Life and death

 

 

Subject: Life and death.

I really don't understand the almost obsessive need we humans have to keep each other alive no matter what. Dying is as normal as living and the Buddhist makes it their lifetimes role to prepare to come to terms with it with the crucial caveat that they believe they will be born again in some form or other.
Watching on television old people performing (there is no other way to describe it) for a nurse in group therapy session one is left questioning the missed dignity in growing old. The old gnarled Ukrainian sitting in his cellar as the shells rain down at least shoulders the instincts of his neighbours, that of defiance towards the aggressor, a far different environment from the mollycoddled existence to that in an old people's home in Bridlington. Of course I'm not suggesting we should brutalise our old but this obsession in keeping them alive come what May, incontinent, in pain, confused and lacking the dignity which had been the cornerstone of their long lives ? Why can't they call time of their own choosing.
Perhaps we should all be given a pill, like the secret service hero who rather than divulge the secrets bites into the pill and seconds later is dead. It seems it's ok on state business, fighting a war, gathering information about the enemy but in our private capacity it isn't. We should all have the option to go when we feel the time is right, painlessly with no rancour, no religious stigma just a clearing of the decks to make space of others.
The cost of keeping old, infirm, senile people alive, especially those suffering dementia is cruel. They become test-beds for the pharmacy business, losing that dignity of purpose as they take their nightly medication, not to make them well but to keep them alive in this stunted form, “because we can, not because we should”. I'm not advocating State euthanasia but I am suggesting another way to close off ones life when you recognise it's purpose has no more meaning.
Of course it is recognised that those left behind fear the loss but the majority would welcome their loved one avoiding the terrible strung out provision we insist upon with chemistry and tubes as the prime mover of our last days on earth.
The religious qualification, ‘that only god can take a life’ is shot through with variables. A deformed baby can't be explained whilst in the same breath extolling a loving god. The whole panjandrum, creation, enacted by an almighty being is shot through with a lack of reality, not only the timeline but the fudged description of what life really means is an indication we should stay away from all ‘faith based religion’ and understand we are each a unique collection of scientific improbability mixed in with intellectual questioning of 'heaven and hell' as concepts born of an ancient primitive mindset.
Of course it has been suggested that science and religion are simply two different ways of looking at the same thing in which case they are not at odds with each other simply different stages of the observation, they focus on different aspects according to the interpretation of what is important. The problem for me in the implication that if there is a god, gods interpretation is the important one and not believing has dreadful implications.
We have thankfully moved away from burning people on a stake for questioning religion but that was mainly the institution, the church which ruled by fear rather than reason. If we could build a religious hadron collider to sift through the philosophical propositions as we do with partials of matter, peeling away the symbolism or justifying the symbolism by examining what we mean linguistically by the identity of death as a fundamental  in our life without resorting to a rewarding paradise, I might be more inclined to listen.