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Humans Are Animals
00:08:13
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| Kevin Sartwell is a self-professed anarchist, according to the New York Times, as well as in the philosophy department of this college. | |
| Now, his article is titled, Humans Are Animals, Let's Get Over It. | |
| Subheading. | |
| It's astonishing how relentlessly Western philosophy has strained to prove we are not squirrels. | |
| Okay, that's the thesis. | |
| Western philosophy has strained to prove we are not squirrels. | |
| In his view, we are squirrels. | |
| We just may have a more developed brain, but we are squirrels. | |
| For the record, I'd like to repeat something that is a central tenet. | |
| Of my outlook on life, why I am an advocate of the Bible as the greatest repository of wisdom ever written. | |
| It is rooted in distinctions. | |
| I make this point in my commentary on the Bible called The Rational Bible. | |
| By the way, Volume 3, two volumes have come out. | |
| It's the first five volumes of the Bible. | |
| I didn't do it in order. | |
| I did book 2 first, book 1 second, book 5 third. | |
| Book 5 is Deuteronomy. | |
| It is coming out later this year. | |
| You can pre-order it on Amazon. | |
| The Rational Bible. | |
| Because if we don't understand the Bible, we have lost the West. | |
| So here's a perfect example of an idea that the West is based on. | |
| Distinctions. | |
| Distinctions are a way of explaining the biblical outlook. | |
| Man and God are distinct. | |
| Male and female are distinct. | |
| Good and evil are distinct. | |
| Life and death are distinct. | |
| Holy and profane are distinct. | |
| And human and animal are distinct. | |
| Human and animal. | |
| Only the human being is created in God's image. | |
| Now you can say that's all faith. | |
| That's fine. | |
| I don't care. | |
| People act like that dismisses the argument. | |
| I don't deny that being created in God's image is a statement of faith. | |
| Fine. | |
| But without that statement of faith, we are animals. | |
| Why do you think for all of my life I have asked young people, would you save your dog or a stranger first if both were drowning? | |
| To show that feelings have trumped values with regard to the worth of the human being. | |
| PETA, the people of the ethical treatment of animals, I think the most widely funded of the animal rights organizations, has frequently argued that you cannot kill a pig. | |
| To remove a heart valve and save a human's life. | |
| I had Ingrid Newkirk on my show many, many, many years ago, the founder of, or I think the founder, but certainly the head of PETA. And I asked her, do you believe that we are worth, that we are the equivalent of chickens? | |
| And she said yes. | |
| By the way, fascinatingly, I thought to ask her the question, so what is Pete's stance on abortion? | |
| If a chicken is a human, is worth a human life, what is an unborn human? | |
| And they said, we have no position on abortion. | |
| Which is because if they were consistent with their values, of course they'd be opposed to abortion. | |
| You can kill a human fetus in the eighth month, but you can't kill a chicken? | |
| Do you know how absurd that is? | |
| You probably do know how absurd that is. | |
| It's another point. | |
| I shall not belabor. | |
| The distinction between man and animal, or human and animal, if you're offended by the use of the word man, and if you are, you're very bored in life. | |
| Boredom is a major. | |
| Reason for these passions. | |
| If you get upset over that, you have a pretty darn good life. | |
| That you can get upset over the word man instead of human. | |
| Man and animal, human and animal are distinct. | |
| But if you are not Bible-based, If you're not in a Judeo-Christian faith, there's no reason to believe that. | |
| That's why the Times published this article by this professor. | |
| The separation of people, he writes, from and the superiority of people to members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. | |
| I didn't say this. | |
| I mean, I have. | |
| I've said it a hundred times. | |
| But I didn't write this. | |
| This is an atheist professor saying we are animals writing it. | |
| He recognizes how central to the West the idea that humans and animals are distinct is. | |
| Most people today do not. | |
| They are taught... | |
| By people who believe people are just another animal. | |
| Maybe a bigger brain. | |
| Maybe the unique ability to speak. | |
| Though they'll probably show you some porpoise films that claim otherwise. | |
| But essentially the only creature that speaks. | |
| And that's it. | |
| They will show biological differences, but not differences in worth. | |
| So he's right. | |
| It is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. | |
| And then he adds, and a good candidate for the worst. | |
| Wow. | |
| The worst idea in Western thought is that we're not animals? | |
| One difficult thing. | |
| To face about our animality is that it entails our deaths. | |
| Being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with dying purposelessly and so with living meaninglessly. | |
| That's correct. | |
| So we're just an animal and we die like an animal. | |
| And we think that we have purpose, whereas animals don't delude themselves. | |
| And that's the way it is. | |
| This is what your kids are learning by implication, if not explicitly, when they go to an American secular school, which is nearly all of our schools. | |
| 1-8 Prager 776. I'm Dennis Prager. | |