Category Archives: Culture of Death

Margaret Somerville/Wanda Morris Debate Assisted Dying on HuffPo. So far, Margaret is Winning!

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Over at the Huffington Post there is a debate between Margaret Somerville, purported ethicist from McGill University in Montreal, and Wanda Morris, Executive Director of Dying with Dignity (Canada), the voice for choice at the end of life in Canada. Somerville, as is her wont, brings out all the usual suspects, none of which are really compelling, and all of which depend on two things, making you afraid of it, and claiming that it’s simply — it’s really that simple folks! — wrong to kill people. She forgets, of course, that people have been killing other people since the dawn of time, and will go on doing it. Certainly, many acts of killing are wrong and to be regretted and condemned, but merely saying that something is a matter of killing another human being is not enough all on its own to make it wrong.

Margaret’s biggest argument — the real big argument so far as Somerville is concerned — is that permitting the act of assisting someone in great suffering to die (she doesn’t like that euphemism, so we’ll come back to it) is changing something fundamental about the way in which we regard human life, and it will bring about untold changes in our society, and may — in fact she is sure that it will — change the way we regard killing others, so that legalising it in the case of those who choose to die in order to end their suffering will set society off on a slippery slope to disaster and depravity. She’s said this numerous times before, and she puts so much weight on it that it really constitutes her main argument against assisted dying (a ”sanitised” form of language that she deplores, but we will come back to that). Margaret’s problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that she is left asking a vague question about the future: “What long term effects might result from that?” She doesn’t know, but she has this in common with the pope: she believes firmly that this will usher in a “culture of death,” if it hasn’t already arrived, and that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth because we didn’t listen to Jeremiahs like her.

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The Pope’s Theocratic Challenge – Time to Revisit Vatican Statehood

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The other day, feeling not so well, I went on a righteous rant against the Roman Catholic Church, the pope, and other idiots who think they have the right to limit women’s freedom to make their own reproductive decisions. It is vital that we see it in this light. Forget the intrinsic or sacred value of the foetus, which, the Roman Catholic Church claims, is equal to that of the “mother’s”. This is the usual religious smokescreen laid down so that we won’t notice what the church is really trying to do. It is trying its damnedest to control people, to make them dance to the Roman Catholic tune, suggesting that only the Roman Catholic Church really knows what is right and good. No one else really knows. That’s the bottom line for the pope and his coterie of conservative bishops, archbishops and cardinals around the world. They’re not prepared to discuss this. Their minds are made up. They know what the truth of morality really is, and the rest of the world should just bend to it and follow their direction. Most of all, women have no choice in the matter. They should just shut up. Women are, really, nothing but walking time bombs of emotional instability, and they should be made to shut up and produce babies. It doesn’t matter how they got pregnant. It doesn’t matter how much psychological trauma they undergo in the process. They may be pregnant by rape or sexual abuse. Pregnancy may lead to death, disability, breakdown, the termination of plans and projects and hope for the future. It simply doesn’t matter, and women should just shut up and bear children. That is their assigned lot in life. It’s simply a matter of natural law.

Zoe Williams has a hard-hitting piece in the Guardian today, where she points out how simply out of touch today the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is on the issue of abortion. It’s time to stop taking these people seriously, she suggests. It’s time simply to reject the mindless repetition of the old certainties. And she says something that really needed to be said:

The tendency with the abortion debate is to consider the anti-choice lobby as more sensitive, more governed by their consciences and anger than the pro-choice lobby. It’s true in some respects – the Roman Catholic church certainly has a tendency toward hysterical overstatement. And yet we pander too much to anti-abortionists, taking whatever scraps of reproductive rights they’ll throw us, stopping the fight as soon as our immediate pragmatic needs have been met.

