Friday, April 15, 2005
The culture of dignity
ASV is brilliant this morning:
Me, too. Life and death is not black and white, but a long continuum of grey. Even in death, we give life in countless ways. Religious people, of all people, should understand that. Indeed, I believe they do. They make these accusations to draw attention to their fundamentally unrelated cause, which is opposition to lawful abortion. Death with comfort and dignity is being held hostage to the political agenda of the right, and it is appalling.
There is another aspect to this, the apparently ascendant willingness of Christians to strengthen their religion by opposition to the other. This is not progress. People who hurl spittle-flecked accusations of apostasy at every turn are the Christian equivalent of the Wahhabis, who have built a whole sect around identifying the many ways in which a Muslim can fall away. They say dishonest things about their opponents to advance their political agenda. Christians who do the same thing should consider carefully whether they are living up to the teachings of their own rabbi.
Read the whole thing.
No one - outside of a person committing suicide - can choose how or when they will die. I could be hit by a bus or die of cancer. It could be today, it could be 40 years from now. But if I can choose, if the circumstances allow, to make my death less lingering and less painful, why not?
That's all I believe in. Not aborting Down's Syndrome fetuses. Not pulling the plug on someone who has a cold. Not locking retarded children in a closet until they starve to death just so we can be rid of them. Not filling a grandmother with morphine just because she's old. There is no Culture of Death. It's a dark, ugly name given to people who disagree with those who think they form some kind of Culture of Life.
The Culture of Dying with Dignity. That's me.
Me, too. Life and death is not black and white, but a long continuum of grey. Even in death, we give life in countless ways. Religious people, of all people, should understand that. Indeed, I believe they do. They make these accusations to draw attention to their fundamentally unrelated cause, which is opposition to lawful abortion. Death with comfort and dignity is being held hostage to the political agenda of the right, and it is appalling.
There is another aspect to this, the apparently ascendant willingness of Christians to strengthen their religion by opposition to the other. This is not progress. People who hurl spittle-flecked accusations of apostasy at every turn are the Christian equivalent of the Wahhabis, who have built a whole sect around identifying the many ways in which a Muslim can fall away. They say dishonest things about their opponents to advance their political agenda. Christians who do the same thing should consider carefully whether they are living up to the teachings of their own rabbi.
Read the whole thing.
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