Category Archives: Quality of life

Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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What does ‘sanctity-of-life’ mean? – I

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Warning — some important edits made after publication!

One of the problems with this blog is that I tend to be very wordy, and most of my posts are of short article length. That alone is a filter of some significance. But what is more daunting for some is the fact that the comments after posts are as long as, and sometimes longer than, the post itself. Not only is this pretty demanding, but it also means that sometimes continuity is lost. It is one thing for a few of us to discuss things at length in the comments, but that doesn’t help connect the dots from post to post.

That introduction is merely to indicate that what I write here is not only a continuation of my preceding posts on assisted dying and sanctity-of-life issues, but tries to take into consideration some of the comments that have been made as well. I often do this without mentioning it, but in this case it seemed important because it so obviously takes off not only from the last post, but from the comments after it, and from comments after some earlier posts as well. It’s part of a fairly large-scale conversation, so if you think you are missing some key links in the chain, they are probably hidden in the comments of the last three or four posts. I will, nevertheless, try to keep this as self-contained as I can, but I am aware as I write that I am thinking around through ideas that have probably been more fully expressed elsewhere.

I want to begin, then, by asking what it means to say that life is sacred, because it is not obvious what this means. Scott McKenna thinks that we can retain our idea of the sanctity-of-life at the same time that we permit assisted dying. Here is what he says:

Despite the absolutist rhetoric of the churches on the sanctity of life (perhaps save the Roman Catholic Church), most churches and many, if not most Christians (certainly in my experience) happily live with both concepts of sanctity and quality.   I discard the absolutist position because it is not morally defensible and it is, in reality, not the position of the churches.

I applaud the sentiment, but think that it would be better to express what he means by “sanctity-of-life” in some other way. I too think that the “absolutist position” is indefensible, but I also believe that the absolutist position is, in fact, the position of the churches. Not of all members of the churches, obviously, since many Christians disagree with the judicatories (that is, the administrative and legislative structures) of their churches. Thus most Catholics in the United States, for instance, disagree with their church’s official policy on abortion. It may sometimes appear that the absolutist position is not the official policy either. The Anglican Church of Canada, for example, while it discusses and dismisses the use of the sanctity-of-life criterion in its so-called “discussion paper,” ”Care in Dying,”  does not notice its implicit use of the sanctity-of-life criterion throughout. While it uses secular arguments to defeat the approval of assisted dying in any situation, none of its arguments can justify an absolute prohibition of assistance in dying. This surreptitious use of the sanctity-of-life doctrine is very common in Christian argumentation about this issue.

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When Darkness Falls

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Spring and Fall:

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

In his book, The Choice of Hercules, A. C. Grayling includes a very necessary chapter entitled “When Darkness Falls” (Chapter 3), in which he discusses, as he must, times when we are sick or dying or grieving, for life is not always summer afternoon. Indeed, as Grayling says,

[t]o live is to contract for loss. Only if you die before the deaths of people you care about, and never separate from any of them because of a quarrel or because they move away or abroad — in short: only if every one of the thousands of exit doors that take people out of each other’s lives stay shut until our own opens out of all of theirs, will you not know loss of this kind. [53-54]

Or, as Richard Robinson said in his book, An Atheist’s Values, the

chief argument for the legitimacy of suicide is that life is a trap. We have not asked for it, and it can be terrible. [57]

When I saw the sun, this morning, shining on the trees in Maplewood cemetery where Elizabeth’s ashes are buried, it brought to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, the chapter from Grayling’s book and Robinson’s rather trenchant remark.

And this reminded me of Jerry Coyne’s comment on the Paul Wallace’s piece in HuffPo: “The Real Problem with Atheism.” And what is the real problem? That atheism is too optimistic. As he says:

Contemporary atheism is optimistic. Given its wall-to-wall phalanx of writers hell-bent on mocking everything that smells of religion, it may seem that this label is ill-applied. Yet under its bluster and iconoclasm atheism is full of good cheer and high spirits. Anyone who knows an actual atheist knows this.

