David Aaronovitch, using the pulpit of his column, challenged me to justify an “outrageous claim” that I made in my Easter sermon. I said that there was a “militantly atheist and secularist lobby” that believes that “we have the right to kill… surplus old people”. He replied that it was simply not true.
But there is clearly a strong body of opinion – part of a larger, albeit unorganised, secularising or atheist agenda – pressing in this direction. Such an agenda doesn’t need protest marches. It has powerful politicians and journalists presenting the case.
Lord Joffe’s “assisted dying” Bill, rejected by the Lords last year, was, at one level, about “voluntary euthanasia”. The normal word for that is, of course, suicide. But his Bill was about those too ill to achieve that unaided – it was proposing not just “voluntary dying” but “lawful killing” by people enlisted by the patient. You can’t reduce this, as Mr Aaronovitch implied, to “people having a right to end their own lives”. The question is, do other people have the right to help them do so? Those who support this Bill reckoned they do.
He might want to come back at me on two other counts. First, I said “old” people. But clearly young people, too, suffer debilitating and incurable diseases. Reports from the Netherlands suggest that moves are being made to extend the euthanasia protocol to cover new-born children.
I applaud Bishop Tom’s willingness to respond to the criticisms being made of his Easter sermon in which he demonstrated that the resurrection of Jesus Christ says something very radical about the nature of our humanity. While there is hardly anything very new in what the bishop says, that he has to say it in the columns of the London Times demonstrates how quickly and far our society is drifting from the theistic understanding of what it means to be human made in God’s image.
This is an issue over which so many Christians (and those of other theistic faiths) seem determined to pretend isn’t there. But this issue will not go away and will only grow. Engaging the debate requires hard work on our part, but we seem less than willing to do that work. To have a biblical understanding of life means protecting not only its beginning, its end, and all that goes on in between, but also the use of biogenetic discovery to tinker with that life. We ignore this whole vast field at our peril.