Euthanasia Quotes

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Euthanasia" is an excellent and comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.

Just as the unwanted pregnancy, there are unwanted people in your life you should strive to abort, and such abortion is not sin, nor harm, but the eradication of a destructive foetus.

...our lack of sleep is a slow form of self-euthanasia...

[…] life is just the misery left between abortion and euthanasia […]

I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

Dying is not a crime.

If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.

In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients’ “ease” but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonguing and even magnifying patients’ dis-ease.

It’s unfortunate that your offspring make people wish for a dystopian future in which euthanasia is a universally beloved form of birth control, but when elderly women literally everywhere are better parents than you, perhaps it’s time to hang up the baby-making spurs.

Good-bye — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia.

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.

For instance, the majority of people are terrified of dying, but, as Epictetus points out, Socrates wasn’t afraid of death. Although he may have preferred to live, he was relatively indifferent to dying as long as he met his death with wisdom and virtue. This used to be known as the ideal of a “good death,” from which our word “euthanasia” derives

It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me--who want to die but haven't got the guts.

Death gets a bad rap. People think that euthanasia is putting their pets “down” when it really is lifting us up. In the first moment, when we come back to earth, we remember the comfort of the Heaven we came from and this is why we cry when we are born. When we are born in Heaven we come in laughing not crying! In birth we have the passage and then the pain. In death we have the pain and then the passage.

There were signs and I missed them. For instance, Crake said once, "Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain?" "You mean, commit euthanasia?" said Jimmy. "Like putting down your pet turtle?" "Just tell me," said Crake. "I don't know. What kind of love, what kind of pain?

The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Margaret Sanger

I lived my whole life following others’ wishes. Let me follow my own wish in my death.

Euthanasia is a topic that taps into deeply personal views of dignity and fear but, mostly, spirituality.

That is not true, but we lack the moral authority to endorse them (acts of euthanasia). What we do instead is what you have just seen. We commend the dying to Saint Hubert and tie them to a pillar in order to prolong and intensify their suffering.

Too fucking late for sorry, innit? I hope he catches bubonic plague and dies in slow fucking agony the day before they legalise euthanasia and then I'm gonna go and learn Riverdance and I don't care how fucking long it takes cos I wanna do it on his grave.

That was four people right there who loved me. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Not a single soul. Love was trapping me here. And they didn't know what it was like, what my head was like. Maybe if they were in my head for ten minutes they'd be like, 'Oh, okay, yes, actually. You should jump. There is no way you should feel this amount of pain. Run and jump and close you eyes and just do it. I mean, if you were on fire I could put a blanket around you, but the flames are invisible. There is nothing we can do. So jump. Or give me a gun and I'll shoot you. Euthanasia.' But that was not how it worked. If you are depressed your pain is invisible.

Why [..] should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?

They said 'specialist children's wards,' But they meant children-killing centers. They said 'final medical assistance' But they meant murder.

Some people are lucky to no longer be, and some are unlucky to still be, alive.

We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to those who love us. But it is necessary that we face this also. The full acceptance of our abjection and uselessness is the virtue that can make us and others rich in the grace of God. It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves. We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere, both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction.

In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.

To deal justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste something of its bitterness.

Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

Never was there a creature more appropriately placed to be the poster girl for euthanasia.

Euthanasia" is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it. It

Rowan has earned a reputation as a ruthless businessman known to stir up the same level of happiness as animal euthanasia.

One reason issues like euthanasia are so salient today is that people no longer have positive ways to respond to suffering.

But what is important is that it is hard to see in this instance what they have to gain by denying that they had been “schooled” for murder at the euthanasia institutes, if that in fact was what happened. They would surely appear in a slightly less terrible light if they could claim that they had been scientifically conditioned – brainwashed – to death-camp work, rather than assigned to it because their natures seemed particularly suited to such activity.

It was, he thought, his gesture against the whole pro-euthanasia movement that talked so glibly of choice without realising the fire with which one played when tinkering with fragile taboos against killing others. Yes, he thought, Mrs Bates's life did not seem to amount to much, but to her it was all she had.

Forgive me,' said Abbot Zerchi. 'I wasn't getting ready to argue moral theology with you. I was speaking only of this spectacle of mass euthanasia in terms of human motivation. the very existence of the Radiation Disaster Act, and like laws in other countries, is the plainest possible evidence that governments were fully aware of the consequences of another war, but instead of trying to make the crime impossible, they tried to provide in advance for the consequences of the crime. Are the implications of that fact meaningless to you, Doctor?

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. ... The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.

So many people say they put their pets 'down' when they are really lifting them up.

I rarely have a pet tell me their human ended their life too soon. It's far more common to hear that their humans waited too long to help them leave their body.

How ironic it is that some of the voices most outspoken against executing murderers also promote contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. They are living a contradiction of God’s plan; they have defied holy innocence. And that’s why shedders of innocent blood have to use the language of deceit — that is, euphemisms. Abortionists are called “health-care providers.

The visitor shrugged. "Like euthanasia? I'm sorry, Father, I feel that the laws of a society are what make something a crime or not a crime. I'm aware that you don't agree. And there can be bad laws, ill conceived, true. But in this case, I think we have a good law. If I thought I had such a thing as a soul, and that there was an angry God in Heaven, I might agree with you.

Are you close to your family?' I considered it. 'Close' was one way of putting it. 'We're close,' I said cautiously. 'But we're very mean to each other. This morning I told my mum that if she didn't stop acting old I was going to lobby for a law on euthanasia, so a bus would come round every Monday morning and take away all the old people who complained that they couldn't hear the telly or see the buttons on their mobile phone or that they had a pain in their hip, and put a bullet in their heads. But we're close.

We both know what those steps would have to be, though we do not mention our thoughts to each other. We should neither of us shrink from the task, awful though it be to contemplate. "Euthanasia" is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.

Some years ago a Belgian couple committed euthanasia together. He (eighty-three) had terminal cancer and she (seventy-eight), suffering from other serious age-related ailments, didn’t want to go on living without him. Hand in hand they stepped out of life. There’s something very romantic about that.

What is the therapeutic path? Is there one? How can we remedy a wound the size of existence? Of course, total recall— ecphoric excavation to the point of obsidian and diamantine repose—is the only therapeutic route. When presented with an infection such as a brain, eudemonia and euthanasia converge.

I love my mother. My mother loves my dad. Those two facts are undeniable. I want my father to live. I want him to fight to live as long as he can. My mother wants to let him pass. She does not want him suffering anymore. She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die. I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young.

For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, and that his suffering was not going to become unendurable, was the one thing that allowed Mr. Peterson to go on living, much longer than he would have otherwise wanted. It was the weeks leading up to our pact that were shrouded in darkness and despair; after its inception, life became a meaningful prospect once more.

Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.

Careful to devalue life in your youth. The young may very well devalue you when you are old.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever going to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

The word euthanasia literally means “good death.

Every social practice is the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human. When a society accepts, endorses, and approves the practice, it implicitly commits itself to the accompanying worldview. And all the more so if those practices are enshrined in law. The law functions as a teacher, educating people on what society considers to be morally acceptable. If America accepts abortion, euthanasia, gender-free marriage, and transgender policies, in the process it will absorb the worldview that justifies those practices—a two-story fragmentation of the human being that denigrates the body and biological bonds such as the family. And the dehumanizing consequences will reach into every aspect of our communal life.

Then one day we suddenly realized that we had been keeping him alive not because it was good for him, but because it was good for us, because it was too hard to make the decision to let him go. And in the joyful bargain between dog and person, that is the one unforgivable cheat.

As early as 1935, Hitler had privately mused about ramping up his gene-cleansing efforts from sterilization to euthanasia—what quicker way to purify the gene pool than to exterminate the defectives?—

Legal, regulated voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide have far less potential for abuse, and when they are available, there is no need to make it easy for people to find out how to kill themselves.

Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been the first ones the Nazis actually gassed; they killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program code-named Aktion T4 that began in the fall of 1939.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

the Nazis’ so-called euthanasia program, the widespread murder of the disabled. As a result, the program had been curtailed. The overwhelming majority of church leaders had said nothing, however, to help their Jewish neighbors. This

Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale. This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.

Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.

The Lord God Almighty says this to all people on this planet earth,“Do not take your lives through Euthanasia or any way, for your life belongs to me who gave it to you,trust in me at all times, lean on me, my ways are different from your ways, I am the Lord, the One who created you. Yeah.

The first gas chambers were constructed in 1939, to implement a Hitler decree dated September 1 of that year, which said that “incurably sick persons should be granted a mercy death.” (It was probably this “medical” origin of gassing that inspired Dr. Servatius’s amazing conviction that killing by gas must be regarded as “a medical matter.” ) The idea itself was considerably older. As early as 1935, Hitler had told his Reich Medical Leader Gerhard Wagner that “if war came, he would take up and carry out this question of euthanasia, because it was easier to do so in wartime.” The decree was immediately carried out in respect to the mentally sick, and between December, 1939, and August, 1941, about fifty thousand Germans were killed with carbon-monoxide gas in institutions where the death rooms were disguised exactly as they later were in Auschwitz—as shower rooms and bathrooms.

In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder.

When the frail black cat who had lived through abuse and abandonment entered her equally arduous life, she smiled at her and said, "What a journey you took to find your way to me." And when the frail black cat who had offered nothing but comfort and companionship died in her arms just a few years later, she smiled at her through hurtful tears and said, "only a journey like that could lead to a love as pure and enduring as this..." She then leaned down and bestowed upon her the breadth of her grace.

In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present. More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that na individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. And George A. Sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of "learned meaninglessness." He himself remembered a therapist who said, "George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act." One must generalize such a criticism. In principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism.

A desire to attain short-term happiness while laboring under the weight a looming death sentence is an obvious paradox. Suicide, as distinguished from medical euthanasia, is an emotional reaction to the absurdity of life. Suicide is a panic-stricken reflex induced by the sinister twins of fear and foreboding. A rational person does not commit self-murder because their longing for happiness is incongruent with their present day reality. Suicide is a superficial response to hard times; suicide is a pusillanimous solution. A more measured reaction and, therefore, ultimately a braver and logical tactic is to meet life’s pillbox of irrationality headfirst. Upon soul-searching reflection, a thinking person accepts that while he or she might never comprehend a unifying meaning of life they still prefer to experience each permitted day of life to the fullest. A pragmatic person accepts the cold fact that happiness is fleeting and death is inevitable. By acknowledging and accepting the underlying absurdity of life, the prisoner awakens to discover his own humanity. By refusing to cooperate with death, by working each day to expand personal consciousness, by savoring each moment of life regardless of its hazards, adversities, misfortunes, and seemingly lack of overriding purpose, an impertinent ward of time transcends his or her incarnate incarceration.

A prediction: In coming decades, involuntary euthanasia will be commonplace in Europe, and Gen-Xers' battles to stay alive into old age will be treated with the same cold contempt as they treated the silent screams of the unborn. Millions will be put to sleep like aged and incontinent household pets." -The Sad Suicide of Admiral Nimitz, Jan. 18, 2002

Losing some faculties is worse than losing your life.

The American psychologists classified persons on the basis of IQ tests, labeling those judged feebleminded in descending order as morons, imbeciles, or idiots

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis. An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader’s zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche’s point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to “hard reason” rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of “the noblest part of our nature.”6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. p15

You don’t want to think about it but it’s the first thing on your mind. You say, “We made THE APPOINTMENT.” You avoid the word “euthanasia” because it makes everything too real. It is a beautiful word, really. It is Greek for “easy death” and it is true, there is no easier death than this. It is unfortunate that, once again, people are so afraid of death in all its forms that they find it so difficult even when the time of death is peaceful.

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

If human life becomes cheapened, it becomes cheapened at both ends. Parents are killed, by euthanasia, when they become a “burden” to their children; and children are killed, by abortion, when they become a “burden” to their parents. All societies in history would regard these two sins as two of the most heartless and inhuman possible sins. To kill your parents is to kill yourself, your own past; and to kill your children is to kill yourself, your own future.

it's possible to go through our time on this ball floating in space without realizing that Fear has been pulling our strings all along. Our inner tyrant has made for us most of our choices—even those we were not aware of making. The fucked-up part about it is that Fear makes it easy for us to go along with this. It doesn't hurt us in an obvious way. It numbs us before injecting us with its poison—a slow form of euthanasia that takes a few decades to come to its conclusion. In

