The decline of a culture can take place by means of a billion small steps. Individually such things may not seem like much, but taken together, they can be overwhelmingly devastating. The cumulative results of a people rejecting God and moral absolutes always takes its toll.
Let me consider just one jarring example of the cultural nihilism engulfing us. In some ways it is a typical manifestation of contemporary culture. The desire to become famous can drive a person to do many shameless and bizarre things.
But of course public notoriety can be quite fleeting, and a person’s 15 minutes of fame can be forgotten quicker than most folks realise. Yet some people will go to great lengths to get instant recognition and attention. Consider the case of a mother-of-two from Leeds who is now four months pregnant. One English newspaper discusses her story this way:
An aspiring glamour model who said she wanted an abortion so she could appear on Big Brother has today revealed her growing baby bump. Josie Cunningham, 24, sparked outrage when she had a £4,800 breast enlargement operation on the NHS. She is now four months pregnant after falling into a life of prostitution.
Yesterday, the aspiring model said she planned to abort the child to further her television career, adding: ‘This time next year I won’t have a baby. I’ll be famous instead.’ Ms Cunningham, from Leeds, said she had been on the shortlist to appear on Big Brother – but was reluctant to proceed because of her pregnancy.
She told the Sunday Mirror: ‘An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. ‘Instead I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way.’ She added: ‘I want to be famous for being me – Josie Cunningham, a glamour model in my own right. ‘If I want to do that I need to put my career first.’
One of course is left speechless after such a story. Indeed, it almost seems like this is just a hoax – can any woman and mother actually think this way and talk this way? Apparently so. But wait, there’s more:
The unmarried mother-of-two, who says she is no longer working as an escort, does not know who the father of her unborn child is. She says he could either be a surgeon who paid her £1,000 for a night of passion or a friend she has casual sex with. Miss Cunningham hit the headlines last year when she underwent cosmetic surgery to increase her bust from 32A to a 36DD at St James’s Hospital in Leeds.
The operation caused outrage, heightened further by the same NHS trust refusing to fund surgery that would enable a two-year-old girl with a form of cerebral palsy to walk. Daily Mail readers donated thousands of pounds to help fund an operation on Sophie Thomlinson’s spinal cord after health chiefs decided that the £25,000 surgery was too expensive.
So here we have not only an individual whose mental and moral condition seems to be wanting, but an ethically bankrupt social system as well. Such is the state of modern Western culture, where we can boast about killing our own children in order to make it as a celebrity model.
Of course this one very messed up individual is not to be singled out here. There are millions of similar stories regrettably that can be found all over the secular West: people engaging in incredibly selfish and immoral activities, because the very notion of right and wrong has been lost.
The rejection of God and moral absolutes leads inexorably to the sorts of things described here and elsewhere on these pages. When man is made the measure of all things, and is left to his own devices to decide what is moral and what is true, such madness must ensue. Ravi Zacharias expressed it this way:
The problem with secularization is as it sleeps over a culture and takes root, you begin to lose definitions in the process. How do we define right from wrong, moral from immoral? … When secularization has done its work, it will lead to a generation that has lost its sense of shame. You show me a human being without a sense of shame, and I will show you a human being who will stop at nothing. Secularization literally comes from the Latin word “saeculum” which means “worldly.” There is no transcendent moral order.
Or as Francis Schaeffer once put it:
If people are not made in the image of God, the pessimistic, realistic humanist is right: the human race is an abnormal wart on the smooth face of a silent and meaningless universe. In this setting, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia (including the killing of mentally deranged criminals, the severely handicapped, or the elderly who are an economic burden) are completely logical… Without the Bible and without the revelation in Christ (which is only told to us in the Bible) there is nothing to stand between us and our children and the eventual acceptance of the monstrous inhumanities of the age.
Back in 1971 Vincent Miceli wrote an important book, The Gods of Atheism. In it he wrote:
Whoever strikes against God strikes down himself. The atheist denying God degrades himself. The atheist exalting himself above God sinks below the level of animate and inanimate beings. Liberation from God is enslavement in creatures. Absolute humanism is the sure road to absolute despotism. Denial of God as truth begets the imprisonment of man in the self-imposed darkness of his own myths.
