About
This Weblog is dedicated to Elizabeth, my wife, lover and best friend, who died in Zurich on 8th June 2007
As I say in my first post, the purpose of this blog, which is just up and running today (2 December 2010), is to explore issues related to choice in dying and the right to die. Its purpose is largely to address itself to the widespread religious opposition to choice in dying, to explain why this opposition is not only baseless, but an unwarranted intrusion into the rights of suffering persons. It is my belief that the issue of choice and assistance in dying must defeat the religious opposition to such choice and assistance. The opposition is based on personal beliefs which should not determine public policy, as they continue to do. Until religion is taken out of the equation, the dispute about choice in dying will be fraught with continuing unnecessary complexity.
While religious people have a right to their beliefs about dying, and its role in human life, they should have no right to impose those beliefs on others, as they are doing now. It took several centuries to wrest political power from the hands of the religious. The right to die is one area where the churches and the religions have retained their power. It is time to take back this freedom too.
A subsidiary though central purpose of this weblog will be to explore religion and religious belief more generally, and to argue against its powerful cultural presence — an intrusive presence even in the lives of the non-religious, granted to religion largely because of a misunderstanding based on a long and complicated history. Despite the fact that over the last four or five centuries, religions (in the more secular societies of the democratic West) have been forced onto the back foot, it is still widely held, for no reason besides religion’s long period of dominance until the modern age, that society would dissolve into chaos without religion. This is a misunderstanding that we will explore in some detail.
As time goes on, readers of this blog should have the opportunity to see how religious beliefs and doctrines not only have no rational basis, but are, in fact, a danger to rational, evidence-based thinking upon which, alone, the ordering of human relations ought to be grounded.
Elizabeth, 25 May 2007, two weeks before she was helped to die by Dignitas in Zurich, Switzerland
As I have already suggested above, this blog is a work of love and devotion. My wife and dearest friend, Elizabeth, went to Switzerland to die at the assisted suicide clinic Dignitas after years of suffering and increasing paralysis as the result of an aggressive case of MS. She experienced a death of unexampled courage and peacefulness. This weblog is a labour of love and obligation undertaken in her honour. The reader who follows the conversation here will soon learn of the circumstances, and the outcome of that journey into exile, from Canada to Switzerland, in order to find help in dying which she could not receive in her own country.
In the Middle Ages, when the plague decimated the population of Europe, a new attitude to death was developed by the church, as it sought to turn experiences of horror into opportunities for spiritual growth. Thus developed the spiritual practice called the ars moriendi, the art of dying. The idea was to transform suffering into a spiritual experience. Suffering was reconceived as something that makes us fully human. Instead of asking Job’s question — Why was I born if I must undergo such pointless suffering? — the idea of the art of dying was to see suffering as an opportunity. This idea deeply influences contemporary religious arguments against assisted dying, and it needs to be confronted.
It is my conviction that the art of dying is an art which, in our own day, may suitably take its leave from religion and set up its home in the secular order to which our freedom is chiefly indebted. People are free to see their suffering in the light of their faith in Christ, if that is what they wish. But this interpretation of suffering is not an obligation. Indeed, it may justly be seen as a piece of prevarication, hiding the reality of suffering, and, if there were a god, that god’s responsibility for it. People who are suffering may see it, with some justice, as something which subtracts from rather than adds to the meaningfulness of life. For those who do not find suffering spirtually fulfilling, or in any sense an opportunity for human growth, it should be possible to negotiate other ways of leaving life than through the processes of disintegration which take place as we die. Those for whom suffering is a good reason not to believe in a god, or for whom the god they believe in does not desire pointless suffering, should have the choice to die at a time and in a manner of their own choosing. They should, in other words, have choice in dying.
It is significant that this last right of the individual is still refused to us on almost entirely religious grounds, with religion playing a dictatorial role to the very end. It is time to put the religious pieces of this puzzle back into their box, and put it away with other things that are used to befuddle and constrict the human intellect, and the freedom of choice that appropriately belongs to it. The right to die is a human right, and the religions should stop imposing their ideas of death on other people.
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