What do you do when your greatest accomplishments lead you straight down the path of an even greater fear? Instead of summoning his faith and standing firm to see the deliverance of his God, Elijah retreats. And in his escape from his geographical surroundings, he begins to back down from the boldness that has characterized his whole ministry up to this point. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. (1 Kings 19:3–5) Now I’m confused. Verse 3 says he was running for his life. Yet verse 4 says he asked God to kill him. Which one is it? Are you looking for life support, Elijah? Or shall God send the angels of euthanasia? One of these things is not like the other. The more I studied this text, though, and considered the context of Elijah’s despair and compared it to similar feelings I’ve experienced under much less duress, the more I got it. Although the text says Elijah ran for his life—and I’m sure that’s how it appeared—it seems like something deeper is going on. In fact, I’m not sure Elijah was running for his life at all, at least not in the sense we would use that phrase. I believe Elijah was actually running from his life. You see, it had been a long, lonely three years for Elijah. Did he survive the drought? Undoubtedly. And through him God won the battle with a unanimous decision. But winning can be as exhausting as losing. Sometimes the pressure of success can drain you at an even deeper level than the frustration of failure. Elijah knows Queen Jezebel doesn’t have the power to call on her gods and end his life. If she had, he’d have been buried beside his bull back on the mountain. So it’s safe to assume that his greatest fear at this point isn’t dying. His greatest fear is living—and having to fight yet another agonizing battle. Jezebel’s threat is ultimately impotent, yes. But that doesn’t make it ineffective. Because fear often finds its power, not in our actual situation, but in what we tell ourselves about our situation.

The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the legalization of abortion on demand or euthanasia does not impose a certain moral view on the rest of society. This is especially true when arguments for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights. The appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights.

And that evening too, as I looked at her arm, into which was flowing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why? At the nursing home I did not have time to go into it... But when I reached home, all the sadness and horror of these last days dropped upon me with all its weight. And I too had a cancer eating into me—remorse. “Don’t let them operate on her.” And I had not prevented anything. Often, hearing of sick people undergoing a long martyrdom, I had felt indignant at the apathy of their relatives. “For my part, I should kill him.” At the first trial I had given in: beaten by the ethics of society, I had abjured my own. “No,” Sartre said to me. “You were beaten by technique: and that was fatal.” Indeed it was. One is caught up in the wheels and dragged along, powerless in the face of specialists’ diagnoses, their forecasts, their decisions. The patient becomes their property: get him away from them if you can! There were only two things to choose between on that Wednesday—operating or euthanasia. Maman, vigorously resuscitated, and having a strong heart, would have stood out against intestinal stoppage for a long while and she would have lived through hell, for the doctors would have refused euthanasia… A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you “Have pity on me” in vain.

By these days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him; he would have yearned for trees to climb, rivers to bathe in, meadows and hills against which he might measure his body. Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.

Entrañado en la oscuridad pecaminosa estuve yo también, concebido no engendrado. Por ellos, el hombre con mi voz y mis ojos y una mujer fantasmal de aliento a cenizas. Se ayuntaron y desjuntaron, cumplieron la voluntad del apareador. Desde antes de los tiempos Él me dispuso y ahora no puede disponer lo contrario ni nunca. Una lex eterna Le atenaza. ¿Es ésa pues la divina sustancia en la que el Padre y el Hijo son con-sustanciales? ¿Dónde está el pobre de Arrio para meterse dentro y ver qué pasa? Guerreando de por vida por la contransmagnificandjudeogolpancialidad. ¡Aciago heresiarca malogrado! En un excusado griego exhaló su último suspiro: euthanasia. Con mitra de abalorios y con báculo, instalado en su trono, viudo de una sede viuda, con omophonon envarado, con posaderas aglutinadas.

today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

Tuan, dengar dulu penjelasan dokter Richard. Euthansia bertujuan untuk membebaskan diri Huup dari penderitaan. Bisa dilakukan dengan menyuntikkan zat-zat tertentu atau secara professional kita hentikan mesin penunjang hidup dan melepas tabung makanan. Sehingga rasa sakit yang dialami pasien sangat minimal,” ujarku memberikan pembelaan atas usul dokter senior tempatku bekerja. (Sebongkah Asa, Dunia Tanpa Huruf R)

The man seemed not to have heard him. ‘At this life-giving time of the year, Professor Scrooge,’ said the pastor, clicking his pen, ‘it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight contribution to babes and adults, who lie languishing in hospitals and care facilities, standing on street corners and under bridges, or living alone at home during this time. Many are in need of blood transfusions or food or pregnancy care every day in our large community; many others – especially the elderly – are in want of comfort and cheer.’ ‘Are there no abortion clinics?’ asked Scrooge. ‘Plenty of clinics,’ said the pastor, clicking the pen tip in again. ‘And Euthanasia facilities?’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’ ‘They are. Still,’ returned the gentleman, ‘I wish I could say they were not.’ ‘Welfare and Food Stamps are in full swing, then?’ said Scrooge. ‘Both very busy.’ ‘Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ ‘Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,’ returned the gentleman, ‘a few churches are endeavoring to raise a fund to provide those in need with medical care and food as well as the comfort of a human presence and the message of eternal life through Jesus. We choose this time to sow into others’ lives because it is a time, of all others, when we rejoice in the life God gave to us through His Son. What shall I put down – in time, money, or blood – for you?’ ‘Nothing!’ Scrooge replied. ‘You wish to give anonymously, then?’ ‘I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge.

Even if these two didn't share the same short dark hair, the same violet eyes, and the same flawless olive skin, I'd know they were related because of their most dominant feature-their habit of staring. "I'm Chloe. This is my friend Emma, who apparently just head-butted your boyfriend Galen. We were in the middle of apologizing." I pinch the bridge of my nose and count to ten-Mississippi, but fifty-Mississippi seems more appropriate. Fifty allows more time to fantasize about ripping one of Chloe's new waves out. "Emma, what's wrong? Your nose isn't bleeding, is it?" She chirps, enjoying herself. Tingles gather at my chin as Galen lifts it with the crook of his finger. "Is your nose bleeding? Let me see," he says. He tilts my head side to side, leans closer to get a good look. And I meet my threshold for embarrassment. Tripping is bad enough. Tripping into someone is much worse. But if that someone has a body that could make sculpted statues jealous-and thinks you've broken your nose on one of his pecs-well, that's when tripping runs a distant second to humane euthanasia. He is clearly surprised when I swat his hand and step away. His girlfriend/relative seems taken aback that I mimic his stance-crossed arms and deep frown. I doubt she has ever met her threshold for embarrassment. "I said I was fine. No blood, no foul." "This is my sister Rayna," he says, as if the conversation steered naturally in that direction. She smiles at me as if forced at knifepoint, the kind of smile that comes purely from manners, like the smile you give your grandmother when she gives you the rotten-cabbage-colored sweater she's been knitting. I think of that sweater now as I return her smile.

I feel it urgent to state that, if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being. The family protects human life in all its stages, including its last. Consequently, “those who work in healthcare facilities are reminded of the moral duty of conscientious objection. Similarly, the Church not only feels the urgency to assert the right to a natural death, without aggressive treatment and euthanasia”, but likewise firmly rejects the death penalty.

As a minister of the Lord in whatever way the Lord decides to use you and with the gifts he gives you for the work, there is the tendency to start idolizing the work itself or the gifts that you forget it is the father who gave it to you. Who picked you up and dusted you from nothing and adorned you. You forget and make the work a god before him. Exodus 20:3 "You shall have no other gods before me". ----- This can be very subtle especially for social media ministry. You begin to love your social image over the word of God. You begin to dampen and tweak the word of God to appeal to a wider audience. You're suddenly no longer about the raw truth of the gospel. As the followers and likes increase you begin to get more and more addicted to the fruit of the works and the response to YOUR messages and posts. If a post doesn't do too well and get many likes and comments you are not happy. It hurts you deeply. That is how you know It has become about you. ------ If this is you and this message has touched your heart, if this post is like a mirror to your face, go back to God and ask for forgiveness. Ask God to forgive you for elevating yourself and your work as a god before him and return back to when it was just about loving him and preaching the good news. You probably may have noticed you lost the fire of inspiration you used to have at the beginning. This is why.

Today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.

At the heart of her doubts about secular liberalism (and what she described as “radical, upscale feminism”) was its embrace of abortion and its (continuing) dalliance with euthanasia. At first, she went along with abortion, albeit reluctantly, believing that women's rights to develop their talents and control their destinies required its legal availability. But Betsey (as she was known by her friends) was not one who could avert her eyes from inconvenient facts. The central fact about abortion is that it is the deliberate killing of a developing child in the womb. For Betsey, euphemisms such as “products of conception,” “termination of pregnancy,” “privacy,” and “choice” ultimately could not hide that fact. She came to see that to countenance abortion is not to respect women's “privacy” or liberty; it is to suppose that some people have the right to decide whether others will live or die. In a statement that she knew would inflame many on the Left and even cost her valued friendships, she declared that “no amount of past oppression can justify women's oppression of the most vulnerable among us.

