Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away

This is an interesting article about an ongoing debate in Switzerland about suicide tourists, people who come to the country for assisted suicide, you know, like O.J. Simpson if Nicole had just been still. The part that caught my attention, or parts I suppose, are two fold: first, though actually later in the article, was that 73% of the Swiss people favor assisted suicide even if the person IS NOT TERMINALLY ILL...let that sink in, the second was the denigration of Christianity embodied in this rather barbaric statement:

"Those Swiss politicians who want to change the rules on assisted suicide behave like moral apostles," said Margaret Weibel, president of Zurich-based suicide organization Ex International. "They are backward-looking people, entangled in the Christian belief that humans don't have the right to make decisions on when to end their lives."

Let's 1) focus on the idea that assisted suicide is apparently perfectly acceptable in Switzerland (and, having had the cuisine there, I was tempted) in the case of a non-terminally ill patient; and 2) that it's a backward Christian idea that maybe people shouldn't be offing themselves at their most vulnerable moments.

Let's also throw out one more idea. If you're a suicide bomber, planning on taking a gun to school or a rally and shooting folks, or generally feel the need to hurt other people or animals, skip the assisted suicide process and pass immediately to go away. Take the gun, dynamite or other instrument of destruction, jam it directly up your ass, and pull the trigger or detonate the object. I'll be along shortly to thank you for short circuiting the process and with a prayer.

But to address the two prior issues, isn't the view more barbaric that if a person who is not terminally ill wishes to die that they should simply proceed than that this is an issue for psychology and not Dr. Kevorkian and the big red "easy" button? Isn't it far more modern to think, hmm, this may not be the act of a rational being? Silly Christianity and it's respect for life that it shares with modern medicine and psychology.

Finally, I can only hope that a pro-suicide activist organization would practice what they preach.

On a more serious note, do some research on this. Japanese teenagers are killing themselves at alarming rates. Suicide rates are up around the world. Attitudes about the value of life (and I apologize but I have no empirical data on this) strike me as being connected to the general development of societies and we are regressing.