Signposts: The Happening

The new M. Night Shyamalan horror movie, The Happening, is indoctrination into a suicide ethic. It imagines that plant life on earth, in a sudden evolutionary advance, intentionally releases a toxin that takes away the human survival instinct resulting in mass suicide. Most disturbing to me was the unspoken but apparently self-evident truth that suicide is the single universal action humans will take when their survival instinct is removed. Of course the human-species-hating, politically correct, green movie-line reveals that this 'happening' is ultimately evolution righteously acting and protecting earth from the overpopulated human locust hoard.

In one sense 'The Happening' is a classic 'The Birds'-like scary movie, where a force of nature becomes our worst nightmare. On the other hand, it imparts a desensitizing and dispassionate visual imagination of suicide by thousands of people with no sense of conscience or transcendence. To enhance the cringe factor, the movie depicts scores of innovative variations of self-murder with an Alfred Hitchcock kind of indirect morbidity.

The Happening is actually kind of silly and would bother me a lot less if it didn't play so conveniently into the pro-suicide agenda being promoted to our society as a rational solution to environmental concerns and government budgeting woes. For example, consider the real life story below.

--"Oregon says cheaper to die than treat” by Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 6/13/2008 8:30:00 AM
Thus far Oregon is the only state to legalize physician-assisted suicide, which is loosely regulated. But respect for life may be facing another threat there.

Oregonian Barbara Wagner is dying of lung Cancer.

Oregon's Health Services Commission has said it will not pay for more treatment, but will provide $50 in lethal drugs so she can kill herself.

Dr. David Stevens heads the Christian Medical Association. "I think this is a terrible situation for patients in Oregon, and something that's going to happen in other states as physician-assisted suicide is legalized," he laments. "Oregon is rationing health care and is also sending a message to dying patients that physician-assisted suicide is the cheap option and they would encourage people to take it."

Stevens believes that is a conflict of interest for the state because it controls the medical funds.

"End-of-life chemotherapy can cost thousands of dollars a month, and bureaucrats -- in an attempt to save money -- are telling patients [they] can't provide money for ... chemotherapy, but here take these pills and they will comfort you [and] end your stress."

The situation goes against the grain of medical ethics, says Stevens. "Palliative care means helping take care of symptoms when you can't eliminate the cause of the patient's illness," he explains. "They're stating [that] the way to comfort someone is to get rid of the patient. That's a terrible message to send to seriously ill patients."

As it would be, he says, to send the same message to people with chronic diseases or physical handicaps, or to the comatose who cannot make the decision themselves, that they are doing the state a favor in dying.

A pharmaceutical company is now providing Wagner with cancer drugs for which the state will not pay."--

Why shouldn't people consider suicide as a natural solution? Here are seven quick reasons:
1. It is against God's law. Remember, 'Thou shalt not kill?' Back when we started killing innocent babies through abortion, Christian ethicists prophesied that soon we would come to other convenience killing like euthanasia, physician assisted suicide and infanticide. Welcome to the future.

2. You cannot repent of a sin until you have committed it; therefore you go into eternity with the sin of murder on your soul. You will stand before God as an unrepentant sinner, not in Christ. How badly we need good strong 'Hell' teaching!

3. No righteous person in the Scripture ever took his/her own life to escape personal pain.

4. Human bodies are technically God's property. A person does not own his/her body, God does. People have the responsibility to nurture and use their bodies for God's designed purposes but not the right to kill them. "The earth is the LORD'S, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." Psalms 24:1

5. Humans are made in the image of God and killing a person is killing God's image. This is the devil's greatest objective--killing stealing and destroying everything in God's image. We believe that human life is sacred and precious because people are made in God's image, not because we are comfortable or happy.

In addition, Human bodies are designed to contain the Holy Spirit. "Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?" 1 Corinthians 6:19

6. What goes around comes around. Welcome to Hitler's world. It's all fun and games until you get old or sick and still want to live but the government decides otherwise. When the government and Hollywood agree as to an appropriate social remedy that opposes the Word of God, watch out.

7. The one escaping into death leaves a legacy as a coward for the living.