“Suicide tourism” in Switzerland exerts a morbid fascination on the media. The assisted suicide group Dignitas, which opened in 1998, is rarely out of the news, especially in Britain (here are some of the latest stories on Google). In a rare interview last March, its founder Ludwig Minelli said it had helped 840 people to die to date, 60% of them Germans.

Another “right to die” group, Exit, gets less attention abroad because it only deals with Swiss citizens. But it seems to be just as active, if not more so. Founded in 1982, it says it gets 150-180 requests for assisted suicide annually.

There have been several polls showing general public support for these groups — the latest one says 61 percent of the Swiss approve of assisted suicide. But until recently, there has not been any serious study of the people who seek these groups out. Are there patterns in the types of people or their reasons for ending their lives this way?

A new study by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) has examined 229 official written requests for assisted suicide in Zurich in a search for any significant patterns. Most findings of the study, presented at a European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) conference that ended at the weekend in Prague, are not surprising. The candidates cited reasons such as wanting to end suffering or avoiding being a burden on their families. No single motivation stood out as the most frequent.

But there was one statistic that did. Women made up 61.9% of the candidates for assisted suicide considered in the study (64.4% over the total in Zurich from 2001 to 2004) and men only 38.1% of those studied (or 35.6% of the overall total).

“We could not find any pattern to explain why there were so many more women than men,” said Romy Mahrer Imhof, the ZHAW nursing lecturer who presented the study.

They need to study this more.

Imagine you go to a conference on major bioethical questions — controversial issues like abortion, embryonic stem cells, assisted reproduction and euthanasia — and a keynote speaker uses all his allotted time warning about global warming. Is this the wrong issue to discuss — or the only one worth talking about?

The question arose at the annual conference of the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) that ended at the weekend in Prague. Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, told the assembled bioethicists they had to look beyond their usual issues to consider the far larger ecological threat he said could soon end up destroying mankind.

The issue is urgent for bioethicists, he said, because the healthcare industry in the rich OECD countries is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. It also spends vast amounts to prolong patients’ lives, about half of it in the final months before death. “The more effort we put into saving individual lives, the more likely we are to doom the human race to extinction,” he said.

“Just being a little bit more green isn’t the answer,” he insisted. Rich countries will have to find ways to cut their carbon emissions almost completely within the next few years. His outlook for the healthcare industry was summarised in a bleak PowerPoint slide:

Possible changes in medicine

• close most hospitals and concentrate on good-quality primary care
• reverse the brain drain and send redundant health workers to developing countries
• outlaw assisted reproduction
• stop medical research undertaken for utopian or financial reasons.

If western countries closed all their hospitals, he said, life expectancy there would drop by only eight months.

“What is more important,” he asked, “maintaining our wealth and economies for 20-30 years until climate change wipes them out, or trying to ensure that as much as possible of the human race survives?”

A non-religious Kansas soldier is suing U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the grounds that his constitutional rights were violated when he was forced to attend military events where “fundamentalist Christian prayers” were recited.

Specialist Dustin Chalker’s cause has been taken up by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which is joining him in the suit.

The MRFF said in a statement that Chalker, a decorated Iraq war veteran stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, “was forced to attend three events in late 2007 and in 2008  at which the battalion chaplain …  delivered  sectarian Christian prayers”.

“Being nonreligious, Chalker objected  … and asked to be  excused from the events.  The requests to be excused were denied.   After the denials, Chalker was forced to attend other events with  sectarian Christian prayers.”

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Kansas last week, seeks an injunction to prevent such  sectarian prayers from being delivered at mandatory military events.

It is the second such suit filed by MRFF and the other is still pending in a federal court. A spokesman at the Department of Justice, which is expected to defend the Department of Defence, said it had not been served with the papers yet.

Prayer and military events often coincide in the United States. Prayers are often evoked at homecoming ceremonies when soldiers return from overseas tours; off base, civilian events such as rodeos often feature marching soldiers and prayers.

Some activist groups such as the MRFF say evangelical Christianity is being promoted in the U.S. military through peer pressure, calls to prayer and other means.

Critics say this violates the separation of Church and state and creates a potential diplomatic minefield with U.S. forces waging wars in two Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.  

The Department of Defense’s watchdog has in the  past taken action on the issue, for example when it chastised a U.S. army general a few years ago for making speeches in which  he described the “war on terror” as a Christian battle against Satan.

Are we headed for another “Rushdie affair” over the yet-to-be-published novel The Jewel of Medina? First an American publisher withdrew its plan to publish the novel about A’isha, the child bride of the Prophet Mohammad, out of fear of a backlash from Islamist radicals. Then a British publisher announced he had bought the rights and would print the “once feared historical novel“. Now comes the news that the publisher’s London office has been the target of an arson attack and police have arrested three men on suspicion of terrorism.

Some early signs are not encouraging. The Daily Telegraph quotes Anjem Choudhary, a radical cleric based in Ilford in east London, as saying: “It is clearly stipulated in Muslim law that any kind of attack on his honour carries the death penalty.” While his unbending interpretation of Muslim law is certainly debatable, his warning that publication of the novel could cause further protests is not.

