In High School English class, we read a story, I think written by an Englishman, about one of the traditions of the Natives and his observations. The story and the tradition, of course, to the cultured was quite outrageous or it created outrage in people.

The story was about how there were the tribes and the tribes had to keep moving, I would assume to stay alive, or so they felt. In the end it is a question of the survival of the fittest, and almost a might makes right philosophy, thought they may have been right, or they may have been wrong. Survival at all costs?

So the story was about how the tribes, when the aged could no longer carry themselves, they'd leave them alone in the wilderness to die. They couldn't, or so they felt, carry these ones around, the burden burdened and threatened, or so they felt, the whole community.

The questions always in my mind from such a story, have always been the might makes right philosophy, the survival at all costs, survival of the fittest, when death is murder, when suicide is martyrdom, when martyrdom is necessary, if it is ever necessary, was it necessary in this case?

Quite literally, to willingly stay behind in the wilderness alone when you need a community to survive, that's an act of suicide. But then, if your continued presense threatens the community, that's an act of martyrdom, yet if it is forced on you, that is an act of murder, no matter how the deed is done.

Morality, is it ever right to kill even just one, for the good of the community? My ethical code of course, says no.

My Church has a banner that's been up for at least fifteen years, whether near the altar or in the basement that says, "The welfare of the whole world is not worth the life of one child." I take "not worth" to mean, not equal. In other words, the life of every child, even just one child, is worth the suffering of every person. Something like that at least, we could discuss it.





In one of my favorite novels, or series of novels, the main character is a doctor, Claire Beauchamp. The first novel in the series is, "Outlander" by Diana Gabaldon.

In the story, third book I think, there is a man who's dying of a disease in which he will not survive, I think. Well, they are trying to save him, problem is, it's costing a fortune in the States, and so he asks her to end his life so that he isn't burdening his family with these exhorbiant medical costs.

In the end, everybody knew she did it, though it was never formally acknowledged. I can't recall whether they laid her off, and then she went back in time and it didn't matter, or if they put her in a position where she was not capable of doing that again. Either way, I feel outrage at such a thought.

Doctor-assisted suicide? Murder? Outrageous?

Random thoughts, my mind is working a mile a minute.


Hmmm, paradox:

"This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like win. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Chrisitanity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing th distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying."

Chesterton - "Orthodoxy"