Respecting the Elderly and Dieing

My wife is in nursing school and has clinical duty where she gets to "be" a nurse. This past week she got to care for a 93 year old woman who was bed-ridden and suffering. The woman was pleading with my wife to let her go (meaning let her die). Of course my wife could not help, but it brought to mind just how disrespectful it is to let our elderly live beyond when they want to live. This religiously-based notion that suicide under all circumstances is an evil thing stops us from allowing the humane thing to be done.

I’m old enough now that I can imagine a time when I’ll be tired of living and would welcome the quiet sleep of death. Death shouldn’t be so feared; the act of dying might be a painful one, but death itself is not.

Many cultures in history have allowed their old to die gracefully when the time came. Our own Native American Indians are an example – the elderly (or really anyone) could wonder off into the woods or fields, as the case may be, and quietly die on their own.

In modern times, we have the luxury of methods that will allow us to quietly go to sleep and die. Why are we therefore hanging on to this notion that all suicide is bad and we force people that would rather just fade away suffer continuously until they get so far gone that technology can’t keep them alive.

It seems to me that this is just being disrespectful of the individual and their right to die when they choose to. Everyone dies, so why should we make the end so painful when there are alternatives?

Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born today in 1809 (198 years ago). As we approach his 200th birthday and we see continued debate about his theory of evolution, more and more people are recognizing Darwin on his birthday as one of the most noteworthy scientists of the 2nd millennium. There are various celebrations and events going on around the world and a site that tries to tell you about all of them (http://www.darwinday.org).

At this point Darwin’s “theories” have turned into the widely accepted beliefs of evolutionary biology and have been applied to other fields as well. It is a rare (and probably misguided) scientist or intellect who does not believe in the basic theory of evolution. In Darwin’s times there were a number of unproven elements that Darwin himself was unable to resolve before his death; virtually all of those have since been resolved and his theories have stood the test of time better than any others.

It is shocking then that only 14% of Americans think that evolution is “definitely true” (pretty much the lowest in all “western” countries) and over a third think that the world was created “as is” 6000 to 10000 years ago and is immutable. America is falling behind in science and technology while there are people trying to turn it into a Theocracy. These are very frightening facts to me and they should be to you as well.

One of the difficulties with evolution is that it just isn’t intuitive; you look around and can’t see any evolution happening at all and to say that we have a vast majority of our definition (DNA) in common with a rat is, frankly, insulting. Finally though there is a modern example of evolution in the making. The HIV virus has evolved in recent years into two distinct strains (HIV-1 and HIV-2) that are no longer capable of mating (combining) and this is one of the distinctions of two separate races. Scientists have seen the variations happening and have seen how some variations are more successful than others; evolution in the making. The reason this can happen with a virus is the shear numbers of reproductions that occur.

It took us going into space to finally convince the Catholic Church that the Earth revolves around the Sun (something Galileo almost died for in 1633) and maybe this modern proof that life is not immutable will help prove once and for all that evolution is fact.

How this fits into Religion is debatable and not really relevant to this blog. But the fact is that we are connected, each and every one of us, to every other Human (after all, genetically, there is no such thing as race) and also to every other living organism on the planet. That is an astounding thought and hopefully one that makes you look around at the world in a different light.

Thank you Darwin!

If you are interested in reading up on the modern view of Evolutionary Biology, try Steve Jones' Darwin's Ghost, The Origin Of Species Updated from Ballantine Books.

Irreverence is a hallmark of humanism

Irreverence is a hallmark of humanism. No writ is too holy, no image too divine to escape merciless critique, doubt, and even ridicule. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that even the most cohesive and organized humanist groups lack a defining cadre of sacred objects and ideas.

Yet sacredness is essential to spirituality for theists and non-theists alike. What we hold sacred forms the foundation for archtypes, traditions, mythology, rituals, and celebrations. It sets a context for the ethical and moral codes we use to guide our own behavior and to judge the behavior of others. It distinguishes doctrine from opinion and creates a living community out of a primordial soup of zealous individuality.

Humanists shy away from identifying anything as sacred because sacredness shapes behavior in a way that transcends rationality. If we refrain from murder, not because it is reasonable and evolutionarily adaptive to support a murder-free society but because life is sacred, does that defeat an essential humanist principle? Only if your goal is to have a religion of all bishops and no parishioners. And if humans are rational creatures, they are also social ones. Shared beliefs and traditions must be palatable by many, not only an elite few. If we deny our social selves by isolating ourselves into pockets of rationality, we deny our human natures and fall into the pits of hypocrisy. The compromise, then, is to use reason as the measure of sacredness rather than divinity.

There is precedent to guide us. In her novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk (a neo-Pagan writer) envisions a future society whose inhabitants are religiously diverse but spiritually cohesive. The prologue to this book is the Declaration of the Four Sacred Things, which names earth, air, fire, and water as sacred. "Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of the Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them." Starhawk also names a fifth sacred thing -- spirit -- that requires freedom, justice, and equality to thrive.

Starhawk's Declaration wraps everything up in a neat little package, and I am not certain that I can improve on what she wrote. It is, of course, a western view of the spiritual elements. Wood and metal are not distinguished from earth, for example. It is also simplistic; carbon is given no more importance than nickel or einsteinium. But it provides a template for us to write the stories and traditions and mores of humanism.

In future posts, I intend to use the Five Sacred Things as a basis for recommending holidays, rituals, and codes of conduct for spiritual humanists.

Looking for a New Name for The Aostach

I've decided to try to come up with a new name for the Aostach. Originally it was Jiyadj which, believe it or not, was from a Klingon dictionary and had something to do with their rite of passage (hard to recall since it has been 10 years or so) and that has been what we called it at home. But, it sounds too much like Jihad and so before writing the book or publishing any blogs, we renamed it to Aostach. But, that name doesn't flow off the tongue well and we never did switch to calling it that at home.

So, I'm after a new name; if you have any ideas, PLEASE send them my way.
Some things that might help (that I've been looking at):

"Iter" is the root for passage and "maturus" is the root for mature, so I tried some combination of those, but didn't come up with anything great.

Madura is the Spanish word for mature and "edad madura" means mature age. This sounds better, but it doesn't make sense to me to use Spanish (why that over any other language). Greek/Latin make some sense, but I haven't found a good combination there yet...

Any thoughts you send my way are greatly appreciated (you can comment on this topic or send me email).

Thanks, Sean