In the counter-intuitive report of the day, those with the strongest faith drag out their deaths more than those with less faith:
Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive, a study has found.
What does it say about the faith of the most devout believers of an afterlife that they are less willing to accept death than those who don’t really believe in an afterlife. Admittedly, this is not exactly the wording here, but it is what it gets at. I guess it is the Terri Schiavo thing, where for some reason the religious nutters (not to be confused with your standard, good devout people) have made it morally necessary to do everything in human power to delay death. To me, not only do I see no scriptural base for this, it seems to betray a real lack of faith in their own religion that tells them not to fear death because something better awaits.
Though I am not particularly faithful (I am too scientifically minded to believe many things), I am not at all anti-religious. I value the role religion CAN play in moral development. Having been raised Christian, what bothers me more than being religious is the abuse of religion that lets the letter of scripture defeat the spirit of the scripture.
