Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Killing should never, ever be easy.
In a position like that of GCW, yes, there does come a point where one life has more potential value than another. We're talking about one person in his twenties or early thirties, and another who has almost reached the end of her projected lifespan. Left alone, she will die in months. Assisted in dying, she would stop suffering far sooner. This results in a net loss of months of suffering, traded for years, perhaps decades, of suffering for someone who is left alive. I don't see any problem in weighing that as objectively as possible and deciding not to sacrifice your own freedom in order to save someone else a few months of further misery. It's not a case of two clearly even outcomes here.
The attempt to boil everything down to moral relativism as proof of God is a little suspect, I think. Why can't empathy just be a trait that creatures with intelligence show one another when they witness suffering? Why does any greater good or greater ill need to be defined by, or ascribed to, any supernatural figure? I've seen this argument before, and it's never yet held any water.
In addition, my argument about God allowing preventable illness even though he doesn't have to still hasn't been touched. It's not necessarily that I want him to answer all prayers, because sure, a two-year-old who didn't get her ice cream is maybe a bit lower on the list than someone who is dying for a preventable reason. But surely if god is all-powerful, he would simply never have allowed such illnesses to occur. This isn't a breach of free will; we generally do not choose to get ill, after all, it mostly happens entirely outside of our own choices or scope of actions. The fact that he not only 1. designed the universe with these awful diseases, then 2. did virtually nothing when people are targeted by them, is proof positive that either we're dealing with a sociopath, a mad scientist, or a fictitious construct that has been created to assuage our greatest fears about what comes next.
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