The Act redefines a word by parliamentary fiat:
- taking your own life. or
- asking another to take your life
is not ‘suicide’ or ‘murder’, for the purposes of the act. Anyone dying under the authority of this act will be said to have died of a ‘disease’.
Accepting this premise is Orwellian.
The New England Medical Journal of 1949 carried a report entitled, ‘Medical Science under Dictatorship’. This paper argued that the policy followed by the Nazis in exterminating the ill and unwanted had its way prepared by non-Nazis during the 1920s, and particularly by the push for euthanasia on compassionate grounds.
Incidentally, while under German occupation during WWII, Dutch physicians refused their invader’s mandate that they should see their job as making people better. The Dutch doctors understood that the Nazis meant that these doctors were not to care for the chronically ill but were to help kill them. Even after one hundred Dutch doctors were sent as prisoners to concentration camps, the remainder refused to submit.
But there is a further consideration. How can the framers and promoters of this Act guarantee that the sufferer will be better off in death. Hamlet’s question, with some reservations, is still reasonable. That fictional Dane thought ‘suicide’ might solve a multitude of problems, until he asked what happens after death, in that undiscovered country from which no traveller returns.
Now, Hamlet was not entirely accurate in the last quoted clause. There has been One who returned from death, never to die again. The person is not fictional, but is the creator of the universe.
The Lord Jesus Christ is God incarnate. He became a male human in order to put right what the first male human made wrong. By Adam’s disobedience, he doomed himself and his children to death. We, his children, have followed Adam in disobedience. We die because of our disobedience to God.
As the Bible says, the wages of sin (breaking God’s law) is death.
By contrast, Jesus is widely reported as having done good, and never having done anything out of place. He always did what pleased God. God the Father is reported in the Gospels as saying so explicitly at least three separate times.
So how could he die, since he did no wrong? He became a man to die in the place of the disobedient in order to save them from death.
This work of Jesus suggests that what ever ‘death’ is, it is something to be saved from, not welcomed as a relief. The Bible teaches that there will be a final judgement, and an eternal punishment, for the disobedient after death. Jesus came to rescue disobedient people like us from that judgement by taking personal responsibility for the guilt of others. By his death, he completed the judgement due to those who would come to trust him. Those who rely on Jesus Christ have their lawless deeds covered, and their sins forgiven. By faith in him they have a good eternity.
Without Jesus, there is no good eternity, but rather a fearful, everlasting condemnation.
This last reason is the best reason not to think that death in itself will solve the problem of pain.
Don't take it from me 