Airhead,
Thanks for your kind words and encouragement. There are many posters here who I enjoy reading as well and I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to interact in this forum. Because of my schedule, I don't get as much opportunity as I once did to debate and discuss with people who hold radically different worldviews.
This may sound odd, but as I was preparing to preach on the subject of the Christian response to Euthanasia (which was a decision that discussion on this board helped me to firm up, rather than putting it off) I was greatly assisted in thinking through the issues by some of the discussion here. Anyway, here is one of the less blatantly Christian clips from what I preached. I post it because we don't seem to really appreciate the roots of the modern euthanasia movement or understand the critical ethical difference between turning off a lifesupport machine and starving someone to death. [some of this has already appeared here in different formats, my apologies for that]
"What is Euthanasia anyway? That as I found out is an interesting question to ask. Because as I was doing research for this sermon, I noticed that neither the word nor the practice of Euthanasia occurred in any of my ethical commentaries published prior to the mid-20th century, it wasn't even listed in Webster's massive 1913 dictionary, the first place I found it listed was a Merriam Webster's dictionary from the 50's. The word Euthanasia is a greek compound word – Eu meaning "good" and Thanatos meaning "death" – therefore "the good death." The term was first coined and widely used by the Nazis in the late 30's in connection with the T4 "Euthanasia" program. Now what the T4 program initially did was take senile adults, handicapped children and infants, the retarded, the brain damaged, the incurably insane and put them to death entirely disregarding the wishes of the patients or the family. Sometimes this was done by injection, occasionally by carbon monoxide gas but usually they were simply starved. The program was run and administered not by the SS, but by Doctors. They justified their actions at the time, by describing it as "Therapeutic Killing." They acknowledged that they were killing, but held that they were keeping their hippocratic oaths because this was killing as healing.
Now they did that on two different levels: The first was by saying that they were healing because the people they were killing were in essence a sickness in the body of humanity – let me give you an example of that. Robert J. Lifton in his book the Nazi Doctors wrote of the following recollection of survivor physician Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner, who pointed to the chimneys of a death camp and asked a Nazi doctor, Fritz Klein, "How can you reconcile that with your Hippocratic Oath as a doctor?" He answered, "Of course, I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind." According to their philosophy a healthy and vigorous humanity had no place for these people, they simply weakened society, drained its resources, therefore they had to be removed.
The second level was by saying that by doing so they were healing by ending suffering, in fact their original orders as given by Hitler were to "provide "final medical assistance" to those judged "incurable" by physicians who were authorized to end their suffering" They also often appealed to the "quality of life" argument, i.e. that the quality of life of the people they were putting to death was unacceptably low.
So the three main arguments advanced for therapeutic killing by these physicians were: that it served the greater good of humanity, that it ended suffering, and that it was the only solution to an unacceptably low quality of life.
Surprisingly the allies didn't buy any of these rationalizations and after the War, a "doctors trial" was held at Nuremberg for 23 Nazi doctors involved with the T4 program. Six of these doctors, including Karl Brandt, Hitler's Doctor and the head of the T4 program, were hanged and five given life sentences.
Because of all this following the Second World War, Europe had to step back and reassess the state of ethics in medicine, they particularly wanted to create a code that would prevent the recurrence of eugenics and euthanasia as acceptable practices within the medical community. The result was the Geneva Code (1948) of the World Medical Association which was written specifically to guard against the "ethics" of the Nazi doctors.
The WMA was for many years absolutely opposed to any reintroduction of discussions of doctors terminating the lives of their patients regardless of their condition. They maintained that the role of a doctor must always be to preserve life, never to take it. However, as time moved on, those safeguards were progressively weakened:
Tthe first domino to fall was doctors not artificially sustaining life, in other words if a person's body was only being kept alive through the functioning of a life support system, and there was "no hope" of recovery, it was acceptable to pull the plug with the permission of the next of kin. Strictly speaking that is not yet Euthanasia.
The next domino to fall was allowing someone to choose not to continue medical treatment if there was no hope of recovery and thus allowing them to die of natural causes instead of prolonging the process. This is still not yet Euthanasia.
The next step however, was in allowing doctors to assist patients deemed to be terminal to die, either by ceasing to feed them or by administering a lethal dose of drugs. This is Euthanasia: Therapeutic Killing to end suffering.
After that the floodgates literally opened in Europe: physicians killing those in pain, but not necessarily terminal if the patient so desired, Physicians killing the mentally incompetent with degenerative diseases with the permission of their next of kin, and Physicians killing infants with serious birth defects including severe retardation with the parents permission.
The current high water marks are in Scandanavia and Holland, where Physicians after conferring together may now elect to terminate cognitive patients with degenerative diseases and infants with severe birth defects without the permission of the patient or the next of kin. This is Involuntary Euthanasia, and is exactly what we put those Nazi doctors to death for in 1945. So either we were wrong then or we are wrong now. If we were wrong then, we owe the families of those doctors an apology.
Incidentally the current battle in Europe is over whether doctors may terminate the depressed, but otherwise healthy, if the patient so requests. If the current trajectory holds true, this will be approved and has the potential to progress to doctors terminating the depressed without their permission on quality of life grounds."
- Seagoon
