Reasonable Dissent

Something We Can All Agree On

(The pedant in me really wants to re-title this “Something on which we can all agree”, but I’m fighting the urge…)

I usually stop by XKCD on update days (MWF) just because it’s my kind of humor, a little nerdy, sometimes topical, sometimes reminiscent. But today’s was less funny, and more meaningful.

And this calls to mind an issue that I think the secular and non-secular worlds can agree on. You have no reason not to be an organ donor. To me, death is death. The end is the end, and I will be none the wiser when it happens. This is a perfect reason to allow my body to be used for organ donation, or be given to science if organ donation isn’t feasible. In any case, I’ll be done with this body, so someone else should benefit as much as we know how.

For the religious person, I’d wager that most could agree on this as well once they get down to thinking about it, for reasons put succinctly in this comic (though maybe the blood transfusion thing would make Jehovah’s  witnesses give some pause). Regardless of whether or not you believe in a soul, if you think it through, your body should have no ties to that soul. If  you lost any specific part of your body, but were still able to live, did you lose some of your soul? Of course not. So why stay attached to this configuration of atoms (which we know it is) after you die? Either you think you’ll be tied to it and stuck lying in the ground forever (in which case you may as well donate and see the world after you die!), or you think you’ll be free of it. Why can’t someone else live with your help?

It’s not a complex issue. People live because of organ donors, and it costs you nothing. So go do it, if you haven’t already.

Tags: atheism, science