowledges that the "existence of conscious experience" is totally unexpected in the context of the totality of the evolutionary process. Haven't we known that for millennia!

Third, how can Seth say that with regards this universe, "we generally have physicalist accounts"? Has he not looked to the religious traditions, especially Christianity with its solid history of scholarship, absorbing as it did the penetrating insights of Aristotle and Plato, for a wider reading of the nature of the human person?

Fourth, in this team effort to "undermine this seeming weird" is he fully open to the "spiritual swerve" arising from the answers he gains, or is he going to remain a lazy or feeble agnostic instead of showing a willingness to explore where colleagues, captured by scientism and/or political correctness, fear to tread? 

Fifth, Seth states that perception is a “hallucination” and “a big lie created by our deceptive brains”. Why the negativity, the deprecation of processes that do, in fact, help us to know reality? As another commentator put it:

It does seem perverse to claim that the very physicality of being alive downgrades perception to spontaneous fakery.

Sixth, I find this from Seth somewhat disconcerting as to a person "being you" - "A lot of what we know about human consciousness is based on animal experiments." The professor should leave the octopi alone and focus on the human.

Perhaps his book, which I have not read, does offer a wealth of  research findings on, for example, reflective reason. To quote (with minor editing) Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest and public intellectual, writing 100 [!] years ago in a more relevant way than lately published neuroscientists on concerns how we know we live in the real world: [*]

Run "instinct" for all its worth; show how [humankind's] delicate sensibility in a thousand directions is but the hypertrophy of such instinct; collect whatever instances you will of inherited tendencies, of herd-psychology, and the rest of it - you will still come up against a specific difference bewtween [humans] and the brute which eludes all materialist explanation: I mean the reflective reason.

When your attention, instead of being directed towards some object outside yourself, is directed towards  yourself as thinking or towards your own thinking process, that is the work of the intellect, that is [humankind's] special prerogative.

The phenomenon of the intellect, considered in itself, is not subject to any material laws or susceptible to any material explanation.

The person is the object of their own thought, and in the direction of that act they borrow nothing whatsoever from their material surroundings. 

Therefore, there is an absolute difference between "the living thing that can feel and the living thing that can reflect on its feelings". This is where neuroscience should apply its talents, towards all the manifestations of the intellect and its associated spiritual capacity, the will.

[*] The Beginning and End of Man, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1961 edition (first edition 1921)

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Women's full equality in the Christian family

Husband and wife ... a mutual submission of love, not of inferiority

For Christians, women and men have equal status. Christians also respect the complementarity of women and men as female and male. Women and men approaching marriage have to negotiate with each other the characteristics of that equality, how equality will play out in their real life situation. 

It's very easy for husbands to be lazy, and for wives to be overburdened but unwilling to say "No" as tasks and responsibilities multiply. That is why a clear plan from the start is imperative. Who is going to clean the toilet? Who is going to make the bed? Who is going to take a child to the doctor? It's been said often that love is not a noun but a verb. Love is not an emotion, but it is an act of the will put into effect. "I will love my spouse no matter what!"

The starting point is to recognize the facts:

Man and woman were made "for each other" — not that God left them half-made and incomplete: he created them to be a communion of persons, in which each can be "helpmate" to the other, for they are equal as persons ("bone of my bones ..." Genesis 2:23) and complementary as masculine and feminine. [Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 372.]

The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out. [CCC, no. 2333] 

This sounds all right and proper, but how does it stand against Paul's calls in Colossians and Ephesians for wives to submit to husbands?

Scripture scholars tell us that the "household code" that Paul discusses in those two letters, and the kindred admonition to "submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men; the king ... or to governors" (1Peter 2:13) were meant to persuade the society around them that they were not anarchists, given that Christians had broken from worshipping state and traditional gods, and were living with a great deal of freedom as to customary rules and regulations.

Those hierarchical codes, inherited by the New Testament writers from the ethical writings of Aristotle and from the patriarchical setting of Roman law, worked from the superior to the subordinate. So we have to acknowledge that Paul was a man of his time in giving guidance to new believers; he was also working somewhat under the constraints set by the dominant society.

However, we can see how Paul was not to be bound by such structures. In Colossians and Ephesians, he offers advice to the subordinates first and, secondly, he addresses all the social groups directly rather than through "the head of the household" - not "Husbands, teach your wives to be submissive" as was the customary manner of address.

