Posted on 12/10/2008 4:53:02 PM PST by GOPGuide
Look, you cannot choose to be born. You can decide whether to jump under a bus or not, so you can choose when you die, but its an imperfect control, because you could have a heart attack or a stroke or an accident and be dead at any time. So, you cannot control when you are born, you can only partially imperfectly control when you are going to die, how can anyone say they “own” their life?
And if you dont have a right to life, how can you possibly have a right to die?
Its not about using God to bludgeon people. The point is that you are the custodian of your life, rather than the “owner” of it. You can (imperfectly) decide what you are going to do with that gift of life, for good or ill, but because you are a custodian, not an owner, other people have a share too. I am me, but I am also someone else’s son, someone else’s husband, somone else’s friend, someone else’s teacher or confidant. If I choose to end “my” life, I am also destroying that which affects other people. Suicide is often portrayed as being a selfless act “I dont want to be a burden any more”, but in fact I would argue its usually an extremely selfish one. “I can’t bear living any more” “I can’t stand it” “I’m going to die anyway” “I, I, I...”.
You could say that not “owning” your own life is allowing other people to enslave you, but its a very odd way of looking at it. Our control of our “own” life is so imperfect and anyway, no man is an island. Would you really want to not have other people share your life? To do that you would have to be utterly independent of everyone else, and that would be horrible.
If they want to kill themselves they can put a .45 bullet through their head or a bomb around their waist. They should not try to corrupt the medical profession.
Man is made in God’s image, if you kill yourself you are destroying that image. Besides, to kill oneself means that you have given up all hope, and there is always hope.Hope for what?
That argument sets up all kinds of stuff about well...my God says you should do this with you life...or I can enslave you because you dont own your own life.The "life is not your own argument" was very popular in Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, the Confederate States of America, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea.
And if you dont have a right to life, how can you possibly have a right to die?But we do have a right to life, and thus a right to end it.
1 Corinthians 6:19...
It says exactly that in the Christian Bible.
I never said I was a Christian...
1 Corinthians...
19 What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
20 For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.
Not at all. God chooses to do (and not do) all manner of things. God could make everyone a Christian but He choosed not to. That doesn’t invalidate the notion of faith (in fact it rather confirms it). The abandoning of hope by us however implies an abandoning of God.
So is not helping them.
I think we are getting into difficulties because of the limitations of language. You do indeed have a “right to life” in the sense you mean, but that is a right under law, i.e. one that is agreed to be a good and meet thing by your fellow citizens and guaranteed by your nation’s government via its security forces. And this is a good thing too. Don’t get me wrong, there should be a “right to life” like that.
What me and Sir Francis are saying is that you have no NATURAL right to life. Your life, its course and its duration are not something that is guaranteed by God, (or by the forces of nature if you are an atheist).
That is one reason why we do not allow people to kill themselves. Many people go through a tough time and think about killing themselves but later come out of it and are glad that they are alive. Besides helping someone to die is just plain murder and so is killing ourselves.
Guilt by association eh?
It is immaterial what the Nazis, Japs, CSA, Soviet Union et al thought. The argument stands or falls on its own merits. I could say that the “life is your own to do with as you will” is the main plank of the pro-abortion lobby.
Besides, I’m not saying your life is not your own, I’m saying its not COMPLETELY your own. Remember the bit about custodian?
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