In John Christopher’s 1967 teen sci-fi classic The Tripods, the heroes Will and Fritz have just destroyed the ‘Masters’, an alien race which has taken over the Earth, once they meet a few of their unlucky slaves. These are people controlled by electronic ‘caps’ fused into their brains.
One of them rises up from the fallen body of his alien overlord and declares to his fellow-slaves, “The Masters are not any more. Therefore our lives now not have a purpose. Brothers, allow us to go to the Place of Happy Release”. That refers, in fact, to a euthanasia centre the Masters had thoughtfully provided.
Though I will need to have read this not less than thirty-five years ago, it got here to my mind after I first heard advocates of assisted suicide complaining that some people oppose assisted suicide for ‘religious reasons’. This gets it precisely backwards, somewhat as if it were said that some people do not believe in kosher food, or in pilgrimage to Mecca, for religious reasons; for in fact these are things that are believed in by one particular religion, for reasons specific to that religion, which obviously everyone else doesn’t share.
The demand to be permitted to kill oneself, and have assistance provided to assist accomplish that, is similarly a peculiar belief of 1 particular religion. The religion in query is humanism, and the peculiar belief is in ‘autonomy’.
The similarity to the Tripods scene is that this: autonomy is, for the humanist, a master which should be served. In the power to make decisions which maximise pleasure is found the complete purpose of human life. And when that master, the all-powerful lord of autonomous alternative, is found to be no more, then life is believed now not to have a purpose. Suicide is the one thing left to do.
Now it might sound strange to talk of being enslaved by autonomy; is not autonomy about freedom, the other of slavery? Yet it is a component of the genius of Christianity to perceive that the other is in truth the case. Sin – autonomy from God – thinks it’s gaining liberty but in truth finds slavery. The try to escape from the rule of God no more brings freedom than a plane escaping from its wings or a fish escaping from water. Those who arrange autonomy because the master ethical principle don’t find that it liberates them right into a brave recent world of happiness and fulfilment. Rather, they find that it locks them right into a way of pondering which progressively dehumanises and destroys.
Nowhere is that this clearer than with assisted suicide. The drumbeat of the argument of those campaigning for it’s autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. It is the quasi-religious belief in autonomy which is driving the campaign for it and it will not be hard to see why.
The adulation of our personal autonomy, the idea that our individual decisions are the meaning and purpose of our lives, meets an inconceivable problem with the approach of death. For some time, the illusion (for that’s what it’s) of autonomy could be maintained by medical treatment which alleviates symptoms and postpones the top of life. But eventually the time will come when reality breaks through. Death is the last word negation of autonomy; it’s a thing which comes upon us, and against which our will is entirely unable to face. The approach of death is due to this fact a thing of horror to humanism, not only due to its utter hopelessness (a humanist funeral is one in all the bleakest occasions it is feasible to experience) but since it stands as an inescapable rebuke to the complete humanist project.
Once death has come close enough that its inevitability can now not be ignored, the master whom the humanist has served all his life is found suddenly to be gone. Hence the grievance of pro-assisted-suicide campaigners that the dying at present ‘haven’t any good decisions’. This will not be a lot a press release of reality (it’s in truth entirely false) as a lament for a departed deity. The human with no further ability to decide on has, within the humanist religion, no further value or purpose. The decisions are not any more. Therefore our lives now not have a purpose.
Except one. There is one possible alternative remaining, a technique of refusing to bow to the irresistible power of death. It is to make the moment of death itself a alternative, an exercise of the desire. Like King Saul falling on his sword in order that the Philistines wouldn’t overtake him, it seeks to avoid the shame of defeat by death by being the reason for death; thus maintaining to the last, even after it has ceased to have any plausibility, the idea that I’m the master of my ship, I’m the captain of my soul. By pulling the trigger myself (or pressing the button on the ‘medical device’, to make use of the term within the Leadbeater bill), I’ll keep the autonomy faith to the very end. Let us go to the Place of Happy Release. Before death can smother my ability to decide on, I’ll cheat it on the last by selecting it myself.
This is why assisted suicide is such an article of religion for humanists. It is why Dignity in Dying has spent huge sums of cash on tube adverts declaring ‘When I cannot stay, let me select how I’m going’. It is why Humanists UK says that UK laws should provide ‘the alternative to face the top of life with dignity and autonomy’. Note the whole identification of those last two; dignity and autonomy are indistinguishable within the humanist religion.
And it explains the motivation behind those pushing for a change within the law. They are, almost universally, either explicitly or functionally humanists. And it explains why, almost universally, those that should not oppose it. It’s not that they oppose it for ‘religious reasons’; it’s just that they do not share the one peculiar religious reason which drives it.
So the query is, why should the law of the United Kingdom be shaped by this one religious view? Particularly one each so fundamentally self-centred and so fundamentally bleak? Which can see no value or meaning in humanity apart from that which we will self-generate by our own decisions? And whose devotees are so in thrall to their master that they like death to the prospect of living without it?
Mercifully, the United Kingdom was founded, and constitutionally still stands, upon a much better foundation. One which understands that human life will not be an individualistic project of self-creation but a precious gift from the God of infinite holiness and ideal goodness. Who made us to display his image, and entered our world to rescue us from our self-destructive attempts at autonomy, and to lift us to an inconceivable future glory. And due to this fact that human life will not be an accident from which we must salvage some value by our own self-assertion against the brute facts of reality, but is a precious gift to be received from our conception and treasured for so long as it lasts. And in order we approach its end, we don’t find our lives stripped of meaning but somewhat that their true everlasting meaning and purpose comes into proper focus.
The query of assisted suicide due to this fact presents us with the query of whether we wish to switch that foundation with one other, sprung from one other religion, which demands suicide precisely due to its atrophied view of what human life really is. It will not be a matter of whether Parliament should reject assisted suicide’ on religious grounds. It is somewhat, whether it should accept it when it’s demanded by one, and just one, religion, within the service of its own esoteric and destructive god of human autonomy.
Rev Dr Matthew Roberts is Minister of Trinity Church York and former Moderator of Synod of the International Presbyterian Church.
