The Death of Humanity: and the Case for Life Hardcover – Illustrated, April 4, 2016

''The gas chambers of Auschwitz prepared not in Berlin, but in lectures of nihilistic scientists and philosophers'' - V. FranklVictor Frankl (holocaust survivor) - ''If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him.''Weikart agrees, says modernity 'corrupted by false concept of man.' Frankl continues . . .''When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.''''I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.'' (278)Thus work takes Frankl's observation seriously. Weikart starts with Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and the impact of the French Enlightenment. He continues with detailed analysis of dozens of thinker right up to the present. This serves as a historical description along with a theoretical commentary. Well done!''In eighteenth-century France, in the aftermath of Descartes and Spinoza, materialism gained in intellectual respectability, even though most Enlightenment thinkers rejected it and considered it inconsistent with their rationalist philosophy. The most notorious materialist of the French Enlightenment, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, provoked quite a stir among his contemporaries by authoring Man the Machine in 1747.''This ''materialist'' idea denied free-will - ''The brain, in turn, was just a cog in a ceaseless chain of cause and effect, lacking any ability to choose moral good or evil. Human behavior was shaped entirely by antecedent causes, including heredity, diet, and education.'' (508)ONE Man the MachineTWO Created from AnimalsTHREE My Genes Made Me Do ItFOUR My Upbringing Made Me Do ItFIVE The Love of PleasureSIX Superman’s Contempt for HumanitySEVEN A Matter of Life and DeathEIGHT The Future of HumanityWeikart's conclusion is supported by prominent professor Frank E. Manuel in ''Requiem for Marx'' on page 328; ''No follower of Jehovah is ever destroyed with the blind indifference of the Hegelian and Marxist historical process''Weikart continues . . .''However, the implications of La Mettrie’s reductionism, the penchant to reduce human mental and moral qualities to the physical, were much more far-reaching than his own behavior. If his worldview rescues humanity from the taint of sin and moral shame, it also eliminates any sense of moral goodness, respect, dignity, or love.'' (547)''One would hardly praise a machine for operating according to the laws of physics, and it seems grotesque to suggest that we might genuinely love a machine. Ultimately he thought all human depravity and evil was the result of mindless natural laws that have no intrinsic purpose or meaning. The ogres of history, such as Genghis Khan, or the vilest criminals, are not a blot on humanity, because they were not autonomous moral agents. Rather they were marionettes dancing along the stage of history without any ability to control their destiny.'' (547)''However, in reality La Mettrie’s view contributes to dehumanization, because it also reduces anything noble about the human spirit to mere atoms crashing against each other. Mother Teresa’s self-sacrificial love, Rembrandt’s and Bach’s masterpieces, and Newton’s intellectual achievements, are all reduced to the mindless functioning of physical laws. They are all machines. Beauty, truth, and moral goodness evaporate, losing all objective meaning.'' (547)''Their utopian project aimed at altering the environment, specifically the economic system, to reshape human nature and produce harmony and bliss. However, most people today do not associate Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot with harmony and bliss. Something apparently went wrong.'' (317)''But what was it? I am convinced that the main problem with communism was not their economic system. The corruption ran deeper. Their fundamental flaw was their impoverished view of the nature of humanity—their view that human behavior is determined by the environment.'' (317)''This stripped humanity of its dignity and undermined reverence for human life. Nazism and communism are two of the most obvious symptoms of the decline of respect for human life in the modern world. However, the erosion of the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic in Western culture runs much deeper.'' (317)''As long as many people in our culture, especially in the academy and media, regard human life as the chance product of impersonal forces having no real purpose or meaning, we will make little or no headway in combating the dehumanizing tendencies rampant in our society.'' (381)''The real question is: Whose worldview comports better with reality? It seems to me that the Christian worldview makes better sense of the human condition than do secular philosophies. Christianity teaches that humans are intrinsically valuable because they are created in the image and likeness of God. Their lives have purpose and meaning.'' (419)''They have attributes that set them apart from other animals, such as rationality, linguistic ability, creativity, free will, aesthetic sense, and religious yearnings. Their consciences let them know that some behaviors are good and others are evil, that love exceeds hatred, and that there is more to life than just getting as much sensual pleasure as you can.'' (419)''Though some thorough-going secularists admit that their worldview denies free will, objective morality, purpose, and the intrinsic value of themselves and their fellow humans, many try to evade some of these unsavory implications.'' (419)Last paragraph -''In the final analysis, then, I am suggesting that the solution to the death of humanity is a revival of Christian love and compassion, a renewed sense that human life has meaning and purpose, because we are created in the image and likeness of God.''Do atoms, trees, etc., desire 'meaning and purpose'? Why do humans?''I have complete confidence that the truth will ultimately prevail, and I wrote this book in the hope that we as a society can heed its warning to turn away from the false, but alluring, philosophies of nihilism to embrace the reality of a loving, personal God who cares about each one of us.''Faith in purpose or faith in nothing. Which?''To be sure, this book will spend more time discussing the problems, rather than the solutions, but hopefully it will rock the complacency of secularists and Christians alike and bring us all into the quest for solutions to our deepest spiritual problems.''“Seek and you shall find.” (457)(See - ''From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution'' by Etienne Gilson; this is an analysis by a leading scholar on the philosophical history of evolution from Aristotle to Darwin.)

