All due respect, but my decision to live or die is MY decision. It is not for you or anyone else to make that decision. Some group saying I have to continue to suffer when I just want to go is just as bad as the UK system where they admit to killing some 130,000 elderly.
You may argue, cajole, plead, whatever, for me to accept your belief, but you DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to tell me how or when to die.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. We all know that the government should be in charge of our lives, every second of it. Uh, heck, wait a minute...
But seriously, I believe what you’re looking for is something called intellectual consistency, rather than the typical “get the government out of our lives unless we happen to disagree with the decisions that some individuals make in which case you’re damn right the government should be in control so people do what I want them to do” mindset.
Good luck with that.
Where does this supposed "right to die" come from? The right to life DOES NOT included a right to die.
Father Frank Pavone: Freedom to Die?For a Christian, however, is "my life" really "mine"? Is my death really mine? The answer has to be yes and no. It is mine in the sense that it has been given to me and nobody else; it is not mine alone, however, because I am not the source of my own existence, and I am accountable for it to another, namely, God. "You are not your own," St. Paul declares (1 Cor. 6:19). "If we live, we are responsible to the Lord, and when we die we are responsible to the Lord. Both in life and in death we belong to the Lord." ( See Romans 14:18). Not one of us decided the time or manner in which we came into this world. Our life is a sacred gift from God, and only He can give it. It is therefore His right alone to take us out of this world.
We do not possess a "right to die." A right is a moral claim. We do not have a claim on death; rather, death has a claim on us! Some see the "right to die" as parallel to the "right to life." In fact, however, they are opposite. The "right to life" is based on the fact that life is a gift which we do not possess as a piece of property ( which we can purchase or sell or give away or destroy at will ), but rather is an inviolable right. It cannot be taken away by another or by the person him/herself. The "right to die" is based, rather, on the idea of life as a "thing we possess" and may discard when it no longer meets our satisfaction. "Right to die" thinking says there is such a thing as a "life not worth living." For a Christian, however, life is worthy in and of itself, and not because it meets certain criteria that we or others set.
>>You may argue, cajole, plead, whatever, for me to accept your belief, but you DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to tell me how or when to die.<<
Prepare for:
“How long until the right to die becomes the obligation to die?”
Slippery slope arguments don’t have much meaning to me and are a logical fallacy.
I agree that the decision to end one’s life (or prolong it in the face of adversity) is the most personal decision one can make and The State (and worse, busybodies) have no business sticking its (their) nose in it.
It is between me and my God.
What you DO NOT have the right to do is compel the greater society to be complicit and to help procure your death.
What I never understood about the pro euthanasia position is that no one prevents you from killing yourself. Buy a gun, jump off a bridge, step in front of an on coming train, buy some rat poison, stock up on pain killers. Just don't make your doctor provide you with the means to your own destruction and don't expect the rest of society to accept and cheer your cowardice.
Man up already!
The acceptance of Abortion on demand, euthanasia leads directly to the forced killing of those found ‘lacking’ or ‘undeserving’ of life by the greater society.
“You may argue, cajole, plead, whatever, for me to accept your belief, but you DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to tell me how or when to die”
They would be telling you how or when you can’t die, but I see the point. I wouldn’t want anyone to stop you from visiting your local bridges and tall buildings. What I do have the right to tell you, being part of the body politic, is that you don’t get other people to help you. That’s as far as I go.
**All due respect, but my decision to live or die is MY decision**
What you are saying sounds selfish to me. Live in God’s will, not yours.
“All due respect, but my decision to live or die is MY decision.”
—
I’m with you. I’m elderly and my family and doctor know exactly how I feel about it. It’s all in writing.
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rstrahan, you already have a right to die. What you don’t have is the right to have someone else kill you.
We don’t want it to be legal to have someone else kill us. The potential for abuse in these situations is insane.
I endorse your position in post 4. If I were the victim of locked-in syndrome I know for a fact that I would want death. Living like that is a living hell, in my opinion.
We as a Christian Culture must do everything we can to keep people alive, no matter their condition, no matter their desire, no matter the costs.
And those who would elect otherwise should be protected from their own desire to die, even if it means criminal prosecution.
[ All due respect, but my decision to live or die is MY decision. It is not for you or anyone else to make that decision. Some group saying I have to continue to suffer when I just want to go is just as bad as the UK system where they admit to killing some 130,000 elderly.