Yes, and a thousand times yes. It’s the same with the anti-assisted dying movement too. The attempt is always being made to paint their opponents as crass and cruel, as baby-killers, murderers and representatives of a culture of death. How many times have I heard Peter Singer characterised as immoral, because he thinks that easing a defective baby out of life is better than simply allowing it to die of starvation and dehydration? John Lennox said precisely this in his debate with Richard Dawkins, and Dawkins rightly responded by saying that Singer is one of the most morally conscientious persons he knows. Lennox is like the pope. He no longer seems to know what is morally relevant in today’s world, because he lives so much in the past. Christians have to live in the past, almost by definition, because the writings that they consider authoritative were written, some perhaps four, some three, and others around two thousand years ago.

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The Mindless Idiocy of Religious Morality

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Isn’t it just about time that we told religious moralists to shove it? Really, when you look at the world today, and consider the offences that religions commit against human dignity and justice, for religions to make claims to speak with authority on moral questions is not only laughable, it is plainly obscene. Religious thought is rightly thought to be “other worldly” — it certainly does not belong in this one. Roman Catholic ethicists, like the incredibly doctrinaire Robert P. George, who thinks that only Catholic morality can be justified by reason, and therefore should be made into law, cannot even imagine how it could be possible for anyone to disagree with them, and yet very few moral philosophers do agree with them. They carry on their moral projects in a private room, as though no one else was thinking about ethics at all. No wonder they are so dismayed when people turn them down.

Take Robert P. George’s arguments regarding the immorality of abortion, for example. He thinks that anyone who thinks that abortion, at any stage, is morally justifiable, is simply wrong, and he thinks that this is a position securely grounded in science itself. I will not go into detail, since I do not think the argument deserves this kind of close attention. Just consider this statement and its sequel:

What the zygote needs to function as a self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.

At no point in embryogenesis, therefore, does the distinct organism that came into being when it was conceived undergo what is technically called “substantial change” (or a change of natures). It is human and will remain human. [71]

Now, let’s stack this claim up against the claim of the woman in whom this zygote has taken up residence.

In the Independent this morning the main headline is:

Woman dies after being refused an abortion in Irish hospital

Here’s part of the story:

Savita Halappanavar, a dentist aged 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she died after suffering a miscarriage and septicaemia.

The woman’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, claimed she had complained of being in agonising pain while in Galway University Hospital.

He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.

A “heartbeat was present”! The woman had suffered a miscarriage, for Christ’s sake! But a heartbeat was present, so, conformable to Robert P. George’s (and the Pope’s) dictum, a human being was present. So, instead of rescuing the woman, she was allowed to die, being told that an abortion was contraindicated because “Ireland is a Catholic country.” The idiocy of this is simply stunning, and yet this is what happened. A life of a woman was forfeited, regardless of her own choices, because there was a heartbeat! It’s enough to make one scream, and to call down execrations on the heads of those “in charge,” and it reminds one that “Mother Teresa” (now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta) declared in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (of all things!), that abortion was “the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.” (We should all retire to Bedlam!) Neither the woman’s distress nor the husband’s request availed anything, and she was left to die because of the inviolable logic of Roman Catholic ethics. It makes me so angry that I want to wring some prelatical throats.

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Who the hell is George Weigel?

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That’s the question I asked Google! And I got several answers. I asked the question because I was reading this most astonishing piece of Roman Catholic bravura, and I wanted to know who the hell its author was, who was both so pretentiously sure of himself, and slightly ridiculous as well. Of course, the pretentiously self-assured just are slightly ridiculous, but there was an unapologetic hyperbole about Weigel’s posturing that was unnerving, and I wanted to know who the hell he was!