The tragic story offered above is just one story. But multiply it many times over, and we have a perfect picture of where the godless West is at today. It is not a pretty place, and it cannot last long. The rejection of the moral centre of the universe cannot be a viable option for any great length of time.
We either admit to our deadly hubris and complete inability to run things on our own, or we continue on this path to destruction. The choice is fully ours. If we keep choosing wrongly, we will see more horror stories as recorded above. And that is something the West just cannot indefinitely sustain.
16 Replies to “Celebrity Baby Killers, and the Decline of Western Culture”
How incredibly depressing. The fact that she’s so shameless about it all is even more horrifying. What will her poor child think when he/she reads that she wanted fame rather than him/her? And not to have any idea who their father is…She also said –
“Suddenly I was pregnant and I could get free dental work on the NHS, so I got a tooth straightened for cosmetic reasons, and it all seemed great.
“But then I started to think. I didn’t want to be famous for having a footballer’s baby or for being the girl who had a kid by someone who paid for sex.
“I want to be famous for being me – Josie Cunningham, a glamour model and celebrity in my own right. If I want to do that I need to put my career first. I want the attention to be on me, not on who fathered my child.”
Its sad that stories like this, while continuing to horrify, never surprise anymore.
I think our cultural obsession with ANZAC Day represents an appropriate opportunity to point out the massive moral delusion and confusion our Australian society stumbles under. We seek to religiously memorialise the sacrifice of young soldiers who willingly gave their lives in battle to provide Australians with the freedom to….murder our own children in numbers that long ago surpassed the death tolls of Gallipoli and probably many other Australian war casualty lists.
It’s equally disturbing talking to young people about what they believe is morally acceptable – their “perfectly acceptable” frequently lines up with the extremist policies of groups like The Greens and it makes you wonder: how far will God allow us to go?
Lets not forget that they are now using the bodies of those poor discarded unborn children as fuel in furnaces, “waste to power” is what it is called, and the fuel used is called “medical waste” including miscarriages, abortion amputated limbs etc.
There was a report in the U.K recently, and one in America bringing it in from Canada just two days ago.
All I can say to this is “Baal Molech”, which if anyone does not know, can be roughly translated today as the environment movement, where people are expendable to be used as human sacrifice to ensure a bumper harvest the next year. Think of dan savage suggesting in ABC Q&A that abortions should be mandatory for the next 30 years and this is what we are up against with the left.
History does not repeat, but it does rhyme quite well.
Neil Waldron.
The left only care about women’s rights – not women themselves. This supposed ‘woman’ is a disgrace on all levels. She’s a disgrace to all women. Say so and you will be called a misygonist. She is protected by a Praetorian Guard of feminists and weak males throughout the whole of society. She is answerable to no one. She is killing for more pleasurable things.
To the daily SS officer at the death camps, they were simply exterminating disease carrying vermin that would otherwise infect the general population. It’s not pretty, but I think that does explain the behavior.
And if society keeps going down this path we will soon owe Hitler and the Nazis an apology.
God Bless Bill.
This is really disgusting that this would happen and this is reflective of the culture of death we live in. One quote from Thomas Jefferson would sum up like this “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”
Stunning but sadly logically predictable.
Dear Bill,
Thankyou for the article which as Jo says is incredibly depressing to read of outrageous examples of the ideas and actions of who I have begun to refer to as the ‘feral’ population which seem to be increasing in numbers.
Even the term ‘feral” is too good for them because sad to say these humans are behaving worse than animals in a state of nature.Since they have a higher intelligence they should know better but don’t simply because as you say they have abandoned God .I would go even further and say they do not know who God is!
Moreover,since practically all the leaders in Western social and political systems, who are supposed to be of above average intelligence have also abandoned God things can only get worse.Most have neither the courage or wisdom to implement measures which will discourage such outrageous ideas and behaviour.Australian society is fast catching up with the UK and the US and Heaven knows where it will all end.
