My wife is on a Facebook cancer support group that's relentlessly Christian, though not identified as such. There are constant requests for prayers and spontaneous offers of prayers as well as those little glurge memes about God.
But another facet of the group is that they relentlessly encourage people to never give up, never accept death, always fight, regardless.
Okay, that might be good advice for somebody with a curable cancer who's going through a rough patch of chemo treatment, but they say the same to stage IV lung cancer patients (there are many in the group). That's pretty much a death sentence, with a five-year survival percentage in the single digits. Undertaking the most aggressive treatment despite the side effects is a personal choice but isn't necessarily the best or most logical option for such patients.
Rather than offering advice on palliative care, support for those who choose quality of life over chemo, etc., the insistence on fighting, despite quality of life, reaches such a fever pitch that I get the impression it's motivated more by a fear of death and a desire to protect a sense of denial, than actual support.
So everyone's afraid of death, more or less. No biggy. But what seems strange to me is that as an athiest (and a stage IV lung cancer patient), I've accepted death as a nothingness which is not better than life, but certainly not worse, and it happens to everyone eventually. I'd rather have the best quality of life possible while it lasts.
These Christians, who supposedly view the time after death as the most wonderful thing ever, seem to have a harder time accepting death's inevitability. They're a mix of various Protestants and Catholics. Is there a doctrinal belief that one must do everything possible to stay alive during a fatal illness, even if there's a risk it will hasten death or causes more suffering?
My knee-jerk pop-psychology reaction is that an intense fear of death causes some people to be more Christian in hopes of finding comfort, but even Christianity can't help many of them, so they still react with fear and denial. But I dunno. Thoughts?
But another facet of the group is that they relentlessly encourage people to never give up, never accept death, always fight, regardless.
Okay, that might be good advice for somebody with a curable cancer who's going through a rough patch of chemo treatment, but they say the same to stage IV lung cancer patients (there are many in the group). That's pretty much a death sentence, with a five-year survival percentage in the single digits. Undertaking the most aggressive treatment despite the side effects is a personal choice but isn't necessarily the best or most logical option for such patients.
Rather than offering advice on palliative care, support for those who choose quality of life over chemo, etc., the insistence on fighting, despite quality of life, reaches such a fever pitch that I get the impression it's motivated more by a fear of death and a desire to protect a sense of denial, than actual support.
So everyone's afraid of death, more or less. No biggy. But what seems strange to me is that as an athiest (and a stage IV lung cancer patient), I've accepted death as a nothingness which is not better than life, but certainly not worse, and it happens to everyone eventually. I'd rather have the best quality of life possible while it lasts.
These Christians, who supposedly view the time after death as the most wonderful thing ever, seem to have a harder time accepting death's inevitability. They're a mix of various Protestants and Catholics. Is there a doctrinal belief that one must do everything possible to stay alive during a fatal illness, even if there's a risk it will hasten death or causes more suffering?
My knee-jerk pop-psychology reaction is that an intense fear of death causes some people to be more Christian in hopes of finding comfort, but even Christianity can't help many of them, so they still react with fear and denial. But I dunno. Thoughts?
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1aZrAXZ
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