Another submission against Unlawful Killing
We oppose the End of Life Choice Bill.
Reasons why.
We are opposed to the End of Life Choice Bill for the following reasons:
1. What we have read and heard from medical people about the way in which such bills have opened-up a Pandora’s box in countries where such legislation has been passed leads us to expect that the same will happen here. A bill which starts off allowing those who wish to end their life to do so, will end up taking the lives of many who do not wish to die. It seems strange that having abolished the death penalty for every crime, we should re-introduce it for the crime of being a burden on society or not being able to contribute anything useful.
2. Such legislation, if it were passed would forever change our relationship with our doctor and with the medical community.
We would see medical people as having the power of life and death over us. We would think twice before visiting a doctor or getting the prescribed tests done. If a doctor put the option of euthanasia to us, then we would change our doctor and suggest to anyone else that we knew who went to him/her to do the same. We would be reluctant to go into a hospital suspecting that someone on the staff might not have our best interests at heart. We would also not be willing to let a member of the family go to mental health if they were referred there, for fear that they might be coerced to end their life.
While being against the bill, it seems to us that if the government is determined to pass such a law for humanitarian reasons then they would need to have medical people who function completely outside of the medical system in separate buildings. Only those who ask for the service should be allowed to see them and they would have to go through a special counsellor first to make sure that no pressure had been put on them by others and that they had really thought it through. Such doctors and nurses who provide this service should not be allowed to also function within the normal health system. But we suspect that such safeguards would defeat the real purpose for which some people want the bill.
We do not think that governments should be trying to set up a modern version of Plato’s “Republic” where people are bred and trained to fulfil certain functions in society and where those who do not serve any useful purpose have no value and so are expendable. This is especially alarming if those in charge think (like Plato) that populations should be limited to a certain number of people.
We live in an age where the tendency is for the State to become all knowing, all seeing and all powerful. There are those who would like to predestinate everyone’s life from test-tube to euthanasia so that they become productive and compliant members of society contributing to the common good until they can no longer do so. Then they would become expendable and could be disposed of. There are those who want to control what we say, what we do and how we think. Virtue has become conformity (or as C.S. Lewis put it ‘virtue has become integration’) and Vice is resistance to the status-quo. But Os Guinness tells us:
“Without freedom of thought, conscience and religion, all drives toward conformity – whether from totalitarian governments, liberal universities or the gatekeepers of our public squares – end in some degree of coercion that stifles not only freedom but many secular considerations that are more crucial to the powers-that-be than religion itself . . . When the religious insistence on monopoly, the communist demand for uniformity and the laudable liberal desire for equality slide into a remorseless drive for conformity, the coercive conformity that results will always prove stifling and self-defeating.”Today it is the State, or at least those who control it, that wants to define good and evil and therefore right and wrong and enshrine it in law and enforce it upon our consciences. People now confess to the Psychiatrist or the Judge. It is also the State that now seeks to provide for all our needs and be our final Judge and to be the final authority in everything. The State even wants to decide who will live and who will die (which they already do through abortion and now want to do through euthanasia). In a word: The State has taken the place of God and seeks to fulfil all His functions. Modern Society is becoming a secular version of the Kingdom of God. It is for this reason that there is rivalry and competition between the Christianity and the State. (The same may true for the conflict between Islam and the State.)
Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of an independent Kenya, said that the Church is the “conscience of the State”. But modern states seek to suppress that conscience. Peter Hitchens wrote “The Rage Against God” partly in response to his brother’s book “God is not Great.” In it he says:
“But in recent times it has grown clear that in my own country the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat, by secular forces that have never been so confident. In the United States, where Christianity appears stronger, it is by no means as powerful and secure as it imagines. Why is there such a fury against religion now? Why is it more advanced in Britain than in the USA? I have had good reason to seek the answer to this question, and I have found it where I might have expected to have done if only I had grasped from the start how large are the issues at stake. Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.”John Lennox (Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University) has also written a book (called “Gunning for God”) about this competition between Christianity and the New Atheists and their desire to abolish religion and put science “In place of God.” But it is not the scientists or even the politicians that are in the driving seat. We think that Christopher Lasch pointed out the real culprits when he wrote:
“Once it was the ‘revolt of the masses’ that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western Culture. In our time, however, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses…Today it is the elites… those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate - that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West.” (Quoted in “The Great Experiment”).Can those rulers who seek absolute power and complete autonomy to remake society with no moderating influence really be trusted to act in the best interests of their subjects? This tendency comes largely from the enlightenment and the Atheist, John Gray has warned us of the dark side of that influence:
“The role of the Enlightenment in twentieth-century terror remains a blind spot in western perception… Communist regimes were established in pursuit of a utopian ideal whose origins lie in the heart of the Enlightenment… a by-product of (an) attempt to remake life. Pre-modern theocracies did not attempt to do this… Terror of the kind practised by Lenin did not come from the Tsars.”In “The Twilight of Atheism”, Professor Alister McGrath traces the history of Atheism through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution on into the 19th and 20th centuries and shows how that dark side developed and the kind of world that the ideas of the Enlightenment produced in some cases. If euthanasia is introduced, we fear that we might go down that road again.
Select Bibliography:
Saunders, Dr. Peter. CMF blogs on End of Life
Richmond, David. Emeritus Professor. Ethical Objections to Euthanasia. Touchstone, June 2009.
Forum on the Family, 2014. Euthanasia. U-Tube Video.
Hughes, Philip Edgcumbe. The Control of Human Life: Eugenic Utopianism and the Christian Perspective.
Packard, Vance. The People Shapers.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man.
Rushdoony, R. J. Christianity and the State.
McGrath, Alister. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.
Guinness, Os, Lee-Thorp, Karen. The Great Experiment: Faith and Freedom in America.
Guinness, Os. A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future.
Guinness, Os. The Global Public Square.
Lennox, John. Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are Missing the Target.
Hitchens, Peter. The Rage against God.
Joad, CEM. The Recovery of Belief.
Kuyper, Abraham. Lectures on Calvinism.
Sookhdeo, Patrick. The New Civic Religion.
Sookhdeo, Patrick. The Death of Western Christianity: Drinking from the Poisoned Wells of the Cultural Revolution.
Wishart, Ian. Eve’s Bite.
Wishart, Ian. Totalitaria.
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