Are Gentiles Human?

Marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. 

"Whether a marriage ceremony was conducted or not, it is not considered a legal marriage, and any child born of the union is regarded as having been born parthenogenetically, that is, he is always classified according to his mother's origins. If the mother is Jewish he is regarded as a Jew; if she is not, then he too is not Jewish. "  The Essential Talmud, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, p. 136

Jewish Telegraph Agency Sephardi leader Yosef: Non-Jews exist to serve Jews
By Marcy Oster October 18, 2010 10:40 pm

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel,” he said during a public discussion of what kind of work non-Jews are allowed to perform on Shabbat... 

The American Jewish Committee condemned the rabbi’s remarks in a statement issued Monday. 

"Rabbi Yosef’s remarks — suggesting outrageously that Jewish scripture asserts non-Jews exist to serve Jews — are abhorrent and an offense to human dignity and human equality,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. "Judaism first taught the world that all individuals are created in the divine image, which helped form the basis of our moral code. A rabbi should be the first, not the last, to reflect that bedrock teaching of our tradition." 

Israel and Anti-Gentile Traditions

"[Israel] Shahak, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2001, was for many years a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also led the Israeli Civil Rights League from the mid-1970s until 1990. In Israel, he was a controversial figure, but he was revered by the international left as a tireless advocate for human rights. 

Are Jewish Lives Worth More?

In Jewish History, Jewish Religion Shahak brings numerous texts and legal rulings to demonstrate Jewish antipathy to non-Jews. He mentions a passage from the Talmud that says that Jesus will be punished in hell by being immersed in boiling excrement. He relates that Jewish tradition teaches pious Jews to burn copies of the New Testament and curse the mothers of the dead when passing non-Jewish cemeteries. Shahak highlights the famous passage from Leviticus commanding Jews to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and mentions that, according to rabbinic interpretation, "thy neighbor" refers only to Jews.

Shahak further suggests that the Jewish tradition values Jewish life more than Gentile life. He cites Maimonides’ assertion that whereas one who murders a Jew is subject to the death penalty, one who murders a non-Jew is not (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Murder 2:11). According to another leading commentator, indirectly causing the death of a non-Jew is no sin at all (Rabbi Yoel Sirkis, Bayit Hadash, commentary on Bet Yosef, Yoreh Deah 158).

Shahak reiterates the well-known Jewish teaching that the duty to save a life supersedes all other obligations and notes that the rabbis interpreted this to apply to Jews only. According to the Talmud, "Gentiles are neither to be lifted [out of a well] nor hauled down [into it]" (Tractate Avodah Zarah, 26b). Maimonides writes: "As for Gentiles with whom we are not at war…their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; if, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued, for it is written: ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’–but [a Gentile] is not thy fellow" (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Murder 4:11).
Indeed, Maimonides is the focus of much of Shahak’s analysis. Shahak believes that the 12th-century philosopher and talmudist was a Gentile-hater and racist. He quotes Maimonides’ statement that, "their [the Turks and the blacks] nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings" (Guide For the Perplexed, Book III, Chapter 51). 

Practical Ramifications

Shahak recognizes that many of these traditions are not followed in practice, but he believes that, in general, they have been covered up, instead of confronted. In support of this claim, he refers to another a violent passage from Maimonides that is not translated in the bilingual addition of the Guide published in Jerusalem in 1962. He sees this as a deliberate deception on the part of the editors to soften classical Jewish militancy. His own English translation of the passage, which discusses the command to kill Jewish infidels reads: "It is a duty to exterminate them with one’s own hands. Such as Jesus of Nazareth and his pupils, and Tzadoq and Baitos [the founders of the Sadducees] and their pupils, may the name of the wicked rot."

According to Shahak, Jewish "traditions of contempt" infiltrated Zionism and have affected Israeli policy towards its Arab citizens and the Palestinians. He cites three main areas where he believes this has occurred: residency rights, employment rights, and equality before the law....

...Shahak was an ardent secularist and anti-Zionist, but he wrote his book as a challenge to Jews to engage the chauvinist, dehumanizing elements of Jewish tradition and to help create a self-critical and sensitive modern Judaism. It’s true that he combed the rabbinic tradition in search of hateful passages, often–though by no means always–misinterpreting them and taking them out of context, but this may be beside the point.

Jewish texts exist that can be–and are–understood to be vehemently xenophobic. These texts must be openly and honestly grappled with, explained, and if necessary, repudiated."

The Rabbinical Assembly for the Conservative Movement.

"The Torah teaches the equality of all human beings created in the image of God and is positive toward non-Israelites. Rabbinic literature similarly contains numerous positive statements about Gentiles. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that there are passages in rabbinic literature, kabbalah and medieval philosophical works that depict Gentiles in negative terms, as inferior to Jews and sometimes even as less than human. Many of these negative statements and depictions can be explained as normal reactions to the exceedingly cruel treatment of Jews by non-Jews, be it the Roman Empire, the Church or others. Some, however, go far beyond that, positing an exclusivist theology. 

Dealing with discriminatory laws and negative texts when teaching our tradition to youth and adults can be problematic, to say nothing of how we deal with them when interacting with Gentiles. This has become particularly acute in the Diaspora today where Jews are in constant contact with Gentiles and enjoy equal rights and equal status.  At a time when other religious groups, such as the Catholic Church, are re-examining their attitudes towards Jews and making changes in their dogmas to eliminate negative doctrines, we can hardly do less.

Unfortunately in Israel an extremely serious situation has arisen in recent times because of the publication of radical books such as Baruch HaGever and Torat HaMelekh, books lauded by a small number of well-known extremist rabbis in which non-Jews are depicted as being of a lesser species than Jews and in which slaying Arabs, including young children, is deemed permissible and even commanded. The so-called Halakhic positions of these rabbis have influenced fanatical groups of extremists and have led to acts of destruction, injury and death. In addition, as such studies as the recent Pew survey have shown, a large proportion of the Israel public holds negative opinions in regards to the Arab population, opinions that are voiced by some governmental figures as well.

For the first time in thousands of years, a Jewish State governs the lives of non-Jews. Jews constitute the majority and must deal with the status of the non-Jewish minority. Even though Jewish Law is not the civil law of Israel, it is influential and has been used by State appointed rabbis to make determinations about the rights of non-Jews that are discriminatory such as forbidding renting of rooms to Arab students. Even the Chief Sephardi Rabbi has made public statements questioning the right of Gentiles to live in the Land of Israel. Such negative teachings have led to halakhic decisions condoning violence....

... If we are not to descend to the level of simple apologetics, it will be necessary to deal honestly with the sources, to admit that different attitudes existed over the course of the development of Judaism and to candidly criticize and reject certain parts of the tradition while embracing others as representing the Judaism we wish to promulgate and which we believe represent the true core of Jewish belief beginning with the Torah itself."

Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos

"All people, we are told, have a soul formed from the husks (qelippah), but the Jewish soul is from qelippat nogah, which contains good.  The gentile soul, on the other hand, is from the other three qelippot, “which contain no good at all” (she-ein bahem tov kelal).  In addition, Jews have a divine soul (nefesh elokit), “a part of God above,” which is entirely absent in gentiles."  (cf. Tanya 1:1, end.  See Adin Steinsaltz, Be’ur Tanya, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1989), pp. 62-64.)

Pebbles of Wisdom taken from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"The definition of a Jew is beyond biology
It may be pertinent to point out a few important basic Jewish concepts that have become obscured as a result of the long controversy with Christianity and the defensive measures that had to be taken. 

In ancient times, the scholar of the Torah was not just an ordinary person with a gift for intellectual matters. He was considered a sort of repository of holiness. 

The implication of such an idea was that the Torah scholar, the talmid chakbam, is like a temple or an altar to which one offers gifts. To support and sustain him is a religious duty. 

The idea that the Patriarchs are the Chariot implies that they unite, almost physically, with the essence of the Divine so that holiness passes through them biologically, strange as this may seem. This means that the Divine spark is transferred to their descendants, irrespective of other facts. 

A Jew, therefore, was one who had this holiness in him; and if he decided to convert out of Judaism, it was a sign that he wasn't really a Jew in essence, even though he may have been born of Jewish parents. 

Similarly, a Gentile who became a proselyte was really a Jew in essence, even though he may not have been born of Jewish parents. 

The definition of who is a Jew is thus clearly beyond biology; it is simply one who has the holy spark. And, according to the Baal Ha-Tanya, the confirmation of this definition resides in the fact that in the last resort, when faced with some ultimate decision such as martyrdom, the Jew will offer himself to God.  

NOTE: In a section called "A 'Holy Nation' Includes Everybody" from We Jews, Rabbi Steinsaltz writes, "The existence of a 'holy nation' means that this role of world priesthood is not the role of a particular people within the nation, but of the entire Jewish people, with all its members great and small" (p. 147). "

Haaretz: Mad 'Max'? The Paradox of the Murdered Brooklyn Hasid
Debra Nussbaum Cohen    Jan 07, 2014 11:12 AM

What you do to the goyim is not the same as what you do to Jews,” said Samuel Heilman, an expert on Hasidic communities like Satmar. Heilman, author of “Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry” and a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College, is currently at work on a book about succession battles in Hasidic courts.
That attitude stems from days when Jews were actively persecuted, he said. “Part of the collective mind-set in the crucible of history when this part of Jewry was formed, the outside world was filled with anti-Semitism and persecutors. The whole understanding of that was that you need to keep a distance from them, that they are a different level of human being,” Heilman told Haaretz.
According to Samuel Katz, who was brought up as a Satmar but later became secular, boys in the community are taught that non-Jews aren’t quite human. Speaking from Berlin, where he is doing biomedical research on a Fulbright fellowship, Katz explained that growing up in such a community, “you don’t see commonality with people who aren’t Jewish. There is a completely different taxonomy of people. There are Jews and then there are non-Jews, who don’t have souls.”
When the messiah comes, “every boy is taught that the bad goyim will be killed and the good gentiles will have the privilege of serving us, of being our slaves," he told Haaretz. "The way Stark dealt with tenants is part of that world view… It’s not taking advantage of them, [rather] that is the world order you’re taught to expect.” 

Chabad Theology – The nature of the Soul
Posted on June 28, 2009 

The following is from the book "Kabbalah and Meditations for the Nations" by Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh .

To use the language of Chassidut, the Divine spark (or soul) of a Jew is considered an inner light (or pnimi), meaning that it is directly experienced and makes for part of his or her psychological makeup. The righteous gentile’s non Jew’s spark of Divinity is described as a “closely surrounding light” (or makif karov), meaning that it is psychologically experienced only indirectly. The Divine spark of non-Jews who are not considered righteous gentiles is akin to a “distantly surrounding light” (or makif rachok), meaning that it plays no conscious role in that person’s experience as a human being.

Even in this third case, due to the refinement of character that results from life’s trials and tribulations, and due to the Divinely ordained meetings between non-Jews and Jews which introduce the beauty of the Torah to the non-Jew, the “distant” spark may grow “closer” and the “close” spark may even desire to convert to Judaism. It is because of this latent potential innate in every non-Jew that we speak of all non-Jews as possessing a Divine spark. Indeed all of God’s creations are continuously brought into being by means of a Divine spark, but, only a human being, even if born a non-Jew, is able to convert in his present lifetime and become a Jew.

Mary: Co-Redemptrix

Major Premise: All grace comes from God. (dogma)
Minor Premise: God enters the world through Mary's womb. (dogma, Theotokos)
Conclusion: All grace enters the world through Mary's womb (dogma, Theotokos)

Major Premise: The work of God is the redemption of the world.
Minor Premise: We are God's co-workers (1 Cor 3:9)
Conclusion: Our work is the redemption of the world.

Major Premise: Mary pre-eminently cooperated with God's grace (see first conclusion)
Minor premise: All human beings are co-redeemers with God (1 Cor 3:9)
Conclusion: Mary is pre-eminently worthy of the title "Co-Redemptrix."

Yeah, it's pretty hard to break the logic.

Donald Trump: Democrat

Trump ran as a pro-life Republican even though:

