Terri’s Right to Die: The fruit of Reason

Last year today…

PINELLAS PARK, Florida (CNN) -- The feeding tube for the brain-damaged Florida
woman at the center of a bitter moral and legal tug of war was disconnected
Friday afternoon, and her husband's lawyer pleaded, "She has a right to die in
peace."

A two weeks latter…

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Terri Schiavo, the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman who
became the centerpiece of a national right-to-die battle, died Thursday morning,
nearly two weeks after doctors removed the feeding tube that had sustained her
for more than a decade.

The rosy glasses we so often view the world through are worn by a generation shaped by the reign of Reason. The dogmatic pursuit of a logical explanation of all we see – removing a need for a spiritual realm – that lifted us into a golden age of reason is beginning to show its true colors.

It is on the pillars of reason and feelings that we rest our understanding of the world. Reason was deified in the enlightenment – replacing God outright. Now we find pure reason cold, so we soften it with feelings. We have become nice. Our niceness has prompted us to embark on brave campaigns to save the whales and daring marches to end the tyranny of our elders. Oh, yes. We are very nice. And everything even makes perfect logical sense…if you keep the religious questions out of it. Which we are very good at doing; we have the first amendment.

Everything we do must make 1) logical sense and 2) make us feel that we did something important. From that starting place we can rationalize anything. You see, reason is everything. And by all outward appearances Terri had lost hers.

In a world defined by reason and feelings, there is no room for humanity. Reasonable people should think it only sensible to let Terri go. She was in a vegetative state that any reasonable person would abhor. Think of all that she had been. And now to be confined to this broken, twisted body… How could we let her go on like that? What reason was there? With Terri’s right to die we have carried, “I think therefore I am,” to “We can see that you think, therefore you are.”

What reason? That is where the paradigm of Reason breaks down. It is an unanswerable question. Why are we here and what makes us human? For what reason? Humanity is more than reason, and we know it. That’s why we go away from a book of logical plots and cardboard characters unsatisfied. In a world devoid of spiritual realities though, “I” is the only logical answer to the meaning of life. But as nice as that sounds, it is not at all fulfilling.

Humanity is more than rational thought. Life is more than happiness. “I think therefore I am” is not enough to explain the love of a mother for her difficult child or helpless laughter at your best friend’s stupid joke or the sacrifice of patriots for generations they will never meet. These belong to the realm of something bigger than reason…

What is that realm? What makes us human…as opposed to intelligent primates? Was Terri’s death a merciful release or an attempt to feel good about ourselves?

On this anniversary we owe it to her to consider these questions. Feel free to use the comment’s section below, or discuss it with someone you know…but whatever you do these are questions we can’t afford to ignore.