Actually, we know quite a bit about assisted suicide—it’s those who insist otherwise that need instruction.

While the movie hasn’t aired or even been viewed by critics, we can infer its perspective on Kevorkian from the comments made by its stars, Al Pacino and Susan Sarandon.

According to Pacino, viewers “don’t know this guy.” Kevorkian “is more than meets the eye…[the film is] a portrait of a zealot. I don’t think we see that often.”

Kevorkian’s “zealotry” also appealed to Sarandon, who said that people who dedicate themselves to a cause at the expense of anything else in their lives “are really fascinating people.”

For his part, Kevorkian is said to be “enthused about helping with the film.” His lawyer thinks the film won’t be “scathing and critical.”

I guess not. I certainly doubt that three Oscar-winners—Pacino, Sarandon, and director Barry Levinson—have come together to make a film that won’t be at least a little sympathetic to its subject.

What viewers will probably see is a story about a man whose excesses hurt an otherwise noble cause and led to his downfall at the hand of religious zealots.

Of course, there’s nothing noble or “compassionate” about physician-assisted suicide—and you don’t have to be religious to believe that.

No one would call the British magazine Spiked religious or even traditionalist. Yet, it recently ran two pieces about why assisted-suicide should remain illegal. In one of them Kevin Yuill of the University of the Sunderlands makes clear what many assisted-suicide advocates try to obscure: The ultimate goal isn’t to alleviate suffering, but to enshrine in law “the right of any person to end their life.”

This “right,” according to Yuill, threatens the “assumption that human life is valuable.”

He calls suicide a “deeply anti-social act” that destroys “possibilities”—not just, obviously, for the individuals themselves, but for others too. Yuill insists that it’s this social harm and not what he terms “outmoded religious beliefs” that lies behind the “taboo against suicide.”

In the other piece, editor Mick Hume adds that the “right to die” is the result of a “loss of faith—not in God, but in humanity.” Hume decries the lack of belief in “the human capacity to transcend the limitations of our lives.” In this “demoralized” setting, the wish for a “good death” replaces “the aspiration for a better life.”

What Hume and Yuill miss completely is the connection between Christian ideas and the beliefs whose passing they lament. What Hume calls “faith in humanity” is inseparable from the idea of our being created in the image of God. What Yuill calls “possibilities” is derived from Christian ideas about hope.

But that’s OK. When it comes to assisted suicide, the next big so-called rights campaign that the left will wage, we Christians welcome good, prudential arguments. So that even non-believers can come to understand the “aspiration for a better life.”

But a recent Wall Street Journal editorial points out that the majority in Congress is also ready to use reconciliation to sneak another government takeover through Congress, this time with little fanfare. The legislation would ban private lending companies from issuing federally backed student loans.

The Journal opines that universities are none too pleased about this because when it comes to customer service and in making sure borrowers don’t default on their loan, the feds don’t stack up well against private companies.

Ostensibly, by taking over student loans, the government plans to save money. But according to the Journal, the planned savings of $67 billion will be overtaken by $77 billion in new spending. No wonder Congress wants to pass the bill before the public catches on.

More disturbing is that this is yet more evidence that the administration and Congress are bent on increasing the government’s power at the expense of the private sector.

So why should you and I, or any Christian care?

We’ve talked often BreakPoint about the danger of debt—for individuals and the government. This new takeover will place additional burdens on future generations, who will pay the bill for the government’s largesse. But this episode points to a more fundamental issue: freedom and the proper role of government.

I’ve said it until I’m blue in the face, and I’ll say it until I’m purple: The biblical view of the role of government is to preserve order, restrain evil, and promote justice. Government has no legitimate interest in running car companies, the healthcare industry, or taking over student loans.

The Reformers understood this, and called it “sphere sovereignty.” Every institution—family, church, private associations, government—have legitimate roles to play in a justly ordered society.