1. "In many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in a 2004 interview. “It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans"
2. Trump called Bill Clinton prior to running in order to get Bill's approval to run for President.
3. None of Trump's children could vote for him in the 2016 Republican primary because none of them were registered Republicans.
4. Trump donated to the Clinton Foundation when Hillary became Sec of State.
5. Donald Trump also donated to Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand.
6. Ivanka Trump donated to Kamala Harris' re-election campaign.
7. Donald Trump bankrolled Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns.
8. Trump constantly praised Hillary right up until the day he ran against her.
9. Trump also praised Bill Clinton as "a great president".
10. Trump's Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. donated heavily to Hillary Clinton's PAC, and to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore. He worked for Goldman-Sachs and was directly employed by George Soros at Soros Fund Management.
11. Trump was head of the WWE, which organization specializes in setting up and selling fake fights between friends.
12. Ivanka and Chelsea have been Best Friends Forever since their teens.
13. Trump invited the Clintons to his wedding.
14. Trump ran on prosecuting Hillary but, upon winning, he immediately walked back the idea that he would ever prosecute the mother of his favorite daughter's BFF. 
15. Trump created one of the biggest tax increases in US history when he started the tariff wars. 
16. Trump signed off on giving Planned Parenthood a half BILLION dollars of US tax money.
17. Trump has ZERO problem with LGBTQ nonsense, as he has already demonstrated to Bruce Jenner. He re-iterated his confusion about basic biology in the Megan Kelly interview
18. Trump appointed two former law clerks of notoriously pro-abortion SCOTUS judge Anthony Kennedy to the SCOTUS: both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were pro-abort enough for Kennedy to hire them to help him write his opinions. Kavanaugh called Anthony Kennedy "a champion of liberty" shortly after Kennedy became the swing vote in keeping abortion legal in the Casey decision.
19. Trump has racked up even bigger government debts than Obama did. He even defended doubling the deficit by pointing out that he'll be out of office by the time it all comes crashing down.
20. Trump has long accepted money and support from George Soros, including a multi-million dollar loan to build Trump Towers and attendance at a Soros Christmas party for Oliver Stone. 
21. "Forget Soros. Leave him alone. He's got enough problems" Trump said at a 2011 Tea Party rally
22. Trump's son-in-law and White House advisor, Jared Kushner, did not disclose his ties to George Soros, Peter Thiel and Goldman-Sachs. Jared owes more than $1 BILLION to various groups, including Deutsche Bank.
23. Donald Trump was also named as a co-defendant with George Soros in a New York lawsuit, demonstrating that Chicago was not the only city Trump and Soros played in together. 
24. Jared Kushner and Donald Trump's companies have been legally selling visas to Chinese nationals for $500,000 per visa, making a profit of $50 million so far. 
25. Trump continued Obama's policy of incarcerating entire families and separating parents and children at the border, thereby impeding Catholic immigrants from fleeing violence.
26. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have similar tastes in conversation topics:  Clinton: After the "Access Hollywood" tape, Trump critics claimed that men "don't speak like that in the locker room." REALLY?!? "'Mike Wallace asked [Vernon Jordan], 'What do you and Bill Clinton talk about on the golf course?' and Jordan answered, 'Pussy.'" --"Clinton in Exile," 2009.  Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Conservatives constantly "defend" Trump by pointing out that his policies are identical to Obama's or Clinton's. Yeah.... about that defense. All it does is demonstrate that Trump is, in many respects, simply carrying out Obama's and Clinton's third term.

That's your defense?
Seriously???

Student Debt

Student debt is the only debt that cannot be gotten rid of through bankruptcy. This essentially makes those with student loans indentured servants to corporations.

People in debt won't start their own businesses, businesses that compete with current corporate ventures, because they can't afford to risk financial failure. Indentured servitude reduces on competition.

It also cuts down on internal corporate criticism. Someone who can't afford to lose a job won't do anything to rock the boat. Student debt makes employees docile.

People who are effectively indentured by debt and live in fear will not be making radical choices about how to live or how to change the world. That's a feature, not a bug.

On the Usefulness of Regulations

The Two Foundational Rules of System Design: 

1. Systems always produce precisely the results they were designed to produce.
2. What you intended your designed system to produce has no necessary correspondence to what you actually designed your system to produce.

The Rule of People in Systems:

1. People do not do what the regulations say they are doing.

Explanation:
As a former computer programmer, I am more aware of how rules actually work than non-programmers are.

A computer program is just a set of rules. As a programmer, I write these rules with a starry-eyed vision of what they will accomplish. Then I run the program and find out that the rule set is completely inadequate to the vision. I re-write endlessly, and after days/months/years of constant manipulation, I might gain some percentage of the original vision, but never the whole.

Now, that computer program is a rule set applied to an inanimate object: rules for electrified rocks. Rocks sit quietly while you impose rules. Rocks sit quietly while you tinker with, reformulate, and endlessly re-apply rules. Rocks apply rules precisely as you have formulated them, with no additions or subtractions.

Sentient beings do none of those things. People do not sit quietly while you impose rules. People do not sit quietly while you reformulate and re-apply rules. People do not apply rules precisely as you have formulated them, with no additions or subtractions.

This is why bureaucracies cannot succeed, even in principle. A bureaucracy is a group of people who do not realize they are pretending to be computer programmers. The faux-programmers formulate and apply rule sets to creatures who they do not realize are not rocks. The designed system does not produce the intended result. Ever. So, tinkering begins. Rules endlessly proliferate for the same reason computer programs suffer "code bloat." As the bureaucrats come to the depressing realization that their rule sets are not producing the desired results, the natural conclusion is that "just one more rule" will fix the situation. As any programmer will tell you, that approach never works.

I used to believe rules were more useful than I now understand them to be.

Priests of EWTN

A recent conversation about EWTN brought up the following interesting question: how many celebrity priests has EWTN gone through?

This is the list I was able to come up with.
It is not clear that this list is complete.
If you can think of anyone else, please let me know.


2002: Father John Bertolucci's bishop removes him from ministry and IDs him as one of 20 child molester priests in the diocese. EWTN silently expunged him from the network.

2003: Father Ken Roberts, accused of forced gay sex with a minor. He is suspended from the priesthood.

2005: Msgr. Eugene V. Clark is discovered to have a long-term sexual relationship with a married woman. The husband eventually has to get a restraining order against his wife to keep her away from the children.

2007: Father Francis Mary Stone, host of EWTN's Life on the Rock, fathered a child with an EWTN staffer. He leaves the priesthood.

2009: the aptly named Father Alberto Cutié, also fathers a child with a married woman.  He subsequently marries the woman he was seen groping on a beach, and became an Episcopalian priest.

2010: Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, admitted having sex with at least one woman, and that woman says he had sex with at least two more.

2011: Fr. John Corapi is accused of mismanaging money. An investigative panel appointed by his order alleged continuing sexual improprieties, drug abuse, and a lavish lifestyle contrary to his vow of poverty. He leaves the priesthood

2012: Franciscan friar Father Benedict Groeschel says children seduce priests and abusers on their first offense should not go to jail 'because their intention was not committing a crime.' He is banned from EWTN's Sunday Night Prime TV show.

2013: Fr. Thomas Williams, former Legionary of Christ, fathers a child with another EWTN staffer, Elizabeth Lev, who already had two other illegitimate children. She goes on to write a book with George Weigel.

2014: Fr. Frank Pavone is credibly accused of severe financial mismanagement by two different bishops under whom he served

2016: Fr. Francis Mary Stone (David Stone), 55, hosted a talk show for youth from 2001-2007 on EWTN. While working at EWTN he fathered a child with an EWTN employee, Christina Presnell. The child was born in 2008.

Then, of course, there is the close relationship between EWTN and the Legionaries of Christ. EWTN would end up buying the National Catholic Register, an LC newspaper. The Legionaries founder, Fr. Marciel Maciel, turned out to be a sexual predator.

In the space of twelve (12) years, EWTN went through a minimum of ten (10) celebrity priests.

Statues in the Tiber

Ed Peters, the rather nonsensical canon lawyer who likes to get clicks to his blog, has certainly gone above and beyond himself. He usually just charges lay Catholics with heresy, but has now implicitly laid the charge at the Pope's feet, as if he has the right to judge the Pope. If he were familiar with canon law, he would realize that he does not.

