There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
We all know chickens have the astonishing ability to turn grain into a key ingredient for Egg McMuffins, but few know that chickens are also the animal equivalent of gimbal cameras – no matter how you move them, back and forth, round and round, up and down, their head remains fixed in one spot. It’s crazy. It’s also the fingerprints of the their great Designer… though this secular video doesn’t go there.
One note: the last 90 seconds of this is just a commercial for a 3D printer, so once that starts you can hit stop.
Australia is now banning kids under 16 from using social media. Hurrah, right? Well, as Rev. Witteveen outlines, there is a dark cloud to this silver lining – in keeping kids off, the government is implementing measures to further monitor everyone else. But they’ll use is responsibly, right? Social media is a big problem, but protecting our kids was always a parental responsibility, and if we hand it off to the government, we might not like what else they do with the power we’re handing over to them. Remember the Australian government’s response to COVID?
A Saskatchewan woman, Jolene Van Alstine, who is suffering from a painful but treatable disease, has been approved for death-by-doctor (euphemistically called “MAiD”). As the linked article explains:
“We have a growing list of citizens choosing death because medicine has become a lottery →
a quadriplegic woman who applied for MAiD because she couldn’t secure basic home-care support
veterans offered MAiD instead of trauma treatment
homeless Canadians considering MAiD because they can’t survive winter
“And now a woman denied a simple, lifesaving surgery.”
The author’s article doesn’t rule out MAiD altogether, but pitches it as a last ditch option. But in doing so, she too has lost the plot. If death is medicine at any time, then on what basis would it not be a valid offering all the time? Why refuse any good option? And why can’t it be a cost-cutting measure even? If it is valid to kill some to ease suffering, why couldn’t it be valid to kill more, so as to more quickly and more cheaply, ease more suffering? When murder is medicine the only fixed line has been crossed – we’ve long treated abortion as healthcare, and killing the born in the name of medicine is just the next step. Offering Alstine death as treatment is entirely in keeping with this worldview.
But there is another understanding of life. Not as something we hold and can choose to dispose of as we will, but as something entrusted to us, to steward. Christians seem unwilling to raise God in the euthanasia battle, but if we leave God out of this conversation, what basis is there for human worth? The State gives you worth? Well, then the State can take away that valuation, as it has done for Van Alstine. We decide our own worth? Again, not so for Van Alstine – outside forces, the province’s neglect, have her devaluing a life she might otherwise treasure. Euthanasia, built on the lie of autonomy, is here exposed. We need highlight her plight to showcase the antithesis. All murders are always wrong because we are made in the very image of God. Our response has to be to proclaim God’s sovereignty over life. For His glory, and because only His Truth can answer these lies.
The value of life grows in magnitude when we stare death in the eye. Death is obscene, a grotesque contradiction to life. The contrast between the vibrancy of a child at play and the limp, rag-doll look of a corpse is revolting. The cosmetic art of the mortician cannot disguise the odious face of death. The death of a friend or loved one robs us of a cherished companion and reminds us of our own mortality.
Death is no stranger to my household. I have hosted its unwelcome visit too many times. The two visits I recall most vividly are the times the black angel came for my parents. Both died at home—both deaths left trauma in my soul.
We chisel in stone the last words of epic heroes:
“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” said Nathan Hale in 1776 before being hanged by the British as a spy.
“Oh my God,” gasped John F. Kennedy, as he clutched his throat in a car in Dallas on a fateful Thursday in November 1963.
“Et tu, Brute,” Caesar moaned, as he fell mortally wounded at the foot of Pompey’s bust in the Roman Forum.
I remember my father’s final words—how can I forget them? But what haunts me are my last words to him.
Death often leaves a burden of guilt to the survivors who are plagued by memories of things left unsaid or undone or of hurts imposed on the deceased. My guilt resides in the insensitive, nay, the stupid words I said to my father. I said the wrong thing, the juvenile thing for which death gave me no opportunity to say, “I’m sorry.”