There is some comfort in the fact that there are still many ordinary people like myself who do the little they can but I’m sure like me, they feel increasingly powerless and frustrated.What this world really needs is a great Christian leader.We have one in Pope Francis of course but we need one on the Western political stage and unfortunately I don’t see one on the horizon. t.
Then there’s all the big time celebrities vigorously pushing the notion that abortion is a woman’s right (Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), Michael Stipe (R.E.M), Rage Against the Machine, etc). How much wrath do these people want to bring down on their heads???? Mick Koster.
The ‘ME FIRST’ Culture. We are seeing this type of thing more and more – even in the lack of manners. I saw a lady who was very pregnant standing in a crowded train (I was also standing even though disabled). This poor lady was almost fainting, and eventually sat on the dirty floor with the gentle assistance of a couple of other young ladies. Not one of the young people – mostly young men – who were sitting would give up their seat. One group in particular caught my attention – they were talking animatedly and avoided looking the way of the pregnant lady. When I reached my destination, which was not far from Adelaide Railway Station to attend a Christian function, lo and behold who should I see but our young seat-hoggers who did not wish to see someone in distress. The irony of all this is that this function was to highlight the situations of those less fortunate than ourselves and how we must not only acknowledge poverty and distress, but actually do something about it, no matter how small our contribution might be.
She is possibly a psychopath of the narcissistic variety. About one in two hundred females are psychopaths but the rate is disputed. According to one psychiatry textbook female psychopaths tend to turn up in the prostitution profession but I assume the percentage is still small in that class. According to my recent reading psychopaths tend towards crude utilitarian ideas in their attempts at moral thinking. That sort of fits my theory that much of modern secular moral thought looks like it came from psychopaths.
Look closely at the photos
All I see is utter hopelessness, sadness and most likely, complete neglect during infancy (hers)
Her lifeless eyes reveal all
She is more than likely desperately lonely, like so many in our trash can society
I would ask you all to pray firstly for the baby within her womb, and then the mother
God bless us all
In regards to the story mentioned here… This is tragic … I am speechless, can’t pin down words for this.
The fleeting prize you win
Can never offset the cost you pay
And some good news here – it looks like she has had a change of heart on this:
But of course public notoriety can be quite fleeting, and a person’s 15 minutes of fame can be forgotten quicker than most folks realise. Yet some people will go to great lengths to get instant recognition and attention. Consider the case of a mother-of-two from Leeds who is now four months pregnant. One English newspaper discusses her story this way:
How incredibly depressing. The fact that she’s so shameless about it all is even more horrifying. What will her poor child think when he/she reads that she wanted fame rather than him/her? And not to have any idea who their father is…She also said –
“Suddenly I was pregnant and I could get free dental work on the NHS, so I got a tooth straightened for cosmetic reasons, and it all seemed great.
“But then I started to think. I didn’t want to be famous for having a footballer’s baby or for being the girl who had a kid by someone who paid for sex.
“I want to be famous for being me – Josie Cunningham, a glamour model and celebrity in my own right. If I want to do that I need to put my career first. I want the attention to be on me, not on who fathered my child.”
Its sad that stories like this, while continuing to horrify, never surprise anymore.
I think our cultural obsession with ANZAC Day represents an appropriate opportunity to point out the massive moral delusion and confusion our Australian society stumbles under. We seek to religiously memorialise the sacrifice of young soldiers who willingly gave their lives in battle to provide Australians with the freedom to….murder our own children in numbers that long ago surpassed the death tolls of Gallipoli and probably many other Australian war casualty lists.
It’s equally disturbing talking to young people about what they believe is morally acceptable – their “perfectly acceptable” frequently lines up with the extremist policies of groups like The Greens and it makes you wonder: how far will God allow us to go?
Lets not forget that they are now using the bodies of those poor discarded unborn children as fuel in furnaces, “waste to power” is what it is called, and the fuel used is called “medical waste” including miscarriages, abortion amputated limbs etc.
There was a report in the U.K recently, and one in America bringing it in from Canada just two days ago.
