More Muggeride to consider

Here are a couple more quotes from Malcolm Muggeridge for you all to chew on.

“Words can be polluted even more dramatically and drastically than rivers and land and sea. There has been a terrible destruction of words in our time.” The End of Christendom, p. 2

“As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument. Faith that makes us think of credo (I believe), rather than of scio (I know). He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived intuitively by the heart, not by reason. . . . Faith does indeed tell us what the senses do not tell, but does not contradict their findings. It transcends but does not contradict them. Pascal repeats, ‘Faith is the gift of God.’” The End of Christendom, p. 6

"Because (Pascal) understood how important humility is and because he could recognize the arrogance that was growing up among scholars and learned people, he foresaw the dangers that the Enlightenment would bring. He knew that as never before in history a choice was going to confront man between seeing the whole future of mankind in terms of man shut up in his physical being--as we say today, in his genes--and the alternative of accepting in humility and contrition a role in the purposes of a loving God." The End of Christendom, pp. 7-8

I look at the world some thirty years after this lecture and shudder to think that Muggeridge may be right. Like C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Muggeridge almost speaks prophetically to us, warning us of the dangers of unrestrained and proud science. If the whole of human existence is wrapped up in our genes, and if we are able by science to alter that structure as we see fit, who then determines what is an improvement or a defect? Who gets to say what is the "ideal human" or the perfect man or woman? As Lewis notes, the only ones left to make this decision are also human, and as such, subject to the same potential "evolutionary" changes in their genes as the rest of us. What makes this "elite" group more capable to decide what is proper or not in human genetic development? Who gets to decide?

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!