Category Archives: Dignity

This blog, really, is all about Elizabeth

Standard

This is my first blog post at Free Thought Blogs, so I want, from the start, to explain my own reasons for being here, for thinking of myself as a “freethinker” (a term which still does not come easy to me), and for wishing to join a community dedicated to freedom of thought, atheism, and opposition to religious belief. I also want to make the point as clearly as I can, as I start out, how Elizabeth (my wife who died in 2007 in Zurich) is the main inspiration of all that I write, and the patron “saint,” if you like, of this Blog. Without her, I would have been a very different person indeed. I will also remark on some of my present interests and concerns.

At the masthead or banner of my blog choiceindying.com, there from the very beginning in December 2010, has been the tag line, “Arguing for the Right-to-Die and against the Religious Obstruction of that Right.” However, had it not been for Elizabeth, my wife of almost 18 years and best friend for 20, whose picture (sitting on a peak in the Lake District) is in the banner above, and who is now in my Gravatar image as well (precisely because what I am trying to say about her part in this is true), I probably would never have come to the point of disbelief, for not only was she a disbeliever long before I was, it was her struggle to die, when her MS, and the misery and pain and indignities associated with it, became so intolerable, that opened my eyes to the fact that, even for a liberal “believer” of the “Sea of Faith” sort, there were moral issues of great importance that I had simply overlooked by the general institutional support that accompanied my membership in, and action on behalf of, a specific religious institution. This stood out for me in stark relief the moment Elizabeth tried to take her own life, and failed, thus setting her on a course which would eventually take her to Zurich, where Dignitas, the assisted suicide organisation which accepts foreign applicants, helped her, with great kindness and dignity, to die, as she sought to do.

Elizabeth herself, though many years younger than I, was the formative influence in my life, far more important than schooling or religion. A woman of great integrity, energy, intellect and joy, she offered me unconditional love, and provided the basis for the freeing of my mind from the dead weight and trammels of my past. Though I do not believe in destiny, the shape my life took seemed – because I can only think of my life until the point that Elizabeth and I exchanged our love as but a propaedeutic and forerunner to the fullness of life that I would come in time to know with her – almost predestined, as though we were supposed to meet and fulfil each other’s dreams of love and commitment. This was expressed in a poem I wrote after her death, entitled “Easter Rising,” about an unexpected intimate encounter with Elizabeth very early on the first Easter morning after we had (earlier in the year) first exchanged our vows of love (and, truth be told, shortly before I would go out to celebrate another resurrection, in a more formal, liturgical way). The poem ends on this note:

One flame forever,
as in the snow,
deeply blended,
each to each,
we yielded,
as the sun began to climb,
and, as one, arose together,
that first Easter morn,
enfolded in each other,
a new creation,
of each other born.

Religion, from that point, began to play an increasingly secondary role in my life, and though I continued to function as a priest in the Anglican Church for all the years of our marriage — and was, indeed, more actively involved in the institutional life of the church on a diocesan level – it was perhaps inevitable that, with Elizabeth’s death, my active participation in that ministry should come to an end. I soon realised that “faith,” for me, had become not only very tenuous, but, indeed, an impediment to clarity of thought and fullness of life. I remember with great affection, however, the years I spent as a priest, and the people I served and learned to care for and admire during all those years, especially those years of priesthood which I shared with Elizabeth, who taught me (for the first time in my life) what it is to love and to be loved in return. It was when the beliefs of the church began to have an immediate impact on the life of the one I held most dear, that close relationship with the church, and participation in its official ministry became intolerable. It is important to recognise that church does not truly acknowledge the right of its members to value things differently than these things are valued through the church’s institutional expression; and being an active and supporting member of the church is in fact to uphold and defend those values, even when one most strenuously disagrees.

You may continue reading this post over at Free Thought Blogs.

_____________

*That it was largely written by Dworkin is my judgement, at any rate, basing myself purely on stylistic grounds.

About these ads

Steve Lopez on the right to decide about the end of life

Standard

In a comment Michael Fugate referred us to a new article by Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times correspondent who has taken on assisted dying as an issue of pressing importance (thanks Michael). You can read the article, and watch an accompanying video, here. It is highly recommended. The title of the article is “Chorus of voices grows stronger for ‘death with dignity.’ The article brings out some important aspects of the discussion about assisted dying, and I will enumerate what I think are the important ones here.

