Title: Religious Groups’ Views on End-of-Life Issues | Pew Research Center
Headings: Religious Groups’ Views on End-of-Life Issues
November 21, 2013
Religious Groups’ Views on End-of-Life Issues
Assemblies of God
Buddhism
Catholicism
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church)
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Episcopal Church
Hinduism
Islam
Judaism
National Baptist Convention
Presbyterian Church U.S.A.
Seventh-day Adventist Church
Southern Baptist Convention
United Church of Christ
Unitarian Universalist Association
United Methodist Church

Content: The Hindu Perspective .” ( PDF)
Islam
Islamic teachings oppose physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. “ Muslims believe that life is sacred and comes from God; therefore it is a sin to take life,” says David Stephen Powers, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Islam also teaches that God alone decides how long someone will live and when they will die, according to Ayman Shabana, a visiting fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. “There is this reluctance … to make any kind of decisions that would end life prematurely because it is believed that [these decisions] are solely in the hands of God,” Shabana says. Islam’s views on such issues as assisted suicide and euthanasia also are influenced by the belief that suffering and other difficulties might be beneficial, Shabana says. “ There is this notion that you don’t always know what’s good for you,” he says, “so it may be right that you should go through some kind of difficulty that tests your faith.” Indeed, Shabana says, “in the Islamic tradition, end-of-life suffering is seen as a way to purify previous sins so that by the time you meet God, you do so in a [more pure] state.” While Islamic thinkers oppose hastening death, they also generally believe that the terminally ill need not employ extraordinary means and technologies to delay dying. “ We are basically talking about the difference between a