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Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest
Stanislav_J writes "A US study suggests that people with strong religious beliefs appear to want doctors to do everything they can to keep them alive as death approaches. The study, following 345 patients with terminal cancer, found that 'those who regularly prayed were more than three times more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging care than those who relied least on religion.' At first blush, this appears paradoxical; one would think that a strong belief in an afterlife would lead to a more resigned acceptance of death than nonbelievers who view death as the end of existence, the annihilation of consciousness and the self. Perhaps the concept of a Judgment produces death-bed doubts? ('Am I really saved?') Or, given the Judeo-Christian abhorrence of suicide, and the belief that it is God who must ultimately decide when it is 'our time,' is it felt that refusing aggressive life support measures or resuscitation is tantamount to deliberately ending one's life prematurely?"
Because they don't really believe and haven't had time to consider and come to terms with their own mortality.
I'd be praying for a quick death so my family wouldn't have to pay the millions to keep me alive after hitting the limit on my insurance policy.
Maybe, since they believe in a higher power, they believe that they "belong" on Earth and "have work to do" and that they can actually make a difference in the universe.
Compare this with an atheist who might believe that life is futile, fleeting, and nothing they do matters in the long run... they might be more accepting and complacent.
I'm not saying that either of these two are the case, my real point is that there are a billion different ways to look at this.
I'd be inclined to suspect(admittedly without experimental evidence) that, rather than being cause or effect of one another, piety and pursuit of aggressive EOL care are both effects.
People with the greatest fear of death would be inclined both to fight it medically and to seek reassurance against it theologically.
People who follow the instructions of authority, believe others should follow such instructions, and tend to believe that authority is right most or all of the time, are called authoritarian. People who hold to belief systems dictated by a hidden power with perfect judgement are some such. Those people also tend to believe/believe in other authorities judgements and power. Thus, people who hold strong religious beliefs tend to be the same people who most strongly believe in (and expect results from) the abilities of health care authorities -- doctors.
The same paradox was noted by Stanley Milgram in the Yale Experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment A nurse was one of the people who continued to follow instructions and "shock" a subject after the subject appeared dead, just because she was told to. At first it seemed a paradox that a nurse would follow instructions that would harm another. He figured it that he was equivalent to a doctor in the nurses mind, and so she was following his instructions to the letter without evaluation, just as she was trained to do with doctors. (Nurses these days are trained differently).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A few notes to remember about this study:
Personally, I would much rather go for hospice care. Aside from being more comfortable for the patient, it also gives them a chance to say goodbye to everyone properly, rather than just gurgling at your horrified visitors from inside a torture chamber.
This study was done on terminally ill cancer patients. My wife is an RN, and in our discussions about her job it has been very apparent to her that death by cancer, slowly, causes a very different reaction in most people she has seen than other terminal illnesses.
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the study, but I would like to see it expanded to, for example, heart/lung failure and other forms of terminal disease, and see what the difference is.
One aspect that I have seen in cancer end-of-life treatment is the heavy reliance on pain-killers to cope (nothing WRONG with that, just an observance). This could also have a very serious effect on EOL decisions.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
I cannot speak for all the pious, nor do I know how the study defines the pious so I will speak for myself. [cue the anti-whatever snarks...]
I believe we---mankind---were created for this world, not some ethereal place in the clouds. The Bible teaches that the people of God will live on earth forever, with a brief (relatively speaking) intermission elsewhere (between death and the return of Jesus Christ). It's quite interesting that the Bible begins with the Tree of Life in a garden (Eden) and ends with the Tree of Life in a city (see Genesis 2-3 and Revelation 21-22). Actually, the Tree of Life is still in a garden-like area that we would call a park. When Jesus returns He will create a sort of heavenly Central Park in the midst of a great city.
God intended from the beginning that man should live on the earth and the great promise is that one day man will live on a newly recreated earth and God will dwell with man forever in a world of peace, free of greed and anger and malice and war and poverty and hunger. In other words, people were created for this world and it should come as no surprise that they want to stay in it as long as possible. If, however, one does not believe this or one believes that this world is all there is, why delay the inevitable? Non-existence can often seem more desirable than a bad existence in this fractured, fallen world. For those who have hope for a future, existence in this broken world is desirable because they believe they were meant for it all along.
Life is short; think quickly.
Oh believe me, I agree with you 100%
I would choose to consider myself a "Christian", if one were to apply a label to my religious beliefs.
The core tenent of Christianity is to (paraphrasing) "Love God above everything, love others as much as you love yourself."
Now I have serious problems with pretty much all organized Christian faith. They spend all their time telling you that you're going to burn in hell if you don't do this, or don't say that, or if you vote in favor of gay marriage, or eat red meat on Fridays during Lent, or use a condom or Pay us 10% of your wages or fail to wear your holy underwear at all times. You have the godhatesfags.com morons who obviously really fucking hate themselves if they're "loving others as much as you love yourself".
