This is "Higher Education" ?

A friend recently emailed me an article by one Milton Scarborough entitled
"A time for quiet reflection on Schiavo case" (sic) that was published on April 21, 2005 in the Advocate Messenger. I did not know this author, and asked others about him.

I learned that this man is a professor of philosophy and religion at Centre College in Kentucky. When I read his article, I would never have believed that he teaches college level, until I realized some of the 'odd thinking' that I hear coming from many of our higher educational institutions.

He uses different forms of 'reductionism' (which he admits that Catholics AND Protestants have rejected), in order to show that Terri Schiavo was no longer 'human' when she died, as her soul was reduced to a vegetative soul, and he bases his reasoning on St Thomas Aquinas' writings on the soul. St Thomas Aquinas describes the life force of vegetables, animals and humans differently. The problem with Mr Scarborough's reasoning is that the human soul is created uniquely and individually, and cannot be reduced.

The value of each person is simply in the existence of that person, whose soul reflects God. It cannot become the soul of a vegetable simply because of brain damage, nor even the soul of an animal.

Using his reasoning, any child born with brain damage is in danger! Any elderly person (and some are diagnosed with Alzheimer's even in late forties/fifties!) with any form of Dementia is in extreme danger, because they cannot express themselves as the disease progresses. Those diagnosed with degenerative diseases can be murdered (oh, excuse me, allowed to die 'peacefully') with no recrimination, as they become less than human as the disease progresses.

Perhaps this is the kind of reasoning that Peter Singer uses to say that a baby should not be considered a human until after birth, when you can know it is 'normal'....a diagnosis of spina bifida, or Down's Syndrome, etc would therefore make that child 'not human'.... scary.

A human being is a human being from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, regardless of the intelligent quotient or physical normality/disability that human being may possess, and can NEVER become less than a human being, even if birth defect, llness or injury makes them less able than others, or than they themselves once were.

A human soul can never be reduced to that of a vegetative soul, or to that of an animal's soul.

This article reflects the kind of thinking that will say any cognitively disabled person is not a human being, solely because they may not be able to express themselves 'normally'. Each human being deserves to be treated as worthy simply because they exist, not for what they can achieve or 'potentially become'.

See, we have already HAD action based on this kind of thinking once before in the fairly recent past, running under the name T4 Program in Germany where those deemed to be non-productive eaters whose lives offered 'no value' (ie, mentally ill, elderly and developmentally/cognitively disabled) could be extinguished. Those human beings labeled in this way were 'reduced' by society to not being human, and they were killed legally.

Helen Keller would not have survived this man's reasoning before Annie Sullivan came into her life.