I long for the chance to replay the scene, but it is too late. I must trust the power of heaven to heal the wound. What is done can be forgiven—it can be augmented, diminished and, in some cases, repaired. But it cannot be undone.
Certain things cannot be recalled: the speeding bullet from the gun, the arrow released from the bow, the word that escapes our lips. We can pray that the bullet misses or that the arrow falls harmlessly to the ground, but we cannot command them to return in midflight.
What did I say that makes me curse my tongue? They were not words of rebellion or shouts of temper; they were words of denial—a refusal to accept my father’s final statement. I simply said, “Don’t say that, Dad.”
In his final moments my father tried to leave me with a legacy to live by. He sought to overcome his own agony by encouraging me. He was heroic; I shrank from his words in cowardice. I could not face what he had to face.
I pled ignorance as I only understood enough of his words to recoil from them. He said, “Son, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
He was quoting the Apostle Paul’s closing words to his beloved disciple Timothy. But I failed to recognize that fact. I had never read the Bible—I had no faith to keep, no race to finish.
My father was speaking from a posture of victory. He knew who he was and where he was going. But all I could hear in those words was that he was going to die.
What impertinence for me to reply, “Don’t say that!” I rebuked my father in the most valiant moment of his life. I tramped on his soul with my own unbelief.
Nothing more was said between us—ever. I put his paralyzed arms around my neck, hoisting his useless body partially off the ground, supporting him on my back and shoulders, and dragged him to his bed. I left his room and shifted my thought to my homework assignments.
An hour later my studies were interrupted by the sound of a crash from a distant part of the house. I hastened to investigate the sound. I found my father sprawled in a heap on the floor with blood trickling from his ear and nose.
He lingered a day and a half in a coma before the rattle of death signaled the end. When his labored breathing stopped I leaned over and kissed his forehead.
I did not cry. I played the man, being outwardly calm through the following days of funeral home visitations and burial in the grave. But inside, I was devastated.
How much value did my father have to me then? I would have done anything I could, given everything I had, to bring him back. I had never tasted defeat so final or lost anything so precious. That was 34 years ago, but it does not require a psychiatrist to recognize that I am not over it yet.
My mother’s death was different. Her death was tranquil, as she gained the exit from this world we all covet. She died in her sleep without a struggle.
Her last words to me were joyful. She said, moments before retiring to bed, “This is the happiest day of my life!”
She had lived a widow for nine years after losing her husband. Being a career woman she continued her work, investing her future joy in her children and grandchildren. Our first child was a daughter, bringing countless hours of delight to her grandmother.
My mother had two future goals she yearned to reach. She wanted to see my ordination to the ministry and she wanted a grandson who would carry on the family name, as I was the last surviving male on the Sproul side of the family.
My mother embarrassed me more than once with the pride she displayed about these passions. She would introduce me to her friends by saying, “My son is going into the ministry.” No Jewish matriarch was ever more proud.
The family name was almost a fetish. I had been christened R.C. Sproul III. I almost wish she would have named me “Sue,” both for all the teasing I endured from my peers about that Roman numeral and for all the scatological puns that the monicker “The third” can yield.
Mother made me promise that the tradition would live on, if my marriage produced a son. It was nonnegotiable; he had to be called R.C. IV. I was not sure whether I was trying to sire a son or to continue a dynasty, but who can refuse a widowed mother’s pleas?
What made my mother’s last day on earth so happy was the converging of dreams into one single day of glorious realization. While she was applying her makeup in preparation for going to work, I was pacing the floor of the expectant fathers’ waiting room in a hospital 12 miles away. I had been there before but still did not feel like a confident veteran.
The same man who delivered our daughter finally came to the waiting room, with green mask dangling from his neck, to announce the birth of our son. My wife was fine and the dynasty was intact. After sharing the most tender of moments with my wife in the recovery room, I hurried to the phone to relay the news to my mother.
Nothing would do but that my mother would go to the hospital to see her new grandson. I picked her up at her office and took her to the hospital nursery to see the orange-haired, prune-faced newborn infant she declared uncommonly handsome. After a leisurely dinner at a restaurant, during which she expressed her unbounded ebullience, we went to her apartment where I was invited to spend the night.
