Dinesh D'Souza argues that reason, science, and history — the intellectual tools acclaimed by atheists — support the existence of God along with the greatness of Christianity. A review of What’s So Great About Christianity.
What’s So Great About Christianity
by Dinesh D'Souza
published by Regnery Publishing (October 16, 2007)
Hdbk., 348 pgs.
ISBN-10: 1596985178
ISBN-13: 978-1596985179
“Nietzsche’s proclamation ‘God is dead’ is now proven false. Nietzsche is dead. The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world’s population.”
How liberating childhood initially seemed to those of us bred without religious instruction. We never had to attend catechism classes or miss a single National Football League game on Sunday. There seemed to be little more to the universe than our parents’ rules and edicts, yet gradually, after adolescence, it became more and more apparent that another world — one within and above the realm of our daily affairs — existed. One in which right and wrong were more than legal constructs.
It was at this moment that we fathomed the dimensions of our inner-void. The wisdom and guidance of the Bible are an invaluable framework within which to interpret human relationships and the rigors of life. As adults, untold numbers of the parochially deprived come to look at The Good Book with both a feeling of respect and loss.
Perhaps it was with the spiritually challenged in mind that Dinesh D’Souza penned What’s So Great About Christianity. The title of his recent release is in keeping with a previous work in which the author outlined the positive aspects of America. In these new chapters, D’Souza eloquently and convincingly defends Christianity along with religion on the whole.
That Mr. D’Souza would take up such a theme is wholly expected as he has made a career out of defending long shots. Illiberal Education, released in 1991, was one of the first works to document the politicization and ideological corruption of our universities. The End of Racism indicted race shysters and the pernicious effects of affirmative action a decade before Shelby Steele did the same thing in White Guilt. Therefore, a defense of Christianity fits well within the parameters of his oeuvre.
What’s So Great About Christianity is very much a return to past form. D’Souza has always been hated by the Left, but a work released earlier this year, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, brought about a fury of condemnation from the Right as well. Discussions of that book were fierce, but my guess is that few conservatives will have anything negative to say about his latest offering. God-fearing people of all persuasions will be receptive to his missive. D’Souza meticulously debunks all manner of anti-religious societal clichés and conventional wisdom in these timely pages.
Atheism, seemingly, has never been more popular among our elites than it is today. Several works devoted to the subject have come out over the course of the last year – such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon — and D’Souza does his utmost to deconstruct them all.
Christians may be stunned to discover that atheists, at least in the case of Dennett and Dawkins, have abandoned their previous practice of implying they are stupid. Now they are only too pleased to make their views overtly known by suggesting that they themselves be termed “brights;” which makes the rest of us dim by comparison. In this way Dennett and Dawkins have rendered self-evident the connection between elitism and atheism.
Always serious about the burden of rejoinder, D’Souza is not content to present his case while occasionally alluding to opposition positions. He devoutly analyzes their words throughout the text, and his attention to detail (and mental quickness) is quite evident in the debate he had with Hitchens last month at The King’s College.
Erudition is what’s most rewarding in What’s So Great About Christianity. A quote from H. Richard Niebuhr aptly sums up the liberal “anything goes” version of Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” How many vacuous, touchy-feely, services does that phrase resuscitate? It further explains why the “do your own thing” message of the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches have led to the melting away of their congregations. An unserious and flighty God is a fiction, but also one of no service to humanity.
That being said, right/left distinctions are largely absent. This is not a work by Ann Coulter or Michael Savage. There is no gloating partisanship endemic to D’Souza’s narration. The discussion largely revolves around philosophy. Here the views of Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Locke, Rawls, and Mill are clarified and expounded upon.
This book will resonate with parishioners of all denominations as D’Souza never advances the notion that one should blindly follow the doctrines of a particular church. His central premise is that reason, science, and history — the intellectual tools acclaimed by atheists — support the existence of God along with the greatness of Christianity. D’Souza appeals to science and logic as a means to illustrate the rationality of belief.