In Catholic social teaching, it was called the principle of “subsidiarity,” recognizing that the interests of individuals are best served by the institutions closest to them. For example, which institution, the University of Virginia or the federal government, knows how best to serve students attending UVa?

In both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, government should perform only those functions which can’t be performed by these “intermediate structures.”

There is little these intermediate structures and voluntary associations haven’t done in building our nation. The great French observer of American life Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at American society—that individuals and communities could come together to promote culture and the arts, to run schools, hospitals, charities and more. Nowhere in the world did he see such vitality.

But today, we’re seeing a concerted effort by the federal government to expand its reach and power at the expense of local government and these intermediate structures. Pressures that are building against the church are very much involved in this.

This not only flies in the face of solid Christian teaching, but the same Alexis de Tocqueville warned that doing this would lead to soft despotism. So we Christians must keep speaking out.

If that were your job, how would you survive without emotionally or spiritually shutting down?

One man, Pastor Rick Frechette, has not only survived, but thrived. Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard recently wrote a brilliant profile of Pastor Rick, which you can read by clicking here.

As director of the Haitian branch of the international organization Our Little Brothers, Pastor Rick runs a children’s hospital, an orphanage, and a mission to educate and feed some of Haiti’s poorest citizens. Once a week, he and a team of volunteers recover forgotten corpses and give them a decent Christian burial, “with a tiny modicum of the dignity that eluded in them in life.”

Having worked in Haiti for over two decades, Pastor Rick deals with horrors most of us couldn’t imagine. To follow him through his routine, as Labash did, is like touring hell. He functions by hanging on to his sense of humor and, even more importantly, “to his faith in a God that orders the universe even amidst the apparent chaos.”

If there were ever an example of the Christian worldview being tried by fire, Pastor Rick would be that example. He tells Labash that the most concrete way he can practice his faith and help the Haitians is to offer “countersigns” of grace—that is, to do something right for someone when everything is going wrong.

For example, Pastor Rick tells the story of a boy that he saw set on fire by thugs. Before he could reach him, the boy was dead, but he got buckets of water and extinguished the flames anyway. Then, he says, “we put him in the back of the truck, and do what we always do. Have a prayer right there. To make a counter-witness by our own behavior.”

He reports that the gang that set him on fire stood by and watched. And the boy’s mother—even overwhelmed by grief—was grateful for this act of love.

“It made her able to live with it,” Pastor Rick says. “It’s like God sent someone to help her, like it restored her faith in humanity again…I call it the countersign.”

Father Rick explains it this way: “The terrible thing that’s in front of you, you hurry, and offset it right away. Before what happens is too taxing and too poisonous…Sometimes with horrible things, you really feel there is nothing you can do…You’re just useless. But over time, you start seeing that to do the right thing no matter what has tremendous power.”

What a wonderful expression of what it means to live out a Christian worldview. We can’t change the past, but, empowered by God, we can show love and grace that offers people hope and a way to move forward.

Maybe you will never have the chance to minister in a disaster area like Haiti. But no doubt you will encounter people who need that countersign of God’s love and grace. Let’s pray we will all be ready to offer it.

Employees were told that starting March 2, Catholic Charities would “not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees not already enrolled” in the health plan. Spouses currently covered under the plan would still be covered.

The timing of the changes wasn’t a coincidence. On March 3, same-sex “marriage” became legal in the District of Columbia. In connection with the new law, the D.C. Council insisted that, as a city contractor, Catholic Charities had to offer the same benefits to same-sex couples that it did to heterosexual ones.

In other words, Catholic Charities had to choose between church teaching and ministering to the city’s neediest residents.

To put it mildly, the Council wasn’t sympathetic to the Archdiocese’s concerns. One Council member called them “childish.”

It’s also no surprise that the D.C. Archdiocese is being portrayed as the villain. The Washington City Paper’s headline ran “To Avoid Funding Gay Marrieds, Catholic Charities Denies Benefits to All Spouses,” with the emphasis on “all.” In case the reader didn’t get it, the City Paper added a visual reminder: a picture of a rosary.

