Monday 21 March 2005
because I'm sick of hearing the propaganda
Obsidian Wings: Terri Schiavo
(because you can't go anywhere else without hearing skewed facts & propaganda, so why not hear some rational information...)
...
"First, in this country competent adults have the right to decline medical treatment. This is a very good thing, since many of the things doctors do to their patients would constitute assault if done against those patients' wills. It is this right that allows cancer patients to decide not to undergo that last excruciating round of chemo that would give them only a slight chance of survival, Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse the blood transfusions that they believe it would be sinful to receive, and people with painful terminal illnesses to refuse treatment for other diseases, like pneumonia, that offer them the chance of an easier death. This right is extremely important: without it, we could be subjected to serious assaults on our body without our consent, so long as some physician said that those assaults were medically necessary.
Second, courts have held that for these purposes, nutrition and hydration count as life-prolonging treatments, and thus that competent adults have the right to refuse them as well. This is also important: having a feeding tube inserted is a serious violation of a person's bodily integrity, and people have the right to refuse it. It's also a point that is often neglected in the coverage of Terri Schiavo's case. What is happening is not that a court has ordered that she be killed. If courts could order that, there would be no reason to wait for her to die; the court could simply order a lethal injection of some sort. The court has found that she would not have wanted this sort of medical treatment, and thus that it cannot be forced on her. This is completely different."
(link via Linkmeister: Schiavo explicated)
official legal record (PDF file)
"Although the physicians are not in complete agreement concerning the extent of Mrs. Schiavo's brain damage, they all agree that the brain scans show extensive permanent damage to her brain. The only debate between the doctors is whether she has a small amount of isolated living tissue in her cerebral cortex or whether she has no living tissue in her cerebral cortex."
Katherine said, in the comments:
"I think part of the explanation of the fervor of the religious right, and of many people's failure to deal with the factual information about Terry Schiavo's medical condition, is that her condition is really horrifying to many people. It is especially horrifying from a religious perspective.
The parts of Terry Schiavo's brain that have been replaced by spinal fluid are the parts that science tell us are responsible for a person's memory, thought, consciousness, emotion, personality, sense of right wrong--all of the things that make us a person, and make us different from any other person.
The single word that describes this concept, in the English language, is the word "soul."
The idea that a living and apparently awake human body could exist for decades without a soul is really horrifying, and a very common response to horror is to deny its existence.
The idea that the soul is located in a part of the body that we can locate in a CAT scan and determine has been destroyed is a really fundamental challenge to religious teaching--a much, much, much more fundamental challenge in my view than the idea of a Big Bang or of evolution through natural selection, and we see how strongly those ideas have been resisted. If we know that the soul is located or contained in a specific part of the body, it is much harder to believe that it is really different from the body at all, or that it somehow escapes the body and rejoins God after death.
It also challenges conservative Christian religious teachings about abortion and birth control: if an adult human being's soul is located in the cerebral cortex, then preventing the implantation of an embryo without any nervous tissue does not kill a human being with a soul, and aborting a fetus before it has brain waves does not kill a human being with a soul.
When a situation challenges our most fundamental beliefs, we are very reluctant to acknowledge that it exists."
My response:
Yes, I think that's the problem, exactly. This idea that because Terri Schiavo's intellect is gone, that means that doctors are saying her soul is gone. Surely nobody knows that, and whether her soul is "gone" is rather irrelevant, and actually kind of makes no sense. But all that's important to our material world really, in my opinion, is that her intellect is gone - because that's what counts in the material world, I believe. And therefore the only important issue I would feel was important were it my business to decide upon whether or not medical treatment should be forced upon my next of kin or not.
I was taught by priests as a child that god was "in my heart"... Though it was explained that it wasn't meant literally, but meaning in my being, inside me & with me always. Why would I need to rejoin then?
In my spiritual view, Terri Schiavo is with god... She was with god when she was a functioning person, she's with god now that she's not functioning intellectually, and she will be with god after her body no longer functions at all.
The presence of her ego makes no difference in these matters, from my spiritual view. And no human, no material force, can interfere with the relationship between Terri Schiavo and god - that's impossible, surely, unless that material or human force was equal to the magnificence of god.
So I think that stuff Katherine said about the soul explains a lot of the hoopla of the fervent religious people regarding the story of Terri Schiavo.
I think it scares the poopy out of literal superstitious-like religious people that the brain can contain all that is you in your personality. They feel sure there must be some "ghost" of a soul hanging around a body for as long as it breathes... containing all that is you... THE EGO.
For those of us who believe in a spirituality that is not grounded in the material world, that ego is NOT the soul, this is not a problem though. The idea of going back into "nothingness", at one with the universe, is not a problem for those who believe that our material world ego is not important to our soul.
I'm not saying faith has come easy to me. Indeed it has not, it has been born in me through trial and hardship, through fighting the very concept, frankly.
And my fear of death, and desire to live, demonstrates my continued attachment to the material world. I believe that attachment is natural, healthy, normal, and not something to be abandoned completely until death itself, or at least accepted imminent death... And certainly not compromised in youth.
Otherwise you wouldn't have such elderly figures of faith as the Pope, continuing on with life pursuits eagerly & courageously, in the face of physical material debilitation.
However, I still have the faith that my ego is absolutely not important in matters of spirituality. And this faith is instrumental in my leading an ethical life, lower in selfishness in everyday situations... less ego-based than in my youth.
I really thought that most religions believed this way... That the material world means nothing to god. That the spiritual is NOT about EGO... From what I'd read about all major religions, there is usually something about this.
But I'm learning that though most religions are based upon this concept, not all the followers subscribe to that. This is demonstrated by the amount of people who find science somehow threatening or inconsistent with their spiritual beliefs. Something that seems incredibly bizarre to me, personally.
posted by Chloe | Monday 21 March 2005 9:04 AM
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"This is demonstrated by the amount of people who find science somehow threatening or inconsistent with their spiritual beliefs. Something that seems incredibly bizarre to me, personally."