Ed opined "{T]he faithful have the right to trust that what they see in Catholic sacred places is actually there in service to the sacred and is not simply a gesture toward some form of political correctness or the latest cause du jour" ... my heavens, that IS laughable.

For instance, would old Ed object to the placement of, say, the American flag in the sacristy, because such a placement is pretty obviously just a "gesture toward some form of political correctness"?

If someone took that flag out of the sacristy and threw it in the river, or burned it, in order to protest the presence of the profane thing in the sacristy, would Eddy see no serious problem? Would he laud the refusal to set up idols like the American flag?

And to those who object, there is no question the American flag HAS become an idol to many American Catholics. The flag is at least as much an idol to Americans as those statues are to various other people. Think about it.

How many American Catholics voted for Hillary or Bernie or Obama, all politicians who are pure anathema from a Catholic standpoint? How many American Catholics voted for Trump despite Trump's attacks on the Vicar of Christ, despite Trump's clear dissonance with Catholic Faith in immigration matters? How many continue to defend the idol that is Donald Trump even after he gave a half BILLION dollars in federal funds to Planned Parenthood?

How many Catholics ignore Catholic teaching as it applies to America because "America First!"? Yet the same people who applaud the throwing of statues into the Tiber would be outraged if the American flag were removed from the sacristy and thrown in the river.

Look, I have zero problem with people throwing the statues in the Tiber. If they want to, fine. Similarly, if bishops want to put the statues in the sacristy, I can't stop them. The sacristy is under the control of the local bishop and the Pope. The statues have no meaning to me, nor will they ever, so sacristy or burned and drowned is all the same to me. Like the American flag, the statues don't mean what other people want them to mean. Placing something in the sacristy doesn't make it holy any more than consecrating a man of priest makes him henceforth sinless. There are all kinds of people and things in the sacristy which just aren't worthy of God, most especially, when I enter the sacristy, me.

The placements of the statues are simply performance art: neither putting them in the sacristy nor throwing them in the river has anything to do with being Catholic nor with Catholic liturgy.

I can reject private revelation, like Lourdes and Fatima and be a perfectly good Catholic.

I can ignore the statues I consider ugly or unnecessary and be a perfectly good Catholic.

I can shake my head in disgust when priest or laity place a national symbol in the sacristy which represents a country that murders unborn children, embraces eugenics, and endorses homosexual marriage. I will still be a perfectly good Catholic.

The statue controversy is just click-bait for Catholics who are determined to be angry about pointless, unimportant things. It serves the necessary weekly outrage that keeps most Catholic blogs alive, but beyond lining someone's pockets, it matters not at all.

REMEMBER: “Even if the Pope were Satan incarnate, we ought not to raise up our heads against him, but calmly lie down to rest on his bosom. He who rebels against our Father is condemned to death, for that which we do to him we do to Christ: we honor Christ if we honor the Pope; we dishonor Christ if we dishonor the Pope. I know very well that many defend themselves by boasting: “They are so corrupt, and work all manner of evil!” But God has commanded that, even if the priests, the pastors, and Christ-on-earth were incarnate devils, we be obedient and subject to them, not for their sakes, but for the sake of God, and out of obedience to Him.” — St. Catherine of Siena, SCS, p. 201-202, p. 222, (quoted in Apostolic Digest, by Michael Malone, Book 5: “The Book of Obedience”, Chapter 1: “There is No Salvation Without Personal Submission to the Pope”).

The "Faithless Elector" Problem

Let me begin by saying the electoral college is a brilliant idea, unmatched anywhere else in the world for balancing political interests, and it should definitely NOT be abolished. However, a common complaint against the electoral college is the problem of the "faithless elector".  Let me explain.

When we vote for president, we aren't actually voting for the president. We are ACTUALLY voting for an elector who will then take his or her place in a very temporary institution called the "electoral college." The electoral college comes together only once every four years, after the presidential election is over. The term of office is counted in days. It is the electors who cast their votes for president, it is the electors who elect the president, not the general public.

Once in the electoral college, the elector should, if everything goes according to plan, vote for the same presidential candidate that the state s/he came from voted for. That's the idea, but the Constitution doesn't actually REQUIRE any particular elector to vote in a way that agrees with the majority vote of his or her state. Some states have state laws which put this requirement on their electors, but the constitutionality of those laws is unclear - they have never been challenged. Certainly not all states even have such laws in place. So, theoretically, the elector can actually vote for whoever they darn well please. This has created no end of entertainment over the last 200 years.

Now, the complain made against the electoral college is precisely about those "faithless electors" who vote their own conscience instead of the "will of the people" of the state that put them into the electoral college. But here's the nub: what - exactly - is the will of the people?

When we elect a senator or representative, those ladies and gentlemen (and I use both terms very loosely) often don't vote the way we want. In fact, the only thing we can count on is that they ALWAYS vote the way THEY want.

This is how they do it: if their opinion on an issue is shared by the majority of the people who elected them, then they proclaim that they are championing the majority and vote with the majority. However, if the senator or rep's opinion is only held by the minority of the people who voted for them, then the senator or rep votes the minority and claims s/he is fighting for the rights of the oppressed!

That's why we have to be very careful who we vote for. Each person in Congress, SCOTUS or the presidency is going to do whatever they damned well please. Despite our luscious illusions to the contrary, neither the majority nor the minority have any control over that. Everyone in government does whatever is in their own interests. If it happens to be in the interests of the majority, well, isn't that grand? But if it isn't, then the majority be damned. If you can't please everyone (and you can't), then you have to please yourself.

So, when it comes to representation, a "faithless elector" is pretty much par for the electoral course..It's standard issue politics. I don't see why anyone would be upset about someone doing, as an elector, what everyone already does as a senator, representative, SCOTUS judge or president. We can't very well expect higher standards for the largely faceless members of the electoral college than we have for all the other, far more permanent, offices. 

Immigration and Original Intent

I love it when "conservatives" argue for Original Intent (tm) on gun control, but then promote Progressive arguments on immigration because they don't know any ACTUAL American history.

The Founders revolted from England in part because the King refused to maintain open borders. Read the Declaration of Independence:

"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither" 

The Founders (and present-day law) distinguished between immigration (entering the country) and naturalization (the ability to vote and hold office). Thus, the Constitution has VERY strict rules on naturalization, but none at all on immigration. In fact, there are NO federal laws restricting immigration until the 1875 Page Act, which embodied Darwinian eugenics to keep out the yellow Asian hordes. 

The only mention of immigration in the Constitution refers to the importation of slaves, the only mention of deportation (not immigration, btw - immigration is never mentioned) in federal law is the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In reaction to the A&S  laws, Thomas Jefferson (author of the Declaration) and James Madison (author of the Constitution) started the first federal nullification movement, wherein the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures passed resolutions declaring those specific federal laws invalid within their states. That is, Jefferson and Madison specifically and explicitly created those respective states as "sanctuary" states.

