One minute of Sunday morning philosophy

By Tom Quiner

I’m reading “Theology and Sanity” by Frank Sheed.

This excerpt caught my attention talking about what is implied by “change:”

“It means that the being which is subject to it is never at any moment the whole of itself: it possesses its being successively, as the philosophers say.

You, for instance, are never at any moment the whole of yourself. What you were last year, what you will be next year, all belongs to the totality called you. But last year has gone, and next year has not arrived. It is obviously an overwhelming limitation that one never wholly possesses one’s self, that one possesses one’s being in successive moments and not simply in one act of being, that one is never wholly there.”

Who you were in the womb was such a successive moment; who you were on your 21st birthday another; who you were with Alzheimer’s disease in a nursing home another yet.

All of that adds up to the “whole of yourself.” The whole of yourself is not predicated on self-awareness, intelligence, or knowledge.

Rather, it is predicated on successive moments.

Abortion snuffs out successive moments, which comprises the totality of you.

That is why abortion is immoral.