"Terminally Ill Should Be Allowed To Decide When To Die"

by Mike Cohen, Guest Author

Published in South Marion Citizen, November 28, 1997

"I don't like to preach- but we have been instructed to point out the obvious faults of our brethren so they will alter their secular lifestyles..." (Quotation from South Marion Citizen, 9/6/97, the Gospel according to Johnathan McNeil.)

I have, in the past, been admonished by people I respect for picking on Mr. McNeil; they tell me he really is a very nice man. I accept that judgment. My dispute is not with the man McNeil, but with some of the things he says. (My secularist version of "love the sinner but not the sin".)

Here's the problem: How can those of us whose reason tells us we must live in the world we live in - the real world- make clear to nice man Johnathan that we have our own cherished beliefs, and we are not pleased by uninvited missionaries pointing out our "obvious faults"?

One of our areas of disagreement is abortion. Everything that possibly can be said on both sides has been said again and again, and having exhausted words, other people on Mr. McNeil's side (not Mr. McNeil himself) have moved on (moved backward, actually) to violence, physical blockades, bombing and shooting. So much for abortion; that's old stuff.

Now Mr. McNeil's expertise on matters of life and death turns to suicide, assisted and/or unassisted. I agree with him (but for different reasons) that suicide as customarily performed is a horror. It is unspeakably cruel to one's survivors to surprise them with your bloody corpse, brains splattered across the room - to say nothing of an attempted suicide that might fail and leave survivors burdened with a vegetable neither dead nor alive.

But there is a civilized way to end a life. For those very few people who have concluded with lucid mind that they want to live no longer, a controlled, scientific, medically assisted quiet procedure should be available without hassle.

There are many situations in which a person might wish to die, and most of them are wrong. But there also are situations in which the wish to die is reasonable. Consider an individual in the terminal stages of some terrible disease, incontinent, in constant agonizing pain, unable to sleep, totally dependent on others and bankrupt of dignity. The mental suffering can be worse than the physical.

Does Mr. McNeil insist this pitiful fragment continue to suffer? Does his love of mankind find something perversely ennobling in the agony of others? Where is that "quality of mercy that falleth like the gentle rain from heaven"?

Mr. McNeil tells us that suffering is good because Jesus suffered. (The blessed Mother Teresa told us before she died that the world is a better place for the suffering of the poor.) Are we being told then that suffering is desirable? Is cruelty a synonym for piety? Moralists speak highly of mercy but with this opportunity to exercise this virtue, they oppose it devoutly.

Is it the human (secular) intervention, suicide that's wrong and should we turn to prayer instead for relief? Mr. McNeil says that when people gather together in prayer, "the quantity and quality of the unified radiation far exceeds that of the same number of individuals who are praying separately." Would a boxcar full of praying Jews headed for one of Hitler's extermination camps qualify as sufficient "unified radiation" to elicit a merciful response? It never did.

Perhaps one boxcar wasn't enough; how about a train of boxcars? How about six million people praying? Turned out it still wasn't enough, was it? All those prayers yielded nothing. Hitler's slaughter finally was stopped not by prayers but by the intervention of real people from this world, the allied military doing something physical, something - yes - secular.

Johnathan McNeil tells us our beliefs are in opposition to "God's plan." Does Johnathan demand we accept suffering and like it? I have been suffering and I hate it. If suffering is good, then those who cause suffering are heroes.

One of the explanations for the existence of suffering is that it cleanses the soul, carries it to new and higher strengths. I don't think any of the souls in that room needed any more strengthening, thank you.

The claim that suffering does any good is rubbish. Sometimes we must endure hardship until it is cured or has run its course. That was the case in that Army hospital 50 years ago; most of us outlasted adversity and went on from there.

But nothing good can be said for unnecessary suffering, such as zealots beating themselves with chains, the ancient religious practices of throwing virgins into volcanoes, the burning of "witches," the tortures of the Inquisition. And in today's world, it is similarly cruel to deny death's release to some poor wretch with a terminal case of a vile and incurable disease.

My idea of morality is to grant a sufferer his wish for death. Mr. McNeil's idea of morality is to require the suffering continue as long as possible. Perhaps the true morality would be to throw out my judgment and throw out Mr. McNeil's judgment and let the sufferer judge for himself.

Mike Cohen

Top of Page

To Mike's Index of Articles

Return to Alaco's Home Page

Return to Guest Authors