Mercy Killings and Suffering

 As the arch- liberal and secular British Parliament looks at legalising mercy killings, the main opponents rely only on pragmatic arguments.  They point to the very real risk that in a society as materialist and focused on gain as the United Kingdom, elderly parents or sick relatives may come to be regarded as burdens and that pressure subtly would be brought to bear on them to “choose” to be killed.  This is a very real risk, but the chief reason to oppose this change in the law is deontological - life is a sacred gift from God and not our own individual possession to be disposed of as we see fit.  

This is a difficult and sensitive subject, where good points made too coldly and logically will only alienate the reader.  Our freedom is precious, as is our gift of life and suffering can be very cruel, but crucially it is permitted although rarely inflicted by divine authority.

While Man must be free from an oppressive political State he must also be protected from harming himself, because his sovereignty is not unlimited.  He holds his life on trust as a gift, not as an absolute possession.  Otherwise self harming, sexual sado-masochism, suicide or anorexia would merely be a matter of personal choice.  We have a telos, that is to live virtuously and find our full participation in the divine.  Of course participating in the divine cannot be forced, but neither should acts that completely desecrate what God has given us be tolerated.

We owe it to God first not to desecrate our souls and bodies, but also owe this to our community.  If we behave badly or in a depraved way, we do not only harm ourselves, but the communal body, the common weal.  And this gives society rights over our “freedoms”.  If we become so enslaved to our passions that we change the moral life of the society then society has the right to stop us.  Sexual vice, greed and avarice, are not to be immune from collective sanction.  We can see where the liberal nihilism of the West has led - to the Pride parades and the destruction of the wholesome family.  As a consequence, Western society itself is disintegrating and everyone is suffering.  There is a clear negative externality to everyone else if libertarianism and moral anarchism is permitted.  The permissive society of the West has led to more misery, more suicide, more mental disorders for all its material wealth.  Each person suffering is a victim in one way or another of permissiveness.

In that context we can now approach the difficult topic of human suffering from illness leading to the desire for death.  We do not need to be distracted by liberal arguments about individual autonomy on such a serious question.  It is clearly a mercy to relieve suffering and if we take a more shallow utilitarian position of maximising pleasure a case can be made that unhappiness will be reduced by allowing others to assist a suicide.  Of course this is based  on a very simplistic and shallow analysis of happiness.  We must rely on the superficial  Benthamite definition of happiness as hedonism or pleasure.  Such an understanding of happiness is far removed from Aristotle’s eudaimonia, a type of joy based on virtuous living.  It seems by contrast that this Benthamite utilitarian view of maximising happiness and of minimising unhappiness is too superficial.  It takes no account of the resulting guilt, the feeling of transgression of a deep moral law, or the fear of eternal consequences that would inevitably result.  It would be like saying a woman who has an abortion to pursue her career is not deeply wounded internally, even if she is in denial about that.

We could rely then on Aristotle’s account of doing the virtuous thing as being the way to true eudaimonia.  But the real question here is not addressed.  With life-preserving medicines, people can live much longer and suffer therefore more from their terminal conditions and degenerative illnesses.  Is it right or compassionate seemingly to force people to suffer?  Are we simply imposing a rule with no regard to the specific situation?  Would a loving response not be to relieve suffering?

Herein though is the Promethean move.  Even while acknowledging the developments in medical science means people just as much as having symptoms relieved will also suffer illnesses for longer than nature would have once allowed, to take the positive step of ending a life does surely cross a deontological line.  It is  a case of us taking power into our own hands as to whether we or our relative should live or die.  Are we really saying it is for us in the modern West to decide how much we should suffer?  Does this not in some profound way disrespect all the suffering around the world?  Is it as though we as First-world Europeans do not deserve to suffer like other people?  What gives us the right to shake off trust in Providence and declare that we are exempt from the law of suffering?

For our collective human life has been all about suffering since the Fall.  We are all both mortal and susceptible to physical suffering.  Suffering seems cruel indeed, but it would not be permitted if not for some deep reason that is to our benefit.  Suffering shapes our lives every step of the way.  It in a sense is the way to glory for the fallen human, dominated as he is by his passions and death.  And we are aware we are promised God will not put us under any trial that is beyond us.  Life is not and never has been about pleasure, it has rather been about how we grapple with suffering.  Technological and medical advances, combined with a hedonistic utilitarian philosophy have perhaps led us to misunderstand what life is about.  In the midst of life we are in death.  All around us is decaying, its beauty fleeting - a mere hint of the Transcendent.

