Is Suicide the Answer to Pain?

Doctor assisted suicide is currently legal in ten states, plus the District of Columbia (Oregon; Washington; Montana; Vermont; California; Colorado; Hawai’i; New Jersey; Maine; New Mexico.). It is a horrible thing that the people in these places have such a low view of life. But it is very possible that an eleventh state will soon be joining the club.

Recently, Stephen Miller, an 85-year-old former doctor turned himself in to face manslaughter charges in New York after police determined he had traveled there from Arizona to help a woman commit suicide. But fear not, several New York lawmakers are rallying to the cause to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future. Legislation is now pending that would give terminally ill people the option to choose to kill themselves with the help of a doctor. It seems that polling in New York shows support for that law by a 2-1 margin.

The New York law supposedly has numerous restrictions and “safeguards” to make sure it doesn’t get abused. But there are people who are very concerned that this is one more slippery slope that will just add to the culture of death. Once a law like this gets put into place, there are always people who want to expand it’s scope as the citizenry become desensitized to its horrors. For instance, currently it is illegal for people in New Jersey and Vermont to come from out of state to commit suicide. But, there are ongoing lawsuits in both states demanding that the restriction be eliminated. And that is just how expansion gets started.

So what is the next step? Canada has had assisted suicide on the books since 2016. Lawmakers there are now considering an expansion that would allow people with a mental illness diagnoses to get help ending their life.

Then what? Well, its not too hard to see where this goes. The Dutch assisted suicide law went into effect in 2002. That first year, there were over 1,800 cases, and it has gone up almost every year since. The latest reported year was 2022 with over 8,700 cases.

But the slippery slope is not just about how many cases, but also how it is practiced. While it almost always starts out being just people who are old and terminally ill, it virtually always expands. Recently in the Netherlands, a 29-year-old physically healthy woman was permitted to have her life ended because she suffered from depression.

So just how far are we behind the Dutch? Probably not very far. We can see the progression by looking at U.S. states that have allowed this for only a few years, Canada that has allowed it for a little longer, and the Netherlands that has allowed it even longer.

But that’s what happens when a naturalistic worldview begins to dominate a society, and human beings are looked at as nothing more than one species of animal among many – with no eternal soul.

Naturalism is the belief that the natural universe, operating by natural laws, is all that exists. For Naturalists, there is no God, so there is no one in existence to give humanity any objectively true moral guidance. That leaves it up to human beings to develop their own moral code to live by.

But who gets to determine what that moral code should be? Well, ultimately it is the ones who are able to exert the influence to pull it off.

In the case of euthanasia, it is politicians and medical people. But the reason they have been able to do it is because the population at large, in the locations that allow it, have accepted suicide as a legitimate moral good. American society is increasingly pushing God aside and walking down a road that devalues human life. (We see the same thing happening in the abortion debate.)

How has this happened? It has happened because the people who hold naturalistic beliefs have been better evangelists for their beliefs than Christians. They have infiltrated and come to dominate virtually every institution of modern society – our schools, the political establishment, the entertainment industry, the news media, business, family, and in many places, even the church. They are the ones educating our children, setting political policy, normalizing immorality in entertainment, slanting news coverage, delivering products and services that push God out of the picture, leading our families to ignore God, and promoting false beliefs.

There is only one way to turn this around. Christians must become better evangelists for the Christian faith than the Naturalists are for their naturalistic faith. Contrary to the understanding of many, we are not in a culture war, we are in a faith war. This war is not the shooting kind, it is the persuasion kind. And until Christians get as serious about their faith as Naturalists are about theirs, we will continue to see immorality rule the day.