Despite what Time magazine may put on its cover, there is no “God vs. Science” conundrum. The two entities are not mutually exclusive. D’Souza points out that it was within Christendom, and uniquely there, in which science first flourished. He further indicates that the supposed disharmony between the two was but a nineteenth century fabrication. The case of Galileo was a case in point. His difficulties with the church have been widely fictionalized over the years. The specifics of his trial suggest that his detention may have been for personal and religious reasons as opposed to those uniquely arising from his scientific conclusions.
Believing that God created humanity and that we evolved from there is a concept perfectly acceptable to many believers. That His hand produced “the big bang” makes perfect sense. That is why, as D’Souza notes, so many atheists prefer the “steady-state theory” as a way to explain the universe because it obviates the need for a Creator. D’Souza himself accepts evolution (“evolution remains the best and most persuasive account of our origins”) but draws a distinction between it and Darwinism.
D’Souza accomplishes much by simply restating the facts. We (rightly) celebrate the cultures and authors of ancient Greece and Rome but usually ignore the anti-democratic practices of their citizens and institutions — which differ markedly from those central to Christianity. Jesus’s affirmation of the average person — wherever they fell within the social strata — was a radical departure from the inequitable precepts of Aristotle and Plato. Only Christ held that serving others was the truest way to lead men. Christian humility does not allow for the transcendence of a “great-souled man” over the masses. Furthermore, it was not Christians who sacked Rome but barbarian hordes of Visigoths and Vandals.
What’s So Great About Christianity is most timely as atheists are on the offensive, and works like D’Souza’s are imperatively needed to combat their influence. Atheists are not content to have honest discourse on this subject. Many of them are housed in our universities and see it as their role to imbue the young with their anti-faith. Given the actions of pseudo-scholar activists, over the course of the last few decades, this is wholly expected. Indeed, Richard Rorty admitted just such a rationale when he said that it was appropriate for students who came to college as “bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists” to leave with views in keeping with those held by their professors. D’Souza makes reference to the way this slant has insinuated itself into our culture via the example of a children’s book concerning the Berenstain Bears. A propagandistic juncture instructs young minds that “Nature is all that IS, or WAS, or EVER WILL Be.”
What’s so great about D’Souza? Well, the fact is most Christians are nothing like him. They are not “contenders” of their faith. They live their lives and that’s about it. They reside in the world but refuse to be of it. Believers tend to look at our culture as if it were a tornado which will soon pass by and hopefully leave them unscarred. I suppose tornados sometimes do that, but they also level entire communities. If American Christians fail to defend their values and their tradition, no one else will step in and do it for them. Today, the Third World alone seems excited about carrying forth Christ’s banner. If it were up to western atheists, our brights would auction off our churches and turn them into condominiums. The time to stand up for what’s right . . . is now.
What’s So Great About Christianity is available on Amazon.com.
Mountain Man – the key misunderstanding here is the notion of the ‘sliding scale’. I am not saying, “if it works, it’s moral”. It’s closer to the opposite, that “if it’s moral, it works”. The “moral sense” we have – the instinct for helping others, for not hurting others without pressing need, etc. – reflects actual realities about what humans are and what kind of universe they inhabit.
I even agree that private thoughts can take on a moral dimension. If someone found themselves lusting after a co-worker when they themselves were married to another, then dwelling on those thoughts is wrong – but because of the likelihood that it might lead to later immoral action, not because the thoughts themselves directly hurt anyone.
Those basic morals are absolute, in that to change them you’d have to change humanity or the universe (or both). They aren’t “transcendant”, but I don’t see where that’s necessary.
The morality of many things is, indeed, crystal clear. But as an example of one that’s difficult: was the United States justified in dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII? As I’ve pointed out, even many of the senior generals involved questioned the necessity. (Personally, I think at least one bombing was justified; two might have been pushing it, but I’d need more information to make a considered judgement.)
Mr. Ingles,
You are free to revise your position, but let me remind you of what you said, starting with you quoting me: “You state that ‘[w]hat works is not necessarily what is moral’; but my point has always been that, the overwhelming majority of the time, in the longest term… they are the same.” So, it seems to me that you are saying that what works is what is moral. Right?
Immorality does not require action. In your example, lust is the immorality. Likewise, greed is immoral. Hate is immoral. No behavioral manifestion is needed.
