Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the famous or infamous "Doctor Death" of euthanasia, is back, and is a powerful advocate for the rights of terminally ill patients to have doctor-assisted suicide. Kevorkian spent six years in prison and two on probation after his conviction for assisting a suicide, and now that he's off probation, he's free to speak again.
Anderson Cooper on CNN had an amazing interview with Kevorkian last night. Here is one of my favorite exchanges. They were talking about one particular suicide Kevorkian assisted, and Cooper asks:
Cooper: "Did you find it sad?"
Kevorkain: "Well of course! You don't like to end a life. ... If someone has cancer of the hip, you don't take the leg off ... because you want to do it. ... Nobody says, 'I can't wait to take that leg off.'"
Cooper: "But a lot of people say that you're playing God ..."
Kevorkian: "Isn't the doctor who takes a leg off playing God?"
Evangelicals and ultra-conservative Christians often vilify atheism by misrepresenting the atheist position, but it's surprising to see a well-educated, apparently thoughtful, professor of theology at a respected university make a glaring error of logic in his blog, and grossly misrepresent the atheist position.
Professor Tom Frame of Charles Sturt University has confused what science predicts with what scientists approve. Professor Frame's writes:
The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. ... He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.
This is a surprising error on Frame's part, a glaring gap of in the logical process. Frame should heed the words of Charles Darwin himself:
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone.
In other words, the scientist's primary job is to discover how things are in nature, not how he would like them to be. Or, from a Christian perspective, the scientist's job might be seen as discovering the rules that govern the universe that God built, whether we like God's rules or not.
If a scientists discovers a horrifying parasite that bores into your eyeballs, does that mean the scientist advocates eyeball-boring parasitism? Of course not. If the scientist discovers that polygamy is predicted by evoltion science, does that mean the scientist advocates polygamy? No, the scientist's opinion on the matter is irrelevant.
But Professor Frame makes this exact mistake: He claims that if an evolutionary scientist discovers that imperialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, etc., etc., are traits that natural selection would favor, it must mean that the scientist advocates these behaviors. Nothing could be further from the truth. Professor Frame's argument is completely without foundation.
Dawkins is a skillful author and lecturer, one who has done much to educate the public about complex scientific principles. Anyone who reads his books can quickly see that not only does Dawkins not advocate genocide, eugenics and other horrors, but in fact quite the opposite. Dawkins is a man of high morals by any standard.
Professor Frame has wandered far from path of logic with his claims about Dawkins.
Last week I had the bittersweet task of helping my dog, Skittles, for the last time. I had to help her die, by taking her to the veterinarian to be "put to sleep." The task was incredibly sad, because she was a great dog, a good friend, always happy, and an integral part of our family. Yet, it was a task that I did out of love and duty. Even when death is inevitible, when there is no hope, the body doesn't want to give up; the heart keeps beating and the lungs keep breathing, only prolonging the suffering. When a beloved pet's death is inevitable, and the animal is only suffering, most pet owners, out of true love for their pets, help their pet one last time by gently and kindly helping them to die.
Why is it that we can't do the same kindness for the people we love?
Yesterday, television viewers in Great Britain had the opportunity to see a man commit suicide, a real suicide, in the documentary about Craig Ewart's death. Ewart had a degenerative motor neuron disease that left him paralyzed and suffering. As he put it, "If I go through with [this suicide] I die, as I must at some point. If I don't go through with it, my choice is essentially to suffer and to inflict suffering on my family and then die."
Mr. Ewarts case struck very close to my heart, because my own father died of the exact same disease, except that he had to let nature take its course. It was a terrible thing to watch, seeing my father suffer a long, drawn-out death, with weeks and months of unnecessary suffering.
The sad memories of my father's death came rushing back to me as I was helping Skittles for the last time, when the veterinarian said, "Can you imagine, we can do this kindness for our pets, but not for our own mother and father?"
One of the greatest tragedies that religion has inflicted on us is the idea that humans are somehow different than animals; that because we possess a "soul" that was put there by some mythical god in the sky, we have to wait for that same mythical god to take the soul away. Worse, like many other religious ideas, this one has become part of our legal system.
Mr. Ewart chose to take his life early, while he still could. My father wanted to kill himself. We talked about it many times. But as the paralysis gradually took over his body, he was faced daily with a terrible choice: Do I kill myself today, while I still can? If I wait too long, will I become incapable, and end up suffering for years, paralyzed in a hospital bed, in discomfort and pain, wearing a diaper, unable to read a book or even watch television? The terrible dilemma was that, as long as he was able to take his own life, his life was still good, still worth living.
If he'd killed himself when he still could, he would have lost a year of a life that, while not perfect, was still decent. He wouldn't have heard about his granddaughter graduating high school. He wouldn't have learn that his grandson won the World Juggling Championships. He wouldn't have gotten to see videos of his other grandson playing a mean saxophone. But the price he had to pay for that year was very high indeed – he became too weak to take his own life, and had to suffer through a "natural" death.
I don't mind if religious people want to choose a painful, lingering death for themselves or their loved ones. But why can't my family and I choose the moral and ethical route. Why is it that we can help a mere dog, but not help our own parents, wives, brothers and sisters, when their time comes to die?
Death is part of life, and life is good. Skittles knew that, and if she could have talked, I know she would have thanked me for helping her. Here's a funny little tribute to Skittles. This is what happens when you give an engineer a new MacBook pro dual CPU with 4 GB of memory, two dual SATA 750 GB disks, a hi-res second monitor, Final Cut Pro movie-editing software, and Soundtrack Pro music editing software. He makes a video of his dog. Enjoy!
At Lourdes, France, this week, Pope Benedict XVI told ailing pilgrims that we must accept death at the hour chosen by God! Wow, that's heavy. Let's see, that means I have to stop taking medicine, stop getting my broken bones mended, stop getting stitched up, no more vaccines ... I mean, if God intended for me to live, he wouldn't have let me get sick or injured in the first place! Right?
Then I figured it out! What a dummy I've been! His Holiness didn't REALLY mean accept death at "the hour chosen by God."
When life is good and God tries to kill us, we're supposed to RESIST His will. Vaccines? God tried to kill my kids with measles, mumps, whooping cough ... gosh, uncountable illnesses, but I foiled God's plan and got vaccines! Antibiotics? God apparently wanted my three children to be deaf, but I showed Him! Those antibiotics foiled God's will, and all three are fine musicians now, two of them professionals, with perfect hearing. So there, God! Broken bones? God put some ice on a sidewalk and made my son slip and break his wrist, but by golly I had it fixed anyway! Take that, God!
So as long as we're happy, and life is good, the Pope wants us to thwart God's will. But, when we're at the end, when there's no hope, and we're incontinent, in pain, all human dignity has evaporated, and all that's left is more suffering, followed by death, THEN we have to bow to God's will. I get it now!
So, what the Pope is telling us is we get to fight God most of the way, but in the end, God wins, and we have to suffer miserably and die without dignity. That makes sense to me!
Thanks, your Holiness, for clarifying that! I sure was confused.
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