After seeing my grandparents go through a slow and humiliating decay that lasted years I'm even more sure then before that I don't want to go through it myself. The availability of a legal assisted suicide option is actually likely to prolong my life since with a lethal dose of narcotics to look forward to once I'm no longer capable of a decent life I'm less likely to try to off myself by other means that will require me to do that while I'm still relatively functional (enough to buy a gun and pull the trigger).

I know that I want that option for myself. It is no one's business but mine (sorry, God-botherers).

Same for me.

In the U.S., legislation allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill patients is blocked at every possible turn by religious objectors. The argument is basically "My religion doesn't allow this, so we must keep it illegal for everyone." Images of death squads knocking off the elderly for profit (or simply as a cost-cutting measure) are conjured in support of this.

I think terminally ill patients are perfectly justified if they decide that they want to end their lives before the cancer, or whatever, takes them. I know that I want that option for myself. It is no one's business but mine (sorry, God-botherers).

Speaking as a medical type, I can only say that if the law permitted it I would prepare fatal doses of drugs for a person of sound mind who genuinely wanted them, but I would not administer them. I do think that the last step is something people should take for themselves.

Not gonna get into the meat question as a confimed carnivore. So, as to the other question, considering at least from around the middle of the last century till today most doctors are not believers, I would think that is has to do with money at least as much as religon. Doctors(and hospitals and adminastrators) make a lot of money in the USA because they extend life..and many ways they do involve expensive treatments, this argument is borne out when you look at what has happened among veterinarians over the last say 20-25 years and what they will do to keep pets alive for people.

@F0
Well, I don't eat meat for basically the reason you outline. I don't see why an animal that is capable of suffering should suffer when there is plenty else I can eat. That said, we do weigh life, even human life differently. "Women and children first" for example, or various moral experiments like if both a 99 year old man and a 9 year old boy were in a fire and you only had time to carry one to safety most everyone would take the child. So we do value human life differently and it would only make sense that people by nature would value animal life to an even lesser degree.

As for why be compassionate to other ethnic groups (or whatever) I think you pretty much answered your own question in that it comes down to our natural psychology and anthropomorphism. I mean people are less inclined to kill animals that have certain characteristics (like babies and big eyes), that whole 'cute' factor. Animals that are way different, like say a snake, well most wouldn't even blink at lopping a head off a snake. I guess this is why even though I don't personally agree with the practice I really have next to zero interest in trying to convince anyone away from eating meat.

Awesome, zach.

So I just took a blog I had created, but never started, late spring and edited this as my first post. With a whole year ahead of me at my school, I'll have material to work with for a while. I'm just going to use it to document my deconversion experience and ongoing experience as an atheist in a Christian community.

http://knightsmovebrain.wordpress.com/

Unfortunately, I would have to pay to edit the CSS, so it's not ideal for me. I want to have a lot more control over my layout, being a designer. But wordpress only has ugly misaligned templates with ugly fonts and an unwholesome penchant for all-caps. What the fuck template designers. Take a fucking class on communication design. For realz.

Bwahah, that would be awesome Zach.

And yes, I freak out whenever I hear "JUST an animal", "JUST atoms", "JUST chemical signals".
Those who live too much on the supernatural end up overlooking the natural.
Also, I should be more tolerant and stop freaking out...

I was talking with a friend the other night—we went out with a bottle of wine and drank it under the almost full moon in the middle of a soccer field. It was awesome out...cool and breezy, but warm and dry enough to walk around with bare feet—and she started on the subject of astrology. I was like, "holy fuck girl, you believe in that shit?" She was like "don't you?!" I thought she was kidding, but nope.

She's one of my numerous pot-smoking friends from my Christian college, says she "doesn't know if she believes" in God, studies physics and engineering, and can't believe that there's not "anything more" than "just" material reality. Jesus.
Being a lightweight, she was already getting drunk while I was explaining the sheer ludicrousness of postulating a "spiritual" world which can't be measured and yet still interacts predictably with "physical" reality. (From my perspective, quantum mechanics is the closest you get to spiritual reality. Why not? It is behind everything together, it is invisible to us, and it is beyond our comprehension for the most part). By the time I got to the bountiful archeological evidence against the historical validity of Christian scripture, she had passed out.

The most peculiar thing to me about the conversation, however, was her inability to grasp the beauty of being "just" an animal. I guess I've resolved myself well to the idea of being an animal. I think that we don't have enough respect for animal suffering. Somehow we believe that being human makes our life so much more precious yet can't comprehend that a non-human being could suffer like we do. I think that we're afraid to confront the possibility that having slaughter houses, cramming animals into inhumanely small spaces...it's too much work to resolve the cognitive dissonance. We have to give much more value to issues of human suffering than the suffering of other animals if we are to live in our low-cost profit-driven meat-eating society without feeling sick about it.

And honestly, I would place human suffering as a more important issue than other species' suffering. The way a religious society does it, however, confuses the issues and ends up either robbing human beings of their lives for unjust reasons or robbing human beings of their right to avoid unnecessary suffering. (To be unremittingly "pro-life" and somehow pro-needless-overseas-violence...this no longer makes sense to me.)

I think I'm going to start a blog about being an atheist in a Christianity-saturated social environment.

I was reading this on /. about Terry Pratchett and read this comment:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2238900&cid=36442198

There is a funny fact about assisted suicide. If Alzheimer/cancer/similar incurable painful disease would be monitored by a veterinarian without putting the animal down, he would be sued for animal torture. And lose.
It's quite telling when our current "general" code of ethics is against torturing animals in this way, but not against torturing humans in the same way.

It basically shows that our laws are written by religions. Putting an animal down when its terminally ill is seen as merciful, because we don't want it to suffer needlessly.

However, people aren't allowed to commit suicide in the same circumstances to avoid needless suffering, and there's only one possible reason: religious proscriptions against suicide. And also because humans are seen as completely different from animals, a viewpoint which again is rooted in religion.

This is something I haven't yet resolved.

Why is it ok to kill an non-human and it is not ok to kill a human?

Spare me "I like beef" responses.
Difference between racism and "specieism" is a continuum... Saying "they are not like us" can be applied (and HAS been applied) to other animals as well as to other human ethnic groups.

I know that our compassion is limited by how much do we feel similar to the other, but why are we expected to be compassionate about people with different ideas/skin color/sex/whatever and not about non-humans?

I do eat meat, btw, and am conflicted about that, but more for ecological/sustainability reasons than ethics.