Miscellany

After six hours, Blogger has seen fit to actually allow me to post. So to minimize my grief, I'm going to collect a few items here.

First, Barbara Nicolosi has a great post examining some common shibboleths about death.

excerpts:

Death with dignity for believers means one thing - being in the state of grace. If you aren't in a state of grace, then, having a painless, calm slipping away is the ultimate cruel joke, because it masks the fact that the demons are casting lots for you on the other side.

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And nevermind the Christian ethical worldview. How about the historical argument? The fact is, in the long history of humanity, no group that EVER defined down another group of humans so as to kill/control them, has been judged to have been right. Not once. Women, blacks, Jews, the mentally ill, Gypsies, Indians, homosexuals, Aboriginees...who else do you have? In every case, the people who defined another group of people as "not people...or at least not like us" have been judged to have been greivously wrong, and even evil. Why, oh why, do we keep doing this?!

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"Right to Die" - Is anybody else completely sick to death of the whole shifty-eyed, ever-expanding, trump all, litany of rights stuff?! There's a reason the forefathers only put ten rights in the Constitution. The emphasis is not on what is owed to you, but what you achieve through your labor and honor.

But really, the "right to DIE"? Sure, and tomorrow we can secure your rights to have zits, to get your car repossessed and to get fired from your job just before you're eligible for a pension. Dying isn't something to be fought for! (Quick, some judge somewhere is about to rule that the Right to Die ipso facto includes the implied rights to have your bodily fluids drip through your eyeballs and to have maggots bury their larvae in your flesh. Chant with me, "Drop Dead, Good-bye, Don't You Touch Our Right to Die!")

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A big grief to me over the Schiavo case is how many Christians are assenting to the "I wouldn't want to live like that" thing. If one more Christian tells me they are making a Living Will! See, we aren't the people who decide when we are ready to check out. We just die when we die because we believe that God is Sovereign, the Lord of our Lives. (Besides the fact that I knew a healthy 68 year old woman who died because she had a Living Will and when she got pneumonia, the doctors couldn't treat her by putting her on a respirator to save her life.) We have to stop talking like the pagans do who get to make choices about stuff that we don't because of our faith.

Here's the only answer to Christians who are going around mumbling the above: "Suck it up, Louise!" It's "Church Militant" - not "Church Effete."

Next we have this excellent wrap-up of how the MSM has once again failed in its primary obligation not to bear false witness.

Finally, Nat Hentoff, leftist and atheist, has much to say about the Schiavo outrage.