You may argue, cajole, plead, whatever, for me to accept your belief, but you DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to tell me how or when to die. ]
No one has the right to tell me that I cannot partake in “self inflicted sins” such as gluttony, sloth, suicide, etc...
It is not for Big Government to judge those sins, it is God!
IF I wanna commit hari-kari I don’t see why I can’t take my wheel chair /crutches to grand canyon, check and make sure no one is below me and then hurl myself off the ledge.
It may be technically illegal, but how they gonna prosecute? Of course I will be cast down to hell if I do this, but it is my own inherent god given “right” as an individual with free will to decide my own fate even if it is throwing away the gift of life that god has given.
But it should never be big government’s power to decide that for ANYONE except those who have deprived others of life, ie. death penalty for murder.
I'm not totally opposed to your view in principle, but I have serious concerns. I think this is a key point where conservatives and libertarians divide, and we need to think through the consequences of that division.
The main reason I'm not totally opposed to your view is that while I believe suicide is immoral, I am not sure I want to promote prosecution of those who attempt suicide. While that may have a valid moral purpose, what secular civic purpose does it accomplish? Would prosecuting attempted suicide really deter people, or just cause them to be more careful to get the deed done right the next time? Is dedicating scarce legal resources to prosecuting attempted suicides a prudent use of tax dollars? Also, the primary victim of a successful suicide is by definition beyond the reach of the state to punish him if he succeeds in his act.
I get your point that you don't want to be forced by civil law to follow the moral tenets of a religion you do not share. I also get your point that not all sinful behavior should be made illegal; in the American republic in which we have not formally established or recognized a particular religious denomination, there are some things which must be left to the individual and his priest or pastor because the civil government doesn't have a Constitutional foundation on which to make laws enforcing certain types of religious doctrine.
There have been times in the not-too-distant history where civil governments **DID** have a Constitutional foundation by which they could enforce Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, or Reformed principles on religious issues which were in dispute among the citizens. Whether we like or loathe that, it's not the modern American situation, and we don't have anything close to a moral consensus on suicide in modern America that could be used as a secular basis for a civil law.
So let's grant your point for a moment that suicide, while it may be immoral, should not be illegal. If we grant that, it's not a major step to say that people who have the legal right to commit suicide should be allowed to ask others for help in doing so, especially if they can't commit suicide themselves.
The problem is that once we cross the line between allowing suicide and legalizing assisted suicide, really bad things follow.
Secular arguments such as the following continue to concern me:
8 posted on Thu Jun 21 2012 18:06:19 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Jim from C-Town: “No one is saying you don't have the right to take your own life. Outside of religious constraints, you most certainly do have that right based on the actual ability to do it. What you DO NOT have the right to do is compel the greater society to be complicit and to help procure your death.”
And this:
34 posted on Thu Jun 21 2012 19:16:23 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Persevero: “rstrahan, you already have a right to die. What you don’t have is the right to have someone else kill you. We don’t want it to be legal to have someone else kill us. The potential for abuse in these situations is insane.”
Let's be honest: Barring the most extreme situations, virtually everyone has the ability to take their own life by active or passive steps. We don't need to even deal with the problems of pain: popping a pile of pre-selected pills will put you to sleep with minimal if any pain involved.
What concerns me is that Persevero is right — if we officially legalize assisted suicide via doctors or nurses or others in the medical system, the potential for abuse is tremendous. It is only a short step from
1) letting people assist clearly-stated advance directives of people who want to die, to
2) encouraging people to make a decision that cuts costs, to
3) promoting a “duty to die” for people who have little hope of recovery and have become consumers rather than creators of wealth.
There is a very dangerous fiscal libertarian “duty to die” argument that we, as conservatives, need to fight against as hard as we can. Being a libertarian means being a conservative without a moral foundation, and in end-of-life issues, it leads to love of money replacing love of God.
Sometimes the fiscally conservative thing to do is not the morally conservative thing to do, and as “social issues” conservatives, we need to recognize that. Many of us in the pro-life movement realize that abortion is a good way to keep a mother and her baby off the welfare rolls, but believe promoting life is a higher value.
The conservative movement will need to make some hard decisions not only with regard to beginning-of-life issues but also end-of-life issues. The “it's my own body, I'll do what I want to” argument is fundamentally un-Christian, but it has some significant appeal for too many conservatives who don't recognize the difference between being conservative and being libertarian.