Charles K. Bellinger

This is largely a pro-life essay, nonetheless a cogent one. Very good summary of historical trends with respect to the concept of personhood, “rights,” and the nature of Christianity and its role in shaping western consciousness with respect to moralityl. He puts the Aquinas view of being (“reality”) vs the nominalist view (as expressed by Ockham).
The dimensions described are vertical (great chain of being), horizontal (societies), and individual—the latter actually reigning today. The vertical concept (i.e. god, king, subject etc) was “discredited” at the time of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; the horizontal concept was perverted by the atrocities of Communism and Fascism; now it is the sacrosanct individual, the monad, which when taken to the current extremes “others” all external to the self. A mother’s taking of her fetus’ life is considered the apotheosis of violence, an extreme example of othering.

“Othering” is the objectification of those outside of the self.

Bellinger reviews the ideas of different anthropologies’ thinking about rights mentioned in John Evan’s book What is aa Human? What the Answers Mean for Human Rights: philosophical, biological, social, and theological. “1. a phlosophical anthropology identifies personhood primarilyh with developed rationality; 2. a biological anthropology is reductionistic, viewing human beings as nothing but very advanced animals; 3. a socially conferred anthropology thinks of personhood as being present when human beings are ina social relationship with another member of the human species; and 4. a theological anthropology views erach member of the human species as a creature of God who is loved by God and whose dignity and worth deries from that relationship.”… (altro)

Othering refines the ordinary ways of describing prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating. The author elaborates on the othering concept by employing the categories of anthropology, history (by far the longest section), rights language, and theology. Each of these categories are related to the three main dimensions of reality as it is inhabited by human beings: the vertical axis (the Great Chain of Being), the horizontal plane (society), and individual selfhood. The upshot of the author's thesis is that othering is a way of detailing what in theology has been enunciated as original sin.

Othering is a refined way of describing prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating's applied to the abortion debate and the language of rights. My first application of the author's intent was to consider contemporary political disagreements which may be a consideration for additional elaboration. For example, Obama, described others as clinging to guns and religion, and in related debates, the language of the deplorables, over heated rhetoric such as extreme MAGA Republicans, and an injustice system which targets political opponents. I think there is an extensive political critique but the focus of the work is on competing views of abortion.

The work centers around two questions (p. 9): why do human beings engage in othering? Can someone be sensitized to one form of othering but engaged in another form of othering without realizing it? The fact that disruption, complexity, and violence characterizes society is clear with the first question but adroitly the author insightfully applies the contradiction in pro-choice advocates who are desensitized to violence towards persons when alive as fetuses.

John Locke held that human beings, cannot legitimately believe that they have the authority to destroy other human beings. To believe that such violence is acceptable is to undermine the foundations of human rights. We need to see and protect the inviolability of the life of each human being as our guiding ideal.

From Christian writers, we understand that there are moral principles that have been articulated in the sacred scriptures that have already shaped human culture in a positive direction, and they will continue to do so in the future. If we claim to be on the side of freedom, while our actions are in reality, tyrannical and violent, then we can damn ourselves. We need to take seriously the concept that all human beings are created equal as our guiding ideal.

From first wave feminism, we are to learn that historic patterns of thinking that stratify the human race into higher and lower tiers are false ways of thinking. God created the human race in God's image, male and female he created them. For Martin Luther King Jr., we can learn that the passage of time does not bring about automatic moral progress in human history. Fallen and fractured human beings resist progress.

The teachings of the Bible and the philosophy of natural law are sure and solid foundations for criticizing the unjust laws and immoral practices that human beings support when they are allowing their spiritual stupor to place them in opposition to the call to real moral progress. Pro-choice advocates that arose out of the cultural crack up of the 1960s took the womb less, sexually irresponsible, wealthy, white male as its model, and insisted that abortion was necessary to gain equality with that model, the sort of man that men rightly condemn themselves. What we need is a different model, a Biblical way of defining success in the world. Jesus and Mary would be good places to begin. Love and nonviolence are two ways of saying the same thing, and bringing a child into the world, and raising that child with a loving heart is the way God works through us to heal fallen humanity.

The Bible takes the side of the victims, not oppressors; and the Bible writers concern for victims, gradually morphed over many centuries into rights language. As a result, the talk of freedom and liberation of society from the chains of religion is misguided. It is the Bible and religious adherents who leavened society and liberated trapped individuals, contra Rousseau.

Medieval debates and philosophy are not often thought of as the starting points for discussion of abortion but the author demonstrates the importance of these philosophical underpinnings. Thomas Aquinas began his understanding of reality with analogical thinking, meaning that our human language can use analogies in an attempt to describe God, but those analogies are always limited. God remains, ultimately mysterious, as the Ground of all being, God, is not one being among other beings, not even a supreme being, but the transcendent creator, the source of all that is. God cannot be placed in the genus of beings. Aquinas' thought is rooted in realism.

This starting of Aquinas' realism was rejected by William of Ockham. This view placed God and creatures, side-by-side, within the genus beings, although God is recognized as infinite, while creatures are finite. The thinking of Ockham lead to the school of thought, known as nominalism, which departed from the realism of Aquinas. It is nominalism that came to dominate Western thought in the late Middle Ages, leading up to the Protestant Reformation. Within the nominalist worldview, the universe consists of discrete and disconnected individual beings; there is no web of mutuality and interconnectedness rooted in participation with the transcendent Creator. These individual and disconnected things may become rivals and competitors to each other. This basic assumption applies also to the relationship between human beings and God; they come to be viewed as rivals who clash.

In the abortion debate, simply stated, the pro-life position is realist while the pro-choice option is nominalist. The realist remains in communion with, and subject to, God. The nominalist, on the other hand, views life as a conflict between powers with the dominant one winning out in the end.

The deepest paradox is that modernity is usually thought of as the age in which human beings have thrown off the shackles of ancient dogma, such as original sin, so that they can be free to move into the bright shining stream of upwardly mobile progress. The fruit of modernity ends up being stuck on the largely unseen dogma that reality is at its deepest level, violence, and must be responded to with more violence. The Enlightenment ideal of rationality should be seen as crashing down with the secularist ideologies of the 20th Century. Progress for the moderns is to manage violence which has proven elusive.

It is actually the concept of original sin that frees us from anxious, grasping after control, and the continuing need to convince ourselves of our own moral innocence. We are flawed beings, and it is the recognition of our own sinfulness that frees us from self righteousness, and opens up our spirits to the sort of people who see the beauty of life is to live lives of love towards all human beings. And all truly means all, including the inhabitants of the womb.

One other note of value is the abundant bibliography offered throughout the volume to elaborate on points drawn during the work for further reading.… (altro)