So, Trump's entire riff on this is actually a violation of the Founders' vision and constitutional law as embodied by the Founders for the first century of this country's history. The Page Act was passed in response to Darwin's work, and Trump has long been a proud eugenicist (as has virtually every President between Teddy Roosevelt and Trump, inclusive, with the sole exceptions of Reagan and GW Bush).

As the Cato Institute points out, the history is quite, QUITE clear.
You are backing a Progressive Darwinian eugenics argument.
Yours is the argument of a damned liberal, not an argument in line with the Founders' vision.

If you want to argue that times change, and the Constitution must change with it, that's Woodrow Wilson's argument. That's a Progressive argument.

Either you are for Original Intent (tm) or you aren't.
Choose.

How to Get Out of Being On A Jury

The elites like to control people, and the doctrine of jury nullification breaks their control, so they don't like it.

If you ever want to get out of jury duty, this is the easiest way to accomplish it. When the attorney asks, "Would X sway your ability to make a fair judgment in this case?", answer this way: 

"My opinion is my own. Gentlemen, once I am on a jury, my opinion IS the law. I stand in judgement not just of the defendant, but of the defendant's attorney, the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and even the very law itself. If I find anything in the conduct of the trial or the letter of the law that I do not like, that defendant will walk free, and - quite frankly - none of you have any recourse. I, and the eleven who stand with me on this jury, ARE the law. As a juror, I am the master of the law. You and the rest of the court are our servants, whose opinions about the law and the conduct of the trial we may choose to note, if we deem any of you worthy of our notice." 

You will be struck from the roster before you the last syllable finishes echoing from the courtroom walls. Every word of the paragraph above is true, you see, and they really don't want you to be saying that kind of stuff out loud.

Vegans and Socialism

Vegans and socialism go together like peanut butter and jelly, and have for at least a century:

"The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters....

And please notice that I am arguing for Socialism, not against it. But for the moment I am advocatus diaboli. I am making out a case for the sort of person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of Socialism, who has the brains to see that Socialism would 'work', but who in practice always takes to flight when Socialism is mentioned.

Question a person of this type, and you will often get the semi-frivolous answer: 'I don't object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists.' Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents....

...In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England....

...It would help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But that, I am afraid, is not going to happen." 

George Orwell, "The Road to Wigan Pier" (1937)

Vaccines

I have no particular brief against vaccines. They work, they reduce and eliminate nasty diseases. They are an important tool in the medical arsenal. But, like any tool, vaccines have problems. They aren't completely safe. After all, if vaccines are completely safe, then:

1. Why does the federal government maintain a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program which pays out money to, presumably, non-existent victims? Certainly, fiscal conservatives should be trying to shutdown this federal boondoggle, right? So, why don't vaccine supporters rail against this database and these "victim"payouts as the boondoggles they are?
2. Why does federal law uniquely insulate vaccine manufacturers from all product-related lawsuits, and force taxpayers to provide manufacturers with both complete immunity and with federally-funded, comprehensive insurance against all damage claims?

If vaccines are completely safe, there would be no need for federal law preventing lawsuits, no need for immunity, no need for a database of "victims", no need for payouts. Instead, we have federal laws insulating vaccine manufacturers from having to pay damages, we have a federeal database of victims, and we have a history of payouts to victims listed in the federally managed database.

I can't think of another industry that has this sweet of a deal.
If vaccines are completely safe, why waste federal dollars like this?

Now, whether or not vaccines are dangerous, it is certainly the case that the diseases being vaccinated against are dangerous. For instance, it is perfectly true that measles, although not particularly deadly, can cause injury and death. It is also certainly true that vaccines have wiped out smallpox, are on the verge of wiping out polio, and have greatly ameliorated many childhood diseases like measles, diptheria, pertussis, etc. Many of the childhood diseases are QUITE deadly (e.g., diptheria), and their reduction via vaccine is a boon to mankind.

However, there are also certainly discordant notes. For instance, why are vaccines in the US federally mandated? Japan, for instance, has no mandatory vaccine policy at all. In Japan, failure to vaccinate results in the payment of a small fine, that's it, yet Japanese vaccine compliance is very high. Japan, for instance, has a 97% measles vaccination rate and measles is no longer endemic to Japan. Japan accomplished this without government mandates and without government-funded immunity for vaccine companies. But, the Japanese refusal to implement government mandates results in Westerners writing odd paragraphs like the following: 

"Although many health-related indicators, such as life expectancy and the infant mortality rate show that the health situation in Japan is among the best in the world, there is a large gap between Japan and other developed countries in the use of vaccines to prevent serious infections. For example, the 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) was only recently approved in Japan (October 2009), more than 8 years after its approval in the UK. Many common vaccines, including those for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), the inactivated poliovirus vaccine, and combination vaccines, are not yet available in Japan....

[T]he epidemiology of meningococcal meningitis, ...has an incidence of around 1000 cases per year in England and Wales [4], but only around 10–20 cases per year in Japan [5]... Meningococcal vaccines are not available in Japan."

Why does the first sentence begin with "Although"? The entire science article begins with the assumption that Japanese vaccine policies are woefully backward and absurd, because Japan does not have any government mandates regarding vaccines. Yet, if government-mandated vaccines are crucial to stopping the spread of disease, the situation that same article so blithely described above should be literally impossible. Japan has no government mandates, so it should be suffering from an enormous caseload of measles. But it doesn't. Japan is measles-free. This is documented fact. So, why is the US government involved in protecting vaccine manufacturers when the Japanese have shown us that this is not necessary?

We can ask the same question in another way: exactly how dangerous are these diseases when compared to the vaccines we use to fight them? Well, let's take measles as an example. The United States has a population of 330,000,000. There have only been 1282 measles cases in 2019 (and this is a HIGH year). So, the chances of getting measles is currently about 1 in 260,000.

Currently, the chance of even catching measles is lower than the odds of being struck by lightning (1 in 180,746). Once you have contracted the disease, the risk of an adverse measles consequence, like pneumonia, is about 1 in 20. The worst adverse reaction is the least common: only 0.2% of the people who contract measles actually die from measles (and the risk of dying can be cut by 50% if vitamin A supplements are provided). So, which is more dangerous? The measles vaccine or the measles?

To find out, multiply the possibility of catching measles (1 in 260,000) with the possibility of serious adverse reaction (1 in 20) and you have roughly 1 in 5 million chance of suffering an adverse reaction from measles. Compare this to the CDC's estimate of the likelihood of an adverse reaction to the vaccine. According to the CDC, the chance of an adverse vaccine reaction is one in a million. So, here is the paradox: vaccines have worked so well for the general population that a statistician can reasonably argue s/he is five times safer to refuse to vaccinate and risk catching measles than s/he is to get the measles vaccine.