And what, one would like to ask, is wrong with being full of good cheer and high spirits? But the claim is ridiculous: Where do the religious come up with their zany ideas?! Atheism is a lot of things, but it is definitely not full of good cheer and high spirits. For atheism, after all, is an “ism,” a word, the name for a point of view, a Weltanschauung, if you like, sometimes accepted by people who find that they never could or no longer can believe in a god or gods. Not all atheists are comfortable with this word, because it is simply a negative term, which makes it seem as though nonbelief in gods is dependent upon belief in gods, or, further, as though atheists have nothing besides the negation of religious belief in common, as though it is all about negation. And it isn’t.

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Further progress in the “right-to-die” movement

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A lot of things have been happening lately in the right-to-die movement, and they are worth recording here. Perhaps the most powerful statement so far made was made by Tony Nicklinson, who, after losing his High Court case for the right to die, lost hear, refused to eat, and died a few days later, finally free of the burden of a life which was becoming increasingly intolerable for him. That the courts would not set a precedent — and there is no obvious reason why they could not — because this is a matter for a Parliament which has shown scant interest in the issue for years, was a great disappointment, not only to Tony, but to many other people who are seeking relief from intolerable conditions of life.

A lot of commentators have remarked that the court could not have acted, for to have acceded to Tony Nicklinson’s request would have been, effectively, to legalise euthanasia, and there seem to be a lot of people who are unwilling to take that extra step, including many in the right-to-die movement. That they are completely wrong about this doesn’t seem to dawn on them. It may be that the preferred way is to provide the means for assisted suicide, so that the person who is suffering is the one who actually has to do the deed, but this excludes, by definition, all those who cannot do the deed, like Tony Nicklinson, and others who have lost the use of their bodies. Many people with MS and ALS end up in this state, and the limitation of assisted dying to assisted suicide means that these people will be forced to make the decision to die earlier than they otherwise might have done, because they would know that, once trapped in their bodies, they are trapped forever, unless they wish to starve themselves to death. But what people who was assistance in dying want is to be in full possession of their faculties when they die, and those who starve themselves to death eventually pass into a comatose state, and then they die. Why they cannot be helped simply makes no sense. It is significant that those who have fought this in court are those who are or who were likely to be in a state where assisted suicide would have been of no use to them. Tony Nicklinson, Diane Purdy, and Diane Pretty: all except Ms. Purdy were unable, at the time of their court challenges, were unable to die by receiving assistance in suicide. And still, unfortunately, the right-to-die organisation in Britain, Dignity in Dying, has not got the point.

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What a horrible, nasty little man Richard Carvath must be to say Tony Nicklinson is selfish, cowardly and dishonourable

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Richard Carvath is a horrible, nasty little man. Here’s how he describes Tony Nicklinson in a post that he misleadingly calls “For the love of Tony Nicklinson“:

Tony certainly isn’t a  human rights hero or a positive role model for the severely disabled either.  Tony is selfish: he is concerned for no one other than himself.  Tony is cowardly: he lacks the courage to live with dignity.  Tony is dishonourable: he seeks murder and despises his own life.  Make no mistake: however much Tony is being manipulated by the media, the pro-euthanasia lobby and even his own family, Tony is guilty of pursuing the legalisation of murder, which, if he ever achieves his aim, would inevitably lead to the murder by doctors of hundreds of vulnerable disabled, incapacitated or elderly patients in an NHS holocaust of involuntary euthanasia.

None of this — not one word of this — is true, and Richard Carvath is a horrible, nasty little man to say it. To start at the end, there is absolutely no evidence that assisted dying will lead inevitably “to murder by doctors of hundres of vulnerable disabled, incapacitated or elderly patients in a NHS [National Health Service] holocaust of involuntary euthanasia.” There is no evidence for this at all, unless, like Carvath, you take it that helping someone to die who wants to die is to murder him or her. But this is simply Christian propaganda of the worst sort. Carvath should be ashamed of himself to say deliver himself of this sort of emotionally uncontrolled nonsense. Again, there is no evidence for this claim at all.