Immorality does not require another person to be hurt. That would be akin to saying, “Well, I can do or think whatever I want as long as no one else is hurt.” That is situational ethics, anathema to the moral absolutes you seem to want.
Mr. Ingles, Regarding comment #100, what does the Declaration say? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Rights are power, imputed by the Creator. Rights give rise to the exercising of authority. Some of that authority is delegated to government by the people. Government has no power other than that which has been granted. Therefore, government’s authority descends from the Creator, as granted by the people.
The people in turn submit to the laws and authority of government as it exercises its power righteously. Submission to authority is a holy thing. However, if government execises its power unrighteously, then the people have the right to rescind its authority: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
“I was only following orders” is the logical extension of moral relativism operating in conjunction with unrighteous government. “Turn the other cheek” has to do with interpersonal relationships, not the operation of government.
The ” I was just following orders” is a lie, ergo, immoral. What is morality? In my estimation the word immorality is a way to dress up the word, sin. It makes people feel better to speak of immoral actions rather than sins. Of course this leads a person to have acknowledge that they can be held accountable for their sins against God. They much prefer to be the ones who make the rules on how a Creator can rule, which of course is absurd.
hvance – how, exactly, do you know that was a lie?
Brother Ingles:
Sounds like you went to law school, I did too. I went to H & K law, the school of hard knocks. While I will cede to you in other instances that little phrase is and can be true, the vast majority of these criminals were lying to save their own skins. Common sense and my trick knee are my allies when I size up a situation. Does it really take a Philadelphia lawyer to see through that blatant lie? Try asking any Holocaust survivor if it’s a lie. Just because someone says he isn’t lying isn’t good enough for me, especially on some levels.
Mountain Man – this is a bit like the Euthyphro Dilemma, which I don’t recall you confronting before. Is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it’s good? Which way does the arrow of causality point?
You shouldn’t have a problem with my position (which I haven’t retreated from). Most theists claim both sides there, or that the question is ill-posed. But if that’s the case, then I can point out that what we call morals are indeed what works for humans – that they reflect “actual realities about what humans are and what kind of universe they inhabit.” And I can also point out that we have that “moral sense”, an intuition about moral action, because it does reflect that reality. Things are moral because they work, and we know that things generally work when we work to be moral.
I recognize that you don’t share my viewpoint. What I find depressing is that you don’t appear to understand it, or even seem to want to try. I don’t think you’d necessarily agree with it, but it’s becoming difficult to justify continuing this if there’s no attempt at mutual communication.
We largely agree on what’s moral – our sets of ‘moral actions’ are largely congruent. The only places we disagree on are corner cases, precisely because our viewpoints are different. The closest analogy I can think of are primality tests – algorithms for determining if a number is prime. Actually determining if a number is prime or not is computationally ‘hard’ – it takes a lot of analysis, essentially dividing a number N by every number from 2 to sqrt(N). But there are probabilistic tests that can determine, to an arbitrarily high likelihood, that a number is prime – but they aren’t perfect, and sometimes give false positives. (That’s a quick summary, see Wikipedia for the gory details.)
Overall, we agree on what’s moral (prime) but we have different algorithms for determining if something’s moral. I think your algorithm works most of the time, but tends to produce false positives – kind of like comparing Fermat’s test to the current Miller-Rabin test. Generally it works (because it leans on our inbuilt moral sense) but like most religions it tends to regard some things as moral or immoral that aren’t. (Like, e.g., the Jewish requirement for male circumcision, or the vastly worse requirement for female ‘circumcision’ seen in Africa.)
You define as moral anything that comes up so in your ‘algorithm’; I think that’s inaccurate, like defining as ‘prime’ any number that shows up positive in Fermat’s test. Usually that will be correct… but not always.
Mr. Ingles,
I’m puzzled. I am answering your questions, it is you who does not answer mine. Perhaps I’m not giving you the answers you expect. But I have answered fully.
It’s the tangental nonsense I have no patience for, like “Euthyphro Dilemma”, “primality tests” and “alogorithms.” And somehow you accuse me of being evasive?
You haven’t retreated from your position, but who the heck knows what you are saying? At least I plainly explain my what I believe. I think your problem is that you simply don’t like my beliefs. You’d rather pigeonhole me according to your preconceptions as to what religious people are like.
