One of the most poignant suicide notes I’ve read was written by Gillian Bennett. A brilliant and articulate woman, and a trained psychotherapist, she was diagnosed with dementia and began to experience the resulting limitations, weakness, and frailty. She decided to end her own life to avoid experiencing further decline. She wrote about her decision on a dedicated website. The story of her death and her reasons for choosing it were widely discussed in the media. Her words help us to understand the perspective of a patient seeking physician-assisted death: I will take my life today around noon. It is time. Dementia is taking its toll and I have nearly lost myself. I have nearly lost me. . . . Understand that I am giving up nothing that I want by committing suicide. All I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country’s money but having not the faintest idea of who I am. Each of us is born uniquely and dies uniquely. I think of dying as a final adventure with a predictably abrupt end. I know when it’s time to leave and I do not find it scary. According to the website, Gillian Bennett died at 11 a.m. on August 18, 2014, in the presence of her husband. News of her death, and her poignant declaration of her reasons for ending her life, contributed to the growing public support for physician-assisted death. Within a year of her death, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the criminal code prohibiting physician-assisted death. By 2022, 4.1 percent of all deaths in Canada were physician-assisted. How do we respond to people like Gillian who find no reason to go on, who want life to be over, and who want to control the manner and timing of their deaths? Given this “why,” which seems so intuitive and plausible in our present social milieu, is there a reasonable “why not”? Wealthy, White, Nonreligious Suicides A consistent finding from studies of patients who seek euthanasia is that they’re generally from a specific group in society: wealthy, white, nonreligious people. This observation is sometimes cited in support of physician-assisted death because it’s taken to mean these patients aren’t from so-called vulnerable or marginalized populations. They aren’t being taken advantage of or forced to obtain physician-assisted death. They aren’t vulnerable to coercion. Nobody is making them choose this path. But are we failing to understand the true nature of vulnerability? What if vulnerability to physician-assisted death arises from within rather than from external social forces? What if people lack the resources offered by spiritual beliefs and community to make sense out of suffering and to transcend it? What if vulnerability isn’t social but rather psychological and spiritual? The fact that a specific group of people is predisposed to seek physician-assisted death raises the distinct possibility that existential, philosophical, and spiritual concerns—problems of meaning and significance in the face of suffering and loss—are key factors that help explain why people seek death from a doctor. Decide Your Own Value Proponents of physician-assisted death claim to care greatly about human value. They insist that physician-assisted death is a matter of respect for intrinsic value and autonomy. Intrinsic value rises from the thing itself. By regarding a person as the source of his or her own value, the person appears to be accorded deep significance and importance. After all, isn’t this “value from inside”? On the contrary, physician-assisted death doesn’t affirm the intrinsic value of humanity, because it’s based on a sense of value conditional on someone’s self-regard. In fact, it requires viewing humans as having extrinsic value, which comes from the valuer’s opinion. When we treat ourselves as the foundation of our own value, we force ourselves to bear an unbearable weight. If we’re in a situation where we’re unable or unwilling to value ourselves, then we lose our value. If we’re of no use to ourselves, then we really are useless. If I feel my existence is bad for me, then it really is bad to exist. By contrast, if I had intrinsic value, I’d be obligated as “valuer” to value myself. But if I don’t have such intrinsic value, then I’m under no obligation to value myself, and I’m free to do with myself as I please, no matter how self-destructive my choices might be. True Value We’re too weak, too frail, too vulnerable to circumstances for our self-regard to be a firm foundation for our value and significance. And this is a burden we need not bear, for God tells us how valuable we are over and over (Ps. 139; Isa. 43:4; Matt. 6:26; 10:29–31; John 3:16). Yet the tragedy of the human condition is that we’re prone to forget how much we matter. We’re too weak, too frail, too vulnerable to circumstances to be a firm foundation for our value and significance. One important way we remember our intrinsic value is through community. When others treat us as if we’re deeply valuable (e.g., kind wishes from friends and family on our birthday), we feel ourselves to be valuable. If we’re ignored, neglected, or forgotten, we quickly doubt our value. Unless we enjoy respect and dignified treatment from others, we’re inclined to feel worthless. This is the essence of loving community, seen