More importantly, there is much that is fresh in Paul's exhortations, much that breaks from custom and the traditional strictures of  family life.

Paul gives each part of the household new status by addressing each independently, expressing a dignity that he had built into church practice by admitting wives and slaves to baptism independently of husband or owner. Also, if the husband or owner became a Christian, the wife and slave did not automatically do likewise, but could make their own decisions.  

More widely in the New Testament, as to the dignity of the individual, we find family ties could be abandoned in favour of becoming a disciple when the family authority had not accepted the subordinate's personal decision. It's easy to see how the enemies of the new "cult" would be quick to accuse it of undermining established social order.

Turning directly to the implications of the exhortation, "Wives be submissive to your husbands", we see that wives have been given dignity and autonomy that supercede the patriarchical codes. Ephesians expresses an equality between husband and wife by linking all behavior to the "ideal of mutual submission to Christ" (5:21).

To look at Colossians' "Wives be subject to your husbands", this is more holy advice than a statement of a rule. The freedom indicated is that of the wife's will, so that making a decision on how to act is a matter of being "subject as the Son is subject to the Father" (1 Cor 11:3; 15:28).  As to men, "Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her..." (3:19), "this not superiority associated with arrogance but instead [the] humility and love that must dictate the behavior of the baptized."  

In turn, to delve into the message of Ephesians, which whether directly or by another's hand, it is like Colossians in that it comes from late in Paul's ministry. So both are mature considerations of family life. The family code passage, 5:22-6:9, is qualified by 5:21, "by calling for the mutual submission of members one to another, and hence in a sense reverses the typical pattern of interaction in the household." Likewise, ...

Ephesians 6:9 relativizes the power of the heads of households by reminding them of the ultimate equality of all before God.

We have touched upon the constraints Paul and other New Testament writers were under, however:

Modern readers [of the New Testament] often ask why the profound sense among New Testament Christians that Christ had transformed the world did not lead to complete transformation of the social order.

The best answer seems to be that it was not seen as wise or practical to do so. ... [Paul's letters] frequently accept existing social arrangements in the process of evangelizing the urban world of the Greco-Roman city.  

Moreover, Paul seems to have been concerned that sudden changes in life or status could cause anxiety and disorder in the fledgling community (cf 1 Cor 7). 

A second element of uncertainty for some readers of Ephesians may come from "the use of marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between divinity and humanity..."

The problem lies in the fact that it is the husband who is seen to represent God or Christ and the woman who is the reflection of the human community (Church or Israel).

The marriage metaphor should never be taken, however, as a statement of male impunity in the face of female fallability.

Such interpretations are, in fact, precluded in the text itself not only by the call for mutual submission of 5:21, but also by the simple fact that both husbands and wives are [equally] part of the Church and ultimately subject to Christ. 

Ephesians is regarded as the most important text in the New Testament on the sanctity of marriage:

This text reveals that marriage can serve as a reflection of the relationship that is the very foundation of Christianity: the union between Christ and the community.

Marriage can serve as the ultimate model of self-giving love and the ultimate sign of God's dealing with the world. 

 A neat commentary on Paul's instruction is given by Fr Frank Doyle in Living Space:

The parallel between the relationship of a husband and wife and that of the Church and Jesus its Lord is full of meaning. Perhaps we have problems with the wife having to submit to her husband "in everything". But it is a submission of love not of inferiority and the same is required of husbands, who are to "love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy". 

Husbands are to love their wives "as they love their own bodies". They are to give at least the same level of care to their partner as they would to themselves. This clearly involves a mutual bonding of deep intensity and commitment which leaves little room for domination or exploitation by either partner. 

Proponents of "women’s liberation" may not be very happy with some of the things said about marriage and wives in that passage. We cannot change the passages which have many beautiful things in it but we do need to sift what is the Word of God and what reflects Paul’s being a man of his times. 

References:

Margaret Y MacDonald, "Ephesians", pages 1670-1686; Carolyn Osiek, "The New Testament Household Codes", page 1707; Cesar Alejandro Mora Paz, "Colossians", pages 697-1709 in The International Bible Commentary, William R Farmer ed., 1998, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN. 

Paul J Kobelski, "The Letter to the Ephesians" pages 883-890; Maurya P Horgan, "The Letter to the Colossians", pages 876-882, in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Raymond E Brown, Joseph A Fitzmyer, Roland E Murphy eds., 1990, Prentice Hall, NJ.

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