A passion for pulling the plug, or tube, or trigger.

Peggy Noonan gives us her take on the Schiavo situation. Along with the politics surrounding this and other events, she's 'dead on' on a most basic issue: you either believe you are a creation of God, or the end result of a myriad combination of circumstances. That perspective defines for us how people are looking at Ms. Schiavo. Now, I'm not for any branch or individual overstepping the Constitution, but whether one believes...or not, we all answer to a Higher Power. Disbelief won't negate our requirement to answer to that Higher Power. It simply puts the answering off until we are individually or collectively called into account. If you don't think that you're knee will bow or your tongue confess...the Constitution gives you that right to think so. It just doesn't change the facts. It does, however, change what your idea of Right and Wrong and Life and Death are. That's why people are going way beyond simply allowing someone to starve to death and taking a more direct route with with guns (which is my argument for making it a law to require and/or to provide all citizens with firearms to protect themselves from people that think life is worthless). As I saw on a bumper sticker the other day, "If you don't believe in God, you'd better be right". Some would consider my position dogmatic. It most certainly is. Hey, its my blog, afterall... :-)

Its not like its a matter of Life or Death, is it?

I'm not the first to make this observation, but recent events really are highlighting this 'culture of death' phenomenon our country is experiencing as the Easter holiday is upon us. The first thing that comes to mind is Terri Schiavo. We have a person that is not on life support, whose ability to function beyond a 'persistent vegetative state' is still subject to debate amongst medical experts, and it seems that our judicial system is Hell-bent on killing her. This in spite of Congress and the President of the United States doing their collective best to give her another chance at Life. We have a young man, Jeff Weise, up in Minnesota that killed 10 people, including his grandparents, and even himself. It was found out later he was deep into 'neo-nazism'. Jessica Lunsford, a mere 9 years old, is murdered by a convicted sex-offender. Here locally a bar fight that in the past would have resulted in some fist fight in the parking lot, winds up with a 'drive by' type of shooting with four people dead. A high school football player simply attending a party is gunned down by another teenager, all because he was asked to leave.

The common thread? In all these cases, Life has lost its value to the people that are taking it. If we are to believe the polls concerning Terry Schiavo (which I don't), Life has lost its value to most of the rest of us as passive bystanders. Its no longer important whether anyone lives. There is no such thing as Eternity, only a blank space where we used to exist. The thing taking its place is Death. Literally, Life and Death have become equivalent in value to many people, and in some cases Death is actually preferable, the first choice. How ironic it is that the Holiday that celebrates Life in the form of the Resurrection falls on the heels of all this death, death, and more death.

Assuming a belief in a God of any kind, our mere existence is in and of itself a miraculous occurance. The culture we're living in now doesn't acknowledge God or the miraculous nature of our existence as the result of His own existence. How short a step it is to Oblivion when our lives are assumed to end there.