First, there is a clear sign that even born again Christians, and ceteris paribus, other religious believers, may be able to see asking for and receiving assistance to die not as an act of unfaithfulness, but as a decision as reasonably and faithfully made as other life decisions. Generally speaking, religions have seen assisted dying as consisting in acts of suicide. This is a mistake. Suicide is an act of desperation taken in the midst of an otherwise normal life. It may or may not be justified by circumstances, but it is an act completely different from that of the person who seeks, because of suffering, to end life (themselves), or to have life brought to an end (by another), because there is no other way to meliorate the suffering involved either in a terminal illness, or in some other condition that leads to the degradation of a person’s quality of life to the point where, for that person, suffering has become intolerable.

(This is one reason, by the way, that I oppose laws which specify terminality as a necessary condition for assisted dying. For others may suffer as much or more than a terminally ill person, and may suffer for a much longer period of time. Another consideration is that, by specifying terminality, assisted dying laws implicitly state that terminality is a condition of life which may, almost by definition, include intolerable suffering. Since assistance in dying should be a choice, the issue of choice should be in the foreground of such laws, not specific conditions. It is for the individual alone to decide when life has become, for them, intolerable.)

Continue reading →

Credit where credit is due

Standard

Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald in the UK. Most of those who have held this post, such as Christine Odone, have been admanantly opposed to assistance in dying. Even the suggestion that assisted dying should be given a second look would have caused most of them to go apoplectic with repressed anger and outrage. Christine Odone has even written a report for the Centre for Policy Studies, entitled Assisted Suicide: How the chattering classes have got it wrong (downloadable as a pdf here) which uses every single bad argument in the Roman Catholic playbook, not even shrinking from using half-truths and outright lies to make her point — being a member of the chattering classes it should not be surprising (given the premise of her title) that she got things wrong as well.

Nevertheless — and now we get to the real meat of this post — Peter Stanford has experienced an awakening of conscience. In today’s Telegraph, refusing to parrot the empty certainties of popes and their acolytes, he tells of his day with Tony Nicklinson, and how he came away with the conviction that the last word has not, after all, been said in the matter of assisted dying. His article, “How an extraordinary day spent with Tony Nicklinson changed my views on right-to-die.”

In the course of this article Peter Stanford says some important things. The most important thing that he could have said, perhaps, is that he had changed his mind. A day spent with a severely disabled man whose suffering was so great forced Stanford to recognise that he could not simply parrot the old lie that people who are asking to die are asking for others to hope for them. He had to recognise Tony Nicklinson as a human being who could make choices, who had carefully thought through the alternatives facing him, and had decided that he wanted help to die.

Continue reading →

Why did anyone think that pain was the only issue?

Standard

An article in yesterday’s New York Times, oddly entitled “In Ill Doctor, a Surprise Reflection of Who Picks Assisted Suicide,” expresses surprise at the type of patient who chooses assisted suicide as a way of bringing their lives to an end. Indeed, the author, Katie Hafner, quotes Linda Ganzini, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, as saying:

Everybody thought this was going to be about pain … It turns out that pain is kind of irrelevant.

When I read this I was deeply troubled, because it seems to miss the point altogether, and shows just how distant people are from understanding what happens when we die. Anyone who had understood this would not have made the mistake of assuming that pain was the central issue in appeals for assisted dying.

Recall, here, that assisted dying is all about choice. In England the association which first attempted — as long ago as 1936 — to get voluntary euthanasia legalised was called the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalization Society, and although one of the conditions specified in their propaganda for the right to receive voluntary euthanasia includes severe pain, the composition of the society itself should have been an indication that this was not really the issue. For the society was composed entirely of high-ranking physicians and men of influence and power, lawyers and churchmen amongst them, some of whom were members of the House of Lords — in other words, just the sort of people who customarily have a great deal of control over their own lives. One of them was the onetime Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Very Rev’d William Inge. But he was not the only supporter amongst the clergy, as this linked article in the Montreal Gazette confirms. They did not carry the day then, and they certainly have not carried the day with the contemporary Church of England, which, according to its website,

is opposed to any change in the law, or medical practice, to make assisted suicide permissible or acceptable.

The point, however, is that those who have come out in support of assisted dying are not at all the type of people who are content to lie back supinely and let other people make decisions for them. They are, by and large, active, educated people, known to value control of their own life and decisions.

Continue reading →

Charleston “Post and Courier” publishes remarkably insightful, sane and thoughtful piece on “elective death”

Standard

While the blogosphere has erupted into justified joy and admiration of NASA’s success in landing the Mars rover, Curiosity, on the red planet, which has occasioned so much exultation at human achievement, I have chosen to highlight an achievement of another sort: namely, the publication in a Charleston newspaper of a remarkable article on assistance in dying. Few newspapers have achieved this level of understanding or support for something that more and more people, despite the almost universal religious condemnation of assisted dying, are coming to recognise as an important human right. Nevertheless, in recognition of NASA’s achievement, here is a picture of the “sky crane” landing operation that was undertaken late on a Martian afternoon, which happened without a hitch, so we are told. Just imagine! Sending tons of equipment millions of miles and setting down a one ton nuclear powered vehicle without damage, after slowing it down from 20,000 kilometres an hour so that it could land gently on the surface of the planet (as in the artist’s rendition below).