It is all too easy to pontificate on a deontological rule in the face of the suffering of others.  There is, though a reason for doing so - if we believe life has a sanctity over and above mere individual choice, then we must see life as the embracing of suffering as a way to change us and lead us to virtue and to God.  Once we take life and death into our own hands in such a way, it is a Promethean move, it is a claim to an authority we cannot and should not have.  It is a revolutionary grab.  It is the atheistic Stephen Fry attempting to hold to account Almighty God for the child with bone cancer.

This is not just about God as a powerful authority though, but that the ultimate Authority over the cosmos is all-loving and all-good.  It is about trusting while suffering in this fallen world, full of distractions, temptations and hubris, that God really does know what is best while not compromising our free will by eradicating the consequences of our Fallen state.  Suffering was not given in Paradise, but after the Fall suffering became a part of our existence and ultimately, in a mysterious way, this will all be to the Good. 

If we juxtapose it to the alternative brave new world the advocates of scientism and our eugenicist elites advocate for, a world with no physical suffering or want, but Man remaining fallen and in a state of rebellion, we can then easily envisage by contrast a world where love becomes impossible, control absolute and temporal existence the seeming totality of life.

Instead, we should resist any move to such a temporal utopia that claims to eliminate suffering and its dread lessons about our own nature, our own capacity for love and kindness, for faith, for hope, our own susceptibility to despair, to anger, to human frailty.  Suffering may well be the route to our spiritual transfiguration - the reason we are all here.  We should not make such a Promethean move against the law of the cosmos, written by the hand of God.  .  

Judaeo- Christian - Contradictory or Complementary beliefs?

 

Politicians in the Anglo Saxon parts of the West frequently refer to our common Judaeo-Christian values.  What does that really mean?  Certainly theologically there is a vast chasm between the Christian and Jewish faiths.  

In these current times one should make clear that identifying any difference or separation between Jewish and Christian values is not a comment upon racial difference, does not imply any eugenicist agenda or must entail hostility to one religion or the other.  The purpose instead is to identify how this attempt to synthesise two Abrahamic faiths can be used to justify a particular political or cultural agenda, namely the Post-War liberal settlement, founded on a reassertion of Enlightenment values.

Let us go back tot he very beginning, the point of separation of Jews and Christian.  Following the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in AD 70 a new form of religion emerged from the Hebrew tradition, the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism that over the next few centuries developed a new sacred collection of writings in opposition to the New Testament - in particular the Talmud.  Those Jews who did not accept the Resurrection and did not become part of the Church from 70 AD, as Christ had warned, lost the Temple.  Instead, in replacement of  a faith centred on the physical Temple, the focus was on the Rabbinic tradition and the synagogue.  Over the following centuries the Talmud and the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, where prophecies about Christ were revised became the sacred texts. Only after some centuries had passed did Rabbinic Judaism emerge as a coherent and fully-fledged religion.

The Church emerged following the Resurrection and before the sacking of the Temple.  The Church was in a sense the continuation of the Temple after the physical building was destroyed.  The Christian Old Testament was the Septuagint, with an older history, where prophecies relating to Christ were clearer..  

There are fundamental differences between these faiths that both claim to be the continuation of the Hebrew faith.  The Rabbinic Jews revised and rejected the earlier multi-person Godhead, as found in Genesis and the Book of Daniel, emphasising instead a radical monotheism, as would later be found in Islam.  The Church, in the tradition of the three angels visiting Abraham and the Son of Man appearing in the fire in the Book of Daniel, and the many other Old Testament theophanies of God's energies, believed God to be triune - Three Persons in One Godhead.  The Rabbinic Jews saw the Messianic prophecies as to be about a future Messianic political state.  The Church interpreted the prophecies as being about Christ directly.  In a sense Rabbinic Judaism defined its theology against the Church.

And so in theological terms Judaism and Christianity are contradictory.  In terms of religious praxis, because of the Incarnation, iconic representations of Christ are permitted and condoned in the Church.  Rabbinic Judaism is hostile to the religious image.  Christians are freed from the dietary laws, Jews must follow kosher.

In terms of eschatological beliefs the two religions oppose each other.  For many Jews the Messiah will come when the Temple is rebuilt.  For many Christians the rebuilding of the Temple is the harbinger not of the Messiah, but of antichrist.  

