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Monday, December 05, 2005

We're know-nothing religious fundamentalists

Dr Peter Singer, the Princeton bioethicist who advocates abortion up to birth, infanticide and euthanasia of elderly and disabled persons, has claimed that belief in the value of human life from conception to natural death will be confined to 'a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists' by 2040. Dr Singer made his comments in the September/October edition of the Foreign Policy journal.
[From SPUC]
Well, I don't claim to know much about nothing, so I am not going to be offended by the know-nothing part, and I suspect that for Singer religious is broadly equivalent to fundamentalist. But does Singer thinks that, for example, Jerome Lejeune would have seen more clearly if he had been allowed to live to 2040?* That our late (or indeed current, and make the appropriate changes in tense) Holy Father would have changed his mind, or that he was a know-nothing religious fundamentalist?

*A question about tenses. Lejeune is dead. But if he were still alive, and were to live to 2040, he would see more clearly. How to put that in one sentence? It's the fact that he's dead that is causing me difficulty.