Posted on 11/25/2007 7:22:05 PM PST by goldstategop
Bump for later read.
The Hebrew scriptures are there not so much to tell us what happened as to tell us what happens.
Nice PARTIAL recitation of history: after the court gave Terri’s adulterous husband rights to decide her treatment, the Florida legislature passed a law forbidding the kind of cruel starvation that Terri ended up enduring. And then the activist Florida Supreme Court narrowly—and quite wrongly—tossed the law out. Only then did it go to the Fed’s (courts and Congress), the part that is more famous in the history books.
People should not be starved!
Enlighten me: on what grounds did the Florida Supreme Court strike down the new law and did that court set new or existing legal precedent when it made its ruling? And, let’s suppose that you believe that Terri would have wanted to end her life given her condition, which is probably not the kind of thing that you would like to suppose but I want you to in order to answer the next question. How should Terri’s wishes have been carried out if not by withholding of food/water?
Sorry, no time to research it! But you can post more here if you’d like.
Peace!
How? Easily, as once the decision to end the patient’s life is made, the question that then arises is “kill by what means?”.
Dehydration produces headaches of severe and lasting duration, along with a long list of other unpleasant effects.
“How? - you asked. Ask any vet.
Ask any physician.
Both have used well known drugs to end suffering.
For those with no knowledge of medicine, consider that an overdose of morphine results in a death vastly preferable to the prolonged agonies of dehydration.
Perhaps we are unwilling to accept that once a “kill the patient” decision has been made, to quibble over the passive withholding of water and food as compared to the active injection of a lethal drug is to attempt to avoid the inescapable responsibility assumed by making the “kill the patient” decision.
Just a remark to this particular sentiment.
"Americans", so-called "native" or any others, get the name from an obscure Italian illustrator and perhaps pornographer named Amerigo Vespucci, whose actual exploration exploits may fall short of the legends told about him. Is it proper to call a Apache a descendant of a risque Italian ne'er-do-well? I think not!
Better to call an Indian by the name of the Tribe he belongs to (excepting Ward Churchill, who we can safely call "slime").
And those so-called natives, themselves, are only recently arrived. Most tribes as we European-arrivals found them, only arrived in the settlements we know somewhere in the recent 500 to 2,000 years. We are all "out of Africa" or someplace, it seems -- Eden or Africa.
So the real insult is to call somebody something they are most definitely not, and even that which is slanderous, e.g. "Native American". It is a joke, untruths and even insulting.
The same thing goes with "African-American". What the heck does that mean? Whereas "negro" is no more or less than calling somebody white, light-skinned, pale-skinned, etc. It means only black, or dark.
And it is one thing to call an Indian a Native-American, at least you recognize by that that he is a member of some real genuine organized tribe. He is still an individual, but also a member of a tribe. Not so with "African-American" -- by using that term you steal a man's individuality and place him in some box of prejudice and bias -- locking him to a dark back-wards continent full of strive and hazard to our day.
I think is strange that the writer equates the word 'old' as stodgy, musty, out-of-date. Perhaps the good rabbi also believes that folks over 65 as stodgy, musty and out-of-date too. He sounds like he's got a serious case of ageism.
Actually, I think what is sticking in his craw (a favorite expression of my Grampa Gene) is that non-Jewish people have absconded with Hebrew Scripture, tacked on more text, then had the audacity to claim that it is the completion of Holy Scripture.
The reason Christians did/do that is that is what Jesus claimed for Himself, the New Covenant in His blood.
However, I can certainly understand why the rabbi is cranky about it, as the Jews were indeed, before they failed to recognize Jesus, meant to be God’s people and a light to the Gentiles.
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