(from here)
I awaken early this morning just to relieve myself. Then I got back in bed, but I had let my mind wander. I had considered thoughts of death, and I had grown afraid. Fear is not conducive to sleep. So, I got up, disgusted with myself and my pointless fear.
The fear old men have of death is age old. There is nothing new under the sun. So said King Solomon in Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 is the origin of what has become a common proverb, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” The verse reads like this: “What has been will be again, / what has been done will be done again; / there is nothing new under the sun.” As a modern idiom, “there’s nothing new under the sun” is often used as a world-weary complaint against life’s monotony. When Solomon wrote the statement, he was…
View original post 574 more words
Citizen Tom 
Good post, Tom. How in the world did you guys turn this into an abortion discussion? Never mind.:)
So here’s the deal, fear is liar. “Perfect love casts our fear.” Faith and fear cannot co exist. There are some 365 fear nots in the Bible, one for every day of the year. Fear is pretty much our biggest enemy in the world, which is probably why God addresses it so much.
Most of the time the things we fear aren’t even real. Like, we’re terrified and then it happens, and we’re kind of embarrassed we made such a fuss. Seriously? This is what I was afraid of? Pfftt.
I used to work as a caregiver, had to call 911 a few times, heart attacks, strokes, mostly people at the end of their lives. There was this one woman, heart attack, lots of CPR, didn’t think she was going to make it. She did survive, in fact she screamed at us all for having saved her. Where ever she went, it was so beautiful, so peaceful, so exciting, she was just furious she’d been interrupted and brought back. She was really angry. It’s an amusing memory, but it reminds me that things are not always what we think they are, and that the vast majority of our fears are misplaced.
@Doug
😆
You know better than to ask that question.
Love that story. That lady, whether she knew it or not brought a great testimony back with her. When she goes back again, she will most likely find herself waiting for her rescuers to thank them. I suspect her job was to calm a lot of fears.
Well, Tom.. in spite of our contrary politics we are human and we are both at the same time in life. My random thoughts these days are less about dying and far more on how I might end up dying.. given we all typically have a fear of the pain of death and not necessarily death itself. I’m sure I am like many who would find just dropping dead from a heart attack to be the best way. The worst of course, is getting a stroke and either turning into a veg.. or worse yet, having my senses but unable to communicate or even move (I sometimes think of the pure terror, and living hell, of old man Kennedy having had a stroke, paralyzed, unable to talk, confined to a chair.. and being mentally aware until he died years later.). I am also not alone in having said to loved one’s over the years when seeing a human being completely infirm, paralyzed, confined to a chair.. at some grocery store, Walmart, whatever… “Please kill me if I ever get that bad.” Which is a personal right we cannot have, brought to you by the same people who are against abortions on moral grounds.
I figure statistically I might have ten years left of life.. but that does not mean I have 10 years left of health to enjoy what’s left of life. I work at a slug job simply because I am too old to be accepted in society anywhere else. If I fully retire.. that’s a milestone in never returning to work… ever again. Next is loosing the independence of being able to drive a vehicle. The pursuit of relevance is a human desire.
I also find myself questioning why I am doing various projects around the house, or even starting new ones.
On the “not gloomy” side… while I am Type II, my recent collection of tests at the VA reveals I have nothing drastic going on with my heart, circulation, feet… and 6 years since my encounter with a skin melanoma removal that hasn’t spread. I can walk around without limping.. and I can actually do the treadmill stress test.
In the end we just keep going until we can’t. But.. yes… the thoughts are continually random, and not so random.
@Doug
The problem with being old is that we are more aware of all the bad things that can happen. The advantage of being old is that we know worry does no good.
Unless you are proposing the involuntary termination (murder) of the elderly and the so-called unproductive, abortion and euthanasia don’t have any relationship to each other. The unborn do not get a choice.
Killing people is problematic. The fact that people on both sides are so emotional about abortion indicates even the Prochoice crowd experiences issues when they kill an unborn child. It is called guilt.
Hence guilt is a deterrent. There are far more things that can kill humans, and do each day. It’s a numbers game. It’s human instinct for a mother to not want to kill an unborn. That’s the natural checks & balances in life. And those that do make that decision are in desperate situations.. and will very likely feel the varying degrees of guilt the rest of their lives for having done it. We already know that “God-imposed” miscarriages are very commonplace and felt by a mother all her life and many succumb to depression over it. Are there pregnant mothers who will do an abortion on a whim after a wild weekend? Of course. But the numbers in that category are very low… and I dare suggest there is no data collected on alleged “whimsical” abortions.
My significant other had a miscarriage in between her two healthy kids. I was adopted at birth. So I understand the concepts more than most, but obviously not near as much as the woman who has had an abortion.
The “gripe” is more about the use of public tax dollars provided by (alleged) “good” Christians to pay for abortions.. and generally making getting an abortion in general illegal, just because. These are the same “good” Christians who are looking the other way in supporting an immoral, unChristian President.
Like how I tied Trump to abortion? 🙂
Sorry.. my thing is to support the living more than the unborn that fall within human social, economic and medical complexities of life. If it gets to be some wholesale infanticide thing and the numbers go up over some compulsory government nonsense, like China in the past,.. that will be another issue. I can rest with the idea that nature (or a vindictive God) imposes maternal guilt for a lifetime enough to be a deterrent to wholesale abuse of the process.
@Doug
Abortion is already a wholesale infanticide thing. You really ought to check the numbers. Bill Clinton use to say abortion ought to be legal but rare. Democrats no longer pretend they believe that.
I suppose I have a weird sense of humor, but this is priceless.
You support the living by killing the living? Euthanasia? Abortion? The unborn are dead before or after an abortion? Don’t we all fall within the human social, economic and medical complexities of life?
Frankly, I don’t have all the answers. Is it always wrong for someone to kill themselves? I don’t know. If the alternative was immediate death or being tortured to death, I expect I would do whatever I had to do to avoid capture. Still, euthanasia is killing people, and I don’t want to see our government in that as a business. War is bad enough, and abortion is just murdering the innocent.
It may not be possible to keep a woman from killing her unborn child, but only the most callous soul would encourage such a thing. We have a great many callous souls leading us. Who? On that is where we truly disagree.
I don’t see it as a moral dilemma as your spirituality takes you and a large number of folks. I am not “pro-abortion”… who would be? Pro-choice, yes… but for some reason, not being a female, I find a personal quandary in imposing an opinion onto the persons directly involved in the decision to do the act. Likely I’ve been very tainted working in a county office that exists solely for the reason of taking children away from incompetent parents… and many of those children are so damaged mentally one can’t stop from wondering if they had been better off not being born to begin with.
@Doug
In practice “ProChoice” is proabortion. In practice, you have made a distinction where you cannot show a difference. Why? If you are supporting ProChoice politicians, you are supporting proabortion politicians.
When you look up the number of abortions every year, including the percentage of the unborn who are aborted, make certain you check on the number of the black unborn who are aborted.
The lady who started Planned Parenthood started her organization as part of a eugenics project. She was a racist.