Wednesday, September 26, 2007

What's the point of unity?

I've just read a hugely distressing piece in the BBC News website:

Anglicans to halt gay ordinations

Basically the Church of England told the Episcopal Church to toe the line, and rather than stick to their principles -- the principes that gay people are as God made them are and just as entitled to love, marry, and serve the Lord as anyone else -- they bent and did what Canterbury told them to do, mostly because the African bishops were getting all medieval on Canterbury.


"The meeting was attended in part by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who urged the Episcopal Church to make concessions for the sake of unity."

Here's what I want to know: What's so hot about "unity"?

If two bodies of people have diametrically different positions about something, why force one body of people to compromise their principles for the sake of staying in the same club. What's wrong with leaving? What's so bad about saying "you know what? We're never going to agree on this issue, and if agreement is a condition of membership, we'll just be over here in our own, new clubhouse on the other side of the lake, k?"

WHY ARE PEOPLE'S CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS BEING COMPROMISED FOR "UNITY"?

I also liked this bit:

"
The Episcopal bishops did reaffirm their commitment to the civil rights of gay people and said they opposed any violence towards them or violation of their dignity."

Do they really not see that keeping gay people second-class citizens and denying them the basic right to marry IS a violation of their dignity??? What's with this attitude that physical abuse is the only form of oppression?

Thursday, September 13, 2007

The "New Death"

Read an article in the BBC this morning about a doctor who wants to revise the definition of death used in the UK.

Right now the medical definition of death is based on brain death -- the cessation of brain function. Apparently this is confusing to some people because a body can be kept alive on life support after the brain is no longer capable of cognitive processes, and so a body doesn't "look" dead.

The definition of death as brain death came about in the 1970s because it made organ harvesting (there's an agricultural term if ever i heard one) much more feasible.

Now a doctor is aguing that the definition of death needs to be revised to fit more in line with people's preconceived ideas about death (ie, when the heart stops) rather than "medical pragmatism."

I have 3 reactions to this:

1. What's wrong with medical pragmatism? He says it like that's a bad thing.

2. Our definition of death needs to be based around our definition of life. We need to ask ourselves not what is it that makes a person dead, but what is it that makes them alive? Where does the essence of a person reside: in the heart, as Dr. Kellehear seems to be advocating, or in the brain? Well, since we can perform a heart transplant on people and they are still the same person after that they were before, the heart doesn't seem to be what makes a person a person, or what makes them alive. The essence of a person resides in the brain. When the brain is gone or dead, there is no coming back. The body may still show symptoms of life, but the person is gone. That then, truly, is death.

3. Dr. Kellehear is approaching this from the wrong side. There is a descrepancy between what is medically death and what people percieve as death, but rather than altering a sound (and pragmatic) medical definition to suit the general public's uninformed sensibilities, we need to focus on educating the general public and slowing altering the general social perception of death.