There’s no recognition that what the Washington Post called a “bitter debate” between the District and the Archdiocese was, in fact, a profound infringement of religious freedom–an infringement done at the behest of a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

Nor was there any acknowledgment that these kinds of infringements aren’t limited to government contractors. Ordinary people are being asked to choose between their livelihood and obedience to their faith—like photographers, landlords, and caterers.

You will also search in vain for mainstream media coverage of the indispensible role played by Christian institutions in caring for the vulnerable and marginalized. Almost 25 percent of the world’s AIDS patients are cared for in Catholic institutions alone. Christian hospitals in the U.S. serve a disproportionate percentage of the urban poor.

All we read about, however, is the Catholic Church’s “stubbornness” or “recalcitrance.”

But it’s not just Catholics. All faithful Christians engaged in charitable work increasingly are being told to choose between serving their neighbors or following the dictates of their faith.

This threat to religious freedom was one of the driving concerns behind the Manhattan Declaration. Interestingly enough, one of the original signers was Archbishop Wuerl of D.C., who refused to bend to the District’s demand. More than 425,000 people have now pledged not to “comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions” to do that which God has forbidden.

Christians no longer have the luxury of sitting idly by while religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and the institution of marriage come under more assault.

Please join us—Christians must stand together. Go to ManhattanDeclaration.org, read the document, and sign it today. Get your friends to do the same.

As he told AOL News writer David Knowles, “She had this funny look on her face, and the other kids giggled a little.” But it wasn’t long before Ivanyi was teaching the boys to do things like pull out the girls’ chairs when they sat down. Now, he says, “Ninety-eight percent of the boys stand now when a girl enters the room, and the girls love it.”

This now-routine show of respect has led to a difference in the way the boys behave around the girls. Being taught to show respect for them leads them to feel more respectful toward them.

It doesn’t please the feminists, of course. One recently told me that she’d kick me if I held a door open for her. But that’s ok—they need to learn as well.

Ivanyi is not the only one who understands the link between etiquette, attitudes, and behavior. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, journalist Meghan Cox Gurdon notes that while proms retain old traditions like corsages and chaperones, student behavior is often vulgar. Gurdon quotes etiquette expert Emily Post, who wrote in the 1920s that, at public dances, couples were expected to demonstrate modesty and decorum because they were in public.

And Mrs. Post had no illusions about how teenagers would behave if chaperones were absent: Young men would try to paw their dates, or worse, she wrote. Today, it’s not unusual for girls to plan to lose their virginity on prom night.

Modern girls get no help from Peggy Post, a descendent of Emily Post. In her new book, Prom and Party Etiquette, Post says that when it comes to sex on prom night, she “made a conscience decision not to try to lecture teens or tell them what to do.”

This is sheer insanity. Eve Grimaldi, dean of students at a girls’ high school in Washington, D.C., understands that you cannot deal with moral issues without moral instruction. Moral neutrality is not neutral in a fallen world. Refusing to take a stand just allows kids to pander to their worst instincts.

This is why, on prom night, Grimaldi brings an armload of sweatshirts with her. Girls wearing immodest gowns are forced to put one on. Grimaldi also keeps a sharp eye on the way dancers behave. Good for her.

In an article in Christianity Today, I once quoted the great historian Arnold Toynbee. He contended that one clear sign of a civilization’s decline is when the elites—people he describes as the “dominant minority”—begin mimicking the vulgarity and promiscuity exhibited by society’s bottom-dwellers. The result: The entire culture is vulgarized.

Christians need to resist the slide into vulgarity by creating strong countercultural influences. We can start by elevating our own standards in speech and dress, if we need to.

And we should applaud teachers who are teaching good manners and decorous behavior to the young—manners and behavior that teach kids to view one another and treat one another with the respect they deserve.

But Avatar is part of another, more important, competition—one between competing accounts of where salvation is to be found.

