Wherein I go all non sequitur againYou may have noticed that I started writing about things other than Genesis within the pages of this blog. Sometimes I feel like I come across a religious-related article or I'll have random thoughts that I want to share, and I don't know where to put them. So, if it's alright with you, I'd like to be able to once in a while blog about something that might not be exactly pertinent to the chapter of Genesis I happen to be exploring in a given week. I tried starting a "Bonus Articles" blog separate from this one to be the catch-all for this kind of thing, but I think it's asking too much of you, dear readers, to always be checking two blogs rather than one.
Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments section about this decision (the three of you who actual read this blog. Hi Erin!)
Anyway...
As a few of you may have heard, Conan O'Brien recently took over for the Tonight Show (yay!). I've been catching almost every episode so far, and there was something in a bit last Tuesday that caught my attention:
Conan's a donor! For those of you who may not know, being a donor means that after you die, your organs and tissue may be transplanted into others who need them. The most commonly transplanted organs are the kidneys, liver, heart and lungs. Skin, bone, heart, and other types of tissue are used for myriad medical reasons.
This has always been something that I've been meaning to look up, and possibly do. Then, this very week, I just so happened to get my new license in the mail. Included in it was a little informational brochure on becoming a donor, which told me that I can "save up to eight lives as an organ donor and improve another 50 lives as a tissue donor."
Sounds pretty good to me. Though there's something a little creepy about the thought of my body being carved into spare parts after I die. But I guess at that point I'll be, you know,
dead, so you I't really care.
Further, there are religious implications to consider. That's one thing that I found compelling about Conan being a donor. Isn't he Catholic? And don't Catholics have something against being a donor? Something about "your body is a temple" or something like that?
Let's check!
For the most part, organ donation is fine under Catholic dogma. What I was surprised to learn is that it's not so much post-mortem organ donation that is problematic, but donation that occurs
when you are still alive. You see, back in the day, Thomas Aquinas put forth the "Principle of Totality", which goes a little something like this:
"An individual may not dispose of his organs or destroy their capacity to function, except to the extent that this is necessary for the general well-being of the whole body. Destroying an organ or interfering with its capacity to function prevents the organ from achieving its natural purpose."
But at the same time, he proposed the concept of "Double Effect", a somewhat complicated doctrine that essentially permits good actions with bad side effects, so long as the good outcome of the good action outweighs the bad side effects.
The Catholic church's position is that it is permissible, admirable even, for a person to donate an organ
so long as it does not cause serious harm to the donor. In other words, if you have two kidneys, and donating one won't kill you, go for it. You can't, however, donate both your kidneys at once. Principle of Totality can be overruled (in part) by Double Effect.
What if donating an organ doesn't kill you, but merely mutilates you? This is a gray area. According to
www.catholiceducation.org:
"Because these donations require a transplant from one living person to another, a moral dilemma involving the principle of totality arises. According to this principle, the parts of the body are ordered to the good of that specific body. Therefore, the surgical mutilation of a donor for the good of the recipient must not seriously impair or destroy bodily functions or beauty of the donor.
For example, both eyes are necessary for certain visual functions. A living person would seriously impair his ability to see if an eye were donated to another. Such a sacrifice would detract from the wholeness or full functioning of the donor's body. It would be a bad means to a good end, and therefore morally wrong."
In other words, no mutilation.
Another gray area? While it's perfectly permissible to donate an organ after you die, there has been a lot of debate over how to determine
when someone dies. You see, the Church has this thing with people killing other people - they're against it. But what exactly defines "killing" another person? To know that is to know how to clearly and specifically define living beings versus non-living beings. And how do you do that? Do you categorize life as "things that have a consciousness"? What is "consciousness"?
You can see the philosophical rabbit hole that this line of thinking can lead us down. Suffice to say that defining death is tricky. But that doesn't stop people from trying.
In an address to the International Congress on Organ Transplants in 2000, Pope John Paul II gave the scientific community a big ol' raspberry by stating, "[Death] results from the separation of the life-principle (or soul) from the corporal reality of the person. The death of the person, understood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly."
Read again,
"no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly."To Johnny's credit, he does go on to state that there are certain scientifically measurable and observable events that happen after "death", in the vague "soul shuffling off the mortal coil" Catholic sense of the word, occurs. This includes the total cessation of brain activity. Which, actually, is the common medical definition of death anyway.
So if you're Catholic, and you want to donate an organ, just remember two things: If you're alive, don't mutilate or kill yourself, and if you're dead, make sure you're dead.
Of course, the emphasis of this blog is on what's actually written in the Bible. What does the scripture say about organ donation?
The answer is, not much. While there is much written in the Bible about the virtues of charity in general, it's fair to say that back when the Bible was written, people couldn't even conceive of organ transplants. I did find a few sites promoting donation that suggested some lines of scripture, including "we can enter heaven without having every part of our bodies present" (Mark 9:47). One suggested that the first transplant took place in Genesis - God taking Adam's rib and creating Eve. That seems like a bit of a stretch though.
Alright, if Catholics are on board with organ donation, what religions aren't? As far as I can tell, just one: Shinto.
The BBC sez:
"The Shinto faith is very much bound up with the idea of purity, and the wholeness of the physical body. Organ transplantation is comparatively rare in Japan because the body after death is impure according to Shinto tradition.
Shinto traditions also state that interfering with a corpse brings bad luck Families are concerned that they might injure the relationship between the dead person and the bereaved (known as the itai) by interfering with the corpse. This means that many followers of Shinto oppose the taking of organs from those who have just died, and also would refuse an organ transplanted from someone who has died."
---
Know when I update my blog and feel cool doing it by following me on my new Twitter account!
twitter.com/bibleorama
