24AR29-42

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AR 29:42 - Blood ties made irrelevant to child custody and identity

In this issue:

CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL - a brief online content update

HUMAN RIGHTS - "radically redefining both family and human personhood … not only in theory, but in law"

ISLAM - how Muhammad failed to understand temple theology

Apologia Report 29:42 (1,683)
November 13, 2024

CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL

Update: While randomly searching the web recently, at the top of our ranked results was the revised collection of individual Christian Research Journal articles on CRI's website. And with this, we discovered that the Journal has started "online publication" in addition to making the CRJ archive available to the general public at no cost. Long may this remain in effect. Visit <www.tinyurl.com/287779rm> to see for yourself.

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HUMAN RIGHTS

Just as we begin to hope that perhaps America's future won't be rushing toward oblivion as fast as it had over the last four years, this came to our attention: "Machine Antihumanism and the Inversion of Family Law" by Jeff Shafer (Director, The Hale Institute <haleinstitute.org>, New Saint Andrews College) -- within the text: "The Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) industry - with its picture catalogues of men and women whose gametes are for sale, its lab-creation of batches of embryos for eugenic sorting, its 'gestate-and-release' surrogacy contracts - exists to decouple child-creation from conjugal relation, to segregate gestation from enduring maternal relationship, and to make blood ties irrelevant to legal child custody and identity. ...

   "We might say that what this means is that the initiating condition of human arrival in the world is as orphans. But that would be wrong. It's much worse than that. An orphan, by that very classification, is reminded that he lost something vital, and he (and we) are allowed to lament that loss. But in terms of the new techno-anthropology, there is no recognition that the child ever had anything to lose, and so there is no reason or permission for lament - or even for the category of 'orphan.'"

   On November 4, N.S. Lyons, <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-Lyons> of the Upheaval Substack, introduced Shafer's essay this way: "What Shafer does exceptionally powerfully is to demonstrate, step-by-step, how the application of new technologies and commercial surrogacy processes to reproduction is already radically redefining both family and human personhood within the liberal managerial worldview, not only in theory but in law. And he then shows how this redefinition must logically lead to a truly totalitarian social and political dynamic, in which children become not persons but assembled products, and parents (if they can be identified as such at all) merely 'provisionally accredited custodians' of this property on behalf of various stakeholders, and ultimately the state.

   "In the vision of the Technium, as well as in those precincts of the law that have absorbed the machine logic as its own," Shafer explains, "children are radically homeless… understood as conceived and entering existence without objective relation to anyone. ... Effectively assembled from pieces sourced from around the world, the 'global baby' of the future is destined to have 'no default placement, no security of embeddedness, no people, no ancestors, no family history…' It will only have the state. And this is the chillingly anti-human future we already find ourselves inadvertently stumbling toward with exceptional speed, thanks to a blind rush to integrate new reproductive technologies (and accompanying philosophical assumptions) into markets and law, exacerbated by an unwillingness to ever say 'no.'"

   Shafer emphasizes "the technocratic project of human reproduction that now confounds historic American family law. Under the influence of this tech novelty, contemporary family policy is trending toward standards and defining precepts that deny or refuse roots, nature, and limits of any kind - embodied or otherwise - classifying these as normatively irrelevant inconveniences to be technologically overcome rather than contemplated, honored, and lived in.

   "I begin with my dissident thesis: Basic to the law's role in the relational security of children is the law's deference to the natural family and the anthropological depths that this family represents and anchors in society."

   "[T]oday in the West we find ourselves in the new and troubling condition of seeing our governments (and other institutions of influence) - in defiance of all human history - redefine marriage and family relations, reconfiguring them in service of a denatured, individualistic, technologically reductionistic, and ultimately statist alternative. And among the questions now upon us in uncomfortably clarifying ways is: To whom do children belong? ...

   "When the law permits and coordinates this commerce in persons, it teaches and ensures that the existence of a child is a legal problem for state resolution rather than a preexisting relational truth that obliges state acknowledgment and deference. ...

   "[T]he new legal model on offer proceeds by describing the child instead as a raw datum, ontologically isolated and absolutely individual - without a history and without a certain home - until the happenstance of a managerial adult choice intervenes. ...

   "[T]hough this family redefinition is carried out under the banner of reproductive and sexual 'rights,' instead of accomplishing a limitation on government power it becomes an instrument securing, in principle, the totalism of state jurisdiction. ...

   "The notion of the untethered individual has been long in philosophical development and maturation. ... Recent decades, however, have seen a strident and often successful effort to align family law with the precepts of this reductionistic anthropology. ... The law is explicitly adopting a mechanistic philosophical vantage as it cooperates with public and prominent biotechnical practices that implement that perspective. These include the pharmaceutical and surgical elimination of children in utero (because there is no normative meaning or responsibility implied in maternity seen in exclusively biological terms), as well as the manufacturing model of human reproduction by consumer selection.

   "As to the latter: The 'global baby' (so called) represents the paradigm and the central case of the industry precisely because it best symbolizes the disintegration of nature and organism accomplished by the ART project. ...

   "... because the ART baby is a project of _making_, it veritably demands the law apply a consumer paradigm in the later custody determination: The person hiring and directing the technicians to manipulate the biological material should receive the tailored product of his commissioning.

   "By permitting this technician-engineered form of reproduction, the law's own description of human meaning is on track to correspond to the mechanical features of this system. ...

   "The ART industry's coup, then, is not merely in the mechanical accomplishment of human reproduction, but in capturing the standards of the law itself." <www.tinyurl.com/5apaz94u>

   An earlier version of this essay also appeared at <www.humanumreview.com/articles/producing-the-global-baby>

   We are reminded that in Christopher F. Rufo's 2023 book, America's Cultural Revolution, <www.tinyurl.com/yct99baa> he describes how the "woke" agenda began to capture the American legal institution, with Harvard Law School as its first target in 1969.

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ISLAM

"The Temple and Islamic Theology" by Samuel Green (TGC Australia, Oct 9 '24) -- "With the long-term absence of a temple, Judaism adjusted its practices. Rabbis and synagogues became more important than the high priest. Prayers replaced animal sacrifices. Temple Judaism became Rabbinic Judaism. ...

   "Muhammad was born AD 570, when there had been no Jewish temple for 500 years. He did not observe Temple Judaism but Rabbinic Judaism. This is significant because Muhammad copied Jewish practices...."

   In particular, "the temple taught that we need a priest to mediate between a holy God and a sinful people. ...

   "However, Rabbinic Judaism does not practice these things because there is no longer any temple, and it was Rabbinic Judaism that Muhammad observed and copied. ...

   "When we read the Qur'an with temple theology in mind, what do we notice? In the Qur'an God does not come to creation to dwell with his people, instead, we are on a journey to God: 'God originates creations, then causes it to return.' ...

   "When Muhammad does refer to the temple in Jerusalem, he calls it a mosque (Qur'an 17:7). He shows no understanding of its function as a temple. ...

   "To understand Islam, you need to understand the practices of Rabbinic Judaism. This historical context of Islam is no Temple 'Judaism'. You will understand the Qur'an better if you realise it has no temple theology.

   "Without an understanding of the temple Muslims do not have the foundations for understanding Jesus and the gospel." <www.tinyurl.com/bp8be2fh>

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