The arguments that are advanced by the religious front against medical euthanasia include:
Medical euthanasia as a practice is against the will and word of God. The religious argument is not that people cannot harm or kill themselves. Rather, they acknowledge that the free will that people have been given allows them to do so. The argument however is that God does not delight in people taking their own lies as they are merely custodians of the life that God has given them. To kill a person denies that God has a supreme right over every human life with regards to length and how it should be lived .
The religious groups, especially Christians and Muslim ague that medical euthanasia distorts and reduces the respect that the society has for the sanctity of life. The argument using the sanctity of life, for example stems from the religious belief that people have been made in the image of God. This belief, therefore informs the religious argument that there is an attribute of life that is sacred and one that needs to be protected and preserved for the creator. This argument is prolonged by the argument that practicing medical euthanasia opens a slippery path to involuntary euthanasia . The argument is that if killing people, though medical euthanasia is made legal, then it would empower the physicians to kill people who are though undesirable and without medical value.
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In the religious fronts, suffering is also seen as having some value towards Godliness. Christianity, for example, teaches that it is right for the believer to share in the suffering of Christ. This is seen also as an avenue for the believer to strengthen faith in God and to entrust their lives more wholesomely to God. The importance of such suffering is said to be a pathway for grace to find its way to transform the human soul to conform to the will of God .
- Baeke, G., Wils, J.-P., & Broeckaert, B. (2011). “We are (not) the master of our body”: elderly Jewish women’s attitudes towards euthanasia and assisted suicide. Ethnicity & Health, 16(3), 259–278.
- Seale, C. (2010). The role of doctors’ religious faith and ethnicity in taking ethically controversial decisions during end-of-life care. Journal of Medical Ethics, 36(11), 677–682.
- Verbakel, E., & Jaspers, E. (2010). A Comparative Study on Permissiveness Toward Euthanasia Religiosity, Slippery Slope, Autonomy, and Death with Dignity. Public Opinion Quarterly, nfp074.