As we reached the entrance to the building, we found two packages stacked against the doorway. Once inside the apartment, she tore open the packages like a child on Christmas morning. The first package contained engraved invitations to my ordination scheduled only weeks away.
The second package was from Maxine’s, a stylish women’s dress shop in Pittsburgh which featured the latest fashions. It contained an elegant dress, undoubtedly the most expensive garment she had purchased since her husband’s death. She danced before the mirror holding the dress in front of her, taking waltz steps around the room.
She bought it for the ordination but wore it at her funeral. It was too much excitement for one day as one dream was fully realized and the other’s proximate certainty was confirmed by the symbolic presence of the invitations and the dress. Within the hour she protested that she was weary and wanted to go to bed.
We said our good-nights and she retired to her bedroom, but not before poking her head around the door to say, “This is the happiest day of my life.”
I was exhausted from the events of the day and quickly fell asleep in the next room. When morning came I knocked on my mother’s door and was mildly puzzled by the lack of response. I opened the door and instantly realized that the woman in repose on the bed was dead.
It did not seem possible. I walked to her side and clutched her wrist. She had been dead for several hours; rigor mortis had set in and her body was icy to the touch. The sensation was eerie, defying logic.
Sleep makes the passage of time seem instantaneous. In what seemed like the span of a few minutes, my mother had changed from a breathing, warm, excited person to a lifeless statue. I stood transfixed in disbelief, caught in the absurdity of it. Within the span of 24 hours, I passed through the emotions of seeing my son take his initial breaths of life and seeing my mother in the coldness of death.
Throughout the pages of the Bible, whether law or history or poetry or prophecy or gospel or letter, death is a fixation far more common than in our lives today. For biblical authors an awareness of death and its implications for life is crucial for a life of wisdom.
An Unpleasant Topic
When is the last time you thought of the fact that you will die? When did you last have a conversation with someone on the subject of death? Have you ever seen anyone die? Ever had someone die in your home? When did you last walk through a cemetery or attend a funeral? Have you read any book, watched any movie, even listened to any sermon that deals with the problem of death? I’m not talking about death by violence or death by accident or death by rare and virulent disease. I’m talking about death as a basic human experience—as basic as birth, eating, and sleeping.
Death is a fundamental human experience, uniting all humans across time and space, race and class. But in our time and place, death isn’t something we think about very often, if at all. The remarkable achievements of modern medicine have pushed death further and further back in the average Western person’s life span. We enjoy better disease prevention, better pharmaceutical treatments, and better emergency care than any other society in history. That’s a wonderful blessing, no question. But it comes with a major side effect: many of us can afford to live most of our lives as if death isn’t our problem.
Death is no less inevitable than it’s ever been, but many of us don’t have to see it or even think about it as a daily presence in our lives. When people die, it is more likely than not in a medical facility, cordoned off from where we live, a sanitized, carefully managed, even industrial process that occurs when professionals decide to stop giving care.
Death is still inevitable, but it has become bizarre. Death has also become a taboo of sorts, not to be discussed in polite company. We label such talk as “morbid.” It’s a pejorative term applied to words or ideas that are unusually dark—distortions of the truth as we wish to see it. To bring up the subject of death is too often awkward at best, shameful at worst.
Canada recently released its updated statistics for how many people died last year from physician-assisted suicide, and the numbers continue an alarming trend. The country’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program was used by roughly 15,300 people to end their own lives. That makes it the fifth leading cause of death in 2023 and represents a 16 percent increase over the previous year. However, considering that 2022 saw an increase of 31 percent, I suppose you could say it’s an improvement in some respects.
But while Canada is the country where the greatest number of people have chosen to end their lives through some form of physician-assisted suicide, they are far from the only place where a form of the procedure is legal. The United Kingdom, for example, took steps recently to join that list and will be discussed at greater length later in this article. However, Canada’s MAID laws are among the least restrictive you’re likely to find.