so clearly in the local church. It’s a web of value in action. Solution to Despair Physician-assisted death is held up as a solution to the problem of suffering; at bottom, it’s a solution to despair. And the solution is to end the person who’s in despair. We know a better way. The gospel offers us deep, durable meaning­—powerful enough to sustain us through life and through suffering and dying. Our story becomes part of God’s grand story, the story behind all stories. It’s the story in which our suffering is shown to be for good, to be meaningful, to matter, to be worth it. And it’s a happily-ever-after story, a too-good-to-be-true story, a story of faith, hope, and love that culminates in eternal life and everlasting communion with the One who made us for himself. In the kingdom, we discover that God himself is our highest good. In the kingdom, we discover a meaning for our suffering that makes it all worth it. In the kingdom, our suffering isn’t useless. In the kingdom, there’s no despair. The gospel offers us deep, durable meaning­—powerful enough to sustain us through life and through suffering and dying. So how should we respond? The church can head off physician-assisted death in our congregations by discipling Christians to suffer well. We must equip believers with the theological, philosophical, and spiritual resources to face suffering, to endure hardness. Our teaching should anticipate suffering, illness, and death. Those of us privileged to live in democratic societies must ask our elected officials to oppose this practice and to uphold freedom of conscience for healthcare professionals who refuse to participate. A nation’s laws are a teacher. Legalizing physician-assisted death teaches our society to doubt human value and to see it as merely extrinsic and conditional. Prohibiting this practice reminds us of the true depth of human value. Protecting freedom of conscience allows professionals in healthcare facilities to provide safety for those living with disabilities or chronic illness who see themselves as vulnerable to the suggestion of death.

In this breakout session from TGC23, Dan Doriani addresses the real concern of churches devastated by bullying, immorality, and narcissism at the hands of pastors. But he also addresses the challenges facing pastors as they endure disapproval, opposition, foot-dragging, sabotage, and whisper campaigns. He challenges pastors to cultivate humility, seek God’s wisdom and mercy, and embrace servanthood while fostering appropriate confidence and resilience in their calling to pastoral ministry.

Imagine a left wing group, so committed to ridding the world of Fox News (and right-wing news in general) that there is no depth they would stoop to make that happen. Say this group had no ethics nor…

Donald Trump's rally in the Bronx in New York City didn't thrill Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just a couple of ago was bragging about the Left's effort to keep the presumptive GOP nominee busy in…

Russia pounded Kharkiv with missiles on Thursday, killing seven people inside a printing house, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy chided Ukraine's Western allies for not providing enough military support…

Getting in tune with rock and roll. The post The artists that gave Maureen Tucker her sound: “The same as it is now” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Occasionally, there are those of us on the right who fall into the mistaken habit of believing things about comedian and HBO talk host Bill Maher that are not true. For example, Maher is some sort of honest broker with whom we might do business. I’ve fallen into this trap myself. Just the other day, I saw a clip from Maher in which, discussing the Harrison Butker imbroglio, he questioned whether Butker’s advice to women that they consider pursuing motherhood as a vocation was so terrible as an alternative to seeking fulfillment through an advanced degree from an “a**hole factory” such as Harvard. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 98: These Are the Monsters of Our Society) He actually gets it, I thought. But Maher doesn’t. You should see Bill Maher as something of a weathervane. Maher represents the Hollywood Left’s limited ability to recognize how out of touch it is with the rest of society. Sometimes it’s refreshing to recognize there is such an ability, and that’s tempting. For example, the Disney wokesters booked him on The View, and he said things that made those women feel all icky: But it’s all fool’s gold. Bill Maher is not somebody you can do business with. 1. And Why Would You Want To? Maher is not “brilliant.” That’s idiotic. He’s a garden-variety gutless 1990s liberal who — if he deserves credit, it’s for realizing this — has been left by the roadside by the screeching Maoists who have taken over the cultural institutions the liberals used to run. There are lots of old-school liberals who woke up one day and found themselves mugged by that reality. They’ve generally fallen into two camps. The more prevalent of the two are the Nancy Pelosis and Joe Bidens of the world who were so starved for power and relevance that they gleefully modulated what principles they had and took that Hard Left turn when Barack