Assisted suicide might cause even worse suffering after death

(LifeSiteNews) — Physician-assisted killing has been legalized in several states in the U.S. and in all of Canada. While the requirements are somewhat different, the argument of those who favor physician-assisted killing is usually the same. They argue that a person has a right to choose when and how to die.

Physicians, other healthcare professionals, and politicians who support physician-assisted killing usually claim that causing death will end a person’s suffering. Those who supposedly choose to be assisted in killing themselves are told that their suffering will end by ingesting a chemical.

Is that true, though? Is death the easy way out that supporters of physician-assisted killing claim it to be? What about the human soul? What happens to the soul of each person after death? Does suffering end at death, or does suffering actually get worse for a soul when earthly life ends? Does a person immediately “rest in peace,” or are they given suffering more intense than anything imaginable and for more “time” than would even be possible on earth?

Some might be surprised to learn that if a person makes it to purgatory (which guarantees they will eventually make it to heaven) multiple saints, including St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and even St. Catherine of Genoa, taught that suffering in purgatory is likely worse than any possible suffering on earth.

Use your imagination to determine what the worse possible suffering on earth would be for you. Simply consider being ravenously hungry and extremely thirsty with no ability to eat or drink for the next several thousand days. Consider being so tired you are in pain all over while in class, at school, or at work… but class or work won’t end and you won’t be able to lay down for 60 years. Purgatory would be worse suffering than that. And those probably are not even the worst imaginable sufferings for a person on earth.

Thus, some of those considered to be experts in both theology and philosophy concluded that suffering likely gets much worse after death for potentially many people.

Of course, those who support physician-assisted killing almost always say something like, “There is no scientific evidence for the human soul. We don’t believe in the soul. We only treat the human body and death ends suffering for the human body.”

While there actually is scientific evidence of the human soul, most of the evidence is not going to be provided in this article.[1] Rather, one of the main points of this article is to explain that those who support physician-assisted killing are actually saying that human beings have souls. In fact, most (if not all) of law in both the United States and Canada and many other countries implies that human beings have souls. This is especially true in medical law, which requires that a person “consent” to receiving chemicals, surgery, and other treatments.

“Consent,” free will, and choosing all require a human soul. There has to be an unforced mover, so to speak, which moves to make a decision for the body to act on. The reasoning is borrowed from one of St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for God – the “unmoved mover,” the “first mover,” or “that which moves without being moved.” For a choice to be free and for consent to be truly consent, there has to be a separate entity other than mere neurobiology which is unforced and then “moves” into action by choosing to do so.[2]

Those who believe that human beings do not have a soul are usually described as materialists. They often claim that human beings are merely neurochemicals or physical things combined into a body.

However, if human beings are merely neurochemistry and other chemicals, then the law is basically just one set of chemicals (a judge) reacting to another set of chemicals (a defendant).[3]

Now apply that to medical law. Chemicals cannot “consent” to a proposed medical treatment; the materialist belief is that chemicals either randomly or necessarily cause the body (more chemicals) to act in a specific way. Neurochemistry might present options in the “mind” of a person as options to choose from, but to say that a “person” consented implies that something other than neurochemistry made a decision. There must be a spiritual agency beyond our neurobiology – again, an “unforced” thing that chooses and then acts. Without the soul, “consent” is nothing more than a chemical reflex and could not be called “consent.”

Phrases like “freedom to choose” and “right to die” imply that humans have a soul as well. It is not possible for neurochemicals to have “freedom” or “rights.” Otherwise, you would have to say that the milk you drink has rights. Rights and freedom presuppose a unified, decision-making thing – a thing that acts through, but is not forced to react by, its underlying neuroelectrophysiology.[4]

If there is no soul, then every action committed by a human body was actually determined by the laws of physics millions of years ago. The materialist view, which is implied by many of those who support physician-assisted killing, makes law almost impossible. A person could not be said to commit a crime. The action would merely be either a random reaction, forced reaction, or reflex of neurobiology.

But law says that humans do commit crimes; therefore, almost all of law is based on the belief in a human soul.

There are other problems with the false philosophies of those who support physician-assisted killing: brain cells are replaced by new cells over time, and human thoughts change. Anyone who drinks caffeine will know how sometimes thoughts, impulses, and emotional reflexivity can be drastically different after an overly strong cup of coffee or a lot of pop/soda/coke compared to water. The law, however, holds you responsible for a crime you committed 20 years ago or after a 20-ounce cup of coffee. This implies there is something permanent (a soul or persistent identity) that remains the same even when the biology changes.

Now how does this all apply to the physician-assisted killing? Those who support physician-assisted killing are essentially making a false claim: they are acknowledging that humans have souls while falsely claiming to know that suffering ends for those souls by killing the body.

Put another way, if governments acknowledge the “will” or “consent” of the patient to die through physician-assisted killing, then governments acknowledge a “will” or “choice” that exists apart from mere chemical activity or survival instinct in the brain. If that “will” exists, then it is non-material. And if governments are dealing with a non-material thing, then governments have no “scientific” data to prove that death actually ends the suffering of that thing which is a part of or one with the person.

By using this false reasoning, governments are facilitating a permanent, irreversible “medical” treatment while being 100 percent ignorant of the patient’s long-term outcome. It seems that most medical law would consider that to be gross negligence or a violation of the “duty of care.”

Putting it slightly differently, if governments do not know the post-death consequences of the soul, then authorizing the “choice” to be killed is an arbitrary act. In any other medical context, if a doctor said, “I’m going to perform this surgery, but I have no idea if it will make your pain 1,000 times worse for the next 100 years,” the physician would likely lose their license or at least hopefully be penalized. Because governments (and most, if not all, other people) do not know what happens to each soul after death, then governments must not legalize, authorize, or decriminalize physician-assisted killing and anything similar.

If each human has a soul that exists, which governments imply that each person does, then the risk of physician-assisted killing (the supposed “treatment”) could be intensely increased suffering. Since the medical field (acting in collaboration with governments) admits it cannot see, measure, or understand the soul, it is physically impossible for the state to provide “informed consent” regarding what happens to the patient after they swallow the poison-labeled-as-treatment. Governments are therefore authorizing a procedure where the primary risk is unknown and potentially infinite.

This, it seems, would be unconstitutional, at least in the United States. While it is possible to philosophically and theologically prove that for most people suffering actually gets intensely worse after death, at minimum governments should not legalize physician-assisted killing due to its unknown consequences on the human soul.

References

References↑1Claims about “out-of-body” or “near-death” experiences are not necessarily scientific evidence and should be approached very cautiously due to the possibility of hoaxes or other false information designed to trap Catholics into what will later be discovered to be false evidence for the soul.↑2How a spiritual soul “moves” the human body is often complained about by materialists and scientists and is beyond the scope of this article. However, the answer might be best explained to be brute fact – it is a property of the human soul to be able to move the physical parts of the human body. It might be that simple. Scientists might simply have to add that significant fact to their textbooks. The body and soul are a unity, one entity – the technical Catholic word is “hylomorphism” – and the soul’s ability to “move” the body is an inherent property of being human. Here it should be noted that Catholics do not believe in “dualism,” which states that the body and soul are separate entities while on earth.↑3It is not clear that a thing with chemicals could even be called a “judge” by those who deny the soul, but that point won’t be argued in this article.↑4There could be more on this point than is being mentioned here, especially in regards to the consequences of mortal sin causing the spiritual death of a soul and “slavery to sin.” But that is beyond the scope of this article.