Light And Life

In my entry on the upcoming "Disability Pride" parade at the University of Illinois, I linked to the "Terri's Fight" website, which was dedicated to helping save the life of Terri Schiavo. Since Terri was successfully murdered, it is now dedicated to helping save the lives of the elderly and disabled, and is a sort of "Euthanasia Watch" website linking to many stories related to right to life issues.

An example of one such story is the recent poll of doctors in Victoria, Australia that found that 45% of said doctors support the legal euthanasia of terminally ill patients, as well as withholding treatment:

Almost half of Victoria's doctors want euthanasia laws changed so terminally ill patients can end their own lives.

Many also say elderly patients with no hope of recovery should be denied expensive life-preserving treatment.

A Herald Sun poll of almost 1800 Victorian doctors found 45 per cent thought the medical profession should support euthanasia and lobby the Government to make it legal for patients to kill themselves.

It's truly frightening that so many "doctors" support such a cold, utilitarian, and dangerous view of medicine, so out of line with the beliefs of Hippocrates.

Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physican who is considered "the father of medicine", believed that physicians had a duty to try to heal their patients, and foresaw the possibility that some physicians might use their knowledge to kill instead. He composed an oath, which doctors have taken since his time: in the original oath, doctors pledge to never help a patient take his or her own life, as well as never to perform an abortion. This man, a pagan who lived three centuries before Christ, knew better than many so-called Christians today.

Today the oath has been altered. Granted, some parts of the oath do require modifications, such as swearing by pagan Greek gods that no one believes in anymore. But the principles in the oath should not change, and sadly, they have.

Here's a segment of what the original Hippocratic Oath read:

"I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art."

Contrast this with an "updated" oath, written by Dr. Louis Lsagna in 1964:

"Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty."

What's missing in the 1964 version is the direct references to abortion and euthanasia. Indeed, there seems to be a tacit approval of euthanasia here. This is because Lasagna himself supported it.

It seems that modern doctors should pay close attention to line in Lasagna's revised oath that reads, "Above all, I will not play at God." If deciding who gets treatment and who doesn't is not playing God, then I'd like to know what is.

The job of a physician is to heal the sick the best they can, period-- not to decide who deserves medical care and who doesn't, and not to off patients they deem unworthy. Such a Mengele-esque view of medicine is, quite frankly, perverted.

Do we really think that euthanasia proponents want legal assisted murder of only terminally ill people who request it? Hopefully we can see how easily the "right to die" will become the "duty to die."

Even the dogs are getting involved!

My brother David recently decided to make a dramatic change of career... he is going from being a call center director to a photographer, focusing on wedding and family pictures. He's always been artistic, and I really hope he can become successful.

Our retired Dad also became interested in photography as a hobby, got a Nikon camera, and David recently stopped by to give him some help with it. Before David left, he took some great shots of Zoe and Basil, my Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. I can never seem to take a good picture of them, but David's shots came out fantastic. Here are four of the pictures he took (two I made black and white in my iPhoto computer program). The first two are of Zoe, and the second two are of Basil:

Maybe one day I'll learn how to take decent pictures, but for now I can at least edit them...

I'm already well aware that western universities have ceased to be institutions for teaching truth and critical thought and are now instead bastions of extreme left-wing indoctrination. Indeed, being a college student, I have been exposed to enough Diversity, Tolerance, and Minority Empowerment that I've learned great gag-reflex control out of necessity.

I'm also aware that the university system requires all manners of "diversity" to be "celebrated", such as practicing homosexuality. But a contact of mine who attends the University of Illinois forwarded me an email that takes "pride" to a whole new level of stupid:

Every year, Chicago is home to the Disability Pride Parade.

This year the UIC Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities (CCSPD) again is a proud sponsor of the 5th annual Disability Pride Parade 2008.

We welcome everyone to come out and march with us or watch this celebration. Please join us in a worldwide celebration of disability, diversity, and empowerment.

"Disability Pride"? Are these people serious?

There's absolutely nothing shameful about being disabled-- and I'll be the first to insist that disabled people be treated with dignity and respect. Their lives should not be counted as less worthy or lower quality because of their disability.

But there's just something about the idea of disabled people "celebrating" their handicaps that's just a tad sick. What are their posters going to read, "Proud to be a paraplegic"? I mean, it's not good to be disabled. That's why it's called a DIS-ABILITY.

I wonder if people with various diseases will now have "pride" rallies. I can see it now, "Lou Gehrig's rules!" and "Anorexic Forever!"

I for one would rather see a focus on human rights of the disabled-- on seeing that they can't be judicially murdered like Terri Schiavo was in 2005.

I don't mean to dash the hopes of so many Christians, but it doesn't appear that the schism between the East and the West will ever be mended. The reason is simple: the rift keeps widening as western Christianity continues to stray further from the teachings and spirit of apostolic Christianity.