Avatar, which broke the all-time box office record previously held by Cameron’s film Titanic, has been compared to the 1990 best picture winner, Dances with Wolves.

The comparison makes sense because in both films, a man sent to remove indigenous peoples from their ancestral home comes to identify with those people. In both films, the natives are depicted as noble beings living in harmony with nature in an environmental utopia—and their would-be despoilers represent the worst about Western civilization.

What’s more, both men are “saved” by their encounter with the natives. They find their truer, better selves. As the end of Avatar, the hero is literally born again.

Avatar brings to mind another film: Contact. Based on the novel by Carl Sagan, of Cosmos fame, whose films portrayed a meaningless universe, it tells the story of an agnostic scientist, Ellie Arroway, who receives and decodes a message from extraterrestrials.

The encounter between these extraterrestrials transforms her life and makes her see the universe and our place in it in a whole new way.

Sagan’s passionate desire to find life in outer space caused one writer to ask, “Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?” Why did a man whose scientific worldview led him to dismiss the Christian view of God put so much stock in intelligent life on other worlds?

The answer is that this worldview, which reduces man to nothing special in an insignificant corner of the cosmos, is unbearable. The idea that we are alone, that we have no special purpose and no meaning that goes with that purpose, creates despair. So we imagine “transcending intelligences from other worlds” that make us feel better.

What Sagan’s “transcending intelligences” do for Ellie, Cameron’s blue-skinned natives in Avatar do for his wheelchair-bound hero, Sully. They provide him with meaning and purpose he can’t find on Earth. They set him free not only from his physical limitations but, more importantly, his spiritual ones.

Sure, it’s fantasy. Many scientists, however, believe that the idea of intelligent life imagined by Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and others is extremely remote. E.T. probably hasn’t called because he’s probably not out there.

Even if E.T. is out there, the solution for the longing expressed in Contact and Avatar isn’t to sit by the phone waiting for him, or imagining other life forms. It’s embracing biblical truths about who we are and what our purpose is.

It’s coming to grips with the fantastic notion that even in the vastness of the cosmos, we are not alone, and we never were. And even more fantastically, we are loved. Loved by the very creator of the cosmos! We were made—crafted—in His image. Rescued from loneliness and despair by His only Son.

And not even the latest 3D special effects can top that.

The disruptive students—including officers of the Muslim Student Association—were arrested. The university’s outraged chancellor, Michael Drake, told the students they were an embarrassment to the school. “Shame on you!” he said.

But the same thing happened that very day at Oxford. Another Israeli leader, Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, was lecturing when a student reportedly shouted “Slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. The student later claimed his words were misinterpreted.

Just a few days later, the BBC broadcast a program in which a participant was allowed to say, without contradiction, that half a million Jews around the world are ready and willing to help Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, to assassinate Israel’s enemies.

Jewish groups were outraged. But a former correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph said he was not surprised. The BBC, he says, “Often handpicks interviewees who are likely to say such things as part of a wider pattern to demonize the State of Israel.”

While anti-Semitism dates back to Old Testament times, it always finds new ways to express itself. While it’s true that there has long been enmity between Jews and Muslims, it’s also true that some of this new hostility toward the Jews is coming from the far left. And that radical extremists are exploiting it for all it’s worth. Like at UC Irvine and the Oxford Union.

We ought not find this surprising. One Jewish blogger makes the compelling case that “the agenda of the left was an end to ethnicity and religion, a one world government in which everyone would be brothers. Rebuilding Israel flew in the face of that agenda.” After all, Israel, as the homeland of the Jews, could never be a part of a worldwide socialist utopia.

Traditionally, radical leftists like Karl Marx have vilified Jews as purveyors and perpetrators of capitalism. Oddly enough, Hitler’s fascist propaganda machine did the same thing with what they called the “plutocratic” Jewish business leaders and bankers whom they claimed were pulling all the strings in the world economy.

