Football club fires new CEO for being a Christian and attending a Christian church

Lately on the podcast we did an episode on “making wise decisions“, where we talked about the choices that Christians make in education and career. We talked about was the need to study something that cannot be cancelled by the secular left. And we talked about the need to work a job where even if you get fired, you have skills that are valuable to other employers.

Here’s a story from the UK Daily Mail that talks about a very talented Christian who ran into the threats that we were warning our listeners about.

Excerpt:

A Christian lobby group says former Essendon CEO Andrew Thorburn is the victim of a ‘frightening’ and ‘toxic’ wokeness in sport that targets Christians but has double standards when it comes to Muslims.

Mr Thorburn was forced to quit on Monday after only one day in the top job at the Essendon AFL club when he refused to stand down as chairman of a controversial church.

[…]Mr Thorburn was announced as the Bombers’ successor to Xavier Campbell in the CEO job on Monday.

But within hours of his appointment, his links to a City on a Hill were thrust into the spotlight, and by Tuesday evening, the embattled Bombers were left searching for their third CEO in less than two months.

In a statement on Tuesday, Essendon president Dave Barham said the board had accepted Thorburn’s resignation after they had made it clear he couldn’t hold positions at both his church and his football club.

‘As soon as the comments relating to a 2013 sermon from a pastor at the City of the Hill church came to light this morning, we acted immediately to clarify the publicly espoused views on the organisation’s official website, which are in direct contradiction to our values as a club,’ Barham said in a club statement.

This is the part where I always laugh out loud, and thank God that there is a place called Hell for secular leftists like these:

‘Essendon is committed to providing an inclusive, diverse and a safe club, where everyone is welcome and respected.

I really want to recommend to Christians that they think carefully about making public statements on social media under their real names. I recommend studying in no-nonsense STEM fields like accounting, computer science, petroleum engineering, etc. And be careful about working with progressive women and LGBT activists, who are addicted to virtue signaling.  There are no limits to what the secular left will do to silence and destroy Christians.

In my opinion, the worst sin possible isn’t murder, although secular leftists certainly support that (in abortion). The worst sin is making it more difficult for Christians to follow Jesus. Secular leftists might thing that they deserve mercy because they force Christians into silence, poverty or death. But in this universe, the real crime is making it harder for Christians to be being faithful to God. Even when the secular leftist wins, they ultimately lose. Big time.

Is Canada killing people in order to reduce costs of single-payer health care?

Most Canadians are very proud of their government-run single payer system. But as I have blogged about before, their taxes are very high. And they have wait time problems. One of my friends in Canada who is a fan of the blog and the podcast just had to travel to America to pay $24,000 out of pocket for a knee replacement. The alternative would have been to wait 2 years for it.

Anyway, Canada has figured an interesting way to cut costs and reduce wait times.

Here is an article about it from a leftist writer at Common Sense:

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible.

[…]There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died.

[…]Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying—successfully—to kill themselves.

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths.

It’s not just for old, disabled people. The law is actually being used to end the lives of children now:

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.” According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.”

This is similar to how depressed children can decide to transform if they think that will help them. You have to wonder where the money is coming from for all of this child-directed “health care”.

Hugh Scher, an attorney… told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

Isn’t socialism wonderful?

What does the government of Canada think about reducing the costs of their single-payer system by eliminating sick people?

In October 2020, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report stating that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million. In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, a research fellow and a doctor at the University of Manitoba, and Braden Manns, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting that MAiD could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.

Daily Caller notes:

The broad eligibility has led to more than 10,000 Canadians being euthanized in the most recent year for which data is available, making it the sixth leading cause of death in the country, the AP reported.

Some disabled Canadians are choosing to be euthanized not because of their disability, but because of mounting medical debts, the AP found.

Sean Tagert, a 41-year-old man suffering from ALS, opted for euthanasia in 2019 in part because he couldn’t keep up with high costs to allow him to continue living at home with caretakers, according to AP. Roger Foley, a man hospitalized in Ontario with a degenerative brain disease, was told by one staffer that it would cost $1,500 per day to keep him alive in the hospital before mentioning euthanasia, the outlet reported.

But I thought Canadian health care was “free”?

By the way, if you’re looking at the chart above, and wondering what the number of “medically-assisted deaths” is for 2021, far-left CTV News reported on that:

More Canadians are ending their lives with a medically-assisted death, says the third federal annual report on medical assistance in dying (MAID). Data shows that 10,064 people died in 2021 with medical aid, an increase of 32 per cent over 2020.

There isn’t a single secular leftist on the planet who has a problem with this. It’s survival of the fittest all the way for them.

I find this very concerning. It’s important for voters to understand the cost of single-payer health care. There is a reason why health care is not one of the legitimate functions of government, according to the Constitution. Monopolies don’t work for consumers.

Brian Auten interviews Jay Richards about Christian apologetics

Recently, I picked up the audio book version of “The Privileged Planet”, which is a book by philosopher / economist Jay Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. This book is different from books about the origin of the universe and cosmic fine-tuning. It talks about what it takes to make a habitable planet. And it talks about how the habitable places in the universe are also the best places to make scientific discoveries.

Christian scholar Jay Richards was interviewed by Brian Auten of Apologetics 315.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

  • What is intelligent design (ID)?
  • Is ID specifically Christian?
  • How does ID helpful to Christian apologetics?
  • What does ID prove?
  • Is it OK to use an argument that doesn’t prove Christianity specifically?
  • What is the difference between deism and theism?
  • Do ID arguments get you to deism or theism?
  • What is materialism, and how can you challenge it?
  • How do opponents of ID define ID?
  • What factors do you need to make a habitable planet?
  • Are habitable planets common or rare in the universe?
  • What is “The Privileged Planet” hypothesis?
  • Is there an overlap between habitability and suitability for making scientific discoveries?
  • What is the “Copernican Principle”?
  • Has the progress of science made Earth seem common and ordinary?
  • What is the most Earth-like planet that we’ve ever discovered?
  • How should ID proponents respond to the objection that creatures aren’t perfect?
  • Does having a big moon make a planet more or less habitable?
  • Does a planet’s distance to the Sun make that planet more or less habitable?
  • How do these two habitability factors affect the observability of solar eclipses?
  • What does co-relation between habitability and “discoverability” tell us about God?
  • How important is training in philosophy to Christian apologetics?
  • What one thing should a Christian apologist work on to be more effective?

If you’d like to learn more about his book “The Privileged Planet”, you can find out more here. I recently bought the audio book version of the book.