Please Try and Help Terri...... 4127

You've suggested that this one in particular should be starved to rest. That seems to be hat I as talking about. You may wish to generalize the debate, but I wuld note first that you start by designating her NOT a "severlely handicapped person", but a person with "no life in any meanigful sense".

I differ. Her parents differ. Lots of people differ with you. Her life makes sense to me. She's alive. People care for her. She moves. She smiles. She squawks. She feels sensations. Sounds and looks alive to me, and I don't care for you choosing to say what's life and what's not.

Nonsense - she has a mind. It's just not up to your standards.

So are most of mine! Or are you suggesting I have to think about standing up the whole time? I don't view the lack of a capacity to think symbolically as meaning a lack of life!

It most certainly IS!

That's alive in many senses too (dying, but aren't we all). But it's much LESS alive than she is. It can't breathe, for one thing. It can't say "Ahhh! Wahhh. I think everyone would place it's degree of liveness at less than 0.1% of what TS has.

Well, I'm sorry, "kill me if I develop bad hair" is not a morally defensible position. Neither is "kill me if I go mad". Neither is "kill me if I can't tell you to". Neither is "kill me if I don't tell you not to". Nor is "kill me if you think I would like to die".

Simply, killing is not moral - the church takes that view, JC took that view, many, many people take that view. If you do it, you had better have an overriding reason that entails the good of many versus the bad karma of a few. Killing because you think the person involved would like that is not moral (not to me! I won't do intrinsically evil things just because somebody asks me to), particularly since you believe "she" is already dead and the present inhabitant of her body is not her, and you believe that she is not suffering.

I can't see any moral defense! What right does the TS you think already died have to kill the present remnant inhabitant of her body? Let alone what right you have!

So why expect me to pronunce on their morality, per se? I can only tell you that killing is barbaric, particularly when the killee is not suffering, and is being looked after, and has people who like her and love her the way she is.

An instruction to kill oneself should one become unable is not even remotely moral, when there is no greater good served by it. If you were a spy and had the secret of the atom plant, maybe you might leave instructions like that. If you were an ordinary person and feared being overcome by pain, well, ask for inject.

But her situation is not hopeless nor unbearable. She's alive and happy within her parameters. She is in no pain. She has a comfortable life.

A will, whether to be applied when living or not, is moral or immoral independently of other considerations. Killing a helpless being just because its body once belonged to you, and you've mostly died, is immoral. It's the rest of you - it has your characteristics. Self-mutilation is not moral, nor is dissolution, unless a greater good is served. What greater good?

Well, she's a life form that looks perfectly alive to me, and I see no reason to kill her, especially NOT on the sayso of a person who is not her and is merely talking about a couple of words she might have once let drop, even if it were true. And evven if it were her will, I would not be able to claim that starving her to rest were ethical!

She feels no pain, according to you too! Let it enter into the equation.

The criteria must always be that a greater good be served. In your uncle's case, it saved him pain (I don't see why - pain management is a medical science; we can turn off the sensors). In TS's case, it saves her no pain.

Your father saved your uncle pain, which is good. Your uncle merely wanted to save himself pain. Your uncle had nothing to live for that made it worthwhile for him bearing the pain (or having it managed). But TS is not in pain, and her living would serve the function of pleasing her parents. I see nothing but bad being done by killing her - which makes it imoral in itself, to say nothing of the barbarous manner.

There you are.

I say the cat scans. I saw plenty of brain. Black areas there were, but plenty of brain too.

I do not view it as the same thing. I cannot see how one would protest saving a brick, on the grounds that it MIGHT "grow up" to be the Taj Mahal. On the other hand, I can certainly protest killing off the Colloseum in Rome, ruined shell of its former self that it is.

Then subsbreastute it by "almost never" in your mind. One can do an immoral thing if it creates a greater good.

It isn't, so forget it.

I can perfectly well believe that the Church of Satan promotes killing of oneself and others just because one wants to. I am not a religious man! But I know that almost all churches hold exactly the opposite view, and always have.

Nor do I, since I don't care and wouldn't know them from Adam.

Looks like it to me - some people are starving another person to rest, even though third persons are pleading to be allowed to supply her sustenance. liquidate, in my book.

Good. I'd also describe killing by the state as liquidate.

In this case, they would be mistaken, according to your argument. After all you claim that the being that was TS ceased to be many years ago, yet you also claim that it is by her will that the being now lying in hospital be end. So that looks like the killing of one being by the will of another, which is liquidate, and the people helping do it are therefore guilty of the same crime, by buttociation.

Seems like "Though shalt not commit liquidate" is perfectly acceptable as a translation to me. Though perhaps it might be "Thou shalt not get away with liquidate".

The church managed to justify wars. Kings always asked the church to dream up a justification for their intended war.

Common law has been codified.

Then consider none of them absolutist. I see a life form who is being starved to rest, while her corporeal parents want to give her sustenance and preserve her present state. The state is not painful to the life-form. The life-form moves, utters syllables, can respond at about the level of a clockwork canaryü etc. Worst of all, killing her will do no "greater good". On the contrary, it is hurting people, and of course the life-form. It's cruel.

The clbuttical punishment was to disinherit their offspring, and claim their estate. Also refuse a christian burial, etc. I'm sure you could come up with something - maybe they get to be stuffed and mounted on a Planet Hollywood wall for all eternity? Plus all the disinheritance and stuff. Be inventive.

What can one say about a state that kills its own citizen prisoners? That's barbaric. Thou shalt not commit liquidate, sayeth the bible, and they didn't mean "because a guy in a wig says you can, that makes it alright". Ask JC.

Peter