Obama demanded it as part of his takeover of the Democrat Party. Most of the Hollywood Left did the same thing. (READ MORE: Ohio Legislature Refuses to Bail Out Biden’s Incompetence. Good for It.) The second camp is the ones who got red-pilled, at least to an extent. The Bari Weisses, Matt Taibbis, Davie Rubins, Joe Rogans, and Tulsi Gabbards of the world are examples. Most of them are not conservatives, but they certainly have become people with whom conservatives can do business. Maher should be in the second camp, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast and proved that while being utterly torn apart by Kelly: Bill Maher Went on the @megynkelly Show and Let's Just Say, It Didn't Go Well pic.twitter.com/CMmEgAf40T — Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) May 22, 2024 So the question is why would we continue to care what comes out of this guy’s mouth? He hasn’t considered both sides. He hasn’t thought much of any of this stuff through. And at the end of the day, he’s still willing to shill for the Left’s stupid narratives. You would think Maher would have known not to peddle the “he’s a criminal” narrative in front of Kelly when it came to the Mar-A-Lago document imbroglio. Getting systematically dismantled to such an extent that he was reduced to mumbling that she might know more about the issue than he did would be a career killer for Maher in a sane society. Does he run a decent show on HBO? That’s debatable. It’s certainly more watchable than the other thing, the one with the boorishly unfunny beta Brit on Sunday nights, but that’s a very low standard for someone we’re supposed to hold up as an influencer of opinion. Maybe the last comedian worthy of that was George Carlin. It certainly isn’t Bill Maher. If I promise to stop caring what this whiny has-been has to say, will you join me? 2. Nine Times Melissa and I did a segment of the Spectacle this week on Joe Biden’s utterly disastrous, race-baiting commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta last weekend. If you haven’t seen it, here it is: The Spectacle Podcast: Joe Biden Is Racist. His Commencement Speech at Morehouse Proved It. with hosts @MelissaTweets and @RVIVRdotcom Available on @rumblevideo and all podcast platforms. pic.twitter.com/VIG9RPVZbJ — The American Spectator (@amspectator) May 22, 2024 What we didn’t talk about, but certainly could have, was that Biden double-dipped in his racial pandering when he shuffled off to Detroit to speak to an NAACP confab there. (READ MORE: Biden’s NAACP Speech Signals an Overlooked Iceberg Ahead) What he said to that gathering was certainly noxious from a race-baiting perspective, and that would have made it noteworthy enough as a disqualifier for Biden’s re-election. But the ugly tone of the thing was overshadowed by something else — namely that the White House had to issue no less than NINE walkbacks for gross factual inaccuracies that escaped Biden’s lips. The most obvious one, and the one you’ve likely seen, was Biden’s conflating the Great Recession with the COVID pandemic and claiming that when he was Vice President, Barack Obama sent him to Detroit to take care of COVID. Yikes. But there were lots more: BREAKING: The White House was forced to make corrections to President Biden’s NAACP speech NINE times tonight, despite him using a teleprompter. We are a laughing stock. 6 more months and we have the chance to clean up this absolute mess. pic.twitter.com/6E4V8FrYjD — JACK (@jackunheard) May 23, 2024 The one I liked best was when he said the Jan. 6 protesters were “erectionists.” Was he thinking about little girls at the time? Tara Reade? Jim Jordan’s take on this was unfriendly, but not wrong: Another day, another speech transcript that the White House has to secretly edit to cover for Joe Biden. Did the Biden DOJ do the same for his interview with Robert Hur? That’s just one of the reasons why we need the audio tapes.https://t.co/37k2lVLrrh — Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) May 22, 2024 This isn’t working. It can’t continue like this. 3. So…Michelle? I’ve gone back and forth on the question, and ultimately I’d come down on the side of saying the Democrats aren’t going to pack Biden off to the glue factory at their convention and parachute Michelle Obama in as the nominee. I….think…I’m still on that side. Then again there was this press release that went out Thursday: Today, When We All Vote launched the Culture of Democracy Tour, a summer of action to register, educate and engage thousands of voters and volunteers. The Culture of Democracy Tour brings voting to popular culture through events, sweepstakes, campaigns, voter registration drives and more in partnership with the organization’s thousands of volunteers and partners. More than 200 partners have joined When We All Vote’s Culture of Democracy Collective — a network of leading national and community organizations, including sports, corporate and entertainment partners, committed to registering, educating and mobilizing voters. Members include Essence, BET, Lyft, Girls Inc., NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Global Black Economic Forum, Lime, the Divine Nine National Pan-Hellenic Organizations, VoteRiders and the Executive