I’ll come back to Weigel’s article in a moment, but the Google search was revealing. The first (or almost the first) article that popped up was one by a Jason Berry at the National Catholic Reporter (from 30 December 2010) entitled “George Weigel: Whitewashing History.” The main thrust of the article concerned Weigel’s biographies (or hagiographies) of John Paul II (Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła), and how they airbrush out Pope Wojtyła’s failures in the child sexual abuse scandal that convulsed the church during his ”reign”. (My mind now simply balks at the language Roman Catholics use for the head of their church — the new name to give them “weight” before history, the language of royalty, the obsequious piety of Holy Father, etc.) Suddenly, when it was obvious that “Fr” Marcial Maciel Degollado’s (head of the Legion of Christ) abuse of seminarians, and other sexual scandals, could no longer be denied, Weigel demanded an investigation by the Vatican, but mentions Maciel’s name not at all in his 992 page biography (at least not in a critical way), though it was Wojtyła himself who provided Maciel with cover and credibility at least seven years after canonical charges of Maciel’s sexual misconduct had first been filed against Macile by men – the first complaint against him had been made to Pope Montini (Paul VI) in 1976! — claiming that Maciel had sexually abused them when they were young seminarians.

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The Religious Narrowing of the Mind

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Patrick Reilly, founder and CEO of the Cardinal Newman Society, a tattle tale organisation with a watching brief on Catholic higher education in the United States, has written two articles, one in 2005, and one this month (June 2011), on the unfaithfulness of some professors and teachers at Catholic institutions of higher learning to the teachings of the popes, and to standard Catholic doctrine, regarding abortion and assisted dying. It is no surprise that there isn’t 100% agreement on these ethical questions, even amongst Catholics. This month’s contribution to these tattle tale works is entitled “Bishops Betrayed on Assisted Suicide.” The 2005 article, which “Bishops Betrayed on Assisted Suicide” somewhat misleadingly (and self-praisingly) calls “an exclusive report,” is entitled, tellingly, “Teaching Euthanasia.” Ophelia Benson is discussing these over at Butterflies and Wheels, where I first became acquainted with Patrick Reilly and his “petulant authoritarianism” (see Didaktylos’ comment below). Together the articles comprise a condemnation of the tendency of teachers at Catholic institutions of higher learning to think for themselves, and to hold up to the cool light of reason the teachings of the church, and the extension of those teachings in surprising ways by the popes, in particular, by Pope John Paul II, the Polish replacement for the murdered pope John Paul I (Albino Luciani). (I know that’s going out on a limb, but there is, I believe, sufficient reason to be doubtful of the Vatican account of his death. However, nothing that I say stands or falls on this particular “leap of doubt”.)

Luciani, as a former Patriarch of Venice, went so far as to welcome divorced persons, and actually looked into the possibility that the “pill” might be the best way of regulating births. (See “The Scandals and Heresies of John Paul I), and expressed himself as not entirely in favour of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. This document, which put the seal of death on the “pill” and other means of regulating birth, and condemned all so-called artificial means of contraception, led to all the madnesses of the church in denying the efficacy of condoms, even to the extent of prescribing that, should a husband be infected with the HIV virus, it is better to have unprotected sex with his wife than to commit the sin of using contraception. There are, said the pope’s spokesman for family affairs, some things that are worth more than life itself (referred to by Uta Ranke-Heinemann in her book Putting Away Childish Things), including the sanctity of marriage, which can only be preserved by preserving its procreative function — thus showing clearly that the Roman Catholic Church is not opposed to someone killing another innocent person, just so long as they do it in an ethical way which preserves the possibility of procreation.

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Death should not be as easy as going to the dentist

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That is the headline of an opinion piece by Allison Pearson in The Telegraph yesterday (15th June). I was going to ignore it, because it’s a bit of the same old same old, but it has a spin which makes it worthwhile mentioning, I think. You know that you’ve just fallen down the rabbit hole when it becomes clear that you need to read the article backwards, starting with the last paragraph:

I’m sure he’s right, and all my humane instincts recoil from the cold indignity of Dignitas. And yet, at the back of my mind, a small voice keeps   saying: “If I had Alzheimer’s and knew that my self was about to vanish,   like sand through a sieve, would I want the rest of me to go on?”