What sets Canada apart?
While the premise behind most physician-assisted suicide programs is ostensibly to help facilitate a more peaceful end for those who are already on death’s doorstep, that is not always how it plays out in practice.
The government in Quebec recently began allowing individuals to request euthanasia in advance when diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness. Efforts to extend access to people with mental illness have encountered more resistance than expected, but the rationale is that the country’s healthcare system is “not ready” rather than that their inclusion would be wrong on the merits. And in Alberta, a judge ruled earlier this year that an autistic woman could end her life despite efforts from her family to keep her from doing so.
That last case in particular could be part of why the provincial government in Alberta recently announced that they are looking for citizen input regarding potential changes to the way their MAID program functions. Among the topics under consideration are:
Creating a new public agency, as well as additional legislation, to provide oversight.
Creating a way for “families and eligible others” to argue that a family member who has sought MAID should not qualify.
Implementing new limitations on who qualifies for MAID.
While MAID is technically a national law and some form of the program must be offered throughout the country, each province has a measure of discretion regarding how it is implemented. As such, there is a good bit of room for provincial governments to adjust how the law works in their jurisdiction. The recent trends outlined above have given rise to a growing concern that the law is not serving the purpose for which it was originally created.
That said, it should not come as a surprise that giving people a quick—and final—way to escape from their pain and distress has been abused. Couple that vulnerability with the fact that the legal protections meant to guard against abuse are increasingly ignored—in Ontario, for example, a quarter of MAID providers were found to have been out of compliance last year—and you get a cautionary tale of where such laws can lead.
But, if that’s the case, why do assisted suicide laws seem to be growing in popularity? And what steps, if any, are being taken to guard against those abuses?
A telling answer to both questions is found in the UK’s move to pass similar legislation, though with one key difference.
Who gives the lethal dose?
This past November, the British Parliament voted to continue toward the legalization of assisted suicide. And while many steps remain in what the bill’s sponsor speculated would be at least a two-year process, signs point to the UK eventually joining the list of Western nations and states to allow doctors to help people end their own lives.
The nature of that aid, however, provides a key distinction and points to an important truth on the nature of what many are looking for when they ask for doctors to help them die.
In the proposed bill—as in most places where assisted suicide is legal—doctors would be able to give a patient the necessary drugs to induce death, but the patient would have to be the one to take them. By contrast, in Canada and the Netherlands, doctors are allowed to administer the drugs as well. This distinction appears to have a profound effect on how often people are willing to utilize such laws.
For example, California and Canada have similar populations, yet more than 15,000 people took advantage of the MAID laws to end their lives in 2023. By contrast, only 884 individuals in California did the same. And while the difference in who administers the life-ending drugs is not the only distinction—the health care system in Canada is so poor that the standard of care “makes assisted suicide seem more reasonable”—it’s a crucial part of the story.
Overall, the statistics clearly demonstrate that people are substantially more willing to accept a doctor’s help to end their life when they don’t have to be the one to actually take it themselves.
And that difference speaks to a principle that applies beyond assisted suicide.
Degrees of separation from sin
Much of the debate surrounding euthanasia typically comes down to the idea that, when faced with a situation where imminent death is all but certain, people should be given the opportunity to end their life on their terms. And the appeal of that idea is easy to understand.
If you’ve ever walked with someone through a losing battle with cancer or been around a person whose mind, for all practical purposes, died long before their body, the idea of sparing them from that fate can seem merciful. On some level, maybe it is. But the Bible teaches that—with few exceptions—when a life ends is up to God, not us.
Perhaps many of those who are ready to die but far less willing to take their own life recognize that truth to some extent. If so, gaining a degree of separation from the action by having a doctor facilitate that end could make it easier to accept. And the same is true in other areas of our lives as well.
It is often far easier to reject God’s plans when we can lay the ultimate blame for our sins on someone else. This temptation has existed since the Garden of Eden and is unlikely to go away anytime soon. However, God is not fooled, and just because others may share the blame does not absolve us of our guilt.
So the next time you’re tempted to think that your sins are somehow lessened because someone else shared in them, remember that’s not how it works. We are each responsible for our own choices, regardless of who else plays a part.
Trusting God’s ways, even when his path is more difficult than what we would choose for ourselves, will always be the right choice.
*Denison Forum does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in these stories.
Quote of the day:
“Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days—when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when you’re out of options, when the pain is great—and you turn to God alone.” —Rick Warren
Voluntary euthanasia in Canada led to more than 15,000 deaths in 2023, according to a government report.
The procedures made up 4.7 percent of deaths in Canada last year, new government data shows, according to the BBC.
The report put the mean age of those who died via assisted suicide at just above 77.
About 96 percent of patients had what the report called “reasonably foreseeable” deaths due to cancer or other conditions.
The report noted that patients in a minority of cases wanted to die after a long illness they believed impacted their quality of life.
Canada legalized assisted death in 2016. Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Austria also have laws allowing people to partake in medically assisted suicide.
Canada requires two independent healthcare providers to support a patient’s request to die.
Quebec, which is home to about 22 percent of the Canadian population, accounted for about 37 percent of voluntary euthanasia deaths nationwide.
Canada created the medically assisted dying process for the terminally ill, but expanded the program to include people who believe their quality of life is severely impacted by an illness. They were planning to include the mentally ill this year, but delayed that step amid concerns about the scope of the expansion.
In October, a government committee showed that what was termed an “unmet social need” led to some deaths, according to the Associated Press.
“To finally have a government report that recognizes these cases of concern is extremely important,” Dr. Ramona Coelho, a member of the committee, said. “We’ve been gaslit for so many years when we raised fears about people getting MAiD because they were poor, disabled or socially isolated.”
The committee cited the case of an unemployed man in his 40s with bowel disease whose background included substance abuse and mental health issues. The man was called “socially vulnerable and isolated,” yet a psychiatrist suggested euthanasia as an option as part of a mental health assessment, raising eyebrows among panel members.
Trudo Lemmens, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Toronto, said Canadian medical and judicial authorities appeared “unwilling to curtail practices that appear ethically problematic.”
“Either the law is too broad, or the professional guidance not precise enough,” Lemmens remarked. “Or it is simply not seen as a priority to protect some of our most vulnerable citizens.”
MPs in the British Parliament have voted for Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill on its second reading by 330 votes for to 275 against.
Despite the warnings from around the world, members of both major parties voted for the Labour MP’s private member’s Bill to legalise what should more properly be called assisted suicide, but which would most likely have received much less support if it had not relied on cosy euphemisms for what is essentially the State helping dying people to kill themselves.
Indeed, the whole campaign for “assisted dying” has been so shrouded in fluffy phrases that many think it means merely helping patients to have a more comfortable and natural death. Most likely, this explains why a majority of the public has appeared to support such a measure – although, tellingly, that majority tends to shrink as the manifold problems are highlighted in detailed discussion.
But perhaps for this reason, when opponents raise the practical and ethical problems of this compassionate, autonomous process of de-lifing, in particular, the danger of slippery slopes – they are accused of “scaremongering”. However, that term might be more usefully directed at the practice of scaring vulnerable individuals into believing that they will “die in agony” if they do not have the choice that means the end of all choice.
Doublespeak
And there has been a strange, one might almost say eerie silence, in all this discussion, about ordinary suicides, which are known to rise in jurisdictions where assisted suicide is legal.
Indeed, despite the well-known fact that suggestion plays a significant role in suicide ideation, the constant talk about deliberate death being an answer to suffering may well move people who are not “dying anyway”, but who are suicidally inclined, to take that final, fatal step. But we are meant to believe that assisted dying is not suicide, therefore instead of engaging in suicide prevention, we must engage in suicide promotion.
As to slippery slopes, Ms Leadbeater’s Bill itself resembles a slope growing more slippery by the day. While stressing its “strict safeguards”, she herself has hinted at its broader application – even acknowledging that being a “burden” on others could be a legitimate reason for seeking assisted dying. In an interview on The News Agents podcast, she said:
“I know I wouldn’t want to be a burden to people, I can say that to you now in the clear light of day. But that’s very different to people saying, ‘I’m doing this because I feel like I’m being a burden’”.
As to “safeguards”, the ban on assisting a suicide could be seen as the “safeguard” that allowed Parliament to decriminalise suicide in 1961. It has taken a while, but finally, in 2024, we have come the long way round to dismantle that particular safeguard – arguably the most important. And among all the reasons why the Leadbeater Bill is so risky, according to former Chief Coroner Thomas Teague, is that “it removes the statutory duty to investigate suicides”.
Unlike other jurisdictions that have legalised assisted dying and now find themselves a long way down the slippery slope, our politicians have no such excuse – most seem to have decided to ignore the red flags, voting in favour of the Bill for ideological reasons instead of heeding the evil practical consequences and swerving at the last minute. This puts one in mind of lemmings, but in this case, it will most likely not be them who end up plunging over the cliff – rather, it will be the weakest and most vulnerable in society. With the legal guardrails torn down, there will be no protection – nothing to defend them from the siren voices of suicide.
As Conservative MP Danny Kruger, previously chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Dying Well, concluded in his speech during the debate on the Second Reading:
“I’m talking about the people who lack agency: the people who know what it is to be excluded from power, to have decisions made for them by bigwigs in distant offices speaking a language they don’t understand. … Not the ones who write to us campaigning for a change in the law, but the people who come to our surgeries with their lives in tatters, or who the police and social workers tell us about, the people with complex needs.
“What are the safeguards for them? I will tell you. We are the safeguard. This place. This Parliament. You and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, and yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.”
It is highly appropriate that this Bill should have passed its second reading on “Black Friday”. But there is still time to raise our voices in warning against this disaster waiting to happen, while we still can command our voices – enabling our long island story to have a happy ending, rather than history recording that “they all died unhappily ever after”.
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Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Pexels.
Last Friday the House of Commons voted to begin the process whereby Parliament may legalise assisted suicide. This marked a significant change in the way our society thinks of the individual, the way we live together and our concept of care. There are immediate dangers which emerge from the change in underlying principle.
The legalisation of same-sex marriage and the acceptance of transgenderism are symptoms of a society in decline, one which lost its way when it deliberately rejected its Christian foundation. Same-sex marriage was a rejection of the natural order. The legal fiction that a man could become a woman and a woman a man by merely wishing it were so is a rejection of science. The acceptance of physician assisted suicide is a rejection of humanity’s most basic right, the right to life. The UK has taken one more step down the road towards paganism.
We live in a society where literally nothing is sacred. There is no moral order, no line which we dare not cross. We have rejected the God who gives us parameters for life and instead have embraced the great god Self, a greedy god who once worshipped knows no limits and makes ever greater demands.
Like the Nazis, we have accepted the principle that there are certain lives not worth living. Many who voted for assisted suicide did so on compassionate grounds and out of sympathy for the very real suffering some encounter. Instead of bending every effort to help them and their loved ones in a dreadful situation, we have chosen out of ‘compassion’ to end their lives. That we in a liberal society have decided to take this road by democratic means does not make it any less wicked than when implemented by a totalitarian fascist regime.
A ‘compassion’ that demands we be allowed to help end the life of another, no matter how well intentioned, is misplaced. Life is, and remains, God’s gift. To deliberately end a life, either our own or that of another, is to reject the gift and the giver. Ultimately this proposed legislation is the adoption of a new religion, one which sees humanity as disposable instead of valuable.
For most of our history we have followed the Christian principle that we must make sacrifices for those less fortunate. Today we are moving into the contrary position where those less fortunate will be persuaded, either directly or by social pressure, to sacrifice themselves for the more fortunate.
