Commentary

Is it brave to quote the Bible to atheists who want to silence you?

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C.S. Lewis has some words to live by for you
C.S. Lewis has some words to live by for you

I was asked by a commenter whether my advice in a previous post was mistaken. I advised people not to make comments on issues under their real names, where the opposition is irrational and dangerous. I said that you should use an alias so that you can write frequently and effectively about controversial issues, without being subject to threats, intimidation, vandalism, violence, loss of employment etc. – common tactics of the unthinking mobs on the secular left.

So here is what I replied to him in a comment:

I didn’t advise people to be silent at all. Obviously, I have been blogging on this issue for the last 7 years – before it ever entered the radar of most Christians. So I haven’t been silent. I have blogged debate summaries, secular arguments against same-sex marriage, horror stories about gay adoption and child abuse, peer-reviewed papers about the impact of no-mom or no-dad parenting, CDC health data about HIV and STIs, the impact of donor-conception on children, specific laws related to the gay agenda, and every specific case where Christian business owners were punished – in America and across the world.

My alias has given me protection from the bad guys so that I could be FAR more productive and effective than the Bible-quoters who jump up in front of machine guns and call that feelings-driven irresponsibility “piety”. When did being INEFFECTIVE become a Christian virtue? Seems to me that people who address the issues of the day by repeating Bible verses to people who don’t accept the Bible aren’t being effective. My goal is to reach more people with arguments they will actually change their minds. My blog post on a secular case against same sex marriage was linked by the Secular Outpost, a major atheist blog – THOSE are the people we need to be reaching. And so what if they were offended? Because of my alias, they couldn’t get me.

Christianity is about making a difference. It is not about being feeling holier-than-thou. It’s about defending Christ’s honor effectively and efficiently. It’s about getting the job done.

Here is what doesn’t work: e-mailing Bible verses to the Human Rights Campaign along with the name of your employer and your home address. That will get you out of the game really fast. What does work is doing what Ryan T. Anderson is doing – getting a PhD and debating the issue with professors on college campuses. Or you could get a law degree and fight out the issue at the supreme court. But trying to spout Bible verses to people who don’t believe the Bible who can then get you fired is not the answer – that doesn’t work.

Suppose we are playing baseball. Your team is down by 1 run and there is a runner on third and no outs. Suppose you go up to the plate and swing for the fences at the first three pitches that the pitcher throws – all of which were obvious unhittable. You get out and you hurt your team. I guess you could brag later about “I would never do anything other than try to hit a home run every time” and then claim that those who didn’t were cowards. But that wouldn’t change the fact that you would be out and you would have let your team down.

Similarly, when you are on your own 20 yard line, down by 6 with 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter, you don’t get out on the field and throw four hail mary passes and then turn the ball over on downs. Expecting Jesus to bail you out when you act recklessly doesn’t work in any area of life.

The best thing is to be intelligent. What should I study to help Jesus that will work? What job should I get to help Jesus that will work? How can I have an influence to help Jesus that will work? Doing what feels good and expecting a bailout is reckless and doesn’t do anything to help Jesus. When you hand the other side your employer and your place of business and your home address, you are handing them things that they can use to hurt you. Why would you let them have something they can use to stop you from having an influence, when you can withhold that information and strike at them with impunity? These are not difficult things for a rational person to understand.

Frankly, I am at the point now where I view the spouting of Bible verses to dangerous, destructive people as a mental disorder, as much as I would view it as a mental disorder if someone decided to travel to North Korea and do street evangelism. I would urge all the Bible-quoting martyr wannabes to prove their bravery to me by doing that, if they think that the point of Christianity is to be feelings-led and reckless about the consequences of actions. Or maybe they can travel to Saudi Arabia and evangelize the people there. On the bible-quoting rule, to not do this is “cowardice”. I think we are reaching the point where the sexual revolutionaries are just as dangerous as militant atheists in North Korea, or radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia.

Studying all of these issues the way I do and then writing about them costs me about 3-4 hours a night – and that’s every day that I’ve been writing this blog. I have had 6.2 million hits in 7 years of writing. My goal is to influence people to make better decisions. And I think I’ve been able to be more effective at doing that when I don’t hand my enemies personal information that they can use to neutralize my influence. Why would I make it easy for them to stop me from having an influence? No Christian should deny Christ when asked directly. But that doesn’t mean that you should make it easy for them to destroy you.