Are anti-vax fears that vaccines will harm or kill their children rational? In many cases, those fears are not rational: many anti-vaxxers fear vaccines on completely irrational, essentially superstitious, grounds. But not always.

We must admit that some of their fears are grounded in facts which the official narrative either seriously underplays or completely dismiss. The facts, indeed, the CDC's own website, demonstrate vaccines are not completely safe. The facts do not support the idea that government-mandated vaccines, and government-funded protection of vaccine companies, are warranted. US vaccine policy does raise valid questions: if vaccines are completely safe, why DO we have government mandates and government immunity for vaccine manufacturing companies? If the individual is duty-bound to bear possibly adverse consequences of the vaccine, from whence comes this duty? When does society have the right to compel an individual to risk personal harm in order to assure a common good?

The anti-vaxxers frequently offer irrational arguments, but the pro-vax arguments aren't fully rational either, at least not from a mathematical perspective. 

Both sides need to acknowledge that the other side has valid points. It is amazing how many people on both sides of the aisle are unwilling to acknowledge that the situation is not necessarily as clear-cut as either side paints it. 

What's Wrong With Designer Babies?

“What’s so bad about creating designer babies?” asks John Stossel:

“Jenna Bush Hager, who's the daughter of former President George W. Bush, recently said that "there should be things that we leave up to God."

"I'm not really sure I'm going to take her word for it," says Brennan. "If God appears before me and says 'don't do this,' I'll stop." 

But why would God say stop?

God would have at least three reasons to say “STOP!” and all three of those reasons revolve around the definition of the word “person.” Mr. Stossel, apparently doesn’t realize it, but by even asking the question, he has put himself in league both with the Progressive liberals who gave us the eugenics mindset and with Karl Marx, whose worldview led logically to Stalin’s socialism. These groups, and others like them, consider persons to be objects, things to be manipulated, and not subjects, persons to be honored.

John Stossel Isn’t The Only One Confused

Although its meaning serves as the foundation for Western law and culture, the Western definition of the word “person” is almost entirely lost. Today, instead of adhering to the ancient Western definition, we attempt to substitute various other worldviews. When we succeed, Western culture always loses.  For instance, most rabbis will assert the soul arrives at “first breath”, that is, at birth. This is the viewpoint we recently enshrined in US law via RvW. It is legal to abort up to the moment the child has “breath in its lungs.” When a fetal body is found in a toilet, the prosecution of the mother for murder relies solely on that test. US law aligns perfectly with Jewish faith.  Substituting Islamic views works no better: Muslims allow abortion, which is just an extreme form of genetic editing, almost universally before four months gestation, and any time the mother’s life is at risk. Hindus, who say every living thing possesses an individual, eternal soul, place the transmigration of the soul into a new body anywhere between conception and birth, depending on exactly which Vedic tradition is followed. Buddhists say there is no such thing as a human soul, but they still view abortion negatively; a Buddhist monk can be expelled from his monastery for assisting in abortion. For both Hindus and Buddhists, it creates very bad karma.

John Stossel is now trying his hand at the game by substituting scientism’s definitions. Some in Stossel’s school would argue “life” or “personhood” begins at “viability”, others, the first appearance of a complete central nervous system, or the first appearance of a heartbeat, or the implantation of the blastocyte in the uterine lining, or the moment of conception, which generally occurs after the egg has travelled about a third of the way down the Fallopian tubes. In each case, the biological event is emphasized as the test for “personhood.”  This emphasis on scientism, on physical tests, is precisely what Stossel endorses and Stalin desired.

The problem is simple: none of the worldviews above were involved in defining the original term. Instead, each necessarily distorts the word’s original meaning in order to shoehorn the term into their worldview. “Person” was defined in a formal, scientific way, nearly two millennia ago. But, the original, ancient definition is entirely incompatible with most modern agendas. Unfortunately, insofar as the word “person” is successfully redefined to fit one of the viewpoints above, Western civilization ceases to exist. By redefining the term, some other form of civilization will, for better or worse, have taken its place.

The Original Definition

The term originated in the formal science that forms the basis for Western civilization. A formal science is quite different than an experimental science. Unlike the latter, formal science does not require experiment. Formal sciences begin with basic propositions and extrapolate a logical framework from those basics. They don't use experiments. The best-known example of a formal science is mathematics.

In math, an axiom is a statement or property considered to be self-evidently true, but yet cannot be proven.  In 1911, the mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead sought to prove that the axioms of math were never self-referential, never self-contradictory. The culmination of their work was the Principia Mathematica, hailed as a masterpiece. Kurt Gōdel, the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, created his “incompleteness” theorem, to counter-demonstrate that the Principia, indeed any logical system as complicated as arithmetic, cannot avoid being self-referential. Math is built upon concepts that simply must be accepted in order to build the logical framework:

"Therefore, it is in fact both true and unprovable. Our system of reasoning is incomplete, because some truths are unprovable."  

We know that the propositions of arithmetic are true. We don’t know how to, in fact, we cannot, prove they are true.

Here’s an unwelcome shock: like math, theology, specifically Christian theology, is also a formal science. Christian theology starts with basic propositions concerning the nature of persons. It then builds a logical framework upon those basic propositions using the tools described in Aristostle's "Logic." In fact, Kurt Gōdel used modal logic to demonstrate the validity of Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God.

Christian theology created the definition of the word “person.” The central mystery – a word we shall return to – the central mystery of Christian theology is the nature of the Trinity. In order to describe the Trinitarian reality, a Christian theologian, Tertullian, stole a Latin stage term, a word used for the mask an actor wore on stage: persona. He then completely redefined this term and used the word to describe the three “Persons” of the Trinity: God is one substance in three persons. The discussion that resulted from this simple statement would eventually result in the creation of both the Declaration of Independence and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Tertullian's Foundation

Tertullian distinguished “nature” from “person.”  “Nature” is the range of actions an entity can take. “Person” is the agent who does it. God’s substance is the Divine Nature. The Divine Nature consists of the Divine Intellect and the Divine Will. The Divine Intellect knows all there is to know, the Divine Will chooses the good. The Divine Persons are the Father, Son and Spirit. Each Divine Person entirely owns the one Divine Intellect and the One Divine Will.  The Divine Nature is not shared. Each Person within the Godhead completely possesses to Himself the single Divine Nature.

The mystery of the Trinity is not the existence of the Divine Nature nor the existence of the Three Persons. The mystery lies in how each Divine Person can completely possess the single Nature without sharing.  We know that it is true. We do not know how it is managed.
We have no experience with such a thing. My intellect and will is mine, I do not share either my intellect nor my will with you, nor do you share either of yours with me. Yet, with the three Divine Persons it is not so. Each Divine Persons completely possesses the one single Divine Nature. The Three Persons know with the same Intellect, the three Persons choose with the same Will. To speak metaphorically, the Three Persons are always of one mind, one heart. This must be true because there is only one God. We do not know exactly how this is accomplished within the Godhead. We do know the answer resides in the relationships between the Persons.

