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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

> We afford old people in their last days less compassion than a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at this as a moral outrage.

Maybe religious groups/political parties/lobbies etc; if they are against abortion, they will definitely be against ending grandma (who doesn't know who you or your grandpa are, but let's not mention that); religious people see it as suicide and murder, so off to hell with 2+ people for every euthanasia.

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If only they would leave the responsibility for hell and punishments to their omnipotent god. Especially if they didn't even read the Bible. But no, a supposed eternity of punishment isn't long and early enough for them.

Ironically, there's a large overlap between those people and people who support capital punishment.

Is there? I'm genuinely curious where this stat comes from.

The Venn diagram of states that criminalize abortion and states that carry out the death penalty is nearly a circle... As are the sets of politicians, and the platforms that evangelical organizations tend to endorse.

Catholics are an exception, but they are a relatively politically inactive minority in the US.

https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/ [1]

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing

[1] Florida's only yellow because it's still being fought in the courts.

I find that to be rational - if you believe in eternal damnation, you would want the bad people to get there fast, but keep the good people out. And if you feel this is really in *your* hands, you would push very vocally for it.

When the destination is eternal, there is no rational reason to hurry there. What is a human lifetime compared to eternity? Even a trillion years is inconceivably short compared to eternity. If an afterlife exists the time where the inhabitants can still remember their life before death must be insignificant.

that depends on the dimension of time in the afterlife. some believe that there is no time at all in the afterlife, such that all souls in the afterlife appear to have been there since the beginning, yet also seem to all just have entered just now.

also, in as much as life on earth is a preparation for the afterlife, you will always be reminded of what you failed to do in your human life, just like you may get a frequent reminder of how not graduating from university, or worse being born into a certain demographic has limited your job/life options.

I don't see it as ironic at all. One way anthropologists studying a society can gauge what that society values is to look at the punishments applied for various transgressions. There are severe consequences for transgressions against things that a society values highly. Thus if a society values each human life as the most precious component of their society, then it is not unreasonable if that society places the most severe penalty on anyone who ends such a life. For that "most severe penalty" to be the ending of the life of the perpetrator, if such judgement is determined with grave concern for all parties involved including the perpetrator, is not ironic. It signals to the members of that society that their very life is the most precious aspect of the society of which they are a member.

And yet we know that people get wrongfully convicted and executed somewhat regularly. If you truly value life highly, you must prefer life in prison over the death penalty. The risk of wrongful execution is unacceptable.

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