Wednesday 12 September 2007

A new secular consideration on death

Found an interesting opinion on death.

[Professor Kellehear] said: "Forty years ago, being dead used to be very simple - it was the point at which your heart stopped beating. Now death itself has been complicated by the fact that we can keep alive people who are brain dead almost indefinitely. Brain death is the point at which doctors can switch off machines or begin harvesting organs, but, to relatives, being brain dead is not the same as being a corpse. Corpses are not warm, they are not pink, they do not move, they are not pregnant - but a person who is brain dead can be all of these things. ... I would argue that these should be social decisions. To better inform these decisions, we need a closer look at the social implications of brain death."
While this is discussion would be lead by secular ideas and understanding of death and human nature, hopefully it would help our society to be more biblically shaped by re-examining not only what "death" is, but the way some of the most fundamental issues have been handled in recent years. Am I being too naively optimistic about secular discussion? Maybe.

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