Leadership Council, as well as major sport teams like the Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Dream, Dallas Wings, Los Angeles Lakers, Washington Mystics, New England Revolution, Houston Dynamo and more. “At a time when fewer young people are identifying with political parties, the work of nonpartisan organizations like When We All Vote has never been more critical,” said Beth Lynk, Executive Director of When We All Vote. “Through the Culture of Democracy Tour this summer, we will bring voting to the culture and meet voters where they are — transforming how they view and participate in democracy and taking this momentum to the biggest stop of all: the ballot box.” When We All Vote is Michelle Obama’s project. She’s the founder and co-chair. It’s expected she’ll be on hand for most of these dog-and-pony shows. So….hmmmm. I’m not changing my opinion, yet, but….hmmmmm. 4. Hey, Look! They’re Going After Monopolistic Corporations With Antitrust Actions! Oh, Wait… This would be about Meta. Or Google. Or Apple. Or Amazon. Or Microsoft. Or any of the Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Auto, or Big Finance oligarchs, right? Well, not exactly. The U.S. Department of Justice is suing to break up Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, over alleged antitrust violations. The lawsuit, joined by 30 states and filed Thursday, follows a DOJ investigation into whether Live Nation maintains a monopoly in the ticketing industry, a probe launched in 2022 and bolstered by fan complaints after a botched rollout for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. “We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.” Shares of Live Nation were down 6% on Thursday. In a statement, Live Nation said the DOJ’s allegations of a monopoly are “absurd.” I have no particular brief for Live Nation or Ticketmaster. They definitely seem to have a stranglehold on live events that could well be considered monopolistic, and if that arouses the suspicion of the Biden Justice Department I’ll listen to the argument. But you’re going to dust off the antitrust laws and take somebody down with them and it’s Ticketmaster? Really? Absurd is a good word. Do something about that oligopoly in entertainment media in which 90 percent of all the TV channels are owned by six massive conglomerates, or the vertically- and horizontally-integrated monoliths dominating the tech space, and then we’ll say it’s time to take a poke at Ticketmaster. We do need to channel Teddy Roosevelt a little and put those antitrust laws to work. That’s a column, or probably more like a book chapter, in itself. But for Team Biden to sic them on Ticketmaster is just a sop to the Gen Z crowd while leaving the big game still roaming the Serengeti. Pathetic. 5. Inside The NBA Is Going Away I’m a casual NBA fan at best, something that won’t likely be fixed until Zion Williamson can actually play an entire season without disappearing to the injured list the minute the Pelicans ask him to play meaningful minutes in the postseason, but I will say this — Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley cutting up on the set of Inside The NBA on TNT makes that show far and away the best sports talk program on television. But soon the show will go by the boards, it seems, because Warner Brothers Discovery, the mega-conglomerate that owns TNT, is getting out of the business of televising the NBA, and now all the rights will go to ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. Maybe NBC or Amazon will get the gang back together and keep the show going. But it doesn’t look like Barkley thinks that will happen. Charles Barkley says morale sucks amid the uncertainty of "Inside the NBA" moving forward. And discusses the possibility of hiring the crew to his production company, continuing to do the show, and selling it. pic.twitter.com/gLoiKm7SM3 — Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) May 23, 2024 ESPN will certainly not reconstruct that show. ESPN’s sports shows are unwatchable food fights without allowing for actual personalities like the ones on Inside the NBA. Barkley might actually have the right idea, which is to take the show independent and just put it on the web with a YouTube channel or some other such distribution platform. Corporate media sucks anyway. Let the good times stream. The post Five Quick Things: No, Bill Maher Is Not Your Friend appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In many ways, former President Donald Trump being stuck in a New York kangaroo court is one of the best things that could have happened to his campaign. (READ MORE: Will Democrats Pay a Price for Their Cynical, Crumbling Lawfare Strategy?) On today’s episode of The Spectacle podcast, hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay talk about the possible outcomes of the case leveled by New York Judge Juan Merchan and discuss the lose-lose situation Democrats have walked themselves into. Join them to hear their analysis! READ Scott and Melissa’s writing here and here. Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.  The post <i>The Spectacle</i> Ep. 111: Trump Is Stuck in Kangaroo Court in New York. That’s Not a Bad Thing. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.