If you’re out, fine. But at least go out honestly.
MM: I agree. When one is more interested in his vocabulary than making his point clear he needs to re-think his approach.
In my defense, this site is titled “Intellectual Conservative”. I’m not trying to obscure, I’m trying to illuminate; I don’t just throw words around, I define my terms and point out where to get further information and explanation if my summaries aren’t enough.
I didn’t go to law school, Hvance, I was trained in engineering and moved to computer programming. I do tend to have a practical perspective on things, and the analogies I see might not be ones that strike others as familiar. No problem, there are plenty of areas I’m ignorant of, as well. But such training does tend to encourage precision. Reality and computers are intolerant of ambiguity.
I thought I was being pretty clear, but let’s try to boil things down: Morality is indeed ‘what works’, but – and I’ve been trying to point this out over and over, reread what I’ve said (especially in comment 88 here) in this light and see if it’s more clear to you – ‘what works’ is not what Mountain Man continually seems to imply, ‘whatever works immediately for me in the shortest possible term’. I do not agree – at all – that what he claims ‘works’ actually does, in fact, work – in this world or any possible next one.
It turns out that doing what everyone agrees is moral works out for the best, long term, for everyone. Who doesn’t argue that this world would be a much better place if everyone behaved morally?
I’m afraid we have different definitions of the morality and immorality. Morality to you seems to be the better way to live. Few would disagree with that. The point I would restate is that if one has to ask if it is immoral, then he already knows the answer. Morality is a secular copout word that is used in place of sin. It’s perfectly ok with me if you don’t see it that way, it’s just one guy’s opinion.
While I am redefining the english language allow me to digress on other words that the media uses that I don’t care for. The use of the word “mom” to describe a woman who is on crack, has x amount of kids, etc. The use of the word “elite” when describing the media. This is an even bigger joke than the aforementioned word. How about “victim”? what a joke when describing someone blaming everyone else but himself.
“It turns out that doing what everyone agrees is moral works out for the best, long term, for everyone.”
Raymond: I’m not going to re-enter this discussion, other than to point everyone to my critique of your work on morality in the IC archives (“The True nature of Human Morality”).
Your definition of morality is so relative and value-laden it is meaningless.
1. Who exactly is “everyone”? The US, the Western Hemisphere, the United Nations, “everyone” in 2007, 1907, 10,007BC, 20,007 AD?
2. What exactly is “working out”? Abortion has worked out just fine for the abortionists, but not so well for the aborted babies or people who oppose this awful practice. So is abortion inherently moral or immoral by your definition, or is it just a relative term applied to something that exists in the mind of the person applying the term?
3. And exactly how is slavery viewed under your definitional criterion? Was slavery in 1830 moral because it was accepted by consensus in several states and foreign nations and “working out” just fine for the slaveholders, and then suddenly became immoral in the US in 1866 when the Civil War was over? How was someone in 1830 supposed to know that slavery was actually immoral and this fact would be clear if they just waited another 36 years? What would have happened if the North lost the war? Is morality primarily dependent on a successful military campaign? Will abortion be seen as immoral in 2107 if it’s abandoned as a practice a hundred years from now, but moral if it continues? And what if it’s abandoned in the US but not Asia. Is it then only “partially moral”?
Again, I dealt with all this relativistic nonsense in my earlier essay.
Dr. Jackson – we already discussed slavery, remember? It fails – it has always failed – the “What if everyone did that?” test, among other things. That’s a simple idea – simple enough for a five-year-old to grasp – but a powerful one. To my mind, Kant overanalyzed the whole thing with his ‘Categorical Imperative’ but it’s in the same spirit. Also works for abortion; as you know, we both dislike the practice but in contrast to you I’m unconvinced that personhood begins at conception.
