Our culture of death

The answer is that it is not an ethical system at all but a way of justifying anything that we want. It is a way of bending reality to our own purposes. Human rights are seen as being attached to the individual, they have no basis in community. This is why the rights of the mother compete with the rights of the child; why the rights of the suicide transgress the rights of those who love him. Does not the parent have a right to be spared the agony of a child’s suicide? Does no the child have a right to be spared the questions about why their mother chose death instead of them? We can proclaim all kinds of rights until we are blue in the face but it will not change our reality.

Self murder and the murder of the unborn is no solution to anything because they rob us of what is essentially human; it is a culture of death. It is one with the arms race that uses death as the final negotiator.

Giles Fraser published an article in the Guardian entitled “Birth, the Ultimate Miracle” in which he argues that the culture of mortality is confronted by a culture of natality. He points out that the birth narrative in the gospel of Matthew is preceded by a genealogy that runs from Abraham to Jesus. So the birth of Jesus takes place at the end of a long line of births. It could have been the other way around, the genealogy could have been marked by deaths and it is significant that it is not. This means that the gospel is predicated not by mortality but by natality.

A culture of mortality isolates the individual along with his death which nobody can do for him. A culture of natality sees the individual as linked to others and dependent upon others. In “Losing Erin” the two cultures collide, Erin, the mother, was seduced into thinking that the solution to her life was death while her sisters actually live out a culture of natality. They become mothers to Erin, stroking her, kissing her and attempting to open a future for her.

The Christian tradition sees human life as a journey into God that only ends in death. When a human being is murdered a particular person takes it upon himself to end that journey. There are many things that can end that journey, life being as it is hazardous. But murder is an unnatural ending; it is an intentional act that cuts off the journey into God that forms the future. Thus murder is a murder of the future; it is a denial of Christian hope.

The depressed state or the unwanted child is allowed to tip us into a faithless act that destroys the future. The idea of being tied down to a child gives us permission to end that child’s life. There is now no hope that a light will shine on the depressed or that a child will bring us into a new humanity. This is only one of the ways that our society is increasing mortgaged over to a culture of morality.