The Death of Humanity | Richard Weikart
The title of our program is Great Minds with Michael Medved, and it really does take a great mind to survey the sweep of Western intellectual history and pick out in all of that a disturbing trend. That’s what historian of modern European history Richard Weikart does in his latest book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life.
A Surveying Mind
Dr. Weikart teaches at California State University, Stanislaus, and is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture.
Video
Show Notes
- 01:35 | What does “the death of humanity” mean?
- 02:40 | The Enlightenment and the decline of the imago dei
- 03:40 | Materialism and two ideas: “just a machine”, “just an animal”
- 04:45 | Two kinds of soul in Hebrew
- 05:50 | Bertrand Russell’s “accidental colocation of atoms”
- 06:25 | Created from animals
- 07:20 | “The Descent of Man” and the ascent of man
- 08:35 | Biological determinism, environmental determinism, and eugenics
- 09:40 | Lysenkoism and “building a new man”
- 11:30 | Doesn’t the religious view sanction poverty, asceticism, and self-denial?
- 12:20 | Moralizing without morality
- 14:00 | Why does materialism undermine the human project?
- 15:50 | The one area we’ve failed to reduce death tolls
- 16:50 | The Enlightenment and the idea of suicide
- 18:25 | Materialism and the obsession with sexuality