Slate
confirms:
"Last week Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that doctors could not unilaterally ignore a Toronto family’s decision to keep their near-dead husband and father on life support. In the same breath, however, the court also confirmed that, under the laws of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, a group of government-appointed adjudicators could yet overrule the family’s choice. That tribunal, not the family or the doctors, has the ultimate power to pull the plug.
In other words: Canada has death panels."
The article in Slate by Adam Goldberg concludes,
" Modern medicine increasingly allows us to extend life indefinitely, and so the question is no longer whether we can “play God,” but when, how, and who should do so. When humanity demands haste, and justice demands expert knowledge, Ontario’s death panels offer a solution—whatever Sarah Palin says.
Well, they already allow the killing of unborn, healthy humans who are in the way; why not dictate the deaths of those humans who are not healthy and are in the way.
6 comments:
Euthanasia and infanticide are the obvious outgrowths of C.S. Lewis' Men Without Chests. Adam Goldberg unwittingly gives away the game. "Experts" will play God. It is funny in light of so many cautionary tales from Orwell to the Twilight Zone that the left almost sees these tales as how-to guides instead of warnings.
I'm reminded of a brilliant episode o The Twilight Zone called The Obsolete Man where Burgess Meredith chides the State representative that History teaches them nothing. He comments that there were predecessors with the beginnings of the right idea:
"Hitler, yes, and Stalin, but there error wasn't one of excess, it was simply not going far enough! Too many undesirables around. Undesirables form a core of resistance. Old people, for instance, clutch to the past and won't accept the new. The sick, the lame and the deformed, the fastened to the healthy body and weaken it, so we eliminate them."
Since we haven't learned from the past, we are doomed to repeat it.
Rikalonius,
It appears more and more like the twilight zone every day. Dear Leader can say the most outrageous lies, and the press won't blink. There is no moral outrage because there are no morals.
@Rikalonius: that was from "The Abolition of Man", was it not?
I recall reading something similar in "The Devil's Delusion", about how our insistence on the 'right to life' was rapidly degenerating into a right by the State to determine when (and if) it began and when it would end, regardless of whether you were a convicted murderer or not.
The Dutch have, I believe, already been observed to be shuffling their elder citizens off this mortal coil with the blessing of the State. But I could be wrong.
@Stan: as long as we are here, speaking out, the truth will be evident. There IS moral outrage and there ARE morals - just, not the ones you expect in the places you usually frequent. You do tend to visit some of the more depressing corners of the web with your forays into the Atheist forums.
You'd have to pay me to go there. Talk about depressing. If 'Hallucination' by Genetix is the elevator muzak you hear on your way down to Hell, Atheist internet forums are what you have for entertainment while you wait in the lobby for... something.
Sorry. That's "Hallucinate" by Genetix.
Steven Satak: "I recall reading something similar in "The Devil's Delusion", about how our insistence on the 'right to life' was rapidly degenerating into a right by the State to determine when (and if) it began and when it would end, regardless of whether you were a convicted murderer or not."
Not just the right to live but also everything inbetween, from education to marriage, civil liberties to education. Big, intrusive government wants nothing more than to decide what you can or cannot say, think and do.
Steven,
Yes, the term Men without Chests came from the Abolition of Man. The quote in the chapter of the same names is
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
It is distilled down to this; that without a belief in and the teaching of universal moral laws, we fail to educate the heart and are left with intelligent men who behave like animals.
That of course doesn't do any justice to Lewis' writings on the matter.
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