All I can say to this is “Baal Molech”, which if anyone does not know, can be roughly translated today as the environment movement, where people are expendable to be used as human sacrifice to ensure a bumper harvest the next year. Think of dan savage suggesting in ABC Q&A that abortions should be mandatory for the next 30 years and this is what we are up against with the left.
History does not repeat, but it does rhyme quite well.
Neil Waldron.
The left only care about women’s rights – not women themselves. This supposed ‘woman’ is a disgrace on all levels. She’s a disgrace to all women. Say so and you will be called a misygonist. She is protected by a Praetorian Guard of feminists and weak males throughout the whole of society. She is answerable to no one. She is killing for more pleasurable things.
To the daily SS officer at the death camps, they were simply exterminating disease carrying vermin that would otherwise infect the general population. It’s not pretty, but I think that does explain the behavior.
And if society keeps going down this path we will soon owe Hitler and the Nazis an apology.
God Bless Bill.
This is really disgusting that this would happen and this is reflective of the culture of death we live in. One quote from Thomas Jefferson would sum up like this “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”
Stunning but sadly logically predictable.
Dear Bill,
Thankyou for the article which as Jo says is incredibly depressing to read of outrageous examples of the ideas and actions of who I have begun to refer to as the ‘feral’ population which seem to be increasing in numbers.
Even the term ‘feral” is too good for them because sad to say these humans are behaving worse than animals in a state of nature.Since they have a higher intelligence they should know better but don’t simply because as you say they have abandoned God .I would go even further and say they do not know who God is!
Moreover,since practically all the leaders in Western social and political systems, who are supposed to be of above average intelligence have also abandoned God things can only get worse.Most have neither the courage or wisdom to implement measures which will discourage such outrageous ideas and behaviour.Australian society is fast catching up with the UK and the US and Heaven knows where it will all end.
There is some comfort in the fact that there are still many ordinary people like myself who do the little they can but I’m sure like me, they feel increasingly powerless and frustrated.What this world really needs is a great Christian leader.We have one in Pope Francis of course but we need one on the Western political stage and unfortunately I don’t see one on the horizon. t.
Then there’s all the big time celebrities vigorously pushing the notion that abortion is a woman’s right (Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), Michael Stipe (R.E.M), Rage Against the Machine, etc). How much wrath do these people want to bring down on their heads???? Mick Koster.
The ‘ME FIRST’ Culture. We are seeing this type of thing more and more – even in the lack of manners. I saw a lady who was very pregnant standing in a crowded train (I was also standing even though disabled). This poor lady was almost fainting, and eventually sat on the dirty floor with the gentle assistance of a couple of other young ladies. Not one of the young people – mostly young men – who were sitting would give up their seat. One group in particular caught my attention – they were talking animatedly and avoided looking the way of the pregnant lady. When I reached my destination, which was not far from Adelaide Railway Station to attend a Christian function, lo and behold who should I see but our young seat-hoggers who did not wish to see someone in distress. The irony of all this is that this function was to highlight the situations of those less fortunate than ourselves and how we must not only acknowledge poverty and distress, but actually do something about it, no matter how small our contribution might be.
She is possibly a psychopath of the narcissistic variety. About one in two hundred females are psychopaths but the rate is disputed. According to one psychiatry textbook female psychopaths tend to turn up in the prostitution profession but I assume the percentage is still small in that class. According to my recent reading psychopaths tend towards crude utilitarian ideas in their attempts at moral thinking. That sort of fits my theory that much of modern secular moral thought looks like it came from psychopaths.
Look closely at the photos
All I see is utter hopelessness, sadness and most likely, complete neglect during infancy (hers)
Her lifeless eyes reveal all
She is more than likely desperately lonely, like so many in our trash can society
I would ask you all to pray firstly for the baby within her womb, and then the mother
God bless us all
In regards to the story mentioned here… This is tragic … I am speechless, can’t pin down words for this.
The fleeting prize you win
Can never offset the cost you pay
And some good news here – it looks like she has had a change of heart on this:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/josie-cunningham-abortion-felt-baby-3464103#.U111NO7bgpI.facebook
Our prayers have saved the baby
Thank you
Let’s hope we can save the mother
Lord Jesus bless her
So glad the baby has not been aborted.