Category Archives: Sanctity of Life
Charleston “Post and Courier” publishes remarkably insightful, sane and thoughtful piece on “elective death”
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.
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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.
The Catholic Idea of Dignity and the Fantasy of Perfection
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.
The Strange Dishonesty of Religion
Religion is, at its very heart, a dishonest, dissimulating undertaking. That’s one of the reasons why I cannot, with Richard Holloway, leave religion alone to get on with its dirty business. Some of its business is good, and secular people have not been as effective in reaching out to the lonely, the depressed, the marginalised, the desperate, the dying or the hungry. Some secular people, no doubt, share Nietzsche’s contempt for pity, and the way that morality, as it has been understood, places a cap on abundant and exuberant life, the life, in Nietzsche’s image, of the triumphant warrior, who expresses his zest for life through acts of dash and courage, who stands, sword raised in passionate salute, roaring his affirmation. In this he shared D.H. Lawrence’s love of passion and vitality, the thrill of being fully alive in the flesh.
But religion distrusts the flesh, distrusts its passions, its insistent lusts, its fiery dash and spirit. Flesh is turned to dirt, and the coupling of bodies into something almost sub-human in its abandonment to passion. That’s what Augustine had against it, that it did not respond to reason. He believed that Adam, had he not fallen, would have had a purely rational sex life responsive to the rational will. Male erections would happen only for the purpose of procreation, and there would be no blinding pleasure in it, pleasure that quite overcomes human reason. Pleasure is the enemy of religion, because it reduces the human to the animal. At least that is the underlying fear.
The Strange Twists and Turns of Heathen’s Pilgrimage
Julian Baggini tells us today that he is bringing his “heathen’s progress” to an end this Saturday with a Manifesto which, he suggests, if we agree with his conclusions today, we will find much to agree with, or if not, we should rub our hands together in eager anticipation of yet one more opportunity to rant. For someone who is seeking to common ground, this seems a strange way of putting it. Agree with me or rant: those are your options. When he began his journey, he says,
I was particularly keen to reposition atheism, to move away from the focus on hostile attacks on religious metaphysics and more towards a positive, constructive alternative that was capable of seeing the virtues as well as the vices of faith.
Yet, as I have commented all along – in what, no doubt, Baggini holds to be a ranting way — Baggini does not seem to have been too sure of his position. Sometimes, he spoke with unvarnished vigour in terms compatible with the so-called new atheists. At other times, he seems ready to tip over into a kind of liberal adherence to the convictions of faith. Indeed, Baggini’s path has been nothing, if not confusing, a desultory journey through a maze of belief and unbelief. Yet today he comes to some conclusions, a propaedeutic, it seems, to the looming Manifesto. Let’s consider them now.
He begins by complaining about tribalism:
First of all, it is dispiriting to see how tribal so many people seem to be. For all the interesting, thoughtful comments that have been posted on the pieces I’ve written, and supportive emails I’ve been sent, there have been many more that have used whatever the subject of the week is as a simple pretext to get in the familiar old digs against whoever the other tribe happens to be.
But consider Baggini’s original statement of purpose:
Broadly speaking, the problem is that the religious mainstream establishment maintains a Janus-faced commitment to both medieval doctrines and public pronouncements about inclusivity and moderation; agnostics and more liberal believers promote an intellectualised version of religion, which both reduces faith to a thin gruel and fails to reflect the reality of faith on the ground; while the new atheists are spiritually tone-deaf, fixated on the superstitious side of religion to the exclusion of its more interesting and valuable aspects.
In which, not to put too strong a point on it, he divides people up into tribes, including the rather jaundiced view of the new atheists as spiritually tone-deaf. If his intention was to mitigate the tribalism, perhaps he shouldn’t have started off in quite this way. The real problem seems to have been that Baggini didn’t really know what he wanted to accomplish with his series. The Guardian gave him free rein, and he’s taken full advantage of it. At one point he says things that make him sound just like a new atheist. The next moment he thinks it more appropriate to veer off in the direction of religious believing, and rant about the new atheists, and their failure to see how emotion and thought are combined in rational deliberation, and how this contributes to their misunderstanding of religious believers who take their experiences more seriously than their beliefs. But then, again, he acknowledges that many Christians take orthodox beliefs at face value. Indeed, he goes so far as to say:
… whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value.
But what about the spiritual tone-deafness of the new atheists, and their failure to recognise the more valuable aspects of religion?