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Misunderstanding Suffering the Christian Way

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I was going to write something quite different today, and then I came upon Charles Lewis’s piece in the National Post this morning. This piece: John Paul II’s Contribution to the Alleviation of Suffering. The article (if you can call it that) is a stupid piece of religious fluff — all about how reading something by Karol Józef Wojtyła (JP II) helped him to deal with back pain — or to see it in its right perspective — or something. The piece by Karol Józef Wojtyła is called an Apostolic Letter, Wojtyła considering himself to have been, at the time, a direct descendent, by the laying on of hands, of the first (supposed) chief of the apostles, St. Peter himself. (That’s why I use his real name. I refuse to buy into the hokum of popes and their flourishes of self-importance.) It’s title is “Salvifici Doloris,” which translates in English as “Salvific [or Saving] Suffering,” about which Charles Lewis says:

Some smart and holy people said this slim document, written a few years after the attempted assassination of the pontiff, would help me make sense of my pain and to realize its deep spiritual meaning.

And then he goes on to say this:

Unfortunately, the suggestion was made while I was still taking copious amounts of morphine and having trouble reading even the time on my clock radio. But once the drugs were out of my system, and my mind was clear, it was the first thing I read. Actually, I read it twice and will read it a third time.

Which translates into human as: “Unfortunately, at the time I was suffering so much that I had trouble reading it through the morphine induced haze that was necessary so that I wouldn’t suffer so much. But once I wasn’t suffering that badly, and the analgesic drugs were out of my system, I read it. In fact, I read it twice and will read it again, now that I’m not suffering as much.” Nonsense like this always reads better backwards.

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The Bishop of Swindon is an Ass

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This is an angry post, by far the angriest that I have made. That’s not an apology. It’s only a warning. It’s about an English bishop upon whom apparently greatness shines its favour, but one, in my estimation, who was probably better as a doctor. But I’d better keep the rest of my anger bottled up for what is to come, though it is, for the most part, decently restrained.

The bishop I have in mind is Lee Rayfield, Bishop of Swindon. Ruth Gledhill tells us that he is “regarded as a rising star heading for one of the top five posts in the established church” — and she seems to be in the know about things like that. But I think he’s an ass, not only for his attack on Dawkins, who tells kids in his new book, The Magic of Reality, (due out in October) that the story of Jesus turning water into wine, or the tale about Mohammed riding to heaven on a horse, are simply fairy tales. Rayfield says:

It is such a shame that the sense of awe, wonder, and indeed mystery, that he opens up so jars with his dismissal of any who do not regard evolution as a complete explanation of existence. Professor Dawkins invariably collapses myth into falsehood and faith into ignorance. For many of us, including large numbers of scientists, the magic of reality not only inspires wonder but worship.

But that really doesn’t answer the question. Does Dr. Rayfield (former lecturer on immunology at Guy’s in London) think that the story of Jesus turning water into wine is more than a fairy tale? Or Mohammed’s famous ride: more than a fanciful religious story or not? The magic of reality may inspire worship for the good bishop, but does it inspire credulousness? What does Bishop Rayfield think of the miracle of Fatima? Or of Mohammed’s heavenly dressage?

You see, we can’t have people continuously telling us that belief for religious people is something complex and shifting, not like believing that the earth is round, or that the moon is a satellite of the earth, but very different, something hard to explain — as James Wood did in a recent Guardian essay about The New Atheism. (I did a post on James Wood’s article a few days ago, and Jerry Coyne has also addressed it to some good effect.) James Wood even explains:

But people’s beliefs are often fluctuating and changing – it is why people lose their faith, or convert to faith in God. If you spend any time asking people what they believe, how they believe, and why they believe the propositions they espouse in church or temple or mosque, you find that there is nothing very straightforward about propositional belief.