I have three reasons for believing Jesus is alive in a new life with God or will be at the end of time: 1) historical Jesus, 2) arguments for God’s existence, and 3) the character defects of people who teach their children life ends in the grave. This book is filled with facts, explanations, and arguments in support of # 3. The book is very readable and interesting.I was happy to learn, for example, that Jean-Paul Sartre, who is supposed to be an atheist, admired the mass-murderer Joseph Stalin. As the book explains, Sartre acknowledges that Jesus saved mankind for meaning. I happen to know that Sartre did not say God does not exist. He only said that the concept of God is contradictory. The concept of a human being is also contradictory because we comprehend all that we do and all that happens to us, but we can’t define what a human being is. In other words, a human being is an embodied spirit or spirited body. While there are only arguments for God’s existence, we can prove that the human soul is spiritual with the metaphysical categories of form and matter.It is not clear to me that the author understands this because he criticized Darwin for “rejecting the existence of the human soul” (location 1020). He also says that the soul is the “the locus of sentience, reason, and will” (location 1652). More serious, in my opinion, is that he continually refers to the “materialist worldview” of “secularists.” If someone thinks they are Napoleon, it means they are crazy. It does not mean their worldview is that they are Napoleon.In my opinion, people who don’t admit that the human soul is spiritual are liars and should be confronted with their dishonesty. To continue a discussion with such a person about God and revelation violates Matthew 7:6 (“neither cast ye your pearls before swine”). I got into an email exchange with a retired professor of philosophy at a university in the United States about Thomas Nagel’s book that I quote below.The professor wrote a piece that sought to refute Nagel and I tried to explain why Nagel understood the “mind-body problem,” as it is called. I feel comfortable saying Nagel a dishonest person because he called “dualism” a traditional point of view:“Among the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some from of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism.” (Thomas Nagel,  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False , location 69 of 1831)My understanding is that dualism is just a bright idea from Descartes. The view of Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Church is “some form of neutral monism.” In my email exchanges with the professor, I tried to nail down exactly what our disagreement was. He dropped out of the conversation. This was my last email:I am very sorry that you both have lost interest in discussing religion with me. I take this as evidence that people who don't believe in God are suffering from cognitive dissonance. We agreed to the following:1) There is no evidence for life after death.2) The metaphysical argument for God's existence is contradictory and lacks content.3) Human beings do not have souls.4) The material world is not an illusion.Where we disagree is whether a human being is a collection of molecules or an unsolvable mystery (embodied spirit). In my judgment, there is zero chance that a human being is a collection of molecules and it is 100 percent certain that we are embodied spirits. What do you think?

Weikert's excellent historical study demonstrates the destructive consequences for human dignity and even human life which flow from the atheist-materialist worldview. He traces the rejection of the Christian ethic of the sanctity of human life from Comte and La Mettrie, Diderot and Hume through to the New Atheists of our day. Along the way, Weikert looks at the impact of Darwin's portrayal of humans as no different from animals and also traces the footprints of both genetic and environmental determinism as they lead into the bloody 20th and then the 21st Century.The conclusion which emerges clearly is that once a society dumps the notion of humans as created in the image of God - designed to have dexterity, consciousness, abstract thought and language, a soul and a conscience - then there is no foundation on which atheist philosophies can build a genuine respect for all human life. The disabled, those of Darwin's 'inferior races', babies in the womb and those near the end of life are all in danger of being shown the red card, (all for the improvement of the human race, you understand !)The obvious examples of this materialist worldview are discussed in detail: the European Eugenics movement, the Nazis' racism and genocide, the 100 million citizens of the communist regimes purged for the sake of 'Progress'; the abortion and euthanasia movements and today's focus on assisted suicide and even post-birth abortion. The most horrifying aspects of the story are the arguments of the American academics Pinker and Singer who fall so clearly into the same camp.Weikert is a Christian, which he makes clear from the start, and the book ends by drawing the obvious conclusion - that ideas have consequences. Unless we can believe in and live out an absolute respect for all human life, we will find ourselves on a slippery slope. We will struggle to find philosophical hand or footholds to keep us from, one way or another, aiding and abetting 'the death of humanity'.

A detailed and well-reasoned account of the development of materialist, humanist, secular thought through history to today, with clear yet comprehensive commentary on the fallacies, the logical ends taken and not taken, and the unspoken or borrowed assumptions undergirding such philosophies.Having Audible was a bonus, for as I couldn't put it down, I didn't have to put my life on hold, but could listen while I worked.

Read this book very quickly as it was very revealing about government's current secular view of the individual in society.

The Author did an amazing job in explaining how our culture has produce an Pro-death society. He does so by examining the philosophical system such as: materialism,evolution, nihilism, etc. I love the book.