The Rebel Faction

I don't know how many of you heard or know about this, but the fight for Terri's life has finally come to an end, after thirteen days of starvation with her feeding tube removed. I wonder how long old Mikey will stay up celebrating tonight?

Yeah to ease her suffering. Probably no one wants to be stuck in a shell forever.

Starved for 13 days??? That doesn't exactly strike me as 'humane'

I don't know much about it, but the doctors who were interviewed on the radio here said that once you loose as much brain as Terri did, you basically don't feel hunger or thirst as we do. I guess 'starving' to someone in that condition is simply getting weaker and weaker and ... gone.
Plus, any more humane methods would have been classified as murder. Technically, removing a feeding tube is the same as never giving it, if you have no hope of recovery.

Issues like this define a civilization. How do we play god today? Is your life not worth saving because you will not live a productive life (productive being subjective, naturally)? How can we justifiably say that someone would not live a a productive life? How can we justify killing someone, or letting someone die, because their quality of life would not meet our criteria?

Perhaps my quality of life is lower than yours. Perhaps I don't mind playing the human carrot, while you won't take anything less than an Olympic Athlete's lifestyle. Perhaps I don't mind living in a cardboard box, while you wouldn't live in anything less than a Ritz.

Though, I think with Terri the case was pretty clear-cut. Her brain was gone, and barring a miracle from God, she would not be capable of being, well, human, ever again. Do we reduce a human to being nothing more than a large dress up toy because we can't bear the thought of her being dead, even though she was basically dead as it was?

This case has become a huge point for a lot of Christians in the US, what with the sanctity of life and such. The only thing I've been able to think of that bridges my faith, and my humanism is that this life really isn't that great. I believe there is something better after death, and you know what? If Terri believed that too she's having a lot more fun there than she would have had living inside an already dead prison.




Haha... this brings up the question of, how do we Christians define death? Was Terri already dead, and in the next world? As our small understanding of the body gets more and more advanced, and our ability to string people along for infinity gets closer to a reality, questions like this are going to become more and more frequent.

... and now my brain hurts.

I did. LOL. Kenny.

That was actually a very interesting episode. "No, we were playing God when we put him on the feeding tube in the first place!"