“If you are in a coma and on a ventilator and your relatives are not readily available, the odds are that you will be an organ donor.”
- Paul A. Byrne and Paul M. Quay
“On Understanding Brain Death”
“With great advances in life-support technology and organ transplantation, the dead today do indeed have much ‘protein’ to offer us – in the form of their organs and body parts. We are the neo-cannibals.”
- Nobel Prize winner Carleton Gajdusek
It’s happening. Quietly. Slowly. Tragically. Human sacrifice is now becoming acceptable in America. The hapless, the hopeless, and the helpless are falling prey to the strong and powerful. It has taken decades for pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia forces to win victories based on such ridiculous logic. But, as C.S. Lewis said, New Age philosophy is “the attitude which the human mind naturally falls into when left to itself.”
Recently the news media documented the passing of Adolf Hitler’s 100th birthday. Much commotion was made about school children not knowing much about the Nazi tyrant, and about the awkwardness with which the German news media dealt with the centennial. One poll found that 46 percent of West Germans believe the Third Reich had some positive influences.1 Another documented that some of the youth in Germany feel Hitler couldn’t be all bad because “he arranged for merciful deaths for handicapped people.“2
In America, teachers and journalists are trying to make sure we never forget who Hitler was. It’s too bad they don’t remember themselves. Today Adolf Hitler and his followers are painted as “right-wing extremists.” (He emphatically stated he was a socialist, and named his party the National Socialist Party).3
But we need to find out how the evangelists of euthanasia today mimic the SS. What does Shirley McLaine have in common with Adolf Hitler? Consider the following news item, not reported by a right-to-life or church group, but straight off the pages of the Chicago Tribune, and later picked up by daily newspapers all over the country.
Four nursing aides, dubbed “The Angels of Death,” admitted to killing 48 elderly patients “out of pity,” beginning in 1983. As the deaths went undetected, they murdered more, “singling out patients who angered them or caused them the most work.” The aides killed many of their victims by pouring water down their noses.4
The New Age movement of today, the fascism of Nazi Germany, Darwin’s theory of evolution – and virtually every pagan society since Cain slew Abel – all have one thing in common: they deliberately seek the shedding of innocent blood. In Hitler’s day the idea was to create “the perfect race,” by subjectively ordering the world’s genes. New Age doctrine runs a parallel path today.
Each month the topics of euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide, and the killing of people for their organs make the news more frequently. Each month our nation’s conscience is dulled. And each month human sacrifice becomes more acceptable.
In the same month of Hitler’s centennial and the emergence of the “Angels of Death,” Newsweek reported the story of an elderly lady sentenced to death. Her crime? Being dependant on medical technology. Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old New York resident, was hearty and independent until she suffered a stroke last October. She deteriorated into what her doctors labeled a “persistent, vegetative state.” Her chances of recovery were determined to be “nil.” A judge decided her condition to be “irreversible.” An order was signed. Her feeding tube was scheduled to be removed. Coons would have died had she not embarrassed her doctors by coming out of her coma just before the order was to take effect.5
The educators and journalists of today fail to remember that Adolf Hitler euthanized over 270,000 hospital patients because they were “useless eaters.“6 Whether it be Hitler’s fascism or today’s New Age movement, the goal is the same: eliminate the unfit and unproductive. Create a perfect race. It’s survival of the fittest.
Nazis in the Scrub Room?
But we really need to go deeper than just comparing today’s yuppies with yesterday’s Nazis. Materialistic yuppieism is just the surface of New Age hedonism. This is not to say that all New Agers are Nazis. The majority of New Agers push their agenda with motives that are paved with good intentions.
But there is a dark side to the lifestyles of the hip and outrageous. There are spiritual forces at work not recognized by most of us. The whole New Age movement gets its name from the idea that mankind is about to usher in a “new age” of history. Mankind is supposedly about to make an evolutionary “quantum leap” from homo sapien to homo noeticus. This “new race” will come about because people have learned to “get in touch with their real selves,” or experience “consciousness revolution.”
New Age prophets will tell you that the answer to the world’s problems is not found in looking to God, but in the prospects of the further evolution of man. Sure, they would say, man has made mistakes, but consciousness revolution will allow us to take a leap into a new, improved version of depravity! Those people who “get in touch with their higher selves” will surpass homo sapiens in evolutionary status. (“Holier than thou” takes on a whole new meaning!)
Homo noeticus will be a race of people who make this quantum leap. This change is said to be a “spiritual evolution” first, and later a biological one.7 In theory it will greatly increase man’s capabilities to confront and overcome the problems of survival, hence bringing mankind into a new age.
Should God allow New Age doctrine to run its course, the blame for Mother Earth’s problems would be laid at the feet of those who have not made this leap into New Age doctrine. A “cleansing action” will be required to remove the “unbelieving” from society so that this new race will be able to manifest its new nature and overcome its medical, environmental, economic and social problems.
Adolf Hitler’s ties to the occult are well documented.8 That they were what drove him to seek the extermination of the Jews and the establishment of his own world order is obvious to any student of such texts. But tyranny, greed, hatred, arrogance, and paganism are not limited to the 20th century. The Aztecs, the ancient cultures of Palestine, and the barbarians of pre-Christian Europe are only a few examples of societies which regularly practiced human sacrifice.
Just what is it? How could anyone really say that such an advanced society as ours would practice something so barbaric? Paul de Parrie and Mary Pride, in Unholy Sacrifices of the New Age, offer the following definition of human sacrifice: “The murder, torture, and/or cannibalism of an innocent person justified as beneficial for himself, for another person or for society.“9
Remember this definition. It will come in handy when we look more deeply at the impact of the New Age on medical ethics next month. Occultism, reincarnation, psychology, and most of all, the loss of moral absolutes and the doctrine of “living for yourself,” influence the values we place on human life today. Sadly, many people in the American medical profession, whom we once held in such high regard, are now the white-robed high priests of the New Age.
1 The Associated Press, April 20, l989.
2 Paul de Parrie and Mary Pride, Unholy Sacrifices of the New Age (Crossway Books, 1988), p. 81. (For those wanting more information on the lack of ethics in medicine, this is an excellent book.)
3 Paul Johnson, Modern Times (Harper and Row, 1983), p. 293.
4 The Spokesman Review (Washington: Spokane, April 16, 1989), reprinted from The Chicago Tribune.
5 “Whose Death Is It, Anyway?” Newsweek, April 24, l989, p. 69.
6 de Parrie and Pride, p. 60.
7 From an interview, The New Age Movement, “The John Ankerberg Show.”
8 See Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich (MacMillan Press, 1974); James Webb, The Occult Establishment. (These men were non-Christian historians who documented Hitler’s ties to the occult.)
9 de Parrie and Pride, p. 15.