In my case, I am happy to report that the hatred I feel toward them is gone, and I pray it remains forever gone.  Reading their responses, and seeing how wretched they are, how confused, how lost, has moved me to feel human sympathy for them, despite the horror of the dark crimes they urge.

That sounds like a paradox, doesn't it? It is not.

We are dealing with people who, at least some of them, cannot tell the difference between a little baby and a malign tumor. They are not logical enough to reason it out on their own; they have not enough common sense to believe their own eyes; they have not enough respect for others to trust the experience of older and wiser generations; they have not enough experience themselves to know what they're talking about.

The question is not how to reason them free from his position. He does not have a position, he has a feeling, and the feeling is a sick, proud, and angry one. Once a person is so far from the sunny fields of healthy human sanity that he approves of killing babies and comatose old woman, he is lost in the wild with no paths back. Reasoning will not guide him. He is like a man possessed, like a victim of hypnosis. The question is what has cast the hypnotic spell, and how to break it: Abortion is just a side effect. The core problem is the Culture of Death.

The fact is that human beings are not psychologically equipped for lives of selfishness. When we try to be selfish, thinking self-centeredness will make us happy, all that happens is that we become self-destructive. A good and likeable person can be deceived or self-deceived into a death spiral. When his moral compass starts pointing south, every other value and virtue gets reversed, but his innate goodness, the boldness and sympathies that make him human, still exist. The engine driving the ship is still sound, the crew is still loyal, it is merely that the captain is mad. The very strengths that would make a good man a hero, when pointed in the right direction, make a good man self-destructive, when pointed in the wrong direction.

In this case, the destruction is literal: abortion, and the general self-centeredness of the Culture of Death has decimated the next generation. The reproduction rates in Europe are below replacement levels, in some places, far below. Saturn has feasted and consumed his heirs. Evolution is a force that in this case will successfully wipe out those who look to it for moral guidance. Those of us who are too meek to think we have the right to sit in judgment over which babies merit life, will, as scheduled, inherit the earth.

It is not too late to save the sinking Titanic of secularism. This vessel had three main bulkheads: Marxism, with its belief that state control of economic and social institutions could perfect mankind; Freudianism, with its belief that human perfection could result from lack of inhibitions, the absence of rules; and Progressivism, by which I mean the Darwin-flavored myth that human progress is a natural and inevitable process, like building a pyramid, not a continuous and doubtful struggle, like bailing a boat. Progressivism is a fine philosophy in May, when each day is brighter than the last, but in November, as the darkness grows, one must doubt that something will be better merely because it arises later.

While all these optimistic science-tinted daydreams might have been viable during the heady days of the Victorians, when every dawn saw new improvements in European civilization, two world wars, a cold war, and the ghastly terrors of scientific socialism run amok have put paid to notions of human perfectibility. If there was ever any religious dogma that empirical evidence supported, the doctrine of the Fall of Man is that one.  Marx and Freud are on the dustbin of history, except in the hermetic halls of academia, where nothing disturbs the dust. Using Darwin to claim some races of man are naturally more evolved or more advanced than other races still has the burnt smell of the death-camps clinging to it, and not even academics believe it any more. All parts of the ship of the secular world view have been holed below the water line.

We have to invite any who will hear us onto the Ark, if they want to escape the waters. That means having love and forgiveness in our hearts, no matter what they advocate.