Some Animals Are More Equal

An interesting glimpse into the atheist's mind.  Excerpts:

...many of my Catholic friends are baffled by how someone could hold both of those views simultaneously: How can you respect animal life but not human life? they wonder. To me, it makes sense. In fact, I used to be a pro-choice vegetarian. And while I now vehemently disagree with at least the pro-choice part of it, I still find the vegetarian/pro-choice position to be an intellectually consistent—if chilling—part of the atheist-materialist worldview...

While I donated money to PETA and other animal rights organizations to help save pigs and cows, I also donated money to Planned Parenthood to support the abortion industry. I had not the slightest qualm about the idea of an early-stage abortion. On my spectrum of worthiness of life, adult humans were on the far right side; fetuses were on the left. Unborn humans were somewhere around shrimp and worms in terms of value, because they could not display any intelligence. And so it seemed unfair to ask women to turn their lives upside down for a lifeform that had all the value of a crustacean.

Even though it would be years before I would come to see that this entire understanding of human life was founded on a lie, I would occasionally get a glimpse of the chilling implications of this view...

What’s troubling, however, is that this idea of intelligence = value is increasingly prevalent in our culture. It might make a certain amount of sense when applying it to other animals, but when we evaluate people by this standard, throwing out the millennia-old concept of the inherent value of human life, the results are chilling indeed.

In other words: moderns are basically gnostics, believers that the enlightened are the worthy, the holy, that the Brahmins are superior to the Dalits.