QUICK LINKS
How Did We Get To This?
Regardless of political persuasion, any decent human being cannot escape the emotion of watching a determined husband killing his wife while a mother, father, siblings, and millions of Americans beg that life rather than death be offered to Terri Schiavo.
How did we get here?
Patrick Henry once said, “It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains, a corrupted public conscience is incompatible with freedom.�
Has our public conscience become corrupted?
I believe it has. And consistent polls taken over a long period of time confirm our changing values and attitudes.
An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992 described what Patrick Henry referred to. The article said that at the end of World War II – when faith and traditional values were much stronger in America – less than 36 percent of those polled thought individuals should have the right to end their own life. By 1990, however, researchers found that 63 percent of Americans approved of euthanasia as a medical option. A USA Today/Gallup poll in 1995 indicated that 75 percent support the idea of suicide for terminally ill individuals. Seventy percent, we are told, agree with the doctors right to remove Terri’s feeding tubes.
I believe that the basic belief in evolution is at the heart of this fundamental change in thinking.
The evolutionary hypothesis holds that man is a mere accident of time and chance, that life is transitory and death is final. By systematically indoctrinating our youth for the past 40 years, primarily through public education, that life is not a gift but rather a chance occurrence, that there is no God and no eternal dimension or consequence to our lives, people’s thinking has shifted from the importance of living (as a gift from God) to the practical expedient of “get all you can get.� A shift away from “responsibilities� toward “rights.�
The shift from a “sanctity of life� ethic to a “quality of life� ethic is the most profoundly destructive step a nation can take. Once we take that step, we then become able to justify any atrocity by disguising it behind the mask of “compassion,� “rights,� or just plan “realism.�
Any society that loses its belief that life is sacred and that only God can decide when to give and when to take away life, has taken a very risky step toward totalitarism. In time, life in such a culture will become meaningless, and death will be incredibly cheap.
Dr. C. Christopher Hook, director of ethics education and consultation at Mayo Clinic has described with some detail how doctors in Nazi Germany began authorizing euthanasia for mentally ill and deformed individuals then to other “undesirables,� until they were able to rationalize the extermination of six million Jews, Poles, Evangelicals, and others deemed expendable by Hitler’s Third Reich.
Over the past few years activist judges and their pro-death conspirators have convinced many that every “right� is good and that the idea of “right to privacy�� in other moral issues some how legitimizes any behavior, regardless of how contradictory it may be to God and His natural law.
Patrick Henry understood that, man does not have the capacity to rule himself away from God’s principles.
Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World describes a situation in which the aged and infirm are disposed of to make way for the next generation, only the definition of “aged and infirm� spirals steadily downward until eventually, children are running the state and callously disposing of their own elders and parents.
Is this too far-fetched or over the top?
Dr. Hook of Mayo Clinic says that sooner or later the “slippery slope� slides all the way to the bottom.
Our heart aches, as we watch the murder of Terri Schiavo.
Our hearts will also come to ache as we realize that “tyrants have forged our chains,� and the tyranny of a few pro-death activists and even fewer activist judges have stolen our freedom because we have forgotten God and our public conscience has become corrupted.
To receive these blogs in your email box, click here.
Comments? Click here.
_______________________________
Gary Randall
President & Chairman
Faith and Freedom Foundation
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home