A NEW report by Theos responds to accusations that opponents of assisted dying will not be honest about their religious motivations.
“How much have your religious views influenced your decision?”: Religion and the assisted dying debate, by Nick Spencer, Senior Fellow at Theos, was because of be published yesterday; the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill returns to the House of Commons to proceed its remaining stages on Friday.
The report refers to advocates for assisted dying, corresponding to Dame Esther Rantzen, who’ve said that, in a supposedly secular country, assisted dying mustn’t be opposed on the idea of spiritual belief — or, whether it is, those beliefs ought to be declared (Leader comment, 23 May).
“In effect, assisted dying serves as a case study for the broader query of what role religion should play in a various, liberal and increasingly contested public square like our own,” the report says.
It tackles objections to “religious public reasoning”: for instance, that it’s “intellectually inadequate”; that it seeks to “impose” its views on others; or that religious believers, “through the use of publicly-accessible language . . . will not be being open about their true motivations”.
In response to the latter objection, the report says: “The concept that one sort of belief system — the religious one — ought to be named, outed and treated prefer it was a compromising factor, but that other (non-religious) belief systems needn’t achieve this . . . is predicated on the conviction that some belief systems (essentially contemporary liberal secularist ones) are normal, obvious, uncontroversial, rational, and straightforwardly compatible with ‘conscience debates’, whereas others will not be. This conviction is historically, sociologically and philosophically unsustainable, but it surely has not stopped it from gaining credence and informing arguments. . .
“Claiming that your opponents are fundamentally lying for covert (religious) reasons just isn’t an appealing way of conducting public debate.”
The report also argues that it’s “extremely odd” to accuse religious figures of “imposing” their views on others, “after they are exercising precisely the identical rights of speech, association, campaigning, and voting as everyone else. And it seems even stranger to accuse elected parliamentarians of doing so.”