This is what Father Vsevolod told an Interfax correspondent, echoing the recent Russian Church Bishops' Council.

From the Interfax article:

"On one side, it is Bishop Diomid's isolation and identifying Orthodoxy with a certain political choice. On the other, it is "a confessional mix" and the so-called theory of branches which equals all Christian confessions that supposedly belong to one living tree," Fr. Vsevolod told an Interfax-Religion correspondent on Friday.

Ah, yes, the "Branch Theory." The idea that basically all Christian confessions "branch" from the same "tree" and are therefore all valid and true. This idea is fallacious on its face and the Russian Church rightly rejects it.

How can anyone say that "the Church" teaches God's truth and at the same time includes thousands of contradictory beliefs?

"I think the question of our participation in ecumenical prayers messing up Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions is settled once and forever," the priest said.

He reminded that once the Orthodox participation in such prayers was justified as "then Western Christians were closer to us in true faith kept by the Orthodox Church, while today they, especially the world of liberal Protestantism, have got even further from the possibility of such unity."

According to the priest, the Council stated that "witness to the truth of the Holy Orthodoxy" is an objective of inter-Christian and inter-religious dialogues, and the councilor decision reads that the Russian Orthodox Church "doesn't accept any attempts to "mix confessions," to hold joint prayer services that artificially combine confessional or religious traditions."

Ah... what a great example of true ecumenism! Seeking truth, and not seeking some nebulous, hand-holding, United Nations-style "unity."

While the Orthodox insist that true unity can only be brought about through fidelity to the truth, this means that the chances of unity with other Christian confessions dwindles as the latter compromise more and more with the values and goals of the world.

Doctrinal disagreement is hardly anything new to Christianity, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants were at least united in moral principles. Abortion, homosexual acts, and fornication were all universally opposed by Christians... until recently. Many churches now brag that they have a "come as you are" policy, which ensures that their congregants stay as they are-- stuck in the mire of sin and spiritual death.

So now not only are there doctrinal differences, but moral ones as well, that would have to be overcome before any real unity can be achieved.

The Russian Church understands that truth trumps "unity" any day of the week, and refrains from confusing and scandalizing their flock.

Last week I reread a wonderful book-- Crunchy Cons: The new conservative counterculture and its return to roots by Rod Dreher. In the book, Dreher cites many other books-- including one by late professor Neil Postman called Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. I found the book at Borders and just finished it.

Neil Postman's thesis in this book is that technology can be bad if it is allowed to overrun and take over a culture, and that this is precisely what has happened in the western world.

Postman divides societies into three categories: tool-using societies (which we would call today "third world" countries), technocracies (societies who allow technology to change their culture to some degree), and technopolies, which are societies that allow technology to reign supreme and completely take over a culture. In this book, Postman argues that the United States is the only country to become a technopoly (the book was written in 1991, so today he might revise that claim).

Postman argues that technology is unthinkingly accepted as not only being a good mark of progress, but the only mark of progress. When it comes to a new technology, we tend to consider what we gain from it without considering what we lose.

He brings up the point that technology is "not additive or subtractive, but ecological." In other words, the introduction of a technology doesn't equal the same society plus this new technology; it equals a different society. Zoologists understand this principle, and consider how the introduction of a new animal or plant form can alter the ecological balance of a habitat-- in essence, creating a whole new habitat.

Postman isn't "anti-technology"; he acknowledges that technology can be good. He simply argues against the assumption that all technology is automatically a betterment and should therefore never be questioned.

This is a very thought-provoking and interesting read; he discusses the invention of the clock (originally used in Benedictine monasteries in the 13th century), the printing press (15th century), the numbered grading system (18th century), and the attempt to quantitatively measure abstract concepts such as intelligence. He derides the dictatorship of numbers and statistics, and touches on the way technology floods us with largely useless information and causes confusion. He argues that much of technology focuses on easy access to information, but that lack of information is not the cause of most of the world's problems.

In a technopoly, technology is not made to fit into a culture, but culture must give way to technology. Human relationships are weakened, as are traditional sources of wisdom such as religion and society's elders. The question is, are we using technology or is it using us?

When I took a class last fall for my education degree called "Technology Innovation", we would have discussions on the benefits versus the drawbacks of incorporating new technologies-- such as computers and even video games-- into the classroom. One thing that was never asked, however, is what Postman asks: "what is education for?" We were focused on whether this or that technology would help students learn the material, not on whether the technology would redefine education as we know it.

I had always regarded the Amish as quaint, "aw-aren't-they-cute" people whose fear of the modern world kept them locked in the year 1692. But in light of this eye-opener about the very real and often damaging effects of technology on society, perhaps they are wiser than I had given them credit for. They recognize, as we largely do not, that technology is not a panacea for the problems of humanity.

This said, I feel strange writing about the dangers of technology on a laptop computer while instant messaging with friends and listening to my iTunes song library. Ah well.