[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Let me start off today's show with a pro tip. We regularly call this podcast ID the Future, but when we launched it on the major podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music, we actually gave it the name Intelligent Design the Future to help people who search the term intelligent Design to find it. So that's an easy way to tell a friend about the podcast. Tell them just to search the term intelligent Design into any podcast platform of their choice, and it'll be one of the first things to pop up. Now on with today's episode. A few months back, I interviewed historian and author Dr. Richard Weichart the discuss his latest book, Unnatural Medicine's Descent From Healing to Killing. At that time, we also ran an episode featuring Dr. Weikart reading an excerpt from his book. Now, in case you missed all that good stuff, go back and find it. But here for now is Another discussion about Dr. Weichardt's newest offering, hosted by veteran radio and podcast host Jerry Newcombe. You know, the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified in recent decades, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death. How did we reach this place? Well, in his book, Dr. Weickhart traces the complex and fascinating history of ideas, attitudes and legal wranglings stretching from Socrates to Peter Singer and beyond. He demonstrates that the Judeo Christian tradition has encouraged a culture of life, but the secular enlightenment and Darwinian materialism have tugged us in a very different direction.
Enjoy this chat with Dr. Weichart exploring some of the major arguments of his book. This is Jerry Newcombe with Dr. Richard Weichart.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: God is the source of our rights, said the founders of America in the Declaration of Independence, and the first right they listed is the right to life. But lately there seems to be a war on the right to life in America and in the Western world at large. The word eugenics means good birth. The word euthanasia means good death. Both of these point to a view of human life that is not valuing, frankly, the right to life. Retired University history professor Dr. Richard Weickert has written books such as From Darwin to Hitler that shows how evolution has devalued the value of human life. His latest book is called Unnatural Death Medicine's Descent from healing to killing. Dr. Richard Weickert, who also wrote Hitler's Religion, joins me now on vocalpoint to discuss the issue of unnatural death. I'm Jerry Newcombe, this is vocal point, and Dr. Weickert it's always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for joining us.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Yeah, it's great to be with you, Jerry.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Okay, so first of all, why don't you give us. Set the table for us. There obviously has been a huge change in the Judeo Christian view of human life in the Western world. And I know from previous discussions you see Darwin as sort of starting the whole process. And now we're, you know, much further down the line and it's not good.
[00:03:38] Speaker C: Yeah, Darwinism is a very important part of that process. It's not the only part of it. Of course. In my book on unnatural death, I do a history of euthanasia and assisted suicide. I go back to ancient times and look at attitudes in Greco Roman times in the Judeo Christian worldview. And then more recently and really from the time of the enlightenment in the 18th century, building up, especially in the 19th century, there was a movement as people became more secular in their orientation, began to dispense with ideas about God and Jesus and Christianity. They began to believe that human life really didn't have any significance, purpose, meaning or value other than what we give it ourselves. And so really there's nothing transcendent about it. And thus this undermined the notion that there is such a thing as human rights at all. And there are many prominent bioethicists today who argue that there is no such thing as human rights, including the right to life. And so we've seen this undermining of the Judeo Christian sanctity of life ethic going on really since the time of the. Especially since the time of the enlightenment of the 18th century. Darwinism, as you mentioned, did have a very big role to play in all of that because Darwinism sort of reduced the division between humans and animals and so made us think, oh, humans are just another animal. We're just product of chance processes that have taken place. And so there's nothing really all that special about humans.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Somebody once noted this. They said in the 18th century the Bible was killed. And what they meant by that was in reference to the, you know, the liberal theology and, you know, where the higher critics were attacking the integrity of the Bible. So back to this quote. In the 18th century, the Bible was killed. In the 19th century, God was killed, and in the 20th century, man was killed.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: Yeah, and there are actually some thinkers who have made that very explicit. In fact, Michel Foucault, who's one of the more famous philosophers of the 20th century, actually explicitly said that. He said that Nietzsche in the 19th century had killed God and this death of God leads inevitably into the death of humanity. And so he and others, but he was applauding that. He thought that was a positive way to go, which it's not. And he, by the way, supported things like euthanasia and assisted suicide and such, as well as a lot of other immoral kinds of deeds. But in any case, yeah, we've got this place. We're now in the death of humanity and what many people are referring to as a culture of death. I use the word death of humanity, actually as a title of my book that I came out in 2016 about these issues.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Okay. Now, the. If you put, in the Greek language, if you put an EU in front of a word, it means good. So, for example, eulogy log would refer to speech or whatever. So a good speech, you know, this is a speech you're making at a funeral. Oh, he was a wonderful person. Okay. Eugenics means good birth. Euthanasia means good death. Comment on those two things in particular and how they differ.