On the other hand, Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala wrote last week that the mood among British Muslims had changed since they clamoured for Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to be banned. “Is this rethinking now widespread amongst British Muslims? Yes, my impression is that it certainly is with many now accepting that the Satanic Verses affair served to create (and for others reinforce) the unfortunate view that Muslims were backward, anti-intellectual, prone to violence and saw themselves as being somehow above the law,” he wrote.

“It is painful to admit it, but on the need to uphold the freedom to offend, Rushdie was right. The consequences of not doing so should be apparent by now to Muslims above all. Earlier this year, the leader of the far right Dutch Freedom Party, Geert Wilders, called for the Qur’an to be banned because he found some passages in the book offensive. And there’s the rub. Who is to decide what is offensive or not? What may be offensive to me may be just harmless fun to you and vice versa.”

There’s a lot of political manipulation behind these “spontaneous” outbursts of violence against anyone accused of blaspheming Mohammad (as we saw in the Danish cartoons controversy). There are also ways of trying to counter this. The failure of Wilders’ much-hyped film Fitna to incite anti-Muslim tension in the Netherlands is a case in point. None other than the top Dutch counterterrorism official noted that the debate preceding the film’s premiere helped bring Christian and Muslim groups together to discuss their views and maintain calm when the film was aired.

If The Jewel of Medina is published, protests in the Muslim world (such as the burning of a Rushdie effigy in Pakistan last year pictured above) might be par for the course. The question is whether they will be matched by copy-cat violence in Europe.

London’s highly competitive newspaper market loves blaring headlines and shock quotes. There are bound to be more coming in this story and they may be justified. As this story progresses, I’m curious to see how Muslim groups in Britain and elsewhere in Europe react and whether those defending the principle of free speech get as much coverage as those railing against it.

Do you think the mood has changed among Muslims in Europe? Or is a repeat of the Rushdie affair on the cards?

Some of Kosovo’s “crypto- Catholics” are slowly coming out of hiding. Pressured into accepting Islam centuries ago by the victorious Ottoman Turks, some families in this Balkan country maintained their Christian customs in private while passing as Muslims in public. Some of them returned to their ancestral faith in the late 19th century, after the Ottomans withdrew. Now, almost 10 years after Serbian rule ended, more have decided to go back to Roman Catholicism. The Church says the conversions now run into the thousands.

Finding these Catholics for a feature was not too hard. At a local church in Pristina, priests provided information on people who had converted and names of other churches where it had happened.

The Sopi family in the central Kosovo town of Klina, which was highlighted in the feature, was initially wary of talking to the international media after a story in the local newspaper led their Muslim neighbours to regard them differently now. But after a long chat, they agreed to an interview as long as it was neither taped nor photographed.

There have been 32 converts in the Sopi family over the past few months. “We have asked the authorities to give us land to build the church and have our own cemeteries,” said Ismet Sopi. He has had no answer yet. The issue of a Christian cemetery was especially important because burials had to be two-faced affairs in the past, he explained: “When someone died ,we were prayed as Catholics in our homes, but at cemeteries we had the imam for the burial ceremony.”

The village of Kravoserija in the south of the country has had a Catholic Church since 2005. People there are happy to be visited by the media. There are five people in the village who have the keys to open the new church and everyone there has their telephone numbers. “Call Ismet or Beke,” said a man working in his yard when I asked how to visit the church. Ismet was not home that day but Beke answered promptly. “Go at the church and I’ll be there in two minutes,” he said. And he was.

In the Kosovo capital Pristina, a new cathedral named after Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Theresa, an ethnic Albanian nun born in neighbouring Macedonia, is under construction. It was raining on the day I went to visit, but that didn’t stop the work. “I’m a Muslim and I’m fasting during this holy month of Ramadan. But work is work,” said Nexhat Osmani, a worker at the cathedral site. Once it is finished, the 70-meter-high cathedral will be the tallest building in town.

Around 90 percent of the Kosovo’s Albanian population is Muslim, with just four percent Roman Catholics.

DALLAS - Republican presidential contender John McCain still retains strong support from white evangelical Protestants, but the 72-year-old Arizona senator's appeal fades with younger voters from this flock.

That is the findings of a survey that was just done for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

It found that McCain has the support of 71 percent of white evangelical Christians versus 23 percent for his Democratic rival Barack Obama.

But the numbers narrow somewhat for evangelicals under the age of 30, to 62 percent for McCain to 30 percent for Obama.

McCain has solidified his support with this important component of the Republican base with his choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin -- a staunch conservative Christian and mother of six -- as his running mate.

But the survey found that while older white evangelical women were among Palin's most ardent supporters, women below 30 from that group were far less enthusiastic about her. 

 It found Palin's favorability rating among white evangelical women below 30 was only 46 percent; compared with 65 percent for white evangelical women over 30. 

President George W. Bush took close to 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004, underscoring its importance to the Republican Party.

Democratic strategists have hoped to make at least some headway into this monolith. Overall, the 2004 election was a close one so even a few votes poached from the other side, especially in closely contested states such as Colorado or Ohio, could make a huge difference to the outcome of the Nov. 4 White House race.

The survey involved 1400 adults, 18 years or older, including an oversample of 400 evangelical Christians ages 18-29. It was conducted September 4-21, 2008.

The margin of error for white evangