Here’s what I found interesting this week…
So what can we expect life to look like in Canada now that we’re allowed to help other people commit suicide? Well, at least doctors are (for now). This article paints an overall picture based on the experiences of other jurisdictions that have blazed this trail before us. Some key points:
- Palliative care will be devalued and likely defunded. After all, why spend thousands – or tens of thousands – of dollars helping keep somebody comfortable as they are naturally dying when you could just spend a couple of hundred bucks to swiftly escort them right up to the pearly gates?
- People – especially the vulnerable people – are more likely to be subjected to “assisted suicide” without their consent. And without consent it grows harder to differentiate between assisted suicide and old-fashioned murder.
- The system, like any system, will be abused. But unlike abuse in, say, the tax system, or the legal system, people will die. So much more is at stake.
- Suicide rates will go up. Remember what I wrote about social momentum? I wasn’t making that stuff up.
Not a pretty picture. But this is the road that the Supreme Court has decided to push our nation down, and nobody is standing up to their divine dictates.
Here’s a lecture from L’Abri Ideas Library that I enjoyed a second time. Ellis Potter (a fascinating gentlemen, although a little bit of an odd speaker) is a former Buddhist Monk turned Christian. In this talk he explores what is meant by the term “spirituality” and what it means for humans to be “spiritual” beings. How do we grow in “spiritual” maturity?
It may not be quite what you expect. Supernatural experiences are quite peripheral to true spirituality, if they happen at all. And being “spiritual” might just involve baking bread and changing diapers.
The claim is made that children in same-sex households do just as well in life as children in other family arrangements; particularly opposite-sex parents. “Research proves it,” we are told. That’s all good and well, until you realize that the initial research maybe wasn’t all that great to begin with, and better research is actually proving the opposite.
This article describes another study showing massive differences between the outcomes of children in same-sex households and children in opposite-sex households, including:
- Far higher depression as adults
- Far higher suicide ideation as adolescents
- Obesity
- Over 90% report feeling distant from their parents as adolescents
The article also points to this study by the same author that shows that,
ADHD was more than twice … as prevalent among children with same-sex parents than in the general population, after controlling for age, sex, ethnicity and parent SES.
Growing up with your biological parents who are in a life-long, healthy, stable marriage has always been, and remains, the gold standard for healthy children. It doesn’t always work out – no family scenario yields 100% effectiveness, of course – but the success rate is far better than the alternatives, as I describe in my book For the Love of Alberta.
Rex Murphy provides an articulate summary of the inspiration behind the “Leave” victory in Brexit. As he says, it’s not that those who wanted to leave are ignorant and stupid, but they were upset with unelected leaders governing their every decisions without any regard for their local customs and traditions.
The European Parliament does house members from democratic states, but once those members make it to Brussels and Strasbourg, they have no constituents to answer to and give but haughty regard to the countries that sent them. The EU is a bureaucrats’ imperium, where unelected masters dispense rules and laws to the citizens of 28 previously sovereign states, with little respect to the traditions and cultures of those nations, and no accountability to any but their well-paid peers and paladins.
Is it just me, or do those accusations sound as if they apply equally well to the Supreme Court of Canada?
The fascinating question, then, is why the “Remain” side wants to remain, given the fact that the EU is determined to micro-manage the minutia of banana dimensions and heat capacities of hair dryers in the member nations (two of Murphy’s numerous examples). Why would people voluntary hand over such wide-sweeping control of their everyday lives to a superpower that is not meaningfully accountable to the will of the masses?
At a time when civilization seems determined to excise God from having any say in how we live our lives, why are so many people eager – even enthusiastic – to hand over more control to these demi-gods in our midst than God ever asked for in the first place? I sincerely doubt God is concerned with the precise size and shape of bananas, so long as his people get fed by the fruit he has munificently provided. The demi-gods, on the other hand, would rather dispose of perfectly nutritious bananas than serve them to the masses under their control, if those bananas do not meet their exacting standards.
Personally, I have some theories as to why people eagerly hand over control to supreme leaders such as these, but I’ll just leave that question out there for your consideration. An interesting book that presents one perspective on this subject is Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live?
Paul K Buller 