If the Terminally ill Adults (End of Life) Bill progresses to become law we will have normalised the principle that state-sanctioned death is a final default position for treatment of the elderly, the vulnerable, the disabled. On the evidence of where right to die legislation has been enacted elsewhere, this could quickly slide into the treatment of those suffering from mental illness, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and other conditions.
The Bill which went forward on the legislative path placed restrictions on the practice, but experience teaches that restrictions never last.
Whatever the initial criteria are, there will inevitably be cases on the outer parameters of what is permitted. When these cases on the edge are resolved it will expand the parameters. They become the new criteria, and so it gradually expands further and further. Eventually you reach the situation in Canada where doctors are permitted and willing to offer to help those with depression to kill themselves when there are no hospital beds available. Nothing remains as it begins.
We have seen this before. When abortion was legalised we were assured that it would be ‘legal, safe and rare’; today it has almost become a sanctioned means of late birth control. If things continue in the UK as they have elsewhere, once begun this process will not stop, and the vulnerable will become even more vulnerable
With the decrease of fertility rates In the West we inevitably face population decline. This means that a smaller proportion of the young and economically active will have to support a larger proportion of the elderly and economically dependent. It is wishful thinking to suppose that this will not result in social pressure on the old to commit state-sanctioned suicide.
Campaigners are concerned that the elderly may be ‘persuaded’ to commit suicide by heartless relatives. Only the naive would imagine that this would never happen. It works the other way as well. As a society we will move into a position where the elderly fear becoming a burden to their own children and grandchildren. Their children and grandchildren will have the appalling task of trying to convince elderly and ill parents and grandparents not to commit suicide: ‘No, granny, we want you to be with us. We love you and will take care of you.’
This proposed legislation sows mistrust throughout society, not only within families. Trust between doctor and patient will be eroded: the sustainers of life will have become also the takers of life. The most basic function of the state is to protect its citizens; can we trust the state to protect us when it sanctions our death?
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I’ll now sign off for a wee while to allow my wonky hand to heal.
There was a woman taking out trash in the early pre-dawn who was hit by an illegal alien. His car knocked out of her socks and her body was a hundred feet from her trash can. The DA decided not to press charges.
We read stories like this all the time these days. I’ve mentioned several times recently that we are living in a culture of death. That culture will climax in the moment when all the world rejoices that the Two Witnesses of the Tribulation are killed and lay putrefying in the street. They celebrate their deaths by giving gifts. As opposed to Christmas when we celebrate the life of Jesus birthed on earth in the flesh to live among us.
The dignity of life is nothing these days. The fact that humans are made in the image of God means nothing to an increasing amount of people.
We have become inured to death. There have been over 63Million abortions since it was legalized in 1973. Abortion is death. It kills a human being.
Movies and televisions shows today routinely show death, and as a culture, we are fascinated with seeing death, watching serial killers, true crime, and horror movies. Even TV show title covers and movie posters are literally dark.
I watch the Aussie TV show City Homicide which started in 2007. They begin every episode with this title card:
In today’s real world, there seems to be rare honor in preserving life, caring about life, bringing justice to a life cut short. Oh, I know it exists, but increasingly what we see in the news is that the loss of a human life just doesn’t have the same punch for people. Children raised on vicious and violent video games laugh when someone gets hurt, shot, or killed. They think it’s funny.
But God! We Christians are released from death to live life and live it abundantly! We have life eternal. We among all people know what Life IS, and what death really is. We can and should display the joy that comes with this sure knowledge.
When we are in Christ, we are In the Person who will never die. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of mankind, (John 1:4).
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms on account of My name, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19:29).
These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matthew 25:46).
You will make known to me the way of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; In Your right hand there are pleasures forever. (Psalm 16:11)
You have put joy in my heart, More than when their grain and new wine are abundant. (Psalm 4:7).
So therefore let us be joyful, let our faces shine with peace and happiness that we are saved and entered into full life of joy with the savior. In a culture of death, this will stand out to those staggering under weight of sin and specter of death. As death gleefully chokes our culture with its maniacal joy, let true joy of eternal life flow out from us who know the savior.
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