Curiosity, the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory ever sent to a distant world, was scheduled to touch down inside a vast, ancient impact crater on Sunday at 10:31 pm Pacific Time. The landing was an outstanding success.

———————————–

Bill Thompson, who has been a feature writer for the Charleston Post and Courier since 1980, publishes a remarkably thoughtful, insightful, and positive article on what he calls “elective” or self-chosen death. Taking his inspiration from South Carolina author Richard Côté, and his new book, In Search of a Gentle Death: The Fight for Your Right, Thompson’s article — entitled “Are our lives our own? The ethics of ‘elective death’” – goes into some detail defining the different types of elective death, from assisted suicide to euthanasia, and is one of the very few writings on this topic that appears to understand the simple truth that pain and suffering at the end of life is sometimes not able to be controlled, even with all the wonders of modern medicine. Indeed, as Thompson points out, it is the fact that we are surrounded by such wonders that has brought us to the point at which we have arrived, where not only do people die more and more often in institutional situations, but where the ability to keep people alive has brought about vastly increased and increasing demand for the right to a self-chosen death.

Continue reading →

The Catholic Idea of Dignity and the Fantasy of Perfection

Standard

Cardinal Cahal B. Daly — we come to his exaggerations and absurdities later. You can dress them up in red, and give them exalted titles, but they still know little or nothing of the art of being human, especially about love and family values that they so frequently invoke in defence of their fantasies and superstitions — and who then, with brazen effrontery, seek to be protected against derision! See the demands of Bishop Schick in Germany.

The Roman Catholic Church has a bizarre notion of human dignity, which it uses systematically to suppress every progressive movement, and to violate human rights. Dignity, for the Roman Catholic Church, is to live life solely in terms of its moral principles, principles which have no foundation other than dogmatic assertion. This is evident wherever Roman Catholic authorities make public statements about some act or other that they deplore. It is important to note that the Roman Catholic use of the idea of human dignity is not based on evidence, or even on rational argument. It is simply an article of faith. The failure to observe the Catholic ideal of human dignity is immediately to put oneself in the ranks of those who not only trespass against the church’s moral code, but it is — we are told again and again — to put humanity itself at risk. Take as an example of this a statement by the Catholic Bishops of Kenya, objecting to Melinda Gates’ drive to make family planning information and materials available to as many women as possible. Just to put this in perspective, here are the benefits of family planning, according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

Through family planning:

  • Maternal mortality is reduced. Family planning could prevent up to one third of all maternal deaths by empowering women to decide when to have a child and avoid unintended pregnancies and abortions.
  • Deaths and illness among young women are reduced. Pregnancy is the leading cause of death for women under 19, with complications of childbirth and abortion being the major factors. Adolescents aged 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die in childbirth as those in their 20s, and girls under 15 are five times as likely to die as those in their 20s.
  • Child health and survival is improved. Reducing the number of births less than two years apart, births to very young and older women, and higher-order births, family planning lowers child and infant mortality. For example, if women spaced their births at least 36 months apart, almost 3 million deaths to children under age 5 could be averted.

To most reasonable people aims like these seem, not only morally unproblematic, but morally laudable. Reducing maternal mortality, the improvement of child health and survival, and, though not mentioned, control over an already unsustainably large human population: all these seem to be worthy aims, and most people of goodwill would praise the Gates Foundation for supporting and furthering these aims.

Continue reading →

Religion as Hate Speech

Standard

Every morning, over my coffee, I go through a number of online newspapers, reading the headlines, and the odd article that captures my attention. I tend to spend more time on the opinion pages, for they deal not only in quickly changing news stories, which have their ten or fifteen minutes of fame and then sink below the attention horizon, but with things of more critical interest. Today, in the National Post, Allan Gould speaks of The Eichmann Effect, on the fiftieth anniversary of the hanging of Adolf Eichmann (31 May 1962), the SS officer (Obersturmbannführer, or Lieutenant Colonel) who made sure that the death trains moved Jews and others to the killing factories in the East, where the Nazi genocide was carried out. Although he was himself too squeamish to watch the killing of Jews himself, he made sure that the death transports were priority traffic, even during a time when, from the standpoint of German war aims, military traffic ought to have been given a higher priority. But the murder of Jews was more important to Hitler and his band of mad men than carrying on the war, which was effectively lost anyway.

