The points I was referring to were the issues sorrounding assisted suicide, as well as your reasons to not support it.

A lot of time people just have opinions, their emotions, and perspectives based on their own reasoning. But not know how things play out in other nations that have already crossed this path.

Based on opinions only this topic would have people clash heads on what counts as moral, and what is a more merciful approach. But looking at how the situation destabilizes and harms those who never ask for assistance to die, that changes everything. Kind of like in theory agreeing to socialistic perspectives and movements, before understanding where they lead and why to avoid them.

I agree with you about not supporting assisted suicide. But now I have reasons to back up my distaste for it. Thank you for the good points to consider.

To Banjo Paterson.

What makes life and death a fundimental human right? Think about it. We don't get to choose to be born, and most people don't choose how or when they die. It is a natural state of the world, everything that is alive is either born, hatched, or grew from a seed (or some other biological way of birth); and also everything dies.

To say that there is a fundamental human right to life and death is not to state a natural law of the world, but instead it hints at humans having this right whereas animals do not.

Life is a fundimental right that most civilizations honor and protect. Killing an animal is a small thing that might be allowed for hunting, for food from farm animals, and for protecting yourself. But with people the moral laws we have keep us from killing other people for the thrill of the hunt, or for food.

This is not a fundimental natural order of things, it's a moral order of things. Therefore think carefully on the question. What makes life and death a fundimental human right? If you find an answer know that it is on the same playing ground as whether it's right or wrong to voluntarily kill someone. Making assisted suicide on the same level as capital punishment, war, and murder being moral or not. Think carefully before you answer. Because this is already a slippery slope from assisting someone who chooses to die, versus choosing for them that they meet the conditions to be "helped" in this way.

Banjo P,

<<The Holocaust and other crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong whom you mention, have nothing to do with euthanasia or “voluntary assisted dying”.>>

Take a read of what I wrote in the article: '

In Germany in 1920, there was a publication by a lawyer, Karl Binding, and a psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, called The Permission to Destroy Life Not Worth Living, that opened the floodgates and led to open discussion and legislation to permit euthanasia in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially, it was seen to have a beneficial social effect in dealing with the so-called "useless" sick'.

VAD has moved to non-VAD in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. These countries have demonstrated the 'slippery slope' moving from voluntary to non-voluntery.

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Dear NNS & OzSpen,

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NNS wrote :

« We don't get to choose to be born, and most people don't choose how or when they die. It is a natural state of the world … »

That’s correct, NNS. Laws of Nature are the “principles” which govern the natural phenomena of the world. They are universal phenomena, unlimited in time and space. Like all reality, they exist independently of ideas we may have concerning them. Laws of Nature are not of our choosing and they have nothing to do with morality.

Water boils at 100° C at sea level. Gravity exists throughout the universe. Electrons all have an identical electrical charge. Copper conducts electricity. There are no Laws of Nature that are limited to planet earth, to our galaxy or the Andromeda Galaxy, nor are there any that hold just for the 21st Century or any other century.

Life on earth is a Law of Nature. All life species evolve, self-reproduce and die according to the Law of Nature. Life on earth has nothing to do with morality.

Like all laws, the Law of Nature engenders rights. Life and death is a Law of Nature and all life species have the right to live and die.

However, as Darwin pointed out, the evolutionary process favours the “survival of the fittest” in the struggle for life against predators and natural phenomena. Nothing to do with morality.

Morality is a human concept, designed to maintain peaceful and harmonious relations among the members of human societies.

As Patricia Churchland explains :

“Morality results from a complex interaction of genes, neural processes, and social interactions. All organisms have genes that enable them to survive and reproduce, but mammals also have genes to produce the chemical oxytocin and vasopressin, which prompt them to care for their young. In some mammals such as humans, the same chemicals encourage animals to form long term relationships and to care for each other. Such caring is the biological root of morality. The origins of morality are both neural and social”

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Banjo Paterson.

I think you've misunderstood the whole thing completely. Natural laws, and natural principles are not a set of rules to live by. They are or they aren't. There are no rights to them, just how things are.

Therefore there are no natural rights from the discriptions you gave, nor from the discriptions I gave. Any right we attribute is a moral thing, not a natural law.

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Dear Not_Now.Soon,

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You wrote :

« Natural laws and natural principles are not a set of rules to live by. They are or they aren't. There are no rights to them, just how things are »

No, Not_Now.Soon, it’s more complex than that.

In the realm of nature, whatever order is the most efficient may be considered to be the most just. Justice is the natural order.

By application of the same principle of efficiency of nature, it is not difficult to imagine that the physiological evolution which favoured the development of superior intellectual capacities in human beings to all other living species was accompanied by the development of religious belief and conscience.

As nature patiently continued to fashion its masterpiece of efficiency, we gradually devised a set of laws and regulations largely inspired by those imposed on us by nature, completed by others founded in religious belief or which were simply the fruit of our developing conscience based on humanitarian considerations.

A hallmark of such laws and regulations for most of western civilisation is the Moses code which, according to Christian tradition, is believed to have been compiled about three and a half thousand years ago (though there is no consensus among scholars regarding the dating of the code).

Supposedly, a thousand and a half years later, just fifty years after the birth of Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, who appears to have been the principal promoter, perhaps the founder of Christianity, following a vision of the “resurrected” Jesus whom he never met, exercised a determining influence on the religious belief and philosophy of which we still find trace in modern, man-made law, today (known under its technical term of “positive law”), alongside traditional Mosaic law and Noahide code.

Our distant ancestors no doubt meant well in integrating the right to life into our positive law but, whether it was by ignorance or misguided religious belief (considering suicide to be a “sin”), they failed to recognize life and death as a single process.

It is the process that is an inalienable and imprescriptible human right.

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