The United States was wrong to impose slavery, and the South was wrong to maintain it so long. We can imagine hypotheticals like the South winning the war, but the most likely scenarios involve time-travelling South Africans supplying AK-47s to General Lee (“Guns of the South”, by Harry Turtledove). One of the reasons for this is that the South simply didn’t have the infrastructure to support a war with the North. Slavery had held back their technological and industrial development. As I noted before, it was only relative incompetence on the part of the Union command at key points (in particular Antietam) that kept the war going as long as it did. When you start trying to come up with reasonable hypotheticals, you start to realize that the South caught about as many lucky breaks as could be imagined. In the 1830s, the fall of Greece and Rome was already known (Gibbon’s account came out in 1776, and he was… not exactly the first historian to treat the subject) and while the weight of slavery’s contribution to that is hard to precisely determine, no one argues that contribution was zero.
All of this, of course, is just extra backup for the main reason – see the quote I put in comment #83 here.
Raymond: “Fails” is a relative term. Slavery has existed for centuries in parts of the world, and still exists today. You simply cannot make a factual statement that slavery has “always failed” unless you look at individual cases with the hindsight of history. This is not a moral conclusion anyway. At best it’s a historical observation that may or may not be true depending upon how you precisely define “failure”. Moreover, you seem to say that slavery is “immoral” because it “failed”, and it failed because slavery was bad economics and the North was just marginally more competent industrially and militarily (comment 113). Exactly what does this definition of morality have to do with an action being inherently “right” or “wrong”?
The fact that slavery “succeeds” or “fails” in whole or in part, in the US or elsewhere, in 2007 or 20007 or 207, is not the criterion for determining morality. Might does not make Right, and morality is not the same thing as human consensus/success, just as immorality is not the same thing as non-consensus or failure.
And morality is not the product of human or societal evolution. If so, the UN — which is the embodiment of the world today — would be the fountainhead of all moral actions. If anything it is the exact opposite. Human consensus and societial pressures often work to suppress morality so a different agenda can be advanced (i.e. slavery and abortion, to name two.)
Your exact quote was “It turns out that doing what everyone agrees is moral works out for the best, long term, for everyone.”
There is no “everyone”. And “working out for the best” is a relative term. The fact that you and I both agree that slavery and abortion are immoral does not make slavery and abortion immoral. Its immorality is the product of a different mechanism, our God-given universal moral code that says it is immoral to deliberately harm an innocent human life.
Your analysis is pure relativism. Happily, you agree with me on the inherent immorality of abortion and slavery because, as a decent person, you are in touch with your God given moral code that informs such judgments.
Again, if anyone is still looking in on this discussion I invite them to read “The True Nature of Human Morality” under my name in the IC archives, where I support my point of view about the immutable definition of morality, rather than making it a personal subjective judgment.
Dr. Jackson – we’re going in circles again. Moral laws are not ‘subjective’ any more than “you shouldn’t move your king out to the center of the chessboard before the endgame” is ‘subjective’. The U.N. is not the “fountainhead of all moral actions” for the same reason that the World Chess Federation is not the “fountainhead of all chess strategies”. “Morality is not the product of human or societal evolution” – as I’ve always said – in the same way that “the best chess strategies are not the product of human or societal evolution”; they fall out from the fundamental rules of chess. Your fundamental unwillingness to address (perhaps even unwillingness to understand) my point appears to doom you to such misguided ‘analogies’.
It’s true slavery still exists today. And one look at where it exists and in what forms tells you how ‘successful’ those areas are. That’s not and has never been a coincidence. Can you point to an ‘individual case’ as a counterexample?
The game-theoretic account of morality can explain why specific things are moral. The “God commanded it” model cannot address this. Why did God command ‘thou shalt not kill’? “I dunno, guess he just felt that way…” You never addressed the Euthyphro Dilemma specifically in our last discussion about this, but it’s still relevant. And again: at root your account of morality depends just as critically on self-interest as any other. Why should anyone do what’s moral? In your account, it’s to avoid potential, undefined ‘consequences’ or to gain unspecified ‘rewards’. To quote: “…it’s better to obey a God-given UMC than violate it… not knowing what the exact consequence may be is not the same thing as saying, therefore, no such consequences can possibly exist.”
We both agree on the fundamental basis for acting morally – self-interest. But I find that the consequences apply quite clearly to this universe, while you posit extra-universal ones as well.
Raymond: I asked you to give me a universal, non-value laden definition of the terms you use to define morality (“success/failure”, “everyone”, etc.). You haven’t because you can’t. These are all relative terms.
