Every now and again, those against Christianity find a way to sum up Christian people as those who hold certain views on what Christianity is against. Yet, Christians need to do so based on what they believe in.
This is a very crucial moment to hang onto this principle.
As Americans were celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday last week, their British counterparts were marking a significant step by legalizing “assisted suicide” in England and Wales. Henceforth, if you are 18 years and over in Britain and have been diagnosed with a “terminal illness” and the doctors have given you less than six months to live, you shall be able to receive judicial permission to take lethal medication at home having been prescribed by your doctors, under strict conditions.
Those in favor of it say that it is a more humane way of dealing with pain. For the bill, Labour member of Parliament Peter Brinsley said, “We are shortening death, not life, for our patients. This is not life or death; this is death or death.”
Readers would understand that this rationale helps lessen the strain placed by the dead on the country’s welfare system and its National Health Service.
Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that western culture’s embrace of ‘assisted suicide’ demonstrates the decline of moral absolutes, which are explicitly Christian in beliefs.
Аmong cultures pressuring the elimination of the “unwanted,” whether they are fetuses, invalids, or senior citizens, it is important for Christians to cling to their basic belief in preserving life.
In this perspective, the cardinal ethical norm is the fact that each person carries intrinsic value since they’re made in the image of the life source in existence: God.
In fact, Mohler argues that any society which holds to this most basic truth cannot fail to devalue and undermine human life and human dignity through something like physician-assisted suicide. A society that denies this crucial truth, however, will at last justify anything, given enough elapsed time and sufficient provocation.
Thus, when moral certainty as Imago Dei is discarded, the terminally ill person loses his inherent worth, and mankind no longer leaves the control over life and death to God alone. In these societies, it is the State which plays God, determining whose lives are valuable enough to keep and which live is too costly to save.
That is, the prediction was in hindsight chillingly accurate. Stanley Hauerwas, the theologian, 2012
If Christians can be only a strange bunch of people who do no injury to their children and old ones: that, in itself, will be very much a notable gain. It may sound not very trumpeting great achievements in truth but I believe that it embodies politics. Supposing we can put up a disciplined community, which, through the fear of God, knows how to come to agreement on new births and help those in need; this is in any case a political alternative that the world otherwise does not have.
Widows and orphans were cared for by Christians. They helped the sick and supported children no one wanted. Christians also showed their compassion to society’s so-called burdens. It is believed that they even helped create hospitals. Christianity includes all human life, believing that every life has its own intrinsic worth.
In a culture where it is increasingly common to dispose of what is inconvenient – whether the unwanted unborn, the sick, or the aged – Christians must remain staunch in their basic and critical ethic of life. In blunt terms: basic Christian identity includes preserving life and helping the helpless; it’s a major part of what it means to be Christian.
