In a recent article at National Review Online, George Weigel tells a chilling story about just how far the culture of death has advanced in some parts of the West.

Three elderly parishioners at the Canadian church he attends during the summer were diagnosed with cancer. Now, that’s bad enough. But what followed was even worse. The first thing they were asked after being told their diagnosis was, “Do you wish to be euthanized?”

While this story should upset us, it shouldn’t shock us. Despite all the promises made by supporters of physician-assisted suicide, the so-called “safeguards” against pressuring vulnerable people to end their lives “have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated over time.”

Or, as Belgian law professor Étienne Montero observed, “What is presented at first as a right [to die] is going to become a kind of obligation.”

Thus, in fourteen years Belgium went from euthanizing terminally-ill adults, to killing chronically-ill adults, to offing adults who had lost their will to live, to finally disposing of children.

As Weigel’s story suggests, Canada seems literally hell-bent on catching up with Belgium in this regard. Physician-assisted suicide has only been legal there since this spring and it has already has transformed the practice of medicine in Canada. And if some Canadian philosophers get their way, a willingness to kill your patients will be a prerequisite for practicing medicine in the Great White North.

Now it’s Colorado’s turn to play waiting room Russian Roulette. This November my fellow Coloradans and I will vote on Proposition 106, also known by its Orwellian title: “The End of Life Options Act.”

The supporters of the act, which is modeled on California’s recent legislation of the same name, assure voters that a vote for physician-assisted suicide is a vote for “compassion.” They assure us that it will remain limited to cases of extreme suffering.

But as Weigel points out, the language of the proposed act is “duplicitous.” It characterizes killing someone as “palliative care.” And it defines an “adult” as anyone 18 or older, which leads to the absurdity of not being old enough to drink but old enough to request assistance in killing yourself.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  A Suicidal Ballot in Colorado: Will the Right to Die Become a Duty to Die? →

Thank heavens that Columbus was able to convince the world that the earth was round. Except, as Chuck Colson explains in this classic BreakPoint commentary, Columbus didn’t have to convince anyone.

For well over a century and a half, secular intellectuals have promulgated the myth that when it came to understanding the natural world, medieval and earlier Christians were superstitious simpletons. As we mark Columbus Day today, sit back and listen to Chuck Colson as he debunks that pernicious fairy tale.  Here’s Chuck.

To paraphrase the opening of a popular ESPN show, these four things everyone knows are true: Before Columbus’s first voyage, people thought the world was flat. When Copernicus wrote that the Earth revolved around the Sun, his conclusions came out of nowhere. Three, the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century invented science as we know it. And four, false beliefs and impediments to science are Christianity’s fault.

There’s just one problem: All four statements are false.

As Rodney Stark writes in his new book, “For the Glory of God,” “every educated person” of Columbus’s time, especially Christian clergy, “knew the earth was round.” More than 800 years before Columbus’s voyage, Bede, the church historian, taught this, as did Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Aquinas. The title of the most popular medieval text on astronomy was Sphere, not exactly what you would call a book that said the earth was flat.

As for Copernicus’s sudden flash of insight, Stark quotes the eminent historian L. Bernard Cohen, who called that idea “an invention of later historians.” Copernicus “was taught the essential fundamentals leading to his model by his Scholastic professors”—that is, Christian scholars.

That model was “developed gradually by a succession of . . . Scholastic scientists over the previous two centuries.” Building upon their work on orbital mechanics, Copernicus added the “implicit next step.”

Thus, the idea that science was invented in the seventeenth century, “when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it,” as it is said, is false. Long before the famed physicist Isaac Newton, clergy like John of Sacrobosco, the author of Sphere, were doing what can be only called science. The Scholastics—Christians—not the Enlightenment, invented modern science.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Columbus and the Rise of Science: We’ve Been Lied To →