News

How exposed is your state to the problem of underfunded pensions?

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I am thinking about moving to a new state in the future, and one of the factors I am considering is underfunded pension liabilities. This basically refers to the ability of a state to pay out pensions to retiring public sector employees going forward. I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to solve this problem in this post.

First, Investors Business Daily explains the problem:

A new report by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Joshua Rauh shows that, unless action is taken soon, many local governments could face bankruptcy because they can’t meet their pension obligations.

[…]The problem is surprisingly simple: States and cities overestimate returns on their pension fund investments, while systematically underfunding them. The result is a growing deficit that will require massive tax hikes or dramatic and painful cuts in government services and promised pensions to public workers.

Rauh’s study looked at 564 state and local pension systems, representing $4.8 trillion in pension liabilities and $3.6 trillion in assets — for an apparent current deficit of just $1.19 trillion.

So far, so good. But Rauh notes the average expected return on pension assets is about 7.6% — which means a doubling every 9.5 years. He calls that assumption “wildly optimistic,” and says a more realistic assumption would be the Treasury bond rate of 3% or lower — less than half the expected return.

Unless pension managers, politicians and voters do something now, the unfunded liabilities of the national system will continue to grow out of control, reaching $3.4 trillion in just 10 years. States and cities across the country would have to raise taxes massively to keep from becoming insolvent.

Right now, state and local governments set aside about 7.3% of revenues for public pensions. To keep the funding gap from exploding and taking down governments across the nation, pension spending would have to rise to  17.5% of revenues on average — roughly equal to a 240% tax increase.

How did things get so bad? Generations of feckless politicians have refused to face down public employee unions, which have negotiated massively expensive pensions for their members while concealing their true cost. Politicians have gone along with it because, heck, it’s not their money and anyway, the problems will take place long after they’re out of office. That’s where we are now.

States and cities will come under intense pressure to raise taxes on local citizens to pay for this travesty. Instead, they should get rid of the public employee unions that have plundered the public for too long and have made local government inefficient, expensive and dysfunctional. If not, they can expect to face the same economy-crippling effects as Detroit, San Bernardino and a number of other cities have — financial insolvency.

Now, obviously states with kick-ass governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin are not going to have the same exposure to such problems as incompetent governors like Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. Scott Walker know how to rein in public sector unions.

Let’s get the numbers to confirm this hypothesis.

Bloomberg has the numbers:

Bloomberg ranked 49 U.S. states based on their pension funding ratios in 2014 under GASB 25. (Delaware is not included because of insufficient data for GASB 25.)

Here are the best states… Wisconsin is 100% funded:

States with the best-funded pension liiabilities
States with the best-funded pension liiabilities

And actually there is a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal solvency of all the states right here from George Mason University.

Here’s the map:

Overall fiscal solvency by state
Overall fiscal solvency by state

I notice that the deep blue states like California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, etc. are just horrible states. No wonder everyone is fleeing them in droves. Socialism doesn’t work. Eventually, the money runs out.

So, if you’re thinking of moving to a new state, look at that. And if you don’t want to move, then vote for governors like Scott Walker who will take on public sector unions – otherwise, you’re headed for a big tax hike in the future, to pay for the big spending liberals of the past.

News

Canadian Liberal Party introduces bill to legalize euthanasia

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Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (right)

Life Site News has a story about Canada’s new assisted suicide bill:

The Liberal government’s euthanasia bill introduced Thursday will not protect vulnerable Canadians or the conscience rights of physicians, say anti-euthanasia activists.

While Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s Bill C-14 is more restrictive than the legislative framework the special joint parliamentary committee recommended in its February 2016 report, it essentially provides “a perfect cover for acts of murder, absolutely,” says Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

The draft legislation restricts eligibility for euthanasia and assisted suicide to competent patients 18 years of age and older who have “an incurable serious and incurable illness, disease or disability” which “causes them enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions,” who are in “an advanced state of decline in capability” and whose “natural death is reasonably foreseeable.”

The legislation mandates that a patient request assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia in writing, and that this request be approved by two independent medical practitioners, or nurse practitioners.

