First thing that came to mind.
Inter-racial marriages were outlawed for many years due to religious reasoning.
If my wife were to be raped, some are seeking to make sure she could not obtain Plan B.
If I was in a coma, I’d be kept that way, even if I had no hope of recovery.
OK, straw arguments and the typical liberal talking points of, abortion and euthanasia. You sound like a Peter Singer apostle.
Your last point about being in a coma is totally erroneous - there are legal instruments called “living wills”.
Here is my Church’s position:
Euthanasia
Definition
The word ‘euthanasia’ comes from two Greek words whose literal meaning is “well death”. Today it is also referred to as “mercy killing” and is understood as causing or bringing about a person’s death painlessly, usually because the person is suffering greatly, terminally or irreversibly ill or severely mentally or physically disabled. It means doing something (or omitting to do something) with the intention of causing death: the intention is a very important element.
Read about suicide and euthanasia in Cherishing Life.
History
While presumably mercy killing has been practised throughout history and in different cultures, attempts to make it legal have been made only fairly recently. In England in 1936 the Voluntary Euthanasia Society sponsored a bill in the House of Lords for the legalisation of euthanasia. The bill was defeated, and similar attempts have also failed. In 1940 the Catholic Church officially condemned the administering of euthanasia to a person with physical or mental defects or for economic or racial reasons. The Church has repeated its opposition many times since then.
The Church’s position: the right to life
The Church’s opposition to euthanasia is founded on the principle that all human life is sacred, and no one has the right to take that life - there are exceptional circumstances when the Church would accept that life might be taken deliberately, but these are only self-defence and capital punishment. Even in the case of capital punishment, however, the Church would argue that there would appear to be very few cases when some other sort of punishment might not be found as an alternative to capital punishment.
The position was stated most recently in the Pope’s Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae (Latin for “The Gospel of Life”) of March 1995. The document takes as one of its starting points what it calls “the incomparable value of every human person”(EV n. 2). This means that each human life is to be valued from its very beginning (which the Church regards as the moment of conception) to the moment of natural death. Nobody has the right to take that life from another person, even if the person has appeared to give consent. Since it would be premeditated killing, the pope says that (depending on the circumstances) it is the same as murder.
The pope suggests that a prevailing tendency today sees life as something that should bring pleasure and well-being, and that suffering is seen as a setback that people cannot accept. In this case death becomes a ‘liberation’ from suffering. He also speaks of a culture which sees people in terms of their ‘productivity’ or efficiency: when people grow old they then become a burden on society and so their lives lose their value.
Euthanasia and the treatment of the dying
The Church makes an important distinction between euthanasia and what it calls “aggressive medical treatment” to prolong the life of a terminally-ill person. Sometimes a person’s life can be prolonged for a short period by medical treatment. If, however, that treatment is both costly (in terms of resources) and distressing for the patient (and family), it may be judged better to allow the patient to die naturally. Clearly, nothing can be done that will deliberately cause or hasten the death of the patient. In all cases ordinary medical treatment (especially pain-relief) should be continued. In some cases, the use of large doses of pain-killers can actually bring on or speed up the death of the patient.
Pope Pius XII in 1957 said that it is acceptable to relieve pain with drugs even if this leads to lower levels of consciousness and accelerated death. He did stress that it is not right to deprive people of consciousness without good reason, because people need to be able to respond to others, especially family, and (if they are religious) prepare themselves to meet God.
There is an important point to be made here with regard to what ‘medical treatment’ means. In some cases of what is called ‘persistent vegetative state’ (PVS), patients have had not only medical treatment but also food and water withdrawn from them. This of course leads to their death. The Church would not accept that food and water are medicine, and to withdraw this basic ordinary sustenance is effectively to kill someone by starving them to death.
Consent
It is argued sometimes that the patient’s own consent or request for euthanasia should be the most important consideration. There is a serious risk, however, that if people say while they are healthy that they want to be ‘put to sleep’ if ever they become a burden etc. they might actually feel very differently about it when they are in that condition; the problem is all the more difficult if they are no longer able to communicate their wishes clearly. Similarly, if a person is in great pain or suffering from mental problems, for example, they are not in a position to make a free and balanced decision.
