Religious Workarounds

 (TRIGGER WARNING: This post talks about Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.) 

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TOWARD THE END of the 2005 movie Batman Begins, Batman informs the bad guy, “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.” Whereupon he swoops away, leaving the bad guy to die in a train wreck.

I am well aware that in the United States there is no duty to rescue. But, come on. Though it’s not chargeable as such, choosing not to save someone you could save — assuming no inconvenience or danger to yourself — still pretty much boils down to murder.

The “I don’t have to save you” workaround reminds of the kind of thing I have come to expect from people who tell me they get their morals from religion.*

Today’s example: Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (DWDA). It permits “terminally ill adults to obtain a prescription for medication to end their life peacefully through self-administration.” 

A verrrrry gooood Christian was lecturing me on why it would be a sin to take advantage of the DWDA. However, he explained, it would not be sinful to decline treatment and allow the inevitable to take prompt place.

I can just picture his God looking down from a cloud, admiringly conceding, “True enough, you didn’t kill yourself. All you did was not save yourself. You sure outmaneuvered me! Well done!”

So I posed a hypothetical situation.

“Suppose,” I said, “you learn than a giant boulder is hurtling down upon a certain spot, and you decide to walk over and stand there so the boulder will crush the life out of you. Would that be sinful?”

Yes, he said, it absolutely would. It would be suicide.

“Now suppose,” I continued, “you’re already standing in that spot, you know the boulder is coming, and you choose not to move.”

That, the verrrrry gooood Christian replied, would be okay. It wouldn’t be suicide.

“It’s the same bloody thing, I told him.” He couldn’t see it.

​Or, perhaps, he refused to see it.
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* You’ll find some brilliant workarounds by religious believers in my book on sex work in Utah. See in particular Chapter Eight, “The Mormon John.”