In terms of ethos, Christ taught to love our enemies.  For Jews revenge on the enemy is a sacred duty.  We have seen this following 7th October 2023 in the mass killing of women and children in Gaza.

How then can these two faiths be seen as complementary?  Advocates of Judaeo-Christian “values” from Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray see Judaism as a fundamental building block of Western values.

A well-known advocate of the importance of Judaism to the West is the homosexual conservative writer Douglas Murray.  For him it is a more significant blow if Jews die than Christians, because there are more Christians.  Despite Jews being on the edge of European society historically, he regards their values as fundamental to what it means to be Western.  Throughout the history of Christendom, the Jews were though regarded as the “other”.

The reason centre-right thinkers value Rabbinic Judaism does not lie in the contradictory theologies.  For Murray and his like, it is rather that Enlightenment values and modernity emerged from the chemistry between the two religions.  The separate religions have different ideas of the sacred and the sacred is what holds each faith in its own unity.  For Murray, who is an atheist, it is the “values”.  This becomes a somewhat nebulous concept.  There is very little that can be seen as Chrsitian in the current actions of the IDF in the Middle East.  Neither was the dispossession of Palestinian families from their ancestral lands during the Nakba a Christian approach.  Nonetheless a reductive approach can find commonalities if the sacred is removed.  Indeed the reduction of us all to atomised individuals might be seen as the lowest common denominator of the two cultures denuded of their ideas of the sacred.

Protestantism was a significant factor in the injection of a more Jewish flavour to European culture.  The new world after the Reformation saw the growth of the banking sector, the importance of compound interest (usury had been forbidden by the Church).  In the translation of the Bible the reformers relied on the Rabbinic Masoretic text. As we moved towards the market economy and a more revolutionary society, our culture found common links with Judaism.  Much of what had been regarded with suspicion in Christendom - banking, revolution, trade - and linked to the Jewish other, was now endorsed and promoted in Protestant countries such as England and Holland.

The European secret societies that grew in power throughout that period were fascinated by the Kabbalistic texts of esoteric Judaism as well as other forms of the occult and esoteric.  It was then as we moved both towards an economy based on banking and a revolutionary political and cultural position that the specific variant of Western society emerged, which would later be defended by Western Judaeo-Christians.  This is what is being defended when we hear about the Judaeo-Christian culture.  It is not about the sacred, where the two religions are in contradiction.  It is about a liberal secular society, with its roots in the revolutions of the Eighteenth Century - revolutions in thought, values and politics.

A fundamental change occurred in the Nineteenth Century when the Scofield Bible was published.  This was funded by Zionists at the time who wanted the Protestant Churches to support the creation of a Zionist State.  The Bible was annotated in a way to suggest the prophecies about Christ were more to do with the creation of a Messianic State of Israel.  Christians were (conveniently) to be moved out of world history through a so-called rapture.  This heresy of dispensationalism spread throughout American Protestantism and shaped the folk view of Jews and finally the Israeli State, regarded almost as fellow believers in a sense.  This was a vital ingredient in the American popular political support for Zionism.

The secular values that link cultural or civilisational Christians and Jews are not about the sacred, but about secular liberal shibboleths such as individualism, rights, equality, liberation.  The very beginning of the USA was in the foment of the Enlightenment and the milieu of various secret societies focusing on throwing off traditional hierarchies and institutions.  

In this sense Judaeo-Christian is not a meaningful idea from a traditional perspective.  It dismisses the ideas of the sacred that are incompatible as irrelevant - looking only for materialist answers.  It focuses on the worldly and revolutionary values of the Enlightenment West, not Christendom.

In terms of geopolitics, the idea of Judaeo-Christian values has put the West on the side of revolution and progress, not tradition or an idea of the sacred.  It is not simply about Israel, but in a topical matter our way of forcing change on the proxy of Ukraine we force them to abandon their Church and their more conservative values.  Judaeo-Christian is a phrase uttered by Western conservatives who are merely yesterday’s liberals, who have little sense of tradition, hierarchy or the sacred.  They are the dull men of business and money, not the heroes of honour and virtue.  Their conservatism is the conservatism of an enervated culture, emptied of its true values and sacred beliefs.  The conservatism of the bottom line, profit, the mercantile class.  True conservatives stand for our own sacred, our hierarchies, our traditions.  This older conservatism, supplanted by the Judaeo-Christians, is about the Church and the institutions that flow from it in the Christian world.