Decisions left in the hands of doctors or relatives are very risky also. It might not always be clear that relatives or doctors are always acting in the patients’ best interests. A doctor may be waiting for an organ for a transplant, for instance, or for a bed to become free, and relatives may simply wish to be relieved of the burden of an ill member of the family. Consent alone, however, would never justify the taking of another person’s life.
There have been recent examples of people that have been diagnosed as PVS (see above), and when doctors have been able to communicate with them and ask them if they want to live, the answer ‘yes’ has come back clearly. This has led to calls for more research into PVS.
Would disagree, at least in part, with your point a, anti-miscegenation laws are not Biblical--where did you hear/read that those laws were due to religious reasoning (not arguing that they weren't--some nominal Christians have pretty crazy ideas--but there were also secular reasons, i.e. racial purity and eugenics)?
For Christians, Manasseh and Ephraim were the products of miscegenation (Hebrew and Egyptian), Rahab (a Canaanite) was chosen to be part of God's lineage, God apparently honored Bathsheba and Uriah's (Israelite and Hittite, another Canaanite) marriage.
Test the hypothesis ~ get back to us later with some evidence.
Inter-racial marriages were outlawed for many years due to religious reasoning.
That was 50 years ago and the odious rationales were exclusively religious.
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If my wife were to be raped, some are seeking to make sure she could not obtain Plan B.
Complex arguement but you are aware that majority of pro-lifers accept abortion in the case of rape, incest, etc...
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If I was in a coma, I’d be kept that way, even if I had no hope of recovery
With the parties that worship death, you could someday be in a condition that is not life ending and they will want to end it because your life is not ‘worth living’. I can’t find the link, but there was a woman who wrote in opinion journal about a hospital staff who offered to end feeding her comatose father, who went on to recover. I have had a similar experience.
This is not theoretical....
According to a Council of Europe report on Euthanasia in 2003
“A number of quantitative studies of the rate and major characteristics of these practices have been conducted in 1990, 1995 and 2001. These have demonstrated a disturbingly high incidence of euthanasia being carried out without the patient’s explicit request and an equally disturbing failure by medical professionals to report euthanasia cases to the proper regulatory authority.”(Emphasis added)
As originally contemplated, doctor assisted suicide was supposed to be a rare event to ease the unrelenting pain and suffering of a person who was not going to get better.
What its become is a way to knock off granny before she becomes a financial burden on the family or to allow the kids to get their hands on granny’s estate before illness eats up the inheritance.
You are a medic, do you really want to live in a society where the first medical impulse is to pull the plug?
That was 50 years ago and the odious rationales were exclusively religious.
Oops.
Make that
were Not exclusively religious.
Also, what force in society ended Jim Crow and other manifestation’s of racial tension? It wasn’t atheism.
Reverand Martin Luther King
Reverand Ralph Abernathy
You mentioned blue laws. My first thought is that there is a strong anti-smoking campaign that has nothing to do with religion. I know smokers who feel very put upon, sometimes with merit. Personally, I drink but do not smoke. My point though is that we shouldn’t quibble ONLY with limits to freedom stemming from religion. I don't mean this as an accusation to you. I struggle to find the right balance between people, their rights and preferences, regardless of whether religion plays a role.
On interracial marriages, I agree with the poster who does not see a strong religious connection.
On rape and abortion, I have nothing to say.
On the coma, I’d like to point out that there have been cases where those who have been diagnosed as being in a “permanent vegetative state” have recovered.
Someone said they didn’t like being told they would go to hell. Well who would? The speaker doesn’t not have a monopoly on theological opinion. So it is only THEIR OPINION, that someone would go to hell. But where the opinion has merit, receiving a warning and preventing the outcome would actually be a good thing.
I enjoyed your posts and many of the responses. You have shown great patience in some instances.