THE CHURCH AND THE HUMAN RIGHT TO EUTHANASIA

Increasingly, people are choosing to end their lives in crossing over ceremonies.  Humanists need to provide something like that.  Some Churches wish to affirm the dignity of the person by permitting such ceremonies in the church building.  The state needs to provide something as well just as it does civil marriages.

The Church allows killing a dying patient with say morphine to kill the pain. The Church says this is not murder for the person is dying anyway and the morphine is intended to kill the pain not the person though it will make the person die faster. To make the person die faster it has to help kill the person. So if somebody is full of arsenic through their own hand and you come along and give them another bit and it kills them it is not murder! To give the morphine is murder if you believe life is more important than happiness which is the logic behind the ban on euthanasia. Grown people don’t need this abusive two-faced morality and if they commit murder they have to feel persecuted by the Church and state and by God if they accept it. It makes people feel good about shielding murderers. The Church still persecutes on religious grounds today. Thanks to the law, it has as fewer opportunities to do that today but it still manages to do it. When you say anything is wrong then you are asserting the right to make your condemnation law because the law has many rules that ban things both serious and minor. In other words, if the law has the right to ban street-drinking when it could be controlled then it has the right to ban condom machines for God supposedly says birth-control is wrong. That is why it is so important that we destroy superstitious morality.
 
Boyle in Christianity is Not Great says that life is not an instrumental good - we do not value life because it can be used to achieve good things. Boyle's argument is that life is not valuable because it is a means of obtaining other goods but is good in itself. Life is intrinsically valuable. That is to say the preservation of life is justified by the preservation of life and nothing further. This amounts to saying that if there is a choice between somebody being tortured to the extreme for all eternity and putting them out of their misery then keep them alive. People need to feel the horror of this doctrine. If they do they will abandon the Christian faith.

Opposition to euthanasia implies that human life is of supreme value which is exactly what Boyle is saying. But the opponents are mostly inconsistent. They say that a patient has the right to refuse therapies and treatments that are reasonably certain to prolong his life. And they say the doctor is not obligated o give the dying patient treatments to keep him alive longer. This is passive assistant dying. It is indirect killing. People exercising hypocrisy in the area of human dying is horrific. It does not give us confidence in the compassion they claim to feel.
 
Catholics say they leave it to God to take the life for it is his right and he knows best. If they are that confident then, why do they let people die when they could keep them alive longer?
 
If you want to protect life from birth to death, then bringing God into it is not the way to do it. What if doctors and society doubt God's existence? You can't expect them to protect life to death then if God is the main or only reason for protecting life. There is something callous about refusing to administer mercy killing to a person in extreme and terminal torment for the sake of God. It is not about God but about the person's suffering and if death should be brought on deliberately to end it. The other problem is the believers are assuming God forbids it. But what if he allows it? What if you think the dying person is dying anyway and deserves to be put to death even if it is in the context of ending their pain? You might feel that capital punishment of a murderer is compatible with euthanising him. And doesn't the Christian faith say we all are sentenced to death by God anyway for sin.
 
It can be argued that refusing for religious and godly reasons to end somebody's life when they need to die to spare themselves extreme torment is religious extremism. It is hurting somebody over faith in God.
 
The Catholic Church says euthanasia is wrong. Let us clarify this. There are two kinds of euthanasia. Passive euthanasia which is letting a dying person die instead of doing anything to prolong their life. The second is active in which the dying person is actually killed (page 127, Ethics: The Fundamentals, Julia Driver, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007). If the Church is against euthanasia it should encourage the prolonging of life.
 
Deliberately letting a person die is trying to kill them by doing nothing. Or it is killing them by doing nothing. Passive euthanasia only looks "morally" different from active. It is not. Doing nothing is still doing something.
 
