Instead of always being one of the chief bastions of the social status quo, the Church is to develop a Christian counter-culture with its own distinctive goals, values, standards, and lifestyle — a realistic alternative to the contemporary technocracy which is marked by bondage, materialism, self-centredness, and greed. Christ’s call to obedience is a call to be different, not conformist. Such a Church — joyful, obedient, loving, and free — will do more than please God: it will attract the world. It is when the Church evidently is the Church, and is living a supernatural life of love by the power of the Holy Spirit, that the world will believe.
Life After Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 21-25, 181-84.
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Despite the wide variation in the circumstances surrounding close calls
with death and in the types of persons undergoing them, it remains true
that there b a striking similarity among the accounts of the
experiences themselves. In fact the similarities among various reports
are so great that one can easily pick out about fifteen separate
elements which recur again and again in the mass of narrative that I
have collected. On the basis of these points of likeness, let me now
construe a brief, theoretically "ideal" or "complete" experience which
embodies all of the common elements, in the order in which it is
typical for them to occur. ¶ A man is dying and, as he reaches the
point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead
by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a low ringing
or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly
through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself
outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical
environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is
a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual
vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval. ¶ After a while,
he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition.
He notices that he still has a "body," but one of a very different
nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has
left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and
to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have
already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never
encountered before — a being of light — appears before him. This being
asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and
helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of
the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself
approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the
limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he
must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet
come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his
experiences.
It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions. And, supposing there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we ight enter it as a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.
Aside from the light it may shed on the abortion question, the issue of infantacide is both interesting and important in its own right. The theoretical interest has been mentioned: it forces one to face up to the question of what makes something a person. The practical imprtance need not be labored. Most people would prefer to raise children who do not suffer from gross deformities or from severe physical, emotional, or intellectual handicaps. If it could be shown that there is no moral objection to infanticide the happiness of society could be significantly and justifably increased. Infanticide is also of interest because of the strong emotions it arouses. The typical reaction to infanticide is like the reaction to incest or cannibalism, or the reaction of previous generations to masturbation or oral sex. The response, rather than appealing to carefully formulated moral principles, is primarily visceral. When philosophers themselves respond in this way, offering no arguments, and dismissing infanticide out of hand, it is reasonable to suspect that one is dealing with a taboo rather than with a rational prohibition.
I’ve seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. But, as you know, Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They’re better than they seem. [Father] Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth — with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has to hear a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence. If [I] believed in an all-powerful God [I] would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely. [S]ince the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence?
One reason the question of the morality of infantacide is worth examining is that it seems very difficult to formulate a completely satisfactory liberal position on abortion without coming to grips with the infanticide issue. The problem the liberal encounters is essentially that of specifying a cutoff point which is not arbitrary: at what stage in the development of a human being does it cease to be morally permissible to destroy it? It is important to be clear about the difficulty here. The conservative’s objection is not that since there is a continuous line of development from a zygote to a newborn baby, one must also conclude that if it is seriously wrong to destory a newborn baby it is also seriously wrong to destory a zygote or any intermediate stage in the develpment of a human being. His point is rather that if one says it is wrong to destroy a newborn baby but not a zygote or some intermediate stage in the develpment of a human being, one should be prepared to point to a morally relevant diffference between a newborn baby and the earlier stage in the development of a human being.
One of the interesting ways in which the abortion issue differs from most other moral issues is that the plausible positions on abortion appear to be extreme positions. For if a human fetus is a person, one is inclined to say that, in general, one would be justified in killing it only to save the life of the mother. Such is the extreme conservative position. On the other hand, if the fetus is not a person, how can it be seriously wrong to destroy it? Why would one need to point to special circumstances to justify such action. The upshot is that there is no room for a moderate position on the issue of abortion…
There is, however, a form of the fallibility principle which is both significant and acceptable. It holds that even one’s most cherished and tenaciously held convictions might be false and are in principle always subject to rejection, reformulation, improvement, or reformation.
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever-growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success,” to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
Richard Feynman, "Adapted Caltech 1974 Commencement Address", Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman (1985), p. 341.
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The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.