Guns don't kill people...

Presumably in Israel poisoners can plead innocent on the grounds that the arsenic did it.

In exactly the same way the Holocaust would be OK if the Germans had used self-cleaning ovens.

Except in degree, how is this different from Orthodox Jews who have timers set to turn the lights, the oven, etc on and off during the Sabbath or in earlier times had neighbors to do the honors. My mother used to perform these little chores for her Orthodox Jewish neighbors. We kids liked it because she always came home with goodies for us.

I don't judge the practice, I just wonder if God is satisfied with the letter of the law even if the spirit of the law is being thwarted.

On euthanasia, there can be no blanket opinion. Each case must be decided by families and their medical and spiritual advisors.

Plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. For example, someone who may not put sour cream on his meat sandwich can fake it with mayonnaise, for a similar texture and effect.

That's not the way the way most of us look at it, but it's understandable in a legalistic system. We would look at the reason for the rule in order to understand it.

We suppose Tibbets and his crew did not bomb Hiroshima: they only operated some machines, and gravity and all those nasty protons, neutrons and electrons did the rest.

if they were to end up in hospital, dependent on a respirator and suffering from a terminal disease.

Um, folks, we are speaking here of elderly, terminally ill people who are being kept alive artificially on respirators. That is, they are elderly people who are alive only because they are hooked up to a machine.

And while I admit that this rather brief---but rather important distinction---happens to be at the very, very end of the article quoted, it does not appear in fine print.

Or does everyone agree that euthanasia really ought to be dumbed down?

I thought there was a duty to help prevent the death of the innocent when possible.

Didn't they use this same situation as a plotline between Dr. Zoidberg and Bender on Futurama?

Barry: I noted a few days ago that "euthanasia" appears to have been expanded to include removing patients from respirators. I don't think it's overly paranoid to worry about the motivation of at least some people who are making this rather profound change in definition...

The machine giveth, and the machine taketh away.

So far, machines can't set themselves up, humans are the instrument whether they press a button from homebase or fly over and drop the bomb or pull the swtich manually.

I think you guys are reading too much into this. They're not talking about Terry Schiavo here. They're talking about DNRs and other end-of-life arrangements that are completely noncontroversial in the US. The alarm, as I understand it, is to avoid mistakes, certainly, but also to leave open the possibility that the patient will revive and take care of the problem themselves.

As Lou notes, in Judaism, the rules are the rules and you are allowed to come as close as you can to the line, so long as you don't cross over. G-d commands what He commands, and it is not up to us to try to exceed his command. This ruling is analogous to, and was no doubt suggested by, other rules for hospitals dealing with machinery use on the Sabbath. For example, elevators are set to automatically stop and open at every floor, so that the riders don't do work by pressing buttons.