Thou Shalt Not Kill...

but needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive...wrote the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

This line from The Last Decalogue came to mind when I was pounding out a few thoughts on the subject of euthanasia. A blogger had challenged the Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Rev Nick Baines, to quote scriptural authority for outlawing assisted suicide.

The blogger either knew his Bible or was bluffing. It's a risky stratagem to publicly challenge a bishop, especially one as experienced in the media two-step as old Nick.

Even so, the blogger's challenge seemed to me flawed on two counts. Firstly, though the Bible informs our body of law, it does not form the letter of it. The country is not a theocracy, not yet at any rate. If Christians adhered to the letter of the commandments in the Old Testament, homicide, stealing, lying and coveting would be non-existent.

Secondly, there is no evidence that the Bible is the undisputed word of God. All religious books, the Koran included, evolved from what had gone before in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic. All culture develops and is transmitted that way. If there is a first truth, we don't know what it is. Neither did Einstein. So why should anyone's view about assisted suicide be ruled by a book that has been revised, translated and edited many times?

On the whole, most people are on the side of life. Abortion and euthanasia are not matters for post-prandial prattling among coffee and After Eights. Those who have experience of either remain scalded by it. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Nobody I know would willingly spectate on pain and suffering. Cats and dogs are put out of their misery because society deems it humane not to let animals suffer. Some believe that animals have souls. Strange, then, that human beings must gasp their last, incontinent and helpless, lest the law of the land or the law of God on Mount Sinai be offended. Does not God change His mind?

We are not born in pain. The pain inflicted by birth happens to the mother, rarely the baby. It's only when the poor little sod opens its eyes that it has an inkling of what it's in for. So if we are not born in pain, why should we die in pain?

For most, dealing with the idea of ultimate death and oblivion day-to-day is enough. Until it becomes personal, death is an abstraction; even when it happens to one of your own, it is him, it is her, not you, whose eyes won't see sunset turn into sunrise.

So long as society permits the clinical ending of life at the beginning, what moral basis does it have for forbidding its termination at the end?

It all boils down to ensuring that a future Beverley Allitt, the baby-killing nurse or Harold Shipton, the mass-murdering GP, don't have a license to kill.