Assisted suicide is not possible. The word suicide means to intentionally cause one’s own death. Assisted means to help, aid or support. So if you help someone to kill themselves, it’s a crime. Call it what you want but whatever you call it, it is wrong.
Why is it if a child is born ill, everything is done to save the child, but 80 years later when that individual is suffering or struggling we want to kill them or they want to kill themselves.
Suffering seems to be the biggest consideration in ending life. We don’t want to see our loved ones suffer and we don’t want to suffer, but we don’t look at it for what it is. It is life. It is not a choice of take it or leave it. Life is life from the day we are conceived.
Some suffer greatly through life and others breeze through with no pain or suffering. We would all choose the latter if we had the choice. But we don’t have that choice.
Why is it when we are dealt a very severe blow that we lose that struggle for life? It is very difficult to comment on other peoples difficulties without walking in their shoes. I think we have lost our perspective. Science and medicine offered us psychological excuses for our actions or inactions.
The suffering and infirm can be given a pill or a needle, it’s OK, they won’t feel a thing, it’s painless, it will put them out of their suffering, they’ll be in a better place. Most of us believe we will be in a better place when we leave this Earth but who are we to hasten that process? I believe that life is a gift from God and only God can take it.
Suffering for Christians is a means of achieving a higher meaning of life. In 2 Corinthians, “I am content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, for the sake of Christ, for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Hinduism holds that suffering follows naturally from negative behaviours in this current life or in a past life and one must accept suffering as a just consequence and an opportunity for spiritual progress.
In Islam, the faithful must endure suffering with hope and faith, not to resist or ask why, accept it and submit to it as a test of faith.
Regardless of your faith or lack of it, assisting or taking one’s own life is not in Gods’ plan and is far beyond human thinking. We were all given a life and it is up to us to live it to the fullest, to its natural end.
As a Canadian culture, we need to counter this negative end-of-life attitude with one of hope and a spiritual perspective. Life is a sacred gift from God and only He can take it.
Leo Leonard
Red Deer