David Hart on dualism and Terri Schiavo

Strange, here he is again. I keep bumping into this fellow's writings. Worth reflecting on:

Of this I am certain, though: Christians who understand their faith are obliged to believe that she was, to the last, a living soul.

Another recent article on the way dualistic assumptions make their way into political arguments by Patrick Lee & Robert P. George is here.

And finally, the comments page to the Hart article raises the issue of theodicy, in this case an inversion of Dostoevsky's argument, in Brothers Karamazov, about the justice of paradise founded on even a single tortured child's suffering:

For myself, further, I also hold that triage is necessary, and that the costs of one Terry Schiavo's medical care is probably the lost resources for a thousand or ten thousand starving children in Africa, and that if some version of God countenances saving one and losing ten thousand, then he is an evil god indeed. I blaspheme here, proudly. Stalin comes to mind, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Not surprising to me to find it at work in our moral struggling.