I take it as a given that the majority of the Fundies upset with 20-odd judicial decisions to let Terri Schiavo die are good people. If you see your government murdering someone, then you have an obligation to protest, to hound your elected officials, to generally raise hell - and that is exactly what they are seeing in the media and hearing from their leaders.
And I'm willing to overlook the hypocrisy as a human failing that I share with them in spades. They are willing to overlook the murder of 100,000 Iraqis, the murder of death row inmates, the negligent homicide of the uninsured, and even the very similar death of a six-month old baby in Texas. We are more outraged over what is closest to us, and Terri Schiavo has been in our living rooms. And there are no complications - she's white, she has an easy to pronounce name, she hasn't killed anyone, no one has been associating her with terrorists on a daily basis. It's easy to identify with Terri, even if she is just a piece of meat.
But why are the Fundies so very vocal and insistent about keeping a piece of meat on life support?
I think it's because this piece of meat terrifies them, and shows them that the soul, if it exists at all, isn't what they think it is, and they are willing to do anything to pretend that this isn't so.
The common belief of the soul is that is it basically the personality, and that when the body dies the soul goes on to heaven or hell and the person continues to exist - perhaps surrounded by angels on a bunch of clouds, perhaps in eternal torment in the fires of hell, but the person is still there. It's a very comforting belief, that you will continue forever (probably less comforting if you are in the eternal fires of hell, but how many people think they'll end up there with all the shrimp eaters?).
Where is the person that was once Terri Schiavo? By all medical accounts, she's not in the body of Terri Schiavo anymore. If you believe that the soul is the personality inhabiting the body, this is very frightening and leaves only a couple of alternatives:
1.Terri has no soul.
2.Terri has a soul, and it is trapped in the meat in interminable torment and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
3.Terri has a soul, is quite enjoying her life, and people should really stop trying to kill her.
Alternative 3 is a whole lot easier to contemplate than alternatives 1 or 2. It flies in the face of everything that scientific observation will give us, but there will always be someone peddling hope masked as an alternative diagnosis (perhaps a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine, or a cat killer who watches some video tapes). And so long as you have hope, you're willing to overlook everything.
How do you talk rationally with people who are desperately trying to hang onto their belief system? I really don't think you can -- even had the Senate dragged Terri in to testify, and we had C-SPAN focusing on her 24/7 for a couple of weeks in her persistent vegetative state, they would still be clinging onto what they have.
I have no idea how the Fundies explain away Alzheimer's, or brain damage, or even anti-depressants. Each of them should show that the personality is a part of the body and that the soul either doesn't exist or is something else entirely.
(Happy Easter?)