Death itself, it is perhaps helpful to remember, is not dignified, and indeed seems itself very cold, so speaking of the “cold indignity of Dignitas” is not only hopelessly biased, it fails to mention what death is like for many people in other situations. Since most people in Western nations now die in hospitals or hospices, we must  ask whether the coldness and indignity that Allison Pearson discerned in the way Peter Smedley died is in any significant way different to the cold indignity of dying in hospital or hospice, and whether those who died with the help of Dignitas would have described their deaths as lacking in humanity or dignity.

I do not know how my wife Elizabeth felt as she lay dying in my arms — I sometimes wish, even now, that I could have been privy to her last thoughts – but I suspect that she felt a sense of peace that she did not feel the day she tried to take her own life all alone slightly less than a year before. In both cases it was by her own choice, and I daresay, since she would have fairly soon been completely paralysed — that is certainly the course the disease was taking — that there was more dignity in her dying that way, than perhaps dying after years of pain and indignity that her MS would have accorded her, had she not had the opportunity to die as she did. And it seems particularly cruel for someone who hears a small voice in the back of her mind wondering whether she, too, might someday be in a situation where she would want help in dying, to condemn so harshly the decision of someone whose small voice had grown into an insistent and unignorable appeal for relief before it was too late to escape the worst and most diminishing aspects of dying.

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Terry Pratchett and Dying on TV

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I suppose I should have jumped immediately onto this particular bandwagon, since it is obviously — or was yesterday — all the rage in the British press, and this blog is, after all, called Choice in Dying. Terry Pratchett, the well-known author, has been, for some time, an active campaigner for assisted dying. Suffering from an early onset form of Alzheimer’s disease, he wants the right, when he thinks the time is right, to end his own life with assistance, and has been campaigning for the general right to do this for some time now, certainly ever since his Richard Dimbleby Lecture in February 2010. Last year he accompanied Peter Smedley and his wife Christine to Dignitas in Zürich, where Peter Smedley’s death became a part of his BBC documentary on assisted dying entitled Choosing to Die (which is, unfortunately, not available for viewing in Canada), which raises, once again, all the standard issues and accusations about assisted dying. Aside from the abusive epithets, there seems to be a determined effort not only to misrepresent, but deliberately to misunderstand, what people who are talking about the legalisation of assisted dying have in mind, and what kind of society they want to see emerge from the present almost universal will to hide the fact that, someday, each one of us will die, and that the manner of our death should be of some concern to us.

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Vulnerability and Empire — The Sequel

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A couple days ago I put up a post entitled “Vulnerability and Empire”. The main point that I was trying to make is that the Roman Catholic Church has hit upon a scheme which enables it to remain in control of key points in people’s lives, the kind of control it needs if it is going to maintain its power (or empire) over “its” people. In the past it could depend upon ignorance, and the awe and profound respect that people felt in the presence of the church, whether through its buildings, liturgy or officials. The church can no longer depend on this kind of reflex obeisance owed to holy people, places or things. Its teachings no longer strike fear into the hearts of the people.

Perhaps an example would help. Many years ago now, when I was still active as an Anglican priest, I stopped into a country church while making my parish rounds to use the loo. As I stepped out of the church a young girl, 7 or 8 years old, was walking by on the street on her way home from school. As I knew her I waved to her. As soon as she saw me she took off like a shot! The next Sunday I mentioned to her mother that I had seen her daughter on her way home. “Yes,” the girl’s mother said, “she came rushing into the house, trembling with fear, and she said, in an awed voice, ‘I just saw God!’”

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Vulnerability and Empire

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"... a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

On 16th September 2011, on the first day of his “State Visit” to the UK, Pope Benedict made a speech at Holyrood House, the official residence of the Queen in Scotland. In the course of that speech he said the following:

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’.

