Wouldn't ya just know it, in the debate about assisted suicide the main faith consituencies come out on the side of suffering. In what is becoming predictably suicidal for them, our top dog God gang in the shape of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols and the chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks have united behind the wish to cling onto state control of our very last biological function, the exact moment of our death.
By all means campaign for strict controls and absolutly strive for better pain relief and preventative medicine, but to simply stand in the face of logic and human compassion in a thinly veiled attempt to foist their bronze-age beliefs that control of birth and death should be out of our hands, shows a preference for dogma over kindness, for superstition-based moralism over humaneness.
An interesting side bar to this argument is that fact that the ex-head of the Church of England, King George V (1936) was it turns out, terminated via a lethal injection of morphine and cocaine administered by his doctor, apparently according to his wishes.
Soooo... if it's good enough for royalty why isn't it good enough for the rest of us?
8 comments:
I think the least we can all agree is that this is a complex area where we're actually dealing with gray areas rather than hard and fast lines. At the one side there is actually killing someone for convenience - when old Auntie Aggie is just hanging onto the house too long - at the other not allowing someone to die at all costs, including the cost of their pain and indignity. I'm not accusing anyone in the pro-euthanisia lobby of wanting the first extreme - but it is still a possibility in that direction. The "slippery slope" concern will always cause many people to steer away from going anywhere in that direction.
I think the first major paragraph of the article you quote shows up some of this blurring - George V was allegedly helped on his way in time for "the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals." It's one thing to help ease someone out of the world, seems another to do it because there are overriding news-management issues to determine the timing. If it's good enough for the Royals to be cleared out of the way for news purposes, I'd rather they kept the privilege.
By the way, in a group of 100 or so trainee Christian ministers, I saw people spread over a wide spectrum with probably about half in favour of euthanasia in certain circumstances.
Hi G,
I agree this is a complex area, to be honest I am not entirely sure what the safeguards should be, it clearly needs more consideration by experts in the field.
I appreciate the point about it being a "slippery slope", we need to ensure there are solid controls. But "x might happen" is a weak argument to do nothing in my view. If we followed that logic then we would find it very hard to move our ethics forwards at all. It would be like arguing that we should continue to prosecute homosexuals because they "might be" paedophiles, as we know from the statistics the % of paedophiles in the heterosexual population is just as large, i.e. this is a straw man argument.
I suspect the same kind of thinking would apply to the % of people inclined to bump off Auntie Aggie, i.e. we can't eliminate the possibility, the best we can do is minimise it, but that isn't a good enough justification to make millions suffer unnecessarily against their will in my view.
It's good to hear that your ministers are thinking about this in what would seem a balanced way; my worry (which I'm trying to convey in this post) is that any religious thinking on this will be clouded by dogma. As in the argument about abortion it seems that the (official) Church line resists what seems like the more humane path to the majority.
The argument against a slippery slope isn't mine, but I can see how it could apply.
"Dogma" in a Christian view would probably say something like, a human being is made in the image of God. Something made in the image of God is of immense value. This is why Christians want to think very hard about these areas. Abortion is another example - a modern Western attitude that demands "rights" will grant those "rights" to those able to demand them - i.e. people who want abortions. Seeing the foetus as also made in the image of God means that "rights" may also be available to something weak and unable to demand anything. Just like euthanasia it's at the very least a balancing act. To simply assume that opposing abortion and euthanasia is in some way less humane than the alternative begs an awful lot of questions about what rights are and who is entitled to humanity.
Sorry, couldn't help but mention - your description of "the wish to cling onto state control" of our last moments. Please when it comes to the last moment, let it be controlled by God, or me, or a priest, or you, or Richard Dawkins or my family or even a doctor in the last resort. But whoever else decides when it is, don't let it be the state. The thought of being launched into eternity to meet a New Labour target or a Conservative budget... I think even Hannibal Lecter might be better of in charge of this one.
G, LOL, you have a good point there, New Labour would demand a focus group, a committee and a dozen forms all with the same boxes on them; plus the obligatory leaflet entitled "What to do if you are dying", not forgetting the link to a WEB site and call centre number in Bangalore :)
If you think about it though the state (under whatever influence) is the final arbiter, through the controls placed on the medical profession. In a lot of cases this state control (or lack of flexibility) places people and their families in horrible situations, in some ways the technology has outstripped the ethics. Our medical infrastructure seems to be able to keep us alive far beyond the point of reason in many cases.
G, to come back to your first point, I accept that these are not trivial matters and so any summary analysis is by definition constrained and exceptions abound. However I do think that opposing things like abortion or stem cell research is indeed prioritising dogma over humaneness, if, that opposition is based solely on one particular faith position. Ultimately I don't think these arguments are about "rights" as such, I would see them being more about reducing suffering; of course these things are intertwined but the faith based lobby seems to be somewhat disingenuous in trying to position the secular lobby as“rights obsessed” like some prissy, PC barrack room lawyer (I’m thinking Rick from the young ones), when the real picture is more complex.
It comes back to an evidence based worldview vs. a faith based one, i.e. how do we arbitrate such matters and what do we use to help us make the best ethical choices? We have hard evidence from Biology, Chemistry and Sociology about the suffering of foetuses; from religion we have opinion (i.e. there is no evidence that we are made in the image of any particular God) should these two factors be weighed equally, in my view they should not.
Historically, faith based positions have been moved (over time) toward the “secular” ones; for example rights of women, homosexual rights (or at least that one is in the end-game), abortion, slavery etc. all of which have been fought for in the teeth of opposition from established religion (not all denominations of course); Is this the same, can we change our view in the light of evidence, or will it boil down to a numbers game in the end?, hopefully not.
I do think that slavery is an interesting one. Goodness knows that the record of many religious people, denominations and societies was shocking. But the "secular one"? The secular world - specifically the commercial and imperial one - had a massive investment in slavery. The "secular world" was just as much on both sides of the argument as any religious argument. From my reading of the history of the British imperial period I suspect that while religious arguments were used in favour of slavery, it was commercial demands that were driving the argument.
G, you are right of course, slavery was not the best example of what I meant, everyone had their fingers in that pie it seems.
Having said that though I have to conclude that since everyone at that time was religious to some extent, then I think it says something to the validity of the point made earlier, i.e. that over the years Christians (and others) have tended to cherry pick the "important" elements of their scripture based on things like making money and forging empires, or at least the religious infrastructure (which was much more powerful than now) around them had no issue with the morality of their actions until the enlightenment.
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