Extreme pro-euthanasia comment re ‘Euthanasia booths’ being made readily available on street corners for elderly people to help solve the problem of an ageing population, provokes an insightful response:

Here, the age-old human goal of giving people longer, fuller, healthier and happier lives where we are no longer expected simply to work and then die but to work and then live is treated as a weird and destabilising pursuit.

In my travels and conversations it is clear to me that one important driver of the marginalisation of the elderly is the much commented high rate of change in society. Australian sociologist Hugh MacKay has written extensively in this area. This is especially clear in communications. Think of email, photography and its transmission, social networking, DVD recording of TV programs, ipods, and the oft mentioned telephone call from grandparents asking for grandchildren to visit and tune their TV, Video cassette, DVD, etc. If ‘the oldies’ cannot tune a TV set and organise their set top box, ‘What is there to learn from them?’

The treatment of the ageing population as a problem really reveals today’s lack of imagination and human aspiration. Incapable of celebrating humanity’s leaps forward, we instead see our success stories in medicine and living standards as something bad. Unable to come up with solutions for making elderly people’s lives more pleasant through allowing them to work, paying them higher pensions or finding other ways to include them in the social make-up, we label them burdens. And with an eco-mindset that insists there are far too many people, we find ourselves referring to the elderly as a carbon footprint too far.

Amis’s idea for euthanasia booths is bizarre. But unless we challenge today’s anti-human outlook ,which treats people as polluters and human ambition as dangerous, then we may find more people asking: What’s the point of old people?

My response: Old people are people! They are made in the image of God. Each and every person is a gift from God, made in the image of God. Therefore, whether people be young or old they are immeasurably valuable. Life is to be honoured and lived at each and every stage of life. It is as we nurture our communal soul in the varying seasons of life that we cultivate a compassionate and deeply spiritual society. Indeed, the failure to nurture the deep inner life of a society brings forward Euthanasia’s end: a suicidal society.

‘What’s the point of old people?’ you ask. I ask, ‘What’s the point of life?’ The Jesus answer, ‘to love God and our neighbour as ourselves’. If its good enough for Jesus, its good enough for me! Let’s embrace life. All of life. Life in all its seasons. Together. A healthy society. A deeply rooted and spiritual society; living the Jesus way.

See the full article from The Weekend Australian at Longevity is a triumph, not a problem by Brendan O’Neill who is editor of spiked in London (www.spiked-online.com).