Thursday, June 04, 2009

The absurdity of life without God

A pair of stories William Lane Craig recounts in his book, Reasonable Faith:
The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity several years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called "The Gathering." It concerned the reunion of certain survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem where they shared experiences and rediscovered lost friendships. Now I had heard stories of the Holocaust before and even visited camps like Dachau and Buchenwald. And I thought I was beyond being shocked by further tales of horror. But I found that I was not. One woman prisoner, for example, a nurse, told how she was made the gynecologist at Auswitzch. She observed that certain pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele, and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed and she noticed that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquirees: "Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?" she asked. "Oh, haven't you heard," came the reply, "Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection."

Another woman told how Mengele had had her breast bound up so she could no longer suckle her baby. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. And desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it bits of bread soaked in coffee. But to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight - a fact which was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. Finally a nurse then came secretly to this woman, and said to her, "I've arranged for a way for you to get out of here. But you cannot take your baby with you. I've brought a morphine injection which you can give to your child to take its life." And when this woman protested the nurse said to her, "Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself." And so this poor woman took the life of her own child. Mengele was furious when he learned he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the corpses of the discarded babies until he could find the body to have one last weighing.

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