Relations Define Persons

The relationships are simple. The Father eternally begets the Son (active relationship), the Son is eternally begotten by the Father (passive relationship). The Father and Son (or the Father alone, if you are Eastern Orthodox) eternally breathe forth the Spirit (active relationship), the Spirit is eternally breathed forth (passive relationship).  If it were not for these four relationships, there would be no Persons. So, we know relationship defines the Divine Persons.  The Father pours everything He is into the Son, the Son, seeing what the Father does, pours everything He is into the Father. This mutual, total, self-gift is Himself the third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit. Total self-gift is Divine love. This is what we are meant to image.

The paragraph above took moments to write. It took six ecumenical councils, ending with Third Constantinople (680-681 AD) and nearly seven centuries of argument to hammer out the details. The simplest definition of “person” comes from Boethius: “an individual substance of a rational nature." In modern terms, we can say a person is “that which possesses an intellect and a will.”

Notice: a physical body is not necessary to personhood. God is pure spirit. God does not have a body. So, personhood is not defined by body or bodily functions. The Divine Nature consists only of intellect and will, nothing else. The relationships that define the Divine Persons center on intellect and will. “Intellect” means rational thought, “will” means rational choice. So, God is Pure Rationality. But God is not just Pure Rationality. We also know God is Love. The ancient personhood debate revealed that the only rational choice, in fact, the only rational relationship, the single rational relationship which very literally defines all persons, is love. Love is identical to pure rationality.

Jefferson’s Declaration 

This was rather a surprising result, but that single result created Western civilization, because it defined how human beings, human persons, are meant to interact with each other. God is three Persons. Man is made in the image and likness of God. To be fully persons, man must imitate God. This is how theology gets around the self-reference problem that plagued math.

While God loves all things into existence, humans are singled out. From the first moment of our existence, the Persons of God actively forms relationships with us, thereby making us persons. The Father actively begets the Son, the Son receives. The Father (and Son) actively breathe forth the Spirit, the Spirit receives. The Spirit actively pours Himself into us, we receive the Spirit. We in turn actively love God and each other, pouring ourselves out in service of each. Thus, we are images of God. We are persons because of our relationships with God (primarily) and with each other (secondarily). God’s relationship with each of us makes us persons. As images of God, our relationships with each other in a sense “confirm” our personhood.

Thus, the Declaration of Independence, written by a Deist, echoes Christian Scripture. It proclaims “that all men are created equal” by God (Gal 3:28). Jefferson knew men’s bodies are not equal: some are weak, some strong, some capable, some less so. Jefferson certainly didn’t mean biological equality or even equality in opportunity. Equal opportunity is an empty catch-phrase if the resources to leverage that opportunity vary wildly, as biological capacity certainly does. Jefferson meant "equal in rights," but which rights?

The last book of Christian Scripture was written a scant century before the personhood debates began. The recognition of which books had Divine origins occurred just as those debates reached their heights. Christian Scripture was defined simultaneously with "personhood." The New Testament insists all persons have equal right to hope for salvation (Gal 3:28).

Jefferson was a Deist, but he was also a deeply serious student of the New Testament – in fact, he created his own expurgated version. He simply repeated Scripture. Since God has dignity and God has rights, we who are made in His image, have dignity, we have rights. Since the Persons of the Trinity are co-equal in all things (except relationship), every human is co-equal in this dignity and these rights. His Declaration of Independence recognizes the Divine origin of the equal rights of persons. Not equal capacities, not equal opportunities, not equal biologies, but equal rights to “the pursuit of Happiness,” which, even for a Trinitarian-denying Deist, meant happiiness not just in this life, but primarily happiness in heaven.

In the Declaration’s phrasing, Jefferson echoed the idea that each “person” is made in the image and likeness of God. Jefferson despised Trinitarian theology, but because the Christian concept of "personhood" founded his entire worldview, he literally could not avoid grounding the Declaration in this very same Trinitarian theology, in the theology of personhood. Man images God via Divine grace, man bears likeness to God via the human soul, composed of the human intellect and human will. We are persons because God calls us to be in rational relationship with Himself, the Persons of the Trinity. Man’s likeness, his intellect and will, make him rational, makes personal relationship possible. Our rational capacity not only makes us persons, it allows us to name ourselves homo sapiens, man of wisdom. It gives us dignity, it gives us rights. Though he was not a Trinitarian, given what Jefferson wanted to say, he had nowhere else to go.

The Lessons of Personhood

We can take several lessons here. First, only Christianity has ever had this extensive debate. No other worldview requires a definition of personhood, so no other system ever clarified what personhood is. The center of Christian theology revolves around personhood because the centerpiece of Christian theology is contemplation and union with the Persons of the Trinity.  Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, name whatever “-ism” you wish, none of them have so strenuously struggled to precisely define personhood, as Christianity has. Most worldviews have not even recognized it as an essential issue.

Second, the heart of personhood is rational relationships. While Christians rightly discarded massive amounts of Greek and Latin writings that incorrectly described how the world worked, the one writing the West never lost was Aristotle’s Logic, His description of how to consider all matters rationally was a touchstone for all of Christian thought. The Christian emphasis on rational consideration reached one of its notable high points with Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. The Summa, Aquinas’ attempt to systematically present the basics tenets of Christianity, was enshrined along with the Scriptures on the altar at the Council of Trent. Unlike Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, the Summa avoided the self-reference problem by demonstrating everything ultimately derived from the Persons of God.

Third, personal relationships do not rely on biological function. The soul is the form of the body, the body is the tool of the soul. If one person has a faulty tool, a body incapable of communicating with other human persons as well as we might prefer, this in no way impairs that person’s relationship with God. That individual’s rights are still equal to the rights held by any other person, for the rights do not flow from government, but from God, from His relationship with each human person. God is completely self-sufficient. He doesn’t need us. The rationale for each personal relationship is not utility, but love.

How It Fell Apart

We smile when Tony Stark says to his daughter "I love you tons" and the little one replies, "I love you 3000!" We know instinctively that there is something childishly erroneous about the exchange, which is what makes it adorable.

The two, both adult and child, are mixing experimental science with formal science. The formal science of theology describes relationships via quality ("I love you..."). Experimental science describes relationships via numbers ("tons," "3000!").  When doing experimental science, when describing objects, numbers decide. When doing formal science, describing rational qualities of the soul, love decides.

The two sciences do not overlap. Experimental science has no way to quantitatively measure qualities of the soul, i.e., qualities of the person, like love, honor, sin, vice, virtue. Similarly, theological sciences, which are created to describe the quality of relationships between persons, has no place for quantitative measure. "3000" and "tons"  are not measures theology can use. 