You also continue to portray what I wrote about morality as a religious “God commanded” treatise. “God” is not the same as “religion”, and perceiving right vs. wrong is not the same as “commanding” right vs. wrong.
I systematically went through your game-theory analysis where you spent most of your time arguing against religion defining morality, and implying that this was my position. I expressly stated the opposite, but to this day you continue to blend the two thoughts together when describing what I said. Morality is not self-interest, as I’ve repeatedly stated. Doing what is moral can conflict with what is convenient or in one’s supposed self-interest, as abortion more than clearly demonstrates.
My position is laid out clearly in http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/07/13/the-true-nature-of-human-morality-a-response-to-the-critique-%e2%80%9cuniversal-morality-and-the-morality-of-the-universe%e2%80%9d/
Since you want to answer my challenges to the actual terms you employ when putting your theory forward with arguments I expressly rejected or never made, there’s not a lot of point in continuing the discussion.
Well, I figured your request for a definition of “everyone” was rhetorical, seeing as you yourself claim that ‘everyone’ has a shared sense of the fundamentals of morality. (Or does ‘universal’ not, in fact, mean ‘universal’ in the term “Universal Moral Code”?) I’m pretty sure we’re using the term the same way.
I don’t mean (and I truly can’t understand how you could still think this, given the pages of clarification I’ve written on this point) that something is moral because it’s what ‘everyone agrees’ on. I argued exactly the opposite – ‘everyone agrees’ on it because it’s moral.
Consider this statement: “It turns out that things that everyone agrees are blue reflect light at a wavelength in the neighborhood of 475 nm.” Things aren’t blue because everyone calls them blue – everyone calls them blue because light at that wavelength stimulates particular cones in our eyes and we experience it as that color. Now, human color vision is pretty complicated, and has automatic calibration mechanisms to take into account the amount and shade of ambient light, etc. (Read the chapter “The Case of the Colorblind Painter” from Oliver Sacks’ book “An Anthropologist on Mars” for an illuminating look at the complications.) But our system of color perception actually reflects aspects of the real world.
In the same way, I argued that we have inbuilt systems for understanding moral situations – the “moral sense” or UMC as you term it. I gave illustrations of those systems in the brain and gave game-theoretic explanations of why those particular systems are that. Even if you don’t agree that I hit that mark, I firmly contend that I made a case that cannot be casually dismissed with a handwave.
I’m arguing that our moral sense reflects aspects of the real world, in the same way as our system of color perception reflects aspects of the real world. Your arguments about morality strike me as akin to saying “things are blue because they possess a God-given transcendental blueness”. And you expressly conceded that you cannot explain why particular things are moral or not moral – at most, you can only say, ‘that’s the way God wanted it, but I don’t know why It chose those particular things as ‘moral’.’ The wavelength theory of color vision can account for why particular things are seen as blue in a way that ‘transcendental blueness’ cannot. In the same way, the game-theory model of morality can explain why particular things register as moral in a way that just saying “God sez so” can’t. (Note that I’m not invoking any specific religion here at all – your God/religion dichotomy does not apply. I’m just taking you at your own words.)
You, and Mountain Man, and others continually repeat that “Doing what is moral can conflict with what is convenient or in one’s supposed self-interest”. Mountain Man said “Morality often contravenes ‘desirable’ outcomes.”
And I replied, again, “But that depends – very critically – on what you mean by ‘desirable’.” I’m not talking about short-term self-interest. I’m talking about long-term self-interest. In one sense, it’s in my self-interest to go eat a storeful of ice cream; it’ll taste good and I’ll get pleasure out of it… for a while. Later, I’ll get sick, and if I do that repeatedly I’ll become obese and/or diabetic, etc. The kinds of selfish things y’all are always quick to point out always turn out to be like that… abortion avoids short-term (and even medium-term) inconvenience and pain. But long-term, a society that doesn’t value and protect human life will become a terrible society to live in, as history shows.
It also cuts off a potential human, whose value outweighs that inconvenience. Your family cared for a member with profound mental and physical handicaps, as I understand it, but found the experience not just worthwhile but rewarding, correct? That’s a benefit in this world and I don’t discount it at all.