Here is another example of the difference between a sanctity of life ethic and a quality of life ethic (see below for previous posts on this issue). Check out these opening lines from a Washington Post report headlined "U.S Combat Fatality Rate Lowest Ever"
Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died
from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks
in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical
SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has
found.But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of
creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe
shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The war in Iraq has produced the "largest burden of casualties our
military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam
War," said Gawande’s report in the New England Journal of Medicine. By
contrast, 24 percent of soldiers wounded in the Vietnam War or the
Persian Gulf War did not survive.
So more soldiers are alive, but this is a bad thing (enormous cost!) because their quality of life is low?
This is where it goes if there is no God.
Thanks to Rush for the link.