Correspondence (letter to the editor): Spiritual Issues Should Be Considered

My comment on the article by Brandt and Angstwurm (1) is that much greater value should be placed on spiritual or religious issues than on sober scientific approaches. The question is that of life and death. The fact that an ethics committee has to be summoned in order to decide whether brain death means a person’s actual death or not, shows the degree to which human intellectuality has come to overlay our hidden spiritual insights.

An article by Walter van Laack (2) explains how research results of near-death experiences imply that a consciousness exists that is independent of the brain and possibly survives a person’s death. We can certainly assume that the entire complexity of near-death experiences is cannot be explained in terms of neurophysiology. Today’s medical scientists are aware that consciousness exists independently of brain function. We can therefore conclude that a brain dead human body is not a corpse.

An article by Cathrin Marshall (3) makes apparent the enormous emotional stress that a transplant team is under when a brain-dead body is opened up from the jugular vein to the pubal symphysis, and the organs are explanted from the hollow basin thus created.

Intuition is a result of psychological-spiritual experiences and cannot be taught. Human beings require time to reach spiritual decisions, especially when crucial decisions—such as organ donation—are concerned.

The opt-out system for organ donation interferes massively with the spiritual decision-finding process. It is a psychological assault and for this reason should be strictly rejected on moral grounds.