Is Euthanasia Wrong or Kind? with James Eglinton - SUMMER REPLAY

So help us think then, James, from a Christian perspective about this issue and what the most compelling, from your perspective, arguments are actually against allowing euthanasia to become legal and to be something that we as a society embrace.

Yeah, so I think from a Christian perspective, life has a very particular importance as a gift in Christianity.

And it's rooted in the fact that God, the living God, is the giver of life, and therefore life is inherently precious.

And you see that throughout the Bible, that life really matters.

The way that the Bible describes human beings as really distinctly special and valuable in universal terms is... as the human beings are the image of God and that's an incredibly dignified way to describe humans.

It doesn't turn them into God or the image of God rather than God, but humans are just wonderful, remarkable creatures and that dignifies human life.

And actually, when you look at the kind of logic that you find in the Bible for why killing another human being is wrong, It's most fundamentally rooted in that irrevocable special status that it's wrong to kill a human because a human is made in the image of God.

So life is this gift within Christianity.

And then Christianity, I guess it brings with it the assumption that life is worth living.

And in Christianity, that's a universal statement for humans, that because we have this dignity and this gift of life, that it is worth living.

And I don't think the Bible is naive in thinking that human life is always awesome and wonderful and that

it

doesn't come without suffering.

If you read a book like Job in the Old Testament, which is this 42 chapters of this guy who goes through unbelievable suffering in terms of his family and circumstances and health.

The Bible's full of stories of the difficulties of human life.

It's not a naive book at all.

But throughout, its constant assumption is that there's a dignity about human life that's actually not conditional, that can't be lost through circumstantial change.

And I think that that's given people in I guess particularly throughout Western cultures, like in the UK and I think in the United States as well, a sort of default assumption that yes, life is worth living, but there's something that's crept into Western culture that makes us now think, but maybe not all life, or maybe there's a particular kind of life that's not worth living.

So when I hear people in the UK talk about this, quite often you hear things like, well, my life would cease to be worth living if I became incontinent, if I just couldn't hold my stool in or something like that, or my life would no longer be worth living if dot dot dot.

And then you insert the thing that while you're still healthy and well, you think would make your life unbearable.

So I think that it's important to remember that while a lot of these issues are presented as debates about legislation and political debates, ultimately it comes down to real people and some of their most vulnerable moments, some of the hardest moments in life.

And I think you hear a lot of people who'll say things like, if I were to lose my continence or something like that, then I would lose my dignity and life wouldn't be worth living.

But I think when Christians engage with that, we bring a very different set of questions about what is dignity and is it as easily lost as that? And actually, let's say then you were to lose your continence through having Crohn's disease or colitis or something like that, not a terminal illness, but a chronic one.

Does that mean that that person's life isn't worth living either? And why restrict things to terminal illness then if dignity is so conditional in that sense? So I think that bringing, we could call it faith-based perspectives into the debate is actually really important because of a very different set of questions that it makes us ask,

but that