🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ZXPX2D1w165w@orchide.dialix.oz.au>, jan@orchide.dialix.oz.au (jan) says:
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>bpl@lynx.co.nz (Brian Paul Lilburn) writes:
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>> In article <5dcbgf$c3o$3@euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au>, d-moss@adfa.oz.au (David Mos
>> >
>> 
>> >There are also historical, moral, legal and socialogical reasons for
>> >opposing euthanasia.
>> 
>> Indeed. But the so called 'moral' reasons for opposing *voluntary*
>> euthanasia don't stand up to scrutiny - nor do any of the others
>> you mention.
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>You are sure about this?  Please demonstrate.

It's being demonstrated in this debate. Of course, if you include in
your moral code an absolutism about life including your own, then you
*have* "moral reasons", and I would be quite immoral to press on you (if
you were very very ill) that you best agree to have help to end your life.
Can you see how it works the other way round?
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>> >
>snip>
>I take it you are a different sort of pagan that Hippocrates.  Here
>from his oath.
>

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>Not all pagans it seems would agree with you. 

But if I crawled in mortal illness up to Hippocrates (supposing I lived
in his era) and asked him to help me end my life, and he refused; would
he allow me to crawl away and find another herbal expert to do it for 
me, *or would he take steps to prevent me, or follow me and then 
watch who helped me and then accuse that person of killing and have
the authorities punish him*? I doubt it. But you see what I'm getting
at - the biggoted 'hypocrates' that now agitates against V.E. from
the medical establishment.

>>                 If you met a soldier crawling out of a bombed fort,
>> with gutz hanging out, obviously in mortal agony and soon but
>> slowly to die, and he pleaded with you to take up his gun and
>> shoot - what would you do? Turn away and leave him to it and
>> think what a good Christian or whatever you are?
>
>War is an extraordinary circumstance where much that is regarded
>as immoral in peacetime, is not only moral but necessary.  As such
>this example quite irrelevant.

I hardly think so. Some other posting remarked it made a difference
if the soldier was friend or enemy - what an attitude! Another said
the soldier could be patched up. But I've read of this case. If a
person is hopelessly mangled all down from the waste, but okay from
the waste up, there's no hope of patching him up, though he can live
for a while - in horrible horrible pain and anguish. The soldier 
crawled out by his arms. It basically hasn't got to do with War. It 
could happen from a car accident, or even from a clot blocking blood
to the intestines, not detected in time, so they die. You can't 
transplant a whole set of lower intestines.
  Only the mask of a peculiar religion (and Christianity is peculiar
in many respects, despite the wisdom of a lot of Jesus's sayings) can
stop a reasonable person seeing the cruelty and pitilessness of 
an absolutist attitude to 'life' such as so many of our priests,
politicians and medical 'experts' are displaying. 

Brian

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