Assisted Dying

Here's a thing: the former Archbishop of Canterbury now agrees with the idea of assisted dying.

He used to be against it, but he has changed his mind.  The old boy, George Carey, asks whether he had "been putting doctrine before compassion, dogma before human dignity?"

The obvious answers to both questions are a matter of stating the bleeding obvious: he's a 'faith leader', of course he has.  That's his job.

I have had countless pets throughout my life, starting with a labrador called Kim.  Even though I was quite young, I had worked out that something was terribly wrong with her and it was no surprise when my mum told me she had gone to sleep and would not wake up.  Phew, that's a relief.  Shame she wouldn't wake up again but hey, she was asleep and that's a lot better than being awake and incontinent, seemingly in awful pain and very unhappy.  It was only in later life that mum told me she had been put to sleep with a lethal injection.  Given her illness, it was the only humane thing to do.

The same with the cats of my life who became horribly ill and their time had come.  Older, wiser; why make them suffer when release was in sight?

It did not, and does not, occur to me that my beloved pet animals might be going to 'a better place'.  I just saw it as the end of their lives, not the 'natural' ending which would be undignified, painful and unnecessary.

As you get older, you go to more funerals and sooner or later one of them will be your own.  It is not a pleasant prospect because I would prefer to live forever in rude health and to not grow old.  That the latter is happening already at a rapid rate of knots suggests the former might be highly unlikely too.

A close relative died horribly, stricken with Parkinsons (what was god thinking about when he invented that one?) and later, I suspect, with a form of dementia.

I watched this healthy, gentle and active man being relieved of nearly all his faculties and his independence, all in the name of keeping him alive.

I am not sure whether he was even aware, in his latter days, that he had to be assisted, by means of a complex and expensive lifting device, to use the toilet, assuming he made it on time.  So far as I could tell, he was pretty well unable to communicate with staff in his care home to tell them he might wish to use the loo.  In any event, he required enormous nappies to catch the waste.

So we keep alive those who, through horrible, debilitating, incurable diseases; have little idea that they are alive in the first place.

You wouldn't treat a dog like that.

George Carey, for whom I have absolutely no respect at all, has finally recognised that he was wrong opposing assisted dying but I don't particularly care what he has to say on the matter.  He represents a failing institution - religion - which has less influence on the lives of the people of this fair island than ever before.

And he's a voice on his own since his successor, another elderly frock-wearing man (perish the thought that the Archbishop might be a woman: now that would be a step too far) with ideas and beliefs from an ancient book, probably a work of fiction, with no basis on fact.

In this day and age, why should we take lessons from the god squad on anything?  Science, which is always the subject of testing by evidence, has long taken over from religion, which is never the subject of testing by evidence.  Religion is faith without evidence.

I do not want to end up in some care home, unable to think for myself, unable to eat other than through tubes, unable to go to the toilet without being put in a harness and then having my arse wiped by someone else. I would rather be put to sleep, like my pets.

If religious people object to assisted dying, then in a free country that's their choose.  If they wish to go through what some of my family have gone through, with all the stress and misery it caused them, whilst they still knew what was going on and then their families when they didn't, then it's up to them.  I'd say they were incredibly selfish people, but that's only my opinion.

We keep banging on about the importance of religious freedom but I would argue that the freedom of the secularist is as important, if not more so.

I cannot tell you, beyond reasonable doubt, that there is no afterlife, that you will not survive your own death and end up in 'heaven'.  But by the same token, I cannot prove there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden. I would say both are equally unlikely.

Assisted dying should not be the decision of the state or by religionists.  But by the same token, it should be legal.

I find it highly offensive that a good number of people who have religious superstition try to tell the rest of us how to live our lives and indeed how to end them.

Show me proof that your god exists and I might take you more seriously but he probably doesn't and that probability is around 99.0%, more than that if you look at it scientifically.

It's for another blog and another day to debate whether we really do live in a free country - I say no! - but there is one thing I am sure about.

Assisted dying should be a matter of individual choice, not a policy laid down by governments or religionists. 

Some may say that George Carey's late conversion is a good thing but I am not so sure about that.  He was wrong before and he's right now, apparently.

To me, he's still the same old religious bigot he used to be and whilst on the face of it his support for changing the law might be a good thing, I think it's irrelevant.

Let us die when we want (if possible) and don't let the God Squad stand in our way.

What's good enough for our pets (even though they don't really know it) it's good enough for me.

Amen.