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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death > Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments

OTOH, Catholicism also is strongly against euthanasia, which is arguably at odds with the sentiment of not having to drag out final years. I think there's plenty of room for a philosophy to "not drag out final years" as a non-believer who doesn't need to rule out certain measures like that.

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It isn't at odds, since in both cases (euthanasia and medically-prolonged end-of-life), it is the human person that is trying to control the ultimate outcome of life. The Catholic approach is to say "let God decide".

I guess to me it sounds like it's at best orthogonal to the idea of dragging out life; sometimes it drags out longer than it might otherwise have to, sometimes it ends much earlier than it would otherwise have to. I think my confusion was over mentioning "opt out of medical treatments" right after "we don't have to drag out life" in a way that sounded to me like it was calling them equivalent, and from my perspective, sometimes forgoing medical treatments can itself drag life out longer than someone might want.

Ultimately it sounds like we mostly agree that people can make personal decisions for themselves about their medical care; I just found the way you described it above fairly confusing.

(edit: I apparently missed that the response was from a different person than I originally responded to)

The Catholic approach is economical: it's expensive to keep dying people alive if you need resources to do so, but a religion promising eternal paradise is going to have a real propagation problem if a significant number of adherents commit suicide - and trying to carve out euthanasia exceptions wasn't going to play well to medieval peasants.

If economics ruled the Church, there are many dogmas that do not "play well to peasants" that could be dropped tomorrow for the sake of propagation.

This is an odd take considering the Catholic church via the Vatican was one of the most powerful and wealthiest organizations in Europe for many centuries, able to topple monarchs.

The point stands: if your argument were true of the Catholic Church being ruled by money and doing whatever it economically can do to propagate, the Church would behave much differently than it currently does. But, the Church is not doing everything economically possible to propagate today, so there must be some other ruling principle.

"economics" doesn't mean "money", it means the allocation of resources.

You're treating this whole idea as though there's a nefarious organization deliberately managing things (which there is in some cases, but the why is unacknowledged).

But a cell in your body has an energy economy that means it adopts certain strategies based on it's constraints.

Similarly, successful religions have an economy of beliefs that they have to adopt based on constraints. Almost all religions portray an afterlife, so all religions have a problem where they need to stop people short-cutting to get there - otherwise they promptly stop existing. But then they also have followers with limited resources so they also can't preach infinite life-extension since that undermines the afterlife narrative, and is economically unfeasible for followers (particularly since you also need to collect donations to your church to keep the organizational structure running).

A belief is economical if it exists today, and existing beliefs are economical. This tautological line of reasoning doesn't help explain the Catholic approach to anything.

What's tautological? How are the Branch Davidians doing? Heaven's Gate?

I note you keep insisting "they would change beliefs" but you've neglected to ever include what changes you think would obviously disprove this hypothesis.

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