Atheism: The Great Deception

Why did Dr Josef Mengele, do it? Why? In the name of 'science' and 'progress' of course!

Fr Ray Blake of St Mary Magdalen has penned an excellent piece that has an internet atheist discussion group up in arms. You can view Fr Ray's piece here and the atheist discussion group, which I decided to pop into and in which he is rounded upon here. Sometimes it is worth walking into lion's den, waving a Crucifix around and then seeing what will happen. Not many of the responses to Fr Ray's article seem proportionate, reasonable or just, but then, hey, we Catholics know what to expect.

There are, of course, perhaps hundreds of figures the Faithful could point to in human history and draw attention to their atheism as being a defining reason as to why they might have gone so far off the rails and suddenly, seemingly without warning, decided to slaughter a truckload of people, for no good reason whatsoever.

However, just for the sake of doing something a bit different, let's take someone who doesn't get talked about much these days, whose operations in the Holocaust seemed to have been particularly interesting to the arch-bad eggstraordinaire, Adolf Hitler. Dr Josef Mengele, come on down! I realise that Wikipedia is not the World's most respected historical website but let's just have a read of Mengele's biog. Bear with me, there is a point here.

In 1943, Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi extermination camp Birkenau. On May 24, 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's "Gypsy camp". In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not, though, the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz — superior to him was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths.

Mengele's experiments also included attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs and other brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims died, either due to the experiments or later infections. According to a website, "Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then injected chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies."

The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were, for the time being, safe from the gas chambers. When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. Some survivors remember that despite his grim acts, he was also called "Mengele the protector". In addition to his studies on twins he did a number of horrifying experiments. Once he burned several Jewish prisoners in a gigantic oven to test how long it would take for the human body to get first, second and third degree burns at certain temperatures. He also tested how much force it would require to break a human skull.

Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said: "I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work — not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher shop — major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation — Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part".

Now, on this point I disagree. It is not enough to just say, "Well, Mengele was mad!" As Fr Ray Blake says in his blog, atheism is responsible for as many great evils of which he can think. Atheism does not defend all human life. It only defends human life it deems to be a life 'worth living'. Josef Mengele professed that all of his crimes he did "in the name of science". The poor and deluded individual simply could not help himself. And of course, as our Priest well knows, what with hearing our Confessions, we humans do not necessarily seek or will what is bad. We will what is good but go astray in attaining it because we very often seek a version of the good which has been divorced from the Will of God. We want something good, like love, sex and human intimacy and are prepared to do it unlawfully, outside of marriage, for example, to get it. Scientists want significant breakthroughs and scientific discoveries, treatments or cures, but they're willing to sacrifice some human beings in order to achieve it, which is, of course evil.

And this is exactly what was introduced in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology legislation. At the disposal of scientists today is a great deal of technology. Religious Faith is discarded by the mainstream media and the mainstream political parties as outdated and of no modern use.

Science is the future, they say. Science means 'progress' and in the name of science and 'progress', atheism will doubtlessly be responsible for more Mengelian madness, perhaps the likes of which we could never have shuddered to imagine. The atheists who do not see that history is about to repeat itself, in just this one arena alone, because science, reason and progress have been divorced from Faith, are only deceiving themselves. Catholics, we pray, are not so easily deceived.

According to secularists and atheists embryos don't count. Well, gypsies didn't count to Mengele! According to many secularists and atheists unborn babies don't count. Well, I'm sure unborn babies wouldn't count to Mengele but then, gypsies, dwarves and Jews didn't count to Mengele either. He could not defend human life because he could not see it for what it truly is - sacred, holy and to be defended, and especially not from his own scientific pursuits, because such sacred truths just got in the way.

Yet, that is the road this country has set itself upon. Atheists will not defend unborn human life in laboratories because they cannot see the embryo as a life. Atheists very rarely defend unborn human life in the womb because a great many cannot see that 'it' is a life. Atheists will not defend the lives of the elderly against the subtle pressure to be euthanised once people become unproductive, expensive to care for, or terminally ill. If, in principle, you cannot defend life at all stages, then it makes it far more likely that you will oversee death, acquiesce with death, agree with death, espouse or even promote and spread, death. Because to the atheist, who has no recourse to the Divine Law, the ends unfortunately, can always justify the means.