The pope was suffering from a curious lapse of historical memory. He forgot that his predecessors signed a Condordat with Hitler, that the Catholic church in Germany prayed dutifully for der Führer on his birthday every 20th of April, and conveyed to him, through its leaders, fulsome declarations of loyalty and admiration. He forgot that the establishment of the imaginary “state” that gives him so much influence in the world today was granted to his predecessors by Mussolini, the head of a fascist state that was in close alliance with Hitler, and fought alongside him against the forces of democracy from 10th June 1940 until 8th September 1943. He conveniently forgot that his predecessors supported Franco, in Spain, against the legitimate republican government of the day, a war claiming thousands of innocent victims, in order to establish one of the longest surviving fascist dictatorships in Europe in which the church itself played such a key role. He forgot that his predecessors excommunicated not one — not a singe one — of the major war criminals, even though many of them were Catholic, and that the Vatican played a key role in enabling some of these vicious men to escape punishment. He forgot, too, that Hitler himself was a Catholic, and, although Hitler’s religion was a strange amalgam of Christian and Teutonic pagan beliefs, he never severed his relationships with the Catholic church and is known to have said that he would remain a Catholic till his dying day.

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Salman Taseer is dead. Religion killed him.

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Salman Taseer

But it won’t help you die. I was thinking about Islam and assisted dying when the news came in that the brave and funny Governor of the Punjab had been killed by his police bodyguard, because of the Governor’s stance on Pakistan’s medieval blasphemy law. So I did a perfunctory search to find out what the Islam which stones women and kills blasphemers thinks about assisted dying. The answer is no. The Islam which prompted a man to pump 26 rounds from his Kalashnikov into the Governor’s back, won’t help you die if you are dying in intolerable pain. Life, you see, is sacred!

You might say it wasn’t Islam that motivated him. But why should we say this? The man was defending a law of his country which says that it’s okay to kill blasphemers. Did the Governor not blaspheme simply by opposing this law? I say it was Islam that motivated his killer. Muslim leaders throughout Pakistan were calling for Governor Taseer’s head. One of the faithful answered the call. Anyway, his killer says that’s why he killed him.

Religion is like that. It is based on beliefs which are completely without foundation, and which are, therefore, simply random occurrences. It is used, without predictability, to support completely bizarre social and political arrangements. It motivates people to perform acts of the most absurd personal abnegation at the same time that others are prompted by the same beliefs to acts of incredibly brutal and inhuman cruelty. And then, despite the evidence of millennia of experience, and sacred texts replete with violence,  we are told, with every evidence of sincerity, that religion is about love and compassion, and the mind simply weeps!

So I looked, as I mentioned a moment ago, for something about Islam and assisted dying, and the first site that I came upon included this.

Marian, from the United States, asks:

I was just wondering (I’m not a doctor or anything) if euthanasia (mercy killing) is allowed in Islam. I think that if someone is enduring blinding pain and doesn’t really have much time to live (2 or 3 months), the doctor should kill that person and end his/her misery. What do you think? Is Euthanasia allowed in Islam?

The Muslim Agony Aunt at Islam.net, answers:

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.

Dear questioner, we would like to thank you for the great confidence you place in us, and we implore Allah Almighty to help us serve His cause and render our work for His Sake.
Euthanasia, in modern terminology, refers to facilitating the death of an incurable patient at his own pressing request presented to the treating physicians. There are various types of euthanasia and each type has its own ruling. However, all Muslim scholars agree that killing a person to reduce his pain or suffering from sickness is not allowed in Islam. Having said this, we can say that if a number of medical experts decide that there is no hope for a certain patient to recover, then it could be permissible for them to stop the medication.
Thus — the poison of religion. I tend to be critical of Christianity, because I know it best, but the other religions should come in for their fair share of criticism, because they are seldom better, and sometimes far worse, than Christianity. Dawkins calls Roman Catholicism the second worst religion in the world, Islam the worst. There’s a reason for that. Not only is the Qu’ran shot through with the most horrific descriptions of the suffering of the damned, but it is largely without mercy for all who do not believe. Salman Taseer was a light in that darkness. His Islam was not the cruel madness that killed him, but religion is like that. Like the curate’s egg, it is only good in parts, and those parts hard to find.