The Jews have always been convenient targets for demagogues, which is why in Europe today, there is a whole new and dangerous wave of anti-Semitism.

But back to what happened at Oxford and UC Irvine. Danny Ayalon is considering pressing charges against the student who yelled “Slaughter the Jews” because, as he said, that is a call for genocide. And at UC Irvine, students who insulted Israel’s ambassador are facing disciplinary action. Good. I’m glad UC Irvine didn’t simply ignore what happened. Neither should we.

A free society depends on civil public discourse. If we or our institutions of higher learning permit these attacks to take place, it is we, not the attackers, who ought to be embarrassed and ashamed.

Not only praise, but wisdom and perspective, as well.

Neither of these is display in the British TV series Survivors, airing on BBC America. In Survivors, a flu pandemic has killed 99 percent of the human race. The series tells the story of those who are left as they try to adjust to the frightening new world.

The principal characters are intended to represent a cross-section of British society: a housewife and mother-turned leader, an 11-year-old boy, a doctor, a millionaire playboy, and even a convicted murderer. They are of different races and ethnic background, and their accents indicate that they come from different parts of Britain.

There’s only one thing missing in all this carefully thought out diversity: Christianity. Islam is represented by the 11-year-old boy. He is always expressing his faith in God, saying his prayers and asking which way is east. He defends his faith in conversations with the playboy, himself a non-practicing Muslim. In fact, apart from the housewife-turned-leader, he is the most well-grounded and sympathetic person on Survivors.

There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that watching the show, you would infer that Islam was Britain’s native faith and that the alternative to the depressed nihilism of the survivors was Muhammad, not Christ.

At the same time the BBC was depicting a Christianity-less Britain, a Saudi embassy official in Washington was being asked to explain Christianity’s absence in his country. What made the inquiry noteworthy was that the people asking for the explanation were children.

Specifically, they were sixth-graders from the Friends School in Baltimore. They’ve learned about world religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. As National Public Radio put it, “These kids are well-versed in the basics of Islam and more.”

Just how “well-versed” became apparent on a recent field trip to the Saudi embassy in Washington. After watching a video about Saudi Arabia, the kids asked the official some polite but pointed questions about the status of religions other than Islam in the kingdom.

The official hemmed and hawed about how Saudi Arabia was the home of Islam, and the inseparability of Islam from Saudi identity, but the sixth-graders weren’t fooled. They knew he was being evasive and they planned to talk about it afterwards.

It’s telling that a group of children could imagine an alternative to Islam in Saudi Arabia—while the BBC couldn’t imagine one in Britain. What is often called “secularism” in Britain and the rest of Europe is actually a rejection of Christianity, especially on the part of its elites and opinion-makers. Having forgotten Christianity’s central role in Britain’s past, they can’t imagine a role for it in the future, even an apocalyptic one.

The biggest threat to Britain isn’t plague or terrorism—it has survived both before. It the loss of the faith that shaped it. That’s something that should really frighten our British brethren—and serve as a warning to us on this side of the Atlantic. For in recent history, what has happened there soon spreads to us.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports the story of Russell Turnbull, who tried to break up a fight while riding home on the bus one night. For his pains, Turnbull ended up getting ammonia sprayed into his right eye, which scarred his cornea. Turnbull lost most of his sight in that eye, and suffered pain every time he blinked.

But now Turnbull has had his sight almost completely restored, thanks to a pioneering procedure using stem cells. Adult stem cells.

Dr. Francisco Figueiredo, an eye surgeon at the North East England Stem Cell Institute, performed an operation that involved cutting away a tiny portion of Turnbull’s undamaged eye—complete with stem cells. He then grew the section of the eye to 400 times its size, and stitched it “onto the badly-damaged cornea in place of the damaged membrane,” the Telegraph reported.

Turnbull is thrilled with the results. “The operation was a complete success, and I now have my sight back,” he said. “This really has given me my life back.”

The technique has been used on eight other patients; most have had their vision almost completely restored.