The Church claims that it is not killing to give a dying person drugs that will hasten death if the intention is to relieve the pain. How it can say that when there are drugs that perhaps could be given to prolong life escapes us! Also, the Church focuses too much on the supposed intention. The Church says murder is murder whether you intended to kill out of hatred or out of love. The intention makes no difference. If that is so, then if giving drugs to a dying person that will contribute to their death is bad because it is intended to do so then it is still bad if you do the same thing with a different intention. And besides, there is no power on earth or within us that can tell us what our true motives are for self-deception is very powerful.
 
If John kills Barney by decapitating him he is a murderer. If John wants Barney dead and finds Barney in the bath about to drown and lets him drown is he as bad as he would be if he cut his head off? The intention in both cases is to cause death. There is malice in both cases. There could be less malice in the first case than the second for Barney would die without pain. Is it not true to say that John actively murders in the first place and passively murders in the second place? Is it not true to say that the passive murder is worse for John will get off lighter for it and may not suffer at all for it? He will get away with it! If the passive murder is not as bad as the active murder then nobody is able to tell us how much less bad it is! If a doctor didn't give a patient life-saving medicine would that not be the same as killing him?
 
If euthanasia is wrong so is the administration of painkillers, which slowly kill the dying person, to make her or him comfortable. People say that is not euthanasia. To say that it is not wrong and is not euthanasia for the intention is to end pain and not to kill is to make a hypocrite of yourself for if life is more important then the painkillers should be binned. Those who say euthanasia is bad say they put life before quality of life. In that case, they have the choice of not administering the drugs at all. They cannot say they have no choice but to give the painkillers for life is more important than being pain-free. If life is the most important thing then killing the pain is not and is wrong in such situations. Killing a dying person slowly is as much killing them as is blowing them up. Blowing them up would show more integrity for it is not as self-righteously sneaky.
 
The Church condemns euthanasia saying doctors have their belief that a person is dying but cannot be proven right and have often been wrong. Then it goes and allows its members to administer morphine for example which speeds up death in those who are believed to be dying!
 
If you can hasten death by pain-relief drugs, what about people who are not dying but are suffering far far worse? Some people endure a crippling depression that far exceeds anything endured on a deathbed.
 
The Church approves of painkillers that will kill the person when the person is dying. What if the person is not dying? The Church can't approve then. That disapproval acknowledges that the drugs kill. It is a mistake to think of the drugs as simply bringing forward a death that is going to happen. They can't do that without helping to kill the person.
 
Why put the pain before the hastening of death for the dying sufferer and not for the sufferer who is not dying but who is in worse agony? Is it because the patients are dying anyway? If that matters then it follows that though the intention is to relieve the pain there is an intention to hasten death. Why else would it matter if the patient is dying or not?
 
If we are to focus on controlling the pain and not to think of the person as dying or not dying then it should not matter if the person is dying or not. It should make no moral difference.
 
If it is murder to give killer painkillers that will slowly kill a suffering person who is not dying then it is still murder to do it when the person is dying. In fact, it is even more murder then.
 
Damn the accursed hypocrisy of the Vatican and the Church. 
 
The Church holds up saints who were flayed alive for their faith and who went to God offering it all up as great examples. To be consistent it should let the dying person suffer and keep urging her or him to offer it to God. It cannot say that stopping the pain is intrinsically right. If a dying person cannot consent to the pain-killers what then? The Church says that the desire of a patient to be sent on their way should be ignored and yet it heeds the desire of the patient for the morphine. It would seem that if you don’t have the patient’s consent or can’t get it or cannot rely on the patient’s consent, you should not administer any pain relief that may hasten death for you should assume he or she wants to suffer for God. The Catholic Church says contraception is bad for it means a contracepting man lies with his wife and he does not love her completely for he doesn’t love her fertility or God who gave her the gift. If pain and suffering is a gift from God then you are not loving God by killing the pain.

If God gives life and only God should take it meaning abortion and euthanasia and so on are banned then you cannot say God is giving you life as a gift. He is only giving you a loan. By the way, the notion that your power to choose is a gift from God is also confused. It is a loan too. Why thank a God like that? Why care what he thinks?