This about it for a moment. It is truly very odd. We apparently believe that we own our own bodies as possessions and should be allowed to do with them more or less anything we choose, from euthanasia to a boob job, but we do not want to be on our own with these precise possessions. We live in a society which sees high self-esteem as a proof of well-being, but we do not want to be intimate with this admirable and desirable person. We see moral and social conventions as inhibitions on our personal freedoms, and yet we are frightened of anyone who goes away from the crowd and develops 'eccentric' habits. We believe that everyone has a singular personal 'voice' and is, moreover, unquestionably creative, but we treat with dark suspicion (at best) anyone who uses one of the most clearly established methods of developing that creativity - solitude. We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone. We declare that personal freedom and autonomy is both a right and good, but we think anyone who exercises that freedom autonomously is 'sad, mad or bad'. Or all three at once.

Thank God for pain. Most of life's blessings, in my experience, are potential curses. And vice versa. So it is with physical pain. Acute short term physical pain, whether mild or severe, is virtually always a blessing. It is a signal that something is wrong with the body, something that needs attention. Without that signals our lives would quite quickly become devastated. But pain is useful ONLY as a signal that something is wrong, be it a broken ankle, a burn or a cinder in the eye. Once the problem is diagnosed and is being appropriately treated, there is no reason for the signal to continue. Pain has lost its utility. If the pain does continue, the blessing has become a curse.

If we look honestly at the way many people manage their dogs today, we are faced with a staggering reflection of irresponsibility and lack of compassion. It is difficult to refer to a dog as “man’s best friend” when more than six million unwanted adult dogs and puppies are euthanized every year. We are not speaking here of the humane killing of animals done out of a sense of responsible stewardship but of the massive human negligence that leads to euthanasia. For those who doubt the serious implications of this situation, a trip to the local animal shelter can be a real eye-opener. We recall one client who dismissed our advice about spaying her female shepherd, explaining she felt it was important for her children to have the experience of seeing puppies born. When we asked her how she intended to care for and give homes to the puppies, she responded that she really had not thought about it at all and that she would probably leave them at the local humane society when it was time for them to be weaned. We then asked her what value such an experience would have if the principal lesson her children would learn is that puppies are cute little playthings who, when sufficiently used, may then be conveniently disposed of. Fortunately, our questioning convinced her of her faulty thinking, and she left with a new respect for the implications of bringing puppies into the world.

The accusation against the Church for being either right or left wing tells you more about the contemporary political assumptions than about the political inclination of Catholicism. The Church will seem both "right wing" (in promoting the traditional family, opposing abortion, euthanasia, embryonic research, etc.) and "left wing" (in advocating the rights of minorities, social justice, active state support for the poorest, etc.), depending on the political bias of the one accusing .The same bias afflicts Catholics. There are pro-life Catholics who think Catholic social teaching is "socialist," and pro-social-justice Catholics who think pro-life causes are right wing. The Church will always be accused of "interfering" or trying to "impose" its view when the critic disagrees with its stance; but the same critic will say nothing when the Church has intervened politically on a matter with which he or she agrees. And if the Church has stayed silent, the critic will accuse it of "failing to speak out." Put another way, people are against the Church "interfering" in what they would much rather have left alone; and in favor of "interfering" in what they believe should be changed. Why and when does the Church speak out on political questions? The answer is rarely and cautiously, and almost always because it is a matter which touches on the Gospel, on core freedoms and rights (such as the right to life, or to religious freedom), or on core principles of Catholic social teaching. In these cases, the Church not only needs to speak out; it has a duty to do so.

Some moral philosophers try to thread a boundary across this treacherous landscape by equating personhood with cognitive traits that humans happen to possess. These include an ability to reflect upon oneself as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death, and to express a choice not to die. At first glance the boundary is appealing because it puts humans on one side and animals and conceptuses on the other. But it also implies that nothing is wrong with killing unwanted newborns, the senile, and the mentally handicapped, who lack the qualifying traits. Almost no one is willing to accept a criterion with those implications. There is no solution to these dilemmas, because they arise out of a fundamental incommensurability: between our intuitive psychology, with its all-or-none concept of a person or soul, and the brute facts of biology, which tell us that the human brain evolved gradually, develops gradually, and can die gradually. And that means that moral conundrums such as abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights will never be resolved in a decisive and intuitively satisfying way. This does not mean that no policy is defensible and that the whole matter should be left to personal taste, political power, or religious dogma. As the bioethicist Ronald Green has pointed out, it just means we have to reconceptualize the problem: from finding a boundary in nature to choosing a boundary that best trades off the conflicting goods and evils for each policy dilemma. We should make decisions in each case that can be practically implemented, that maximize happiness, and that minimize current and future suffering.