That view differs from the Judeo Christian view that the Founding Fathers, for example, of America had for the most part.
[00:06:58] Speaker C: Well, interestingly, the term euthanasia itself actually in the early 19th century had a much different meaning than it was going to take later on in the 19th century. In the early 19th century, when people talked about euthanasia, that is a good death, they simply were talking about providing comfort to people who were on their deathbed, so trying to relieve their pain, trying to soothe them in various kinds of ways. In the late 19th century, though, people began hijacking the word and beginning to make it seem like mercy killing, that is, killing people before their time was the way to bring about a, quote, good death. And of course, they try to continue this on into today, too, where many people use the term death with dignity and other kinds of things like that to try to sweeten it, make it seem like it's better than it really is. And so euthanasia is taking over the thing of good death when it's really not a good death. A good death would be a death that comes about naturally for the person rather than a person who's abandoned. And what's interesting is that when you look at the people that take assisted suicide, OR has, for example, done a lot of studies of the people that have taken assisted suicide in their state. Oregon was the first state to have assisted suicide in the United States. And what they found is that most of the people that take assisted suicide don't do it because they are in pain and suffering physically. In physical torment. Rather, they do it very often because they feel lonely, they feel abandoned, they feel like they don't have good social connections and family connections. They feel like they're being a burden on society. Which, by the way, is how the eugenics movement tried to make people feel that they're being a burden on people. And so they feel like they're a burden on society and so they don't see any purpose in going on living.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: I want to. We'll have you comment more about euthanasia in just a moment, but is there anything briefly that you want to say about eugenics itself and what that means? And that did play a role even in some ways related to the Holocaust, didn't it? At least indirectly?
[00:09:08] Speaker C: Oh, yes. Oh yes. And it played a very key role in the advent of the euthanasia movement as well. Because in the late 19th century, the euthanasia movement was actually as much or more about killing people with disabilities as it was about allowing people to die who were having terminal illnesses, who were in pain or suffering and were wanting to die. So involuntary healing was part of the euthanasia movement from the very start. And a lot of that was built upon ideas of eugenics, that is, ideas that were supposed to try to improve human heredity. And the way to improve human heredity is to get rid of. One of the ways anyway is to get rid of people with disabilities. And sometimes that get rid of meant trying to keep them from reproducing, but sometimes that get rid of mean actually killing them. And so the euthanasia movement was sort of the radical wing of the eugenics movement, very often in the early phases of its existence.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: But can you explain what eugenics is, you know, per se?
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Sure. Eugenics is the idea that we're trying to improve human heredity. So there were a variety of ways that people tried to do this. One was by trying to encourage people that they thought were superior to reproduce as prolifically as possible. And by the way, Hitler did this by passing marriage laws and trying to get the Germans to have as many babies as possible.
And on the other hand, the negative, that was called positive eugenics, negative eugenics was trying to get rid of people who had so called bad heredity, usually people with disabilities. And that could be done through compulsory sterilization. That was one big way that the eugenics movement tried to approach that problem. And the United States, by the way, had. Most of the states in the United States had compulsory sterilization laws in the early to mid 20th century to try to push Eugenics to try to get rid of people with mental illnesses and other kinds of disabilities. The Nazis were going to take that to a extreme in that they culturally sterilized far more people than the United States, which has a larger population and in a much shorter period of time. And they began killing people with disabilities in late 1939, early 1940 in their so called T4 euthanasia program. And so they began killing people with disabilities. And all told, they killed between 2 and 300,000 people with disabilities over the course of the period, of course, about five years from 1940 to 45.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Okay, now let's just focus the rest of this conversation on euthanasia if we could. But I wanted you to explain that about eugenics. I think it's important to understand Switzerland, Canada and the Netherlands. I'd like you to comment. Just take your time. And we have about four minutes left in this discussion. And talk about mercy killing and euthanasia, doctor assisted suicide, et cetera in those countries.