Like many ancient philosophies, pagan Rome and Greece philosophies disliked experiment, preferring the life of the mind over that of the hands.  In both of their Divine pantheons, the god who worked with his hands, Vulcan/Hephaestus, was the only god who was ugly, physically deformed and constantly cuckolded, the only god ejected from heaven. The work of the hands was the work of slaves. This is why Judaism and its son, Christianity, were both considered the religion of slaves: the God of Genesis worked with His hands in the clay of the earth, as a slave would.

In addition, all pagan philosophies assigned personal agency to inanimate objects. Both their theology of nymphs, naiads, dryads and their philosophy, in which Aristotle argued that even inanimate objects have a kind of purpose and action, reinforced this view. For example, Aristotle asserted rocks fell because they "wanted" to be at the center of the universe (the earth). While Christianity slowly converted the pagans to a new worldview, many old misunderstandings, which were not obviously related to Christian theology, were slower to be abandoned. Experimental science was recognized as valid – both the Old and the New Testaments contain descriptions of experiments and emphasize the importance of the physical test – but, the formal sciences were held in highest regard. As a result, Greeks, Romans and early Christians all made a serious error: the formal sciences of theology and philosophy, not the experimental sciences, were used to define both the relationships between persons and the relationships between objects.

As Christian theology more deeply suffused every aspect of European thought, the problem created by this mis-match became more apparent. The problem was complex. Human persons are a unity of subject and object, soul and body. The seven Christian sacraments used to minister to man's body/soul unity are themselves a unity of divine grace and creation. Distinguishing object from subject, body from soul, without harming the correct understanding of either, was not an easy task.

Various attempts were made to solve the problem. Some, like Martin Luther, tried to resolve it by throwing away the Christian theology of sacrament, which could only be done by repudiating logic itself. Luther's cry "Reason is the whore of the devil!” resulted in the absurdity we call "blind faith." The "blind faith" movement was nonsensical, but it meant hard thinking was no longer necessary. This appealed to many unwilling to do the hard work of thinking clearly. A century later, Galileo demonstrated the formal science and language of math was superior to the formal science of theology in describing how objects interacted, but by then, it was too late to fix the error Luther had introduced. Within a century, England’s last Catholic king was overthrown (1688). From that point forward, the Protestant appeal to “blind faith” ruled the English colonies.

While England was never Lutheran, Protestant England adopted much of Luther’s worldview. Luther’s rejection of formal logic and insistence on an incorrect understanding of fallen human nature, led him to a false understanding of rationality, faith and personhood itself. Mathematical fields developed by Catholic scientists, like Pascal’s discovery of statistics and Galileo’s discovery of mechanics, focused attention on objects instead of persons. These trends seemed to tear theology in two. This, in turn, meant that by 1896, Andrew Dickson White could write his book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and have its wildly erroneous history accepted as Gospel truth, Today, America, still a Protestant culture to its core, considers logic and religious faith contradictory, simply because its entire experience with religious faith is the experience of Luther's Protestantism, a worldview that barely acknowledges the original Christian development of the “person.” This loss of memory was not always accidental.

Stalin Understood

Few people realize that Josef Stalin spent five years in study at the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, Georgia, wearing cassocks every day and living the life of a seminarian. He was also one of the seminary’s top students before he was expelled. Though an atheist when he ruled the Soviet Union, he had been trained in liturgical Christianity, Russian Orthodoxy. He knew the history of the word “person” intimately.  So, when the UN began formulating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he made a point of having Soviet diplomats object to the documents’ use of the word “person.” Since the word “person” was a religious term, such use, the Soviet atheists said, constituted the establishment of Christian faith as the overarching worldview of the UN. The Soviets insisted rights flowed from government to human beings. The word “person” implied rights derived from something other than government. American diplomats, being Protestant and relatively ignorant of Christian history, had no idea what the Soviets were talking about.

But Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain and René Cassin, two of the principals behind the Declaration, understood Stalin’s objection. This is part of the reason the Declaration starts not with a right, but with a definition:

Article 1 . All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. 

As we can now see, the Declaration's definition is simply a paraphrase of the definition of the word “person” hammered out by the ecumenical councils a millennium before. It omits only Jefferson's observation that the Creator is the One Who endows human beings with freedom, equality, dignity, rights, reason and conscience. Since the UN document used. at the insistence of an Indian delegate, the phrase “human being” instead of the word “man” or “person”, and did not reference the Creator, the definition was generally accepted. The document passed. The Soviets abstained from the vote. The ancient Christian understanding of the word “person” is now enshrined not just in the Declaration of Independence, but also, via the UN, as a fundamental value of all nations. It has had a profound effect on the development of not just two millennia of Western European culture and law, but on all subsequent international law.

Returning to the Problem

So, when does the person begin existence? Experimental science, which deals only with the human body, cannot tell us. But the formal science of theology can. Follow the logic: sin is the absence of the grace necessary to be in full, rational relationship with God. Since persons alone are called into relationship with God, only persons can sin. Non-persons, such as chairs, dogs, or clumps of cells, are not persons and cannot sin. The Blessed Virgin Mary is a simple human person, a woman. She is also the Immaculate Conception. If  Mary is sinless from the moment of conception, she must be a person from the moment of conception. Since we are all, apart from sinlessness, no different from Mary, then we are all persons from the moment of conception. The left rejects this reasoning as empty religious posturing. The right refuses to supply this reasoning for fear of being accused of imposing theocracy. And so we stumble together, hand-in-hand, towards Stalin. Given what we are willing to say, we have nowhere else to go.

The moment of conception is not just a biological event, it is also, and primarily, a theological event. Experimental science can demonstrate the biology, but it can never demonstrate the theology. Insofar as we emphasize the biology, insofar as we attempt to define “person” as something man defines instead of something God establishes, we support Stalin’s objection.

When Stossel insists on "designer babies", he insists on a child made by committee, designed by teams, treated like an object. Each child will have not one, but a thousand fathers, not one, but a hundred thousand mothers. This is a "child" whose existence does not flow from the love between persons, but a "child", a person who has been redefined by government committee - and who really believes government will not get involved? -  to the nth degree.

Ovulation, ejaculation, uniting gametes in a lab dish, allowing a conceptus to reach a particular stage of development, whether in the womb or out, all of these biological stages are regulated by human persons. A government is just a group of human persons acting together.

So, if we accept the idea that personhood flows solely from a biology controlled by men, then we accept that personhood results solely from a group of human persons acting together. We will have judged Stalin right and Jefferson wrong: rights flow from government, from human persons, not from Divine Persons, not from God. The original definition of “person” will be changed, and we will no longer be ruled by either the Declaration of Independence, nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will be ruled by capricious, ordinary men and women. Our rights will flow from their whims. Two millennia of constant usage will have gone by the wayside. The word “person” will have been successfully redefined. Western civilization will be at an end.