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Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide
cHALiTO writes "Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed. As part of this, he has visited Switzerland's Dignitas clinic, an assisted suicide facility, with a BBC camera crew, as part of a documentary that will include Britain's first televised suicide. Pratchett took home Dignitas's assisted suicide consent forms."
It is every person's right to decide how they die. Not the governments.
The starting point for these evils is the liberal and materialistic view that man is the owner of his life; that he is free to choose the moment and manner of his death. Those who hold this view define suicide as “the last liberty of life.”
Free will my friend. Your religion my decide that my suicide is a sin; that does NOT deprive me of the right to commit that final sin. That right and decision is mine alone. Even if you prove correct, and i have indeed stolen that life from your God, judgment is his. It is not yours, not the Church's and most certainly not the State's.
If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well.
Wait what? This is a pretty egregious logic fail - even for a religious organization. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are nearly diametrically opposed. One leaves the final decision in my hands; the other in the hands of society. Stating that there is a connection between the two is not sufficient to prove that connection.
Sorry, I stopped reading once I realized that the remainder of that "article" is based on both conflating the two actions, and upon the false premise that under your religion I do not have free will to sin or not.
There is a funny fact about assisted suicide. If Alzheimer/cancer/similar incurable painful disease would be monitored by a veterinarian without putting the animal down, he would be sued for animal torture. And lose.
It's quite telling when our current "general" code of ethics is against torturing animals in this way, but not against torturing humans in the same way.
It basically shows that our laws are written by religions. Putting an animal down when its terminally ill is seen as merciful, because we don't want it to suffer needlessly.
However, people aren't allowed to commit suicide in the same circumstances to avoid needless suffering, and there's only one possible reason: religious proscriptions against suicide. And also because humans are seen as completely different from animals, a viewpoint which again is rooted in religion.
It would be nice if the first-world nations (and maybe others too) would pour some more funding into research to combat these diseases. You'd think that maybe some of these greedy leaders would be interested in more treatments and cures for old-age diseases, considering most of them aren't that far away from old age themselves and thus have a significant chance of acquiring these diseases themselves.