Family, not religion, will influence our attitude to assisted dying [View all]

[SecularMotion]

One of the difficulties for the opponents of assisted dying is that they are thought of as religious fanatics. So tactically it isn’t a good move for 23 religious leaders to release a letter denouncing Lord Falconer’s bill. It will confirm to the bill’s supporters that opposition to it comes only from religious people and that they, in turn, are motivated by the teachings of their scriptures.

This last point is a bit rich when it comes from people who will, in other circumstances, argue that scripture is full of exhortations to genocide (and the Old Testament has plenty in its accounts of the conquest of what is now occupied Palestine). There is even a biblical precedent for assisted dying, when Abimelech, a remarkably unsavoury king of Israel who came to power by executing 70 half-brothers, found himself in a bad way after a woman in a town he was besieging dropped a millstone on his head and “broke his brainpan”, as the Geneva Bible says. He called for his armour bearer to kill him so that it might not be said a woman had done so, and the obedient young man did.

I don’t doubt you could make a less lurid Christian case for assisting the death of some patients. Polls show that a large majority of Christians and Jews favour assisted dying under some circumstances. And there is always Lord Carey. So the appeal to official teaching doesn’t do much to persuade waverers.

What is more important in this context is that it does little to persuade believers either. Detailed polling by professor Linda Woodhead shows that hardly anyone makes up their minds on moral questions by reference to the views of local or national religious leaders. For Anglicans, the figure is 2%; even among Muslims, fewer than 14% say they take any notice of what religious leaders tell them when deciding moral questions. What matters overwhelmingly are individual judgment, feeling and the influence of family.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2014/jul/18/family-religion-assisted-dying