It mandates a 15-day waiting period after the request is approved, but that period can be waived if the two medical practitioners deem the patient’s condition will deteriorate before that time is up.

[…]Schadenberg says the bill “does not provide effective oversight in the law,” because while it calls for two independent physicians or nurse practitioners to approve a request for euthanasia,  “this is the system where the doctor or nurse practitioner who does the act also does the reporting.”

The legislation also provides “legal immunity for anyone, anyone who does anything at a person’s request, under Sections 241.3, 241.5,” he said.

[…][W]hile the bill acknowledges conscience rights in its preamble, it “provides no protection for conscientious objectors,” according to Albertos Polizogopoulos, a constitutional lawyer for Canadian Physicians for Life.

Canadian doctors are already forced to perform abortions against their conscience, so this last point is no great surprise.

In a country that has single payer health care, all medical care is paid for by the federal government. You pay into the system your whole life (at an average of 42% of your income, in Canada) and then at the end, you get in line and hope that the government will treat you. It is extremely convenient for the government to kill off patients who are elderly. Elderly patients won’t be able to vote in many more elections, but they will want to draw away funds that could be used to buy the votes of young people who want “free” breast enlargements, plastic surgery, sex changes and IVF treatment. So the government has every incentive to cut loose the old people and then buy the votes of young people with the taxpayer money they save. Single payer health care is a scam to help politicians stay in power.

Similar laws in places like Belgium and Netherlands have been used to cut down on the medical bills that the government must pay.

A Parliamentary committee brief that I found on the Canadian government web site says this:

A study published in the NEJM entitled: Recent Trends in Euthanasia and Other End-of-Life Practices in Belgium (March 19, 2015) found that 4.6% of all deaths in the first six months of 2013, in the Flanders region of Belgium, were by assisted death and 1.7% of all deaths were assisted deaths without explicit request representing more than 1000 assisted deaths without explicit request in 2013.

The supplemental appendix in the study informs us how the researchers classified the data.

It states: “If in the latter case the drugs had been administered at the patient’s explicit request, the act was classified as euthanasia or assisted suicide depending on whether the patient self-administered the drugs. If drugs were used with the same explicit intention to hasten death but without the patient’s explicit request, the act was classified as hastening death without explicit patient request. This can include cases where a patient request was not judged as explicit by the physician, where the request came from the family or where the physician acted out of compassion.”

This research study confirms that many intentional hastened deaths are occurring without the explicit request of the patient which contravenes the Belgian assisted death law and medical ethics.

Previously, I blogged about how the UK government provides bonuses to hospitals who put elderly patients on an end-of-life pathway.

Ethicist Wesley J. Smith comments on the Canadian law in National Review.

Excerpt:

The Canadian government has tabled its new euthanasia bill–and as expected, it will be the most radical in the world.

Since the death doctor need not be present at the demise, the bill creates an unprecedented license for family members, friends–heck, a guy down the street–to make people dead.

[…]In short, this provision is the perfect defense for the murder of sick and disabled people who requested lethal drugs.

The George Delury case is an example of what I mean: Delury said he assisted wife, Myrna Lebov’s suicide out of “compassion” and at her request due to MS.

But his real hope was not only to be free from care giving, but become famous writing a book about her death. (He did, What If She Wants to Die?)

It almost worked. But because assisted suicide was a criminal offense, authorities conducted an investigation and discovered his diary.  It showed that contrary to the compassionate face Delury was conjuring, in reality, he emotionally pressured Myrna into wanting to commit suicide, telling her, for example, that she was a burden and ruining his life.

He also withheld full dosage of antidepressants so he could use those drugs to kill her. And, he but put a plastic bag over her head to make sure she died.

If euthanasia Canada’s bill had been the law of New York when Delury killed Myrnov, he might have been able to coerce her into asking for lethal drugs. At that point, he could have killed her any time he wanted and there wouldn’t have been a criminal investigation to find his diary.

Canada has just paved the way for a person, hungry for an inheritance or ideologically predisposed, to get away with the perfect murder.

In the last election, the Liberal Party promised the Canadian voters the moon, in terms of new spending. They said it would only add 10 billion to the deficit this year. But now (after the election) the number has exploded to 30 billion this year and over 100 billion over the next five years. Could this euthanasia plan be the first step in balancing the books, so they can win re-election?