Its not my place to pass judgement on ANYONE. I live my life, believe what I believe, pass on my beliefs when appropriate, and try my best to be good natured. And I fail miserably at times :). I try to do good overall in the world, and help other people out when they need it. And quite frankly, I can do that without someone telling me the myriad of ways I'm going to go to hell.
But I agree..the Burn in Hell shit is nothing but FUD. These people who call themselves Christian and constantly tell you how you're going to burn in hell....well, assuming hell IS real, my personal opinion is they'll probably be there too.
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Original sin as a Christian doctrine predates the formation of most distinct separate sects -- it may be "catholic" in the sense of "universal", but it isn't a distinctly Catholic idea; it is found in most strains of Christianity (though not in all groups that are or call themselves "Christian"). OTOH, the evolution over time of the precise understanding of original sin differs between different groups within Christianity. Wikipedia's article on original sin is a fairly decent starting point.
People pray a lot. The question is what they actually do with their lives.
Many church regulars will tell you about people they know who attend every Sunday, yet who live some of the most amoral lives imaginable.
So prayer itself isn't a measure of religiousness. It may even be a measure of self delusion so that people can live with what they have done with their lives.
Too many people don't know why they live. They don't really believe in anything, so the thought of death scares them to no end. They seek prayer as an affirmation that they're basically good people, even if they don't feel like their time on Earth was a good thing.
I call that a guilty conscience, not a pious person.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
His will cannot be defied, they were merely doing his bidding. How can any action of man be artificial when god is everywhere, omnipresent and omnipotent. There is only the will of the divine, and what you see as doctors performing miracles is in fact a host of angels.
You need a better line of reasoning to convince believers that they are cheating their god.
Buddha looked around him and saw life as a bondage and full of suffering, as we are subject to our animal instincts, fears, desires, etc. I have read a Chinese erudite who interprets the concept of original sin as a corruption of this buddhist idea into something where we are born as entirely corrupt (while it could be observed that we inherited cooperative instincts as well) and where we inherited guilt from our ancestors, a quite simplistic and vicious turn of a sound observation of our animal and earthy nature.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest of inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I was raised a very "on fire" Evangelical Christian, but have since seen the light and accepted myself as my Personal Lord and Savior--a spiritual condition which has brought me much more happiness and peace than Jesus ever did.
As such, I think I have a very keen insight into the psychological differences between highly religious people and agnostic/atheistic people.
Basically, the belief in an afterlife that is great (for you and people who agree with you, anyway) really shields you from ever having to sit down and think, "I am going to die. It's not going to be some other person--some old man--who looks like me. It's going to be me. Just like I am now, but I'm going to look like that old man." Instead, the whole concept of mortality is couched in language like "going to a better place" or "being with Jesus" or whatever. Your entire concept of death is euphemistic. As a result, you have a sense of peace and well-being because you don't need to worry about death.
All that changes, I imagine, however, when the time actually comes. Suddenly you can't be euphemistic anymore. It isn't so much this "meta" idea of death. It is your lungs filling up with fluid. It is pain wracking your body as the cancer spreads. It is the heartbreak of knowing that you and your loved ones are going to be separated now, and you don't know when you'll see them again, or in what form (this is assuming you really believe in heaven). Suddenly it's not so beautiful. Suddenly it's the nuts and bolts of your body--the only vessel you know--falling apart and failing you. Suddenly it is very real and very immediate.
And you weren't ready for that.
Atheists, however, accept death--the nuts and bolts--as inevitable, and probably first thing you have to come to terms with if you are an atheist is how you're going to think about death. And, I think, most people have to put themselves through that process of thinking and realizing that, yes, you are going to die. Your lungs will fill with fluid. Your body will be wracked with pain. By the time you get to that point, you have already thought a lot about this, and have resigned yourself to the pitiful, painful, undignified end almost all of us eventually face.
So you don't see any point in fighting.
Furthermore, a mindset that believes in a "super-natural" world--a world and truth and story that supersedes and explains everything we experience and in which we play an important part--comes to see death as more important than it really is. Part of the benefit of religion is that it makes one feel that everything they do is part of a Grand Plan, that everything fits together and has meaning. As an atheist, I know that it doesn't. I know that whether I live or die is wholly inconsequential. I am the product of an incredibly complex physical system that started moving billions of years ago when something exploded. Whether I lived or did not makes no difference whatsoever.
And herein lies one of the most important distinctions between religious people and atheists: Religious people find that viewpoint hopelessly sad and question why we would want to live. Atheists think that the pleasure of typing into a textbox on Slashdot while nibbling black licorice is plenty reason to keep processing oxygen and sugars for as long as they can. The warmth and camaraderie of friends and family are enough. Life is worth living for life's sake. That may be the genes, who are selfish and want to be propagated, talking, but who cares?
Religious people's peace and happiness are conditional, and when the conditions change, they often don't know how to cope. Atheists are unconditional, and therefore don't kick up such a fuss when it's over.
My $0.02.