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Notes -
They is currently an 8 month old baby in the UK with a mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal. The babies name is Indi: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/italy-grants-citizenship-terminally-ill-british-baby-after-104666139
A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.
The Catholics have said: give us the baby and we will put the baby in our pediatric Vatican hospital, and the Italian government has said they would cover the medical bills. The Italian government has also said that the family can have Italian citizenship.
The UK has said no, you can’t leave, you need to keep the baby here so we can kill it.
I know this sounds hyperbolic, but…I don’t think it is. Read the article.
Absolutely deranged behavior.I understand that in socialized medicine countries there is some calculation about how much life support will cost, and famously in Canada sometimes this means the government just tries to get you to kill yourself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby. The UK government won’t let them and insists that they should just kill her.
Insanity.This is just a weird mind worm that Catholics have. They’ve lost control of society, of culture, Francis is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, Vatican 2 has been in place for 60 years, divorce is commonplace, but one brain-dead infant needs to be pumped full of drugs and kept alive as a vegetable for the longest possible time. Maximizing the number of deformed, disabled, unwanted, underclass or critically sick babies appears - in the 21st century perhaps along with supporting large scale immigration - to be the guiding principle of the Catholic Church.
This isn’t even opposition to euthanasia, because as others have suggested, she wouldn’t survive for any period naturally (which is the traditional threshold), but rather must be artificially kept alive in what amounts to a gruesome and morbid Frankenstein-esque medical experiment.
I will respect Catholic trads when they actually fight for for something that might improve civilization in a material way for people currently alive and their healthy descendants instead of kvetching endlessly about irrelevancies. Until then, for God’s sake if for nobody else’s, they ought to let this deeply unfortunate child rest in peace.
The sanctity of human life as a bright line between good and evil is an important load bearing principle of our civilization that is much too often taken for granted.
It's easy to call Catholics idealistic and impractical, but you're the one who lacks foresight if you think it isn't worth fighting tooth and nail on this particular battlefield.
Consider carefully the horrors that we know lie beyond the door of the State deciding who lives and dies. And remember it isn't you who controls it at the moment.
Are you a staunch pacifist? Do you believe that no human being can ever kill any other human being under any circumstances? Even if your answer is yes, surely you can acknowledge that nearly no other person on earth, including in any nation you consider civilized, holds this belief. The vast majority of people believe that it is completely permissible to take another human life in at least some circumstance. That means that the line you are pointing at is not actually very bright at all, and is certainly not foundational to our civilization.
There’s a difference between a war and the state deciding that one of its own must die. I don’t think the line is death qua death but the line is certainly the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness of those citizens who live within the borders of the state. The concept of human rights is absolutely foundational to the west and I think this is the line that must be defended.
Are you suggesting that the death penalty - something eagerly practiced by every single country you would consider part of “the West” until practically yesterday, is “anti-Western”? Again, if you do, then you’re applying a definition of “Western Civilization” that didn’t exist until about forty years ago at the earliest.
It seems that you have an extremely progressive understanding of Western history, in which the West only started at the exact point in history in which your exact values became solidified. No Western person three hundred years ago cared about or believed in “human rights” in the way you’re using the phrase. Western countries were all totally fine with slavery at that point. Were they “not Western” at that point? England at least was executing thousands of people per year for even petty crimes. Was England not “Western” until it stopped doing so?
I’m suggesting that killing somebody outside of a state of war without due process (with the exception of self-defense) isn’t part of the enlightenment western tradition. It took a long time to get there, and we’re still working to get there.
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I don't think that they were saying that "the state should never decide that one of its own should die." It seems that we can draw distinctions between a convicted child murderer and a child, for example.
However, I agree that human rights, in the modern sense (secular nonlegal rights that one holds because of being human) is extremely recent. The traditional Western view (going back to the days of the Roman Empire) was that one's extra-legal entitlements vs. others came from God. There were other Western ethical systems that worked differently (Stoicism, Peripateticism, Epicureanism) but these weren't based on the legalistic model that Western civilizations inherited from the Ancient Hebrews.
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It was certainly abolished by appealing to Western principles. Much like slavery.
There's always a distance between the principles people hold and what they actually do.
But this is precisely the shell game I’m accusing you of. “Western countries happily lived one way for hundreds of years, and then very recently they decided to do things a different way. That means the original way they did things, which lasted for much longer than the more recent thing, was never actually Western at all.”
I don't see the enlightenment as a divergence but simply a continuation of the principles that have guided western civilization since it's foundation.
I suppose we might simply disagree there.
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