Now, doubtless, Rayfield will claim that he’s trying to say something similar. It’s not just propositional. The story of the miracle at the wedding in Cana, for example, is more than just the story about a miraculous changing of water molecules into a “complex mixture of molecules, including alcohol, tannins, sugars of various kinds and lots of others,” as Dawkins says; it’s so much more than that. It evinces, for example, something deep about the relationship between Jesus and his mother, or it says something about the messianic banquet, and how the Jews had been waiting for so long for the fullness of time to come, and here, in Jesus, symbolically represented by the water of Judaism being turned into the wine of new life (in Christ, of course, since the gospel was written long after Jesus had died and was believed to have risen again), the messianic promise is being shown forth and fulfilled. Quite frankly, I have no idea what Dr. Rayfield thinks is important about the story, but if it is okay for him to tell kids that it was really a miracle, a great symbolic work done by Jesus to show forth his significance to the nations, then why is it not all right for Dr. Dawkins to tell kids that it’s a fairy tale? Especially since his book is subtitled: How We Know What’s Really True? Just because Rayfield wants to worship is no reason for Dawkins simply to bow down before Rayfield’s shrines. This is just assinine. Are we all to become quasi-Christians because Rayfield is the genuine article? This simply doesn’t scan.

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A Case in Point and “An Instinct for Kindness”

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The following is a story in The Telegraph (20th August 2011):

The law shouldn’t put this poor man out of his misery

A stroke victim who wants to die is fighting a landmark legal case. But changing the law so that medical professionals can end someone’s life is a big step on a slippery slope.

By Alasdair Palmer

No one can read about “Martin” – his name has been withheld in order to protect his privacy – without feeling desperately sorry for him. Three years ago, at the age of 43, he suffered a catastrophic stroke which left him almost totally paralysed: he can move his eyes, but that’s about it.

Before his stroke, he was a fit and active man. Now he spends every hour lying in bed, able to feel the pain from his body but not to move it, managing to communicate only by staring at letters on a special computer which responds to his eye movements and allows him to spell out words.

Read more ….

I will quote the relevant points as I go along, but reading the story is perhaps the best way to get the “full picture.” I speak about “a case in point” because this is just what the standard Christian position holds, though not for the reasons that Alasdair Palmer gives. Well, almost not for those reasons, though these reasons very often — though I do not say this in the case of Mr. Palmer, because I don’t know — stand in for the “real” reasons, which are derived, in one way or another, from the Bible, Christian doctrine, natural law theory of morality (which is supposed to be able to stand completely on its own, independently of Christian doctrine), or other religious sources, which imply an absolute condemnation of so-called “mercy killing,” or what I call assisted dying.

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It’s not yours!

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Ann Neumann ends her article on the USCCB declaration calling for the end to legal aid in dying with these words:

I asked Doerflinger, Is it immoral to end a dying life? Even if it is one’s own?

“If what?” he asked from a cell phone in Seattle.

“One’s own,” I repeated.

“It isn’t one’s own.”

(Richard Doerflinger is “the associate director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.”)

Now, I know where that idea comes from. St. Paul says, in his First Letter to the Corinthians:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God with your body. [1 Cor 6.19-20]

So of course Richard Doerflinger thinks this, since he is (or at least purports to be) a Christian. But what weight should that belief have with other people? In what sense could it be said that my life is not my own, and your life is not your own? Doerflinger thinks that it is appropriate to say to someone who does not (or at least may not) share his beliefs that her life is not hers. On the strength of what evidence does he make this claim?

In the USCCB declaration itself the only candidate for evidence that our lives are not our own is the discussion of the idea of inalienable rights. The founders of the American republic named these as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in true Enlightenment terms. Life, the bishops say, is named before liberty and happiness, since liberty and happiness are premised upon having life. “Therefore,” they say, “the right to life is the most basic human right.” Other rights can only be enjoyed if we are alive, but these other rights “lose their foundation if life itself can be destroyed with impunity.”

Now, all this is doubtless true, although there is a sense in which even the dead have rights, the right not to have one’s body desecrated or disposed of without due regard, or the right not to be blamed for things which one did not do in life, as well as the right to have one’s testamentary will respected. But being alive, or having been alive, are certainly the basis for having rights of any kind. And while the bishops’ declaration goes on immediately to say that,

As Christians we go even further: Life is our first gift from an infinitely loving Creator. It is the most fundamental element of our God-given human dignity,

there is absolutely no reason for anyone to follow them in this, unless they accept the bishops’ religious premises, and indeed many good reasons not to.

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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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