Consistency? Don’t Be Silly
I know. Why’s she so quiet all of a sudden? you’ve been thinking. What’s the deal? Did something very heavy sit on her or what? Has she gone prancing off on a trip again? Is she at the mall shopping for new spring outfits? Getting her hair done? Training for a marathon? In prison? What?
Since it’s not as if I fall silent in the normal course of things, is it. No. No, it’s none of those, just a death struggle with my computer. So I finally shot it (I had to) and got a new one. Which means I have to go from three meals of cat food a day to two, for the rest of my life – either that or get an actual paying job, and we wouldn’t want me to do that, now would we.
So I’m not going to say a lot about it, because I gather the right-wing talking heads have pretty much talked themselves into puddles of exhausted steam doing so. But I do want to say just one thing. It’s this business of ‘only God can decide.’
The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, on Monday condemned the withdrawal of the feeding tube, saying only God can decide whether a person should live or die. “Who can judge the dignity and sacredness of the life of a human being, made in the image and likeness of God? Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out-of-order household appliance?” the paper said in a commentary. A year ago, Pope John Paul II said that feeding and hydrating a patient in a persistive vegetative state was “morally obligatory” and called withdrawal of feeding tubes “euthanasia by omission.”
Thus illustrating yet again why one doesn’t turn to god-botherers for clarity of thought. I mean…if only ‘God’ can decide whether a person should live or die, then Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago, remember? As did a great, great many of the rest of us and our parents and grandparents and so on. If only God can decide then we’re not supposed to do anything, right? Somebody has a fever, an infected cut, TB, cholera, tetanus, whatever – we’re supposed to just let God do what it will. Or else we’re not – but then the Vatican doesn’t get to pick arbitrary points where we’re obliged to let the deity do the deciding. Either humans intervene all along the way or they don’t.
This business about the appliance. The Vatican newspaper seems to think this God of theirs issued Schiavo with a feeding tube – a special feeding tube, apparently, that materialized only after she’d had the brain damage. But it must have looked to bystanders as if humans were involved with the appearance of the feeding tube. So why couldn’t it work the other way? This God of theirs dematerializes the feeding tube, and to bystanders it looks as if humans are involved in the process but in fact it’s the deity doing it all. That makes just as much sense as the other version, in which humans are perfectly entitled to perform medical interventions, they’re just not permitted to decide to end them when (actually, long after) it’s clear that the upper cortex has been destroyed.
And what is all this crap about compassion. (Oh look, I said I would only say one thing. But – oh well, two then.) Compassion. Is it. Is that why sane people are so filled with dread? Is that why we’re all imagining ourselves lying around like department store mannequins, bodies without minds, propped up like dolls, dead but still kept hanging around? Right to life my ass. It’s not right to life, it’s no right to death.
I try to be reasonable (sometimes) but this country looks like such a loony bin these days. It scares me.
I think I might be a right-winger in some things. I know I am a fiscal conservative with a dislike of deficits and the government spending money which could be in my pocket. Yet, in the social area, while I have doubts about gay marriage, I am pro-choice on abortion and rather atheist in my religious leanings.
The consequence is that I can not see myself when you identify right wing talking heads as the enemy of reason. Surely, you could say the Pope and his supporters are religious cranks without applying a term which made more sense in 19th century France than now.
The GOP is in the forefront of the battle to defend the state’s right to administer its own affairs, or at least those that they agree with. It seems the Republicans only believe in states’ rights when it suits them; you know, curtailing abortion rights, teaching creation myths in public schools, or planting 20 ton marble monuments to the 10 commandments in public buildings.
This has nothing to do with Terri Shiavo and everything to do with the cynical manipulation of the “right-to-life” vote.
Your use of the phrase “loony bin” is clearly a derisive reference to people of faith, as are many of your other comments.
In view of impending legislation about hate speech and religion, let me warn you:
Nobody expects the English Inquisition!
As someone who has worked in two nursing homes with many very elderly, highly dependent, often terminally ill patients, I have come across this kind of nonsensical thinking regularly. Unfortunately, many people in this line of work hold irrational religious convictions about God ‘deciding’ when someone should die. The strange thing is:
1. They believe God created nature, and therefore the natural process of life and death.
2. They believe it somehow sinful to allow that supposedly God-given process to run its course.
A religious nurse told me once that ‘this patient would die tonight if I didn’t give her this medication as her heart would fail’. She saw it as some sort of godly mission to keep the poor woman ticking, long after she would naturally have died, and with a very poor standard of life (she was mentally degenerating, causing her great distress, she was unable to wash, dress, or walk, and she was doubly incontinent).
If the nurse stopped giving the medication, the patient would die. From this, it would appear clear that, if there is a God, God wanted her to die, and that it was human defiance (in the form of giving medication) that was preventing God’s will being done.
To think, religious (and not so religious) people complain about evil scientists ‘playing God’, while the nursing and medical profession does exactly that, and is seen as evil when it ceases to do so!
“To think, religious (and not so religious) people complain about evil scientists ‘playing God’, while the nursing and medical profession does exactly that, and is seen as evil when it ceases to do so!”
Exactly. And don’t even notice the contradiction. Which is pretty glaring in Schiavo’s case. If medical people hadn’t interfered with “God’s will” in the first place, this whole issue wouldn’t exist.
Jim, I didn’t mean all right-wing people were alike, I was talking about specifically the pundit variety. I know there are plenty of conservatives who are not enemies of reason (though there are times when I wish more of them would make more public noise on the subject – but some of them do).
Hasn’t the Pope just had some fairly major medical interventions? What about when he was shot – wasn’t that God saying he’d been here long enough? Surely I can’t be suggesting that the Vatican operates a double standard?
OK.
So I’m lying in a hospital bed, my brain keeps my heart beating and my lungs breating but I have no higher functions, no chance of recovery, and would ‘naturally’ have died years ago. Only human intervention keeps my fleshly housing from dying.
Doesn’t this mean that human intervention is preventing my soul from ascending to judgement? Doesn’t this mean these doctors are binding my soul on this sinful earth against God’s will and mine? (OK, nothing can strictly be ‘against God’s will’, but that’s by the bye).
What’s the orthodoxy on this?
(Disclaimer: no, I don’t believe in soul, judgement, or God…)
The Pope has indeed been having major medical interventions for some time. In fact he’s been thwarting the deity’s understandable desire to have his company. Impious bastard!
The orthodoxy on this appears to be engaging in flagrant contradiction while hoping that everyone is so conditioned not to question other people’s ‘faith’ that no one will point out the contradictions.