[00:12:05] Speaker C: Yeah, Switzerland actually has no law against assisting suicide. And so it's sort of, there's a loophole in the law there that's been exploited by people in the euthanasia program. So there are lots of people who actually do what's called suicide tourism in Switzerland. They will go to Switzerland to get suicide in very in suicide clinics that have been set up by people and they don't even have to be run by doctors. Anyone can do it.
It's not restricted to physicians. In the Netherlands. The Netherlands has been really in the forefront though.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. If I could stop you real fast. Switzerland, I mean historically Switzerland, you know, had some Calvinistic input. That's part of the reason why the banks are so strong there and so forth. How did they end up to this state? I mean this is unbelievable. I know they're long post Calvin, et cetera in their influence, but it sounds terrible. It's almost like the wild, wild west of euthanasia. Switzerland is, based on what you just said even. Yeah, it is.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: And again, a part of us, there's a legal loophole that Switzerland never had a law against assisting suicide, except if you were assisting suicide for the purposes of pecuniary gain. So if you were an heir to a person, you couldn't help them do suicide. But if you're claiming to do it for non other reasons, for humanitarian reasons or whatever, whatever reasons you want to give, then there's a loophole in the law and Switzerland allows that to happen. Once this started going in the 1990s, early 2000s, they started setting up different groups, started setting up clinics and other things like that to kill people.
The Swiss never closed that legal loophole. They never legislated against it. And so again, there are people that come from all around, all over the world to go to Switzerland to commit suicide if they're that desperate.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: One of the endorsers of your book on natural death is Wesley J. Smith. And I remember he told me one time on a radio discussion about this, he mentioned that in Switzerland it's illegal to take a goldfish and flush it down the toilet, but it's legal to do these kinds of suicides. Okay, the Netherlands, you were going to comment on that, please.
[00:14:21] Speaker C: Yeah. The Netherlands has a legal system where the judicial system began allowing assisted suicide in euthanasia in the late 20th century, 1980s, 1990s, and then right at the early 2000s, the Netherlands legislature began allowing it. It is only for physicians to do it, however, and they allow euthanasia as well as assisted suicide, which means euthanasia is where the physician actually gives an injection of a poisonous substance to kill the person. Assisted suicide is where the person actually has to ingest the pills, poisonous pills themselves. United States. The states in the United States are 10 jurisdictions in the United States that have assisted suicide, but there's none that have euthanasia. Canada, however, since 2015, has allowed both euthanasia and assisted suicide. And by the way, most people take euthanasia when they have the option of euthanasia or assisted suicide. Most people that want it do take euthanasia. And so the physicians actually end up complicit. They actually end up giving the injection. But Canada has gone gangbusters in terms of their euthanasia excuse, euthanasia program. They're now over 4% of their population is dying through euthanasia. And so it's grown incredibly in Canada. And people are getting, and sometimes people being encouraged to get euthanasia in Canada because they have various disabilities, various health problems, sometimes when they don't even want euthanasia. And so there's been a lot of flap over that where people are protesting, sometimes against, sometimes medical personnel or social workers who are sometimes trying to encourage them to get euthanasia, even when they don't want it.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: All right, we're out of time. Thank you so much for being with us. Darwindohitler.com for more information. Again, Dr. Richard Weickert's latest book is called Unnatural Death. Dr. Weickert, thanks so much for being with us. All the best.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: It's great being with you.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:25] Speaker C: Bye.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Bye. Now.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: That was Jerry Newcombe hosting an interview with Dr. Richard Weichart about his latest book, Unnatural Medicine's Descent from Healing to Killing. It's available anywhere you can purchase books, learn more and order a copy at Discovery Press. That's Discovery Press.
For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