Miracles like this have been repeated many times as researchers bend their attention to the uses of adult stem cells. But because much of the mainstream media refuses to report on them, many Americans remain unaware of them. If people knew how good they were, they’d stop demanding embryonic stem-cell research, which kills human beings at the embryonic stage. And the media knows that. Americans also seem unaware that not a single clinical success has ever resulted from treatments using embryonic stem cells. None!

Tragically, in the U.S., multi-million dollar grants are available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for ethically sound and workable adult stem cell research.

Why isn’t adult stem-cell research receiving the funding it deserves? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, explains why. What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There’s no middleman…and there’s no drug company that’s going to get rich as a result.”

But, she explains, a lot of pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that sell, as opposed to a treatment that can cure you.

This is a moral obscenity—one that not only the drug companies, but medical researchers, are complicit in. They want to experiment with human embryos simply for the sake of science. And the media constantly labels our efforts against embryonic stem-cell research as backwards and unenlightened.

That’s why you and I have got to get the word out about the miracle cures of adult stem-cell research. This administration is deeply committed to research involving the destruction of human embryos. In his inaugural address, President Obama took a swipe at those who oppose this research on moral grounds when he said, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place.”

Well, if you really mean that, Mr. President, stop funding useless embryo-destructive research, and start funding adult stem-cell research. Not only because it is morally unproblematic, but because it’s the only thing that works. Just ask Russell Turnbull—the British man who once was blind, but now can see.

What began as a correspondence between the two has led to a co-authored book, a debate tour, and now a fascinating documentary—a kind of behind the scenes look at that tour, featuring interviews with both men.

These interviews achieve a rare level of honesty and insight about what it takes to have faith in the modern world—or, conversely, what it takes not to have faith. The film shows the tremendous level of intellectual preparation that goes into the debates. And interestingly, even though Hitchens insists that no “thinking person” could believe the tenets of Christianity, the film also shows that he’s come to have a grudging respect for his devout opponent.

According to Hitchens, Douglas Wilson genuinely understands that Christians and secularists have some fundamentally different beliefs about morality because Christians believe that “the will of God is involved.”

The paradox is that even though Hitchens finds this a wrong and dangerous belief, he genuinely appreciates it when Christians are open about it and don’t try to blend in with the secularist crowd. He says Wilson is a “huge improvement” over other Christians that he’s known because Wilson really believes what he says, without hypocrisy or prevarication. “I know where I am with him” is how Hitchens puts it.

For his part, Wilson teases that Hitchens “would have made a very good Puritan.” He appreciates that Hitchens has some sort of innate sense about what’s right and wrong. But he keeps reminding Hitchens that he’s not appealing to any overarching standard of right and wrong when he talks about the subject, so this makes no sense. In fact, Wilson says that Hitchens is using the “coherent morality” developed by the Judeo-Christian worldview in order to criticize that very worldview.

For all their cooperation and good fellowship, Hitchens makes the stakes clear when he declares, “One of us not just has to lose the argument but has to admit real moral defeat. I think it should be him.”

The film takes its title from Wilson’s remark, “Basically a debate like this is more a collision of lives than it is an exchange of mere views.” Christians can learn a lot from watching this collision of lives. For one thing, we can learn about how to argue graciously while at the same time taking a strong, uncompromising stand for our beliefs. If an atheist as firm as Hitchens respects that kind of stand, that should tell us something.

The film ends on an intriguing note. Hitchens, who previously called the faith a “wicked cult,” admits that even if he had the power to “drive it out of the world,” he wouldn’t do it. Is this because he’s come to know one sincere, well-educated Christian? Or he grudgingly approves of the good works Christians do?

Collision doesn’t answer that question. But it does hint at what’s possible when such Christians know what they believe, and articulate their faith honestly and winsomely.

(Note: This film contains occasional profanity.)

Collision Movie Website
Collision

Collision: Is Christianity Good for the World?
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