One of the things that struck me about Allan Gould’s article is something that has nothing at all to do with Adolf Eichmann, though it is, I think, closely related. He begins his article by saying that he grew up in Detroit, his parents having moved from Toronto because of the regnant antisemitism there:

In the mid-30s, “No Jews or Dogs Allowed” signs were posted along old Highway 2 (now the route of the 401), and along the beaches of Lake Ontario. Many jobs were closed to Jews, as well. My family’s memories of those experiences were what propelled me to attend Eichmann’s trial — a watershed in the history of the fight against antisemitism.

The odd thing is that, though I was born in Canada, I grew up in India in complete ignorance of antisemitism; and although there were fundamentalist Hindu groups in the India I grew up in, and even though I arrived in India as a child shortly after the massacres of Muslims and Hindus during the partition of India into a largely Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan, and shortly before Gandhi was murdered in New Delhi early in 1948, religious animosities played virtually no part in my life. My father was a Christian missionary, and though I never heard any outright condemnation of another religion, the only reason for being a missionary is because you believe the people among whom you work are burdened with religious error and blindness, and are likely, without a change of faith, to suffer the just punishment of God.

Continue reading →

Misunderstanding Assisted Dying

Standard

Almost everyone does — misunderstand assisted dying, that is. This is particularly evident in several recent articles, both in Canada in the UK. I’ll just discuss Derek Miedema’s “My right to life trumps your right to die“, and Matt Gurney’s “Euthanasia’s foes, out of arguments, settle for fear-mongering” in this post. The first one, obviously, opposes assisted dying, the latter supports it; both are misunderstandings.

The main problem lies in the fact that Miedema makes a number of claims about the danger of assisted dying, and Gurney accepts that these are genuine dangers, but insists that they can be overcome by careful legislation. But he needn’t have taken Miedema’s arguments at face value in the first place, and by doing so, distorts both the nature and the purpose of assisted dying. This distortion is present in almost all the polls that have been done in order to gauge the level of support for assisted dying in most jurisdictions, and is based on the idea that the only reason for assisted dying is serious and uncontrollable pain at the end of life. This is a misunderstanding of what people who are demanding that their right to assistance in dying be recognised are saying, and allowing for assistance in dying only for those who are terminally ill and in great pain is not an adequate response to those demands.

Continue reading →

The F#@%!ng Catholics are at it again!

Standard
   You can tell he’s a Christian by his fake smile!

The National Post has an article about Conservative MP Steven Woodworth’s call “for abortion debate using ‘modern medically accurate information.’” Keep your f#@%!ng Catholicism to yourself, why don’t you, Mr. Woodworth? How about the Catholic Church using modern medically accurate information about women, and the fact that they are as fully human as the silly celibates in the Vatican, who are still hampered by the old mythologies of women and the “uncleanness” of menstruation, and women’s inability to function in leadership capacities over men. To bring up, at this stage, something called ‘modern medically accurate information’ — you mean, like the fact that the conceptus, from the moment of conception, is human tissue, with the potential to become human? How can there be modern medical evidence of when the conceptus-blastocyst-embryo-foetus becomes a person? Being a person is not a medical category, but a social, political or moral one. You can’t have medical evidence of when something becomes a person. That’s simply a category mistake: in this case a category mistake based on religious mythology. And Woodworth has the nerve to call it modern and scientific! (At least in one respect he is right. This is modern Roman Catholicism. The magisterium did not always take this view.)

Obviously, Woodworth is playing his Catholic game — or his f#$%!ng Catholic game. Catholics, like other religionists, will insist on intruding themselves in other people’s lives, without so much as a knock upon the door. As Miguel Kottow says in his essay in 50 Voices of Disbelief:

I have this theory: people claim connection to God so they can meddle in other people’s lives. To act in the name of “God” is a prime excuse to be paternalistic and preach the gospel with a clear conscience and  a sense of being anchored in the truth. [233]

The key word, of course, is ‘paternalistic’, because religions of practically all stripes seem to have an idea that they have a right to rule over women especially — though, in general, of course, over everyone. Men can escape the state of needing paternal control by becoming fathers themselves – Catholics significantly call their leaders ‘father’ and even ‘holy father’ — but women, it seems, can never get beyond the stage of requiring supervision and control.

Continue reading →

W5 on Euthansia: A Second (or is it a Third?) Look

Standard

Until now I haven’t been able to grab clips from the CTV W5 programme with Victor Malarek which would allow me to go through my argument step by step. However, I just managed it, so this will take a number of clips from the programme and comment, briefly, upon them.

Error
This video doesn’t exist

This is simply false. The Dutch euthanasia law does not require written consent. According to the “due care” criteria (Chapter II: Due Care Criteria), written consent is not required. The criteria for “due care” are as follows:

Continue reading →