Morality
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A doctor should be allowed to practice euthanasia |
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Euthanasia
(from the Greek euthanathos, eu ‘well’ + thanathos ‘death’) is defined as ‘the painless killing of a
patient suffering from an incurable disease or in an irreversible coma’. In
other words, euthanasia is a death hastened by doctors with the permission of
the sufferer or his relatives. |
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In
1998 the Waldensian Churches in |
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Confutation |
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Euthanasia
is murder in God’s eyes. He who has the power to kill and to make alive is
God alone (1 Samuel 2:6). Therefore, if the country where you live permits
euthanasia and one of your relatives is in a hopeless condition from a
medical point of view, because according to the doctors he is condemned to
die after unspeakable sufferings without any chance of recovering, you must
not give the permission to let him die in advance (before time) in order to
put an end to his sufferings or to make him suffer less, because if you give
such a permission you will share in a murder. And then who said that that man
will surely die? The doctors, thus human beings who can’t lengthen the life
of men and who have a limited knowledge like all the other human beings.
Therefore they do not have the last word, for it is God (the Omnipotent, the
Omniscient and the Omnipresent) who has the last word in the life of men. It
is God who decides when a man is going to die and what kind of death he will
die. Thus what counts is His decision, is what God says. |
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So,
let us suppose that one of our relatives is dying of an incurable disease and
is suffering terribly. How should we cope with such situation? Well, first of
all, we should ask: ‘What did God determine to do? Did He determine to let
him live or die?’ Nobody knows (unless God reveals His will by a word of
wisdom). Therefore we must plead with God to heal that person who is dying of
an incurable disease. For we must never give up hoping in God, for our God is
able to raise up a man the doctors say he’s done for or a man who thinks he
is done for. Job is a clear example of how God can change the most desperate
situation. Job was suffering terrible pains, his flesh was wasting away from
sight and his bones clung to his skin and to his flesh, he thought that he
would soon depart from this world, and his wife was waiting for his death;
but God healed him and made him prosperous again. Another eloquent example of
what God can do when there is no more hope from a human point of view is that
of king Hezekiah, who was taken ill and in the midst of his illness thought
that he was a dead man, but God heard his prayer and saw his tears and added
to his days fifteen years. “I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go
to the gates of the grave: I am deprived of the residue of my years. I said, I shall not see the LORD, even the LORD, in the land
of the living: I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world.
Mine age is departed, and is removed from me as a shepherd's tent: I have cut
off like a weaver my life: he will cut me off with pining sickness: from day
even to night wilt thou make an end of me” (Isaiah 38:10-12) said Hezekiah in
his song after he was healed by the Lord, and he added: “What shall I say? he hath both spoken unto me, and himself hath done it: I
shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul. O Lord, by these
things men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit: so wilt
thou recover me, and make me to live. Behold, for peace I had great
bitterness: but thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of
corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back” (Isaiah
38:15-17). As you can see, the above mentioned examples show us clearly that
God can change the most desperate circumstances in the life of men, for both
Job and Hezekiah were ‘terminally ill,’ but God healed them. Knowing this,
therefore, let us pray for our relative who is terminally hill so that God may
heal him, and God will surely heal him if it is His will to heal him. Do not
lose heart, with God nothing is impossible. |
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But
not only can God heal incurable diseases, which lead to death, if it is His
will; but He can also raise the dead. Therefore He can act on behalf of a man
even after his death. So he can allow a man to die of an incurable disease in
order to raise him from the dead before or during of even after his funeral.
The resurrections which are recorded in the Scripture confirm this concept.
So it is lawful for us to plead with God to raise a dead person, and
obviously if it is God’s will to raise him from the dead, it will come to
pass that that man will rise again in answer to our prayers. |
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But
what shall we say if God has determined to let him die of that incurable
disease but not to bring him back to life? We will say: ‘The will of God be
done.’ If the dying person is a believer, when he dies he will go to heaven
to be with the Lord; if he is a sinner, he will go to Hades (hell), where he
will be tormented with fire, and thus he will continue to suffer in another
world, and we know that the sufferings in Hades are greater than any
suffering on the earth. |
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I
would like to point out that many of those who die in severe pain are people
who have been struck by the rod of God for their wickedness. For God makes them reap the evil they have sowed. The Scripture says
that God struck king Jehoram with an incurable disease because of his
wickedness, as it is written: “After all this the Lord struck him in his
intestines with an incurable disease. Then it happened in the course of time,
after the end of two years, that his intestines came out because of his
sickness: so he died in severe pain” (2 Chronicles |