An atheist who loved his neighbour

It has been a long and frustrating row to hoe for Philip Nitschke. His is a working life of constant confrontation with the establishment (a Google search brings up 42 pages of links relating to him) and of scratching around for money to keep viable his crusade for the right to die with dignity. Maybe Nitschke was born to remain restless until he had a cause to fight for. His history indicates this.

After gaining a PhD in laser physics, he left that field to work with the Gurindi people, and from there he went on to be ranger with the NT Parks and Wildlife Commission. Nitschke then studied medicine - graduating at age 42.

He got a job as a doctor at the Royal Darwin Hospital. Nitschke was working in the public health system which puts a lot of effort into promoting an exaggerated image of dedication and competence. It was only a matter of time before there was a falling out.

It came when a nuclear submarine moored in Darwin Harbour to the delight of the local business people who were hoping Darwin would become a US naval base. This was a time for buying beers for sailors and not for any radical jumping up and down.

At the hospital, Nitschke was the designated Radiation Safety Officer - and yet there was no nuclear disaster plan in place when there was supposed to be. He blew the whistle, and the system’s retribution which followed almost crushed him. He got out of the public system and set up an out-of-hours drug rehabilitation service.

Following the introduction of the Northern Territory Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, he became passionately involved with those who wanted to use the act to end their lives.

Family and friends could gather in the house of the person wishing to die. That person would then send a command through a computer for a fatal drug to be injected by a machine designed by Nitschke. The first to die by this method described what Nitschke was doing as an act of love.

While some well known people have worked hard for the cause while still working in their profession, it has been Nitschke who has made it his life’s work. Currently he runs workshops on how to suicide without botching the process and ending up still alive but brain damaged.

This is not loving your neighbour

After only four patients had been able to use the NT Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, a private member’s bill introduced by a member of the federal parliament, Kevin Andrews, overturned the world’s first assisted death law. Andrews exploited the technicality that the Northern Territory was not a state.

Although prone to fearing imaginary threats, Australians typically do not recognise a real threat until it becomes the elephant in the bathroom. Andrews’ electorate allowed him to get away with this strike against democracy via a backdoor, and he retained his seat at the next election.

While suicide is no longer a crime, unscrewing the cap off a bottle of Nembutal for a person with unbearable arthritis could, in theory, land you in jail for 25 years. Under the Suicide Related Materials Act, it is now even a crime to discuss end-of-life options by phone, email, Internet or fax.

To be fair to the servants of the Lord, if the Australian Medical Association was not against euthanasia, we would probably now have it. Although many doctors support euthanasia, the AMA sees its duty as advising its members to avoid situations which could be legally complicated and psychologically stressful.

My mother told me when she was in her 40s that she wanted to die with dignity. At aged 80 she told me that she wished she could die in her sleep as much of her body was not working properly. She died at 85 in a nursing home with leg ulcers up to 80 square centremeters in area. As her once athletic 180cm frame now weighed only 36kg, she probably starved to death.

The most loving and selfless person I have ever known was made to suffer for five unnecessary years because of the philosophies and fears of others.

In his Sermon from the Mount, Jesus told those before him that every man must love his neighbour. He would not have expected us to structure a world where in one component 30,000 children die every day due to causes which as little as $2 or $3 a day spent on each could prevent, while in another component countless millions of dollars are spent each year on keeping alive people who do not want to live.

In the meantime while awaiting the legislation he wants, Nitschke has discovered the hard way that singular targets are a gift for the opposition of any crusade which moves along an unpredictable path and along which it is humanly impossible not to make mistakes. He is watched closely for “evidence” which can be used on anti-euthanasia websites to paint him as the Devil Incarnate.

As their screwball gift-of-life talk failed to sway the bulk of the public, the tactic of the religion driven anti-euthanasia movement is now to scare everybody with warnings that if euthanasia is legalised, then many old folk will be pressured to agree to get out of the way.

Contrary to the claims by authoritatively-appearing religious websites, there is little concrete evidence that this has happened in Holland. Jesus should have more clearly stated his disapproval of lying - as his followers don’t seem to see much wrong with it.

A closer look at the case of Philip Nitschke v the religious

Your moral integrity can be maintained up to your personal threshold. Beyond your personal threshold, you begin to justify to yourself your increasingly immoral, self-serving and cowardly behaviour. Most of us could not name any person they know who has an unshakeable integrity, as few find themselves in testing situations where an unshakeable integrity, if it exists, can be revealed.

In spite of so much happening which should not happen, whistleblowers are very rare. And, once a whistle is blown, every whistleblower is astonished at the extent of the betrayal by those in the workplace that he or she trusted for support. Some would say that your morality threshold is the point where your survival instinct kicks in.

The survival instinct kicks in early in the religious. Their fear of damnation controls their behaviour. That behaviour is little different to those who ingratiate themselves to a dictator. All autocrats use carrot and stick to control their subjects. Nobody is more powerful than God - and God has Heaven as the carrot and Hell as the stick.

An aspect of the Nazi period which should be studied more than any other is the behaviour of people who are in situations where carrot and stick were applied in the extreme.

The survival instinct kicked in very early in those who gleefully dobbed hidden Jews into the SS. The bishops’ morality thresholds were higher, but not by much, as their condemnation of what was occurring was negligible. Humanists (including some renegade priests) were early casualties in the most organised application of evil in history. (By the way - in the Nazi oath of loyalty was a reference to God.)

Although the Bible is central to the life of a lovely friend of mine, my many years of workplace experiences led me to conclude that most of the seriously religious are basically amoral in that they have no ability to distinguish right from wrong. If you have no ability to distinguish right from wrong, then you can be manipulated into doing anything by a persuasive enough person or doctrine.

Whatever sense of right and wrong you may have was not taught to you. It is due to a mix of the example set by the behaviour of close family members (which writes that part of DNA which can be written by experience) and the natural propensity you are born with to be good or not so good (that part of DNA which cannot be rewritten).

And yet, John Howard (remember that he was the man who played the race card to win an election by lying about children being thrown overboard) used $165 million of our money to fund a school chaplaincy program to teach our children a thing or two about decency.