# Jesus v. Abortion  ## Metadata - Author: [[Charles K. Bellinger]] - Full Title: Jesus v. Abortion - Category: #books ## Highlights - As Weaver searches for the root of the human malaise, he reaches back into Western history, pointing to a late medieval philosophical school known as nominalism. The competing school, realism, taught that reality has principles and laws built into it by God, which human reason is capable of comprehending with a fair degree of competence. Nominalism taught that reality is not graspable by reason; therefore, we human beings must come up with interpretive schemes and then impose those schemes onto reality. We say what things are; we define reality. ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=327)) - This contest of visions, between realism and nominalism, was slowly but surely won by nominalism over many centuries from the late medieval era to our own time. World War II was the fruit of that process of gradually leaving behind a respect for creation as it comes from the hand of God, and putting in its place a Promethean assertion of human will. If reality is not an order within which we find our place, but is instead like clay to be molded, then society and human nature become malleable. Hence, the competing visions of the Nazis and the Russian Communists, who were enacting in their own ways the concept of nominalism. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=331)) - The shadow consists of feelings of imperfection, guilt, finitude, shame, and so forth. We human beings typically repress the shadow side and then project it outward onto others. We don’t want to consciously acknowledge our guilt and inadequacy, so we label others as evil and ourselves as good. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=341)) - Everyone sees evil as external to themselves because they refuse to recognize their own shadow side and integrate it into their consciousness. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=345)) - He concludes that no consensus has been forged within intellectual circles regarding how we should understand Hitler’s motives and those of the German people during that era. Hitler remains, at a deep level, an enigma, even after many thousands of pages of scholarship have been devoted to understanding him. My brief survey of the theories of violence that have been articulated by Burke, Weaver, Becker, Jung, Miller, Juergensmeyer, and Stein conveys a similar message, and there are dozens of other theories that could have been presented to similar effect. Violence as a phenomenon within human culture remains extremely difficult to make sense of. “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers,” as Nietzsche put it. ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=396)) - point is that we human beings have a rich cultural and intellectual history, and we can never escape that history.27 ([Location 441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=441)) - The most basic rights, life and liberty, are possessed by human beings because they are creatures of God, and whenever governments, or private individuals, do violence to other human beings, they are not respecting these rights. ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=494)) - Nietzsche argues that we should try to escape from that history. “They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality. . . . When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. . . . Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.” Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 69–70. See also Smith, “Does Naturalism Warrant a Moral Belief in Universal Benevolence and Human Rights?” ([Location 541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HHCZVT8&location=541))