Weaver 1

Nandri Weaver

Mr. Jonathan Patches

Capstone Project

17 February 2021

To Die or Not to Die?

Imagine a place where a child can decide that they no longer want to live, and a doctor is legally allowed to kill them. In it is legal for minors of any age to choose . In other words there is no age restrictions on euthanasia requests. A seventeen year old who was terminally ill was the first minor that euthanasia was performed on. Euthanasia is the act of putting a person to death painlessly or allowing them to die by withholding medical services, usually because of a painful and incurable disease. The Greek word translates euthanasia to mean

“good death.” The struggle between the longing to stop suffering and the longing to survive is something that humans have wrestled with for a long time. Euthanasia is becoming more accepted by society because they are embracing the curse of death instead of letting God be the final judge of when a human’s life is over.

There are two types of euthanasia that I will be talking about throughout my paper. The first type is called active euthanasia which is when an action is taken with the intention to cause death. The second type is called passive euthanasia, this is the action of withdrawing and withholding of life-sustaining treatment with the result that death will occur as a natural consequence of the disease. A debate called the nutrition-hydration debate states that there is a difference between killing someone and letting them die. The question is then raised if feeding Weaver 2 someone who has no chance of survival is worth it or if they should just let them die? It really all depends on the intention because if the intention is to relieve the patient of a burdensome treatment, or if it is useless to preserve their life, then it is not considered euthanasia. But if the intention is to bring on death, it is considered euthanasia. There are multiple terms that are used instead of the term euthanasia. Supporters of euthanasia use more favorable terms such as

“mercy killing” or “death with dignity.” Sometimes euthanasia is referred to as physician or physician assisted dying. Not only are there different terms but also many different views on whether it should be allowed. Euthanasia is legal in the , Belgium,

Colombia, , Western , , and . Assisted suicide is legal in

Switzerland, , the Australian state of , in eight of the U.S. states, and in the

District of Columbia. There are many more places where people are trying to legalize euthanasia.

Sometimes it is said that we live in a “culture of death.” Abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, and suicide are all things that are vastly prevalent in our culture and are becoming more accepted.

The society that we live in is accepting of the termination of one of its members by allowing euthanansia (Tang ch.1). Sadly, our society tends to value people for what they do for us rather than for who they really are as a person. People who have good jobs, a lot of money, big houses, and or expensive cars are individuals whom society tends to look up to. To society these are people who have an exceptional status and we view them as important. We have established human status to determine human value. “Euthanasia is a social decision. It involves the one to be killed, the one doing the killing, and it involves a complying society to make it acceptable” (Tang ch.7). Society as a whole should feel responsible for protecting the sick, weak, and poor. They should not be undervaluing them as human beings, which euthansia is Weaver 3 supporting. As soon as people start to reduce their morals concerning human value it is easy for them to accept euthanasia and the inhumane treatment of people. We saw this happening in

World War two in the concentration camps. Euthanasia was actually a term used by the Nazis that meant to terminate those whom they considered worthless to the society that they were trying to create. The medical field work is also being affected by the way society is valuing people. Medical decisions are no longer based on moral ideals but are being focused in a business frame of mind. Dr. Alex Tang is a Bible teacher, medical educator, practical and moral theologian, and a pediatrician. In his book on euthanasia he states “The concept of healthcare as a business, however has changed medical care such that the bottom line is not healing but dollars and cents. This means that patients are not treated as human beings but as commodities. Once we begin to treat people as means and objects, we devalue and dehumanize them” (Tang ch. 1).

Next I will be focusing on some of the cultural trends or lies that exist in our global society, which causes people to accept physician-assisted suicide. One lie that people tell themselves is “I can do what I want because this is my own body” (Tang Ch.1). As a Christian I believe that our body is a temple of God and that we have to honor God with our bodies. We should not do anything to harm our bodies which would include killing ourselves or allowing a doctor to end our life. “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). These verses are clear that our bodies are not our own and that we are to glorify God with our bodies. “If man was indeed created in the image of God and he was created for a life of fellowship with God, then death is alien to anything that

God in his creation of man intended before man’s fall.” (Koop 113) Weaver 4

A trend that is seen in the secular world of medicine is that doctors are no longer focusing on moral traditions but instead on the business and financial aspect.. As stated before when people are being viewed as a way to make money this dehumanizes them. This would make it much simpler for doctors to kill their patients if they are viewing them more like objects.

We live in what is known as a pluralistic society, which means that it is based on a conglomeration of principles and beliefs. This is a popular lifestyle trend where anything and everything is deemed as acceptable. As Christians we have certain beliefs and we do not believe that everything is acceptable. We are to live upright and holy lives that are pleasing to God. Jesus goes as far as saying not only is murder wrong but he equalizes hating someone with murder.

“Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:15)

Should quality of life be considered at the end of one’s life? Our lives are made up of good and bad times and experiences. When people struggle with depression, heartbreak, the loss of a loved one, financial problems, or injury, these are all times when their circumstances can make them feel that the quality of their life seems low. As Christians we recognize that we are not the determiners of the quality of our life. Everyone’s life has meaning and God has a purpose for them. We need to let God be the one who determines when our life should come to an end.

We should not let our opinion of the quality of our life take control of us that we would decide to end our life. There are many places where the Bible talks on these things. In Ecclesiastes 3:1

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (ESV). Also in Acts

1:7 Jesus said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.”’ The biblical standpoint would be that “Quality of life cannot be defined by Weaver 5 external factors. The quality of one’s life is deeply personal and yoked oftentimes to that person’s relationship with God. Healthy, successful Americans may have a low quality of life due to emotional unrest and poor moral decisions, while a handicapped person in a developing country may live a joy-filled life. Physical sickness also does not determine a person’s quality of life, so trying to evaluate it is not within our power” (In End-of-Life Decisions).

Many people have wrestled with the following questions for a long time. Why does God allow suffering if he loves His people? Why doesn’t He choose to heal everyone? First, suffering was never God’s original plan but came as a result of the fall of man and because God gave everyone the freedom of choice. We have to choose to believe that God is still faithful even when we are suffering, because ultimately it is not His fault.

An example of someone who believed in the faithfulness of God even in the midst of suffering is Job in the Bible. He went through a great deal of suffering and still trusted in the goodness of God. Job had lost pretty much everything he had. All of his children died at one time, and his wealth and health were stripped away from him. To add to this his friends were not encouraging to him through his difficult time. His wife was of no support either and she actually told him to curse God and die. Job did want to die but he knew that it was not God’s time, and that he did not have the authority to take his life into his own hands. He even requested that God kill him rather than him having to endure all the emotional, physical, and spiritual pain that he was going through. Through all this Job states, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job

13:14). This shows that God allows suffering in order to bring us closer to Him and to bring glory to himself. If we can stay faithful to Him through hard times it shows how real He is to others around us. The story of Job proved to Satan that Job didn’t only love God because God Weaver 6 had blessed him with many things. When everything was taken away from him, he continued to believe in the love and the faithfulness of God. God may use the trials that we go through to build a stronger faith in Him. The promise to us is that there is nothing in this world that is not intended by God to help us on our walk with him. When we are sick or suffering, we want it to be God’s will to heal us. Many times people see healing as a direct result of a person’s faithfulness to God and conversely, we tend to see sickness as a result of sin. We need to realize that it is not always God’s will to heal someone, and God’s blessings can come in other ways besides physical healing.

Joni Eareckson Tada went through a great amount of suffering and was never healed, but she used her disabilities to honor and glorify God. She was seventeen when she dove into the

Chesapeake Bay after misjudging how shallow it was. She became paralyzed from the shoulders down. During Tada's two years of rehabilitation she was angry, depressed, suicidal, and she was doubting her faith. However, she turned to God and trusted that He had a purpose for her pain and a plan for her life. She pushed on and founded a very successful organization called Joni and

Friends. Her organization helped those in the disability community all over the world. If Joni would have taken her life when she felt like she had no purpose, God could not have used her in the wonderful way that He did.

For many people, a good death involves relief from suffering. Many people use the term death with dignity. “Dignified death is one in which the suffering person takes advantage of all measures available to relieve pain and ameliorate the things that cause a loss of imputed dignity but also recognizes that his or her innate dignity remains” (Tang ch. 2). When people die they want to have control over the nature and timing of their death. This is what would be considered Weaver 7 as dying with dignity. Christians would say that one’s dignity comes from God, who is in control of their life. He controls when our time on earth is over. A dignified death to a Christian is giving themself over to God even in their worst moments. Jesus is an example to us in the way He handled his suffering and death in the garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha.

Death to most people is an extremely frightening idea. Many people have a fear of death because of the uncertainty involving the concept of an afterlife. Death is unknown territory and people are generally scared of the unknown. Even though Christians are anticipating everlasting life with Christ, the process of death can still be a terrifying thought. Fear is an immensely strong emotion, and it can drive people to do extreme things such as taking their life or another person’s. An emotion that can compel a person to end their own life seems exceptionally powerful. “The post modern society is a society that is built on fear - fear of uncertainty, insecurity and hopelessness. We are a society obsessed with the fear of dying and death” (Tang ch. 7). In A Good Day to Die there are six different fears that go along with the dying process.

Patients tend to have one or two of the fears when they are facing death. These fears consist of prolonged dying, dying in the cold, uncontrolled pain, loss of control, being a burden, and isolation or depression (Tang ch. 7). These are all reasons that could cause a patient to ask a doctor to perform active or passive euthanasia. I will be explaining each type of fear in more depth in the next paragraphs.

As a whole, people aren’t fond of the idea of a prolonged death. They don’t want to drag out their death any longer than it has to be. A big reason for why people want the right of euthanasia, is so that they can end their life when they feel like they are just slowly dying. Weaver 8

Dying in the cold refers to being in an institutionalized place such as a hospital or nursing home instead of in the comforts of their home when facing death. Many would like to have the choice of having a pill that they could just take at home when they feel like they are ready to die because a hospital can make death feel like a cold clinical procedure.

An additional fear that people have that causes them to question the reason for living is when they are experiencing a tremendous amount of pain, and they feel like they are not going to get better. In today’s society, people are not taught how to deal with pain. Everything and everyone is focused on avoiding pain at all costs. We have many types of entertainment that distract and help us escape us from the pain of this world such as alcohol, drugs, media, movies, and music. If someone is diagnosed with a disease that will cause them to have severe pain and the end result is almost certain death they feel that they should have the right to end their lives.

They don’t want to have to go through all that suffering just to end up dying.

Another fear is when they feel they no longer have control over their life. People like to feel in control of everything. When they can not control the sickness or disease they are having to endure, they feel as if they have lost their dignity, and therefore they want to die. Or again, if they know this is going to die they want to die while they still have their dignity.

Many people are afraid that they are either an emotional, spiritual, financial, or physical burden to their family or friends when they are dying. Healthcare is quite expensive in today’s world, so patients feel like they should have the power to take that burden away from their family if they feel that death is inevitable.

A huge aspect that produces fear for patients is when they feel like they have to face death alone. This can cause depression or anxiety to which they might also want to escape from. Weaver 9

If they have no will to live or anyone to live for they do not see the reason to be alive. Christians can help those who have these fears, which I will talk about later in my essay.

There are many perspectives and beliefs on whether euthanasia is acceptable and should be allowed. Some would argue that if a person can no longer serve God or others by being alive, then it is not wrong for them to bring about their own death or to ask a doctor or other person to do it for them. However, most religious and moral individuals would view euthanasia as a type of murder. Even if someone has good intentions it does not make it any less of a killing. There is a doctor in Belgium named Yves that performs active euthanasia for patients. He expressed in an interview “I provide the final care, but I don’t feel like I’m killing the patient. We have to accept that we can not cure everything and our role, when we can’t cure the patient, is to try and relieve the patient, and so I’m still doing my job as a doctor when I go to the very end” (Euthanasia

Doctor). Another doctor named Allen Saxe asks the questions, “If we allow our pets that are so near and dear to us to go in this way... why not humans? Why do we do this to our loving pets and not transfer that to humans” (TEDxTalks)?

Catholics completely disagree with these statements. They strongly believe that euthanasia is murder and should not be permitted. They are not allowed to ask for this to be done to them or anyone else. The Lutheran church are a little bit more in the middle on their views of euthanasia. This can be seen in this quote, “As a church we affirm that deliberately destroying life created in the image of God is contrary to our Christian conscience. While this affirmation is clear, we also recognize that responsible health care professionals struggle to choose the lesser evil in ambiguous borderline situations — for example, when pain becomes so unmanageable that life is indistinguishable from torture” (Religious Perspectives). On the other side Methodists Weaver 10 support individuals having the freedom of choice when it comes to the timing of their death.

They say that people need to listen to their conscience to decide the manner and means of their death. Some of their conferences have supported the legalization of physician assisted dying

(Religious Perspectives). Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have very similar views on the matter. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are all condemned because it is taking something that belongs to God away when He is the only one that has the power to take away life. In the Islamic beliefs there is no concept of a life that is not worthy of living, therefore it is in no way a justification for suicide of any kind to escape suffering. “The central difference between those who favour and those who oppose assisted suicide and euthanasia lies in the judgement they make about God's purposes and power in the light of human suffering” (Tang, 557).

The church should be having a significant role in the lives of people who are sick and considering euthanasia. Christians are instructed by God to take care of the sick and those who are suffering. When Jesus was here on earth He said that when He comes back every nation will come together, and the King will separate His people from everyone else. “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink… I was sick and you visited me… Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?.. And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25: 34-40). These words from Jesus show us how important it is to look after one another. We are called to take care of one another and these verses tell us that when we do Weaver 11 this it is like taking care of Jesus himself. So when we do not do our duty of taking care of our brothers and sisters in Christ it is like neglecting Jesus, which is so serious that it could diminish our reward with God.

Jesus also says “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). If we were sick and dying we would want people to be there for us. We wouldn’t want to die all alone in a hospital. It is understandable that people who are not being taken care of will look to euthanasia as an option. Again the church has a major responsibility in trying their best to meet the needs of these people. Sometimes it is easy to ask, what can we do about it since we are not doctors, but in reality we have a lot of power that we can use to help them. We have the power of faith, prayer, community, and compassion/empathy which I will go into more detail about in the next paragraphs. We can have faith that God will do His will. This means that we can rest in the fact that if it is His will to heal a person, they will be healed. We can encourage those with sickness to have faith to be able to go on with bravery from the Lord.

Another huge way that we can help out is by praying. We can be prayer warriors for people going through these hard times. Even though it doesn’t always seem like our prayers are helping, we are promised that God does hear our prayers. The Bible gives us clear directions on what to do when someone is sick and in need of healing. James 5:14-16 states “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the

Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” We also have the power of community. The Weaver 12 church as a whole can be helping meet the social and practical needs of anyone who is terminally ill or dying. Christians should be willing to take time out of their life to do this, because this will create a stronger community. This goes along with the fact that the church has the power of empathy for the dying. If the sick know that there is a community of believers that are there for them, this can make it much easier for them to choose life. The church must show the sick that they have worth and that they are still respected. They need to know that their lives still have meaning and that they are not being abandoned. Christians should be creating a culture of life to help them embrace the life that they have been given. They also need to be aware that death is a part of life and that it is okay. A reason that patients would ask for euthanasia is because they are feeling alone and have no one to talk to about their issues. They have to make major life decisions by themselves and have no one to counsel them. They could be experiencing depression, severe pain, or emotional and mental stress, and it is important that someone can be there for them to talk things through. Once their underlying problems have been talked through and they realize that they have something to live for they may no longer want to die. We should be telling them about Jesus if they don’t know and how He has a purpose for their pain.

Although euthanasia can be a tricky subject, I think that the answer is clear. God is the giver and sustainer of life. He should have the power to decide the timing of our death, and we do not have the right to overthrow His authority. When we end our lives and those of others, we are throwing God’s plans out the window. We are basically saying that we know better than God.

The problem with the argument of if we have the right to live and the can be compared to the behavior of Lucifer. We know that he wanted to be like the Most High and be equal to God (Koop). Our society has lost the understanding that human life is God’s. Therefore Weaver 13 they are giving the power of life and death to doctors, which assumes God’s role by allowing them to decide when someone’s life should be over. I believe that all active euthanasia is wrong, but passive euthanansia needs to be taken more by a case by case basis. It needs to be a manner of prayer and should only be done if God reveals to them that it is His will. Our lives are a sacred gift from God and He longs to have a relationship with us. We are created to have a life of fellowship with Him, therefore death was not a part of God’s original plan. Weaver 14

Works Cited

“Access Your Bible from Anywhere.” BibleGateway.com: A Searchable Online Bible in over

150 Versions and 50 Languages., www.biblegateway.com/.

“Belgium Minor First to Be Granted Euthanasia.” BBC News, BBC, 17 Sept. 2016,

www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37395286.

“Euthanasia Doctor: 'I Don't Call It Killing' - BBC Stories.” Youtube/Euthanasia Doctor: ‘I Don’t

Call It Killing' , Youtube/BBC Stories, 14 June 2019,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdK0neywYOc.

“In End-of-Life Decisions, When Should Quality of Life Be a Consideration?”

GotQuestions.org, Got Questions Ministries, 6 June 2018,

www.gotquestions.org/quality-of-life.html.

Koop, C. Everett. The Right to Live, the Right to Die. Tyndale House Publishers, 1988

“Legality of Euthanasia.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Mar. 2021,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_euthanasia#:~:text=As%20of%20March%202021%2

C%20active,Australia%2C%20Canada%2C%20and%20Spain.

“Religious Perspectives On Euthanasia.” Institute of Clinical Bioethics, Saint Joseph's

University, 14 Mar. 2011, sites.sju.edu/icb/religious-perspectives-on-euthanasia/.

Tang, Alex. A Good Day to Die: a Christian Perspective on Mercy Killing. Genesis Books, 2005.

TEDxTalks. “Beyond Life: Managing Your Right to Die | Dr. Allan Saxe | TEDxPlano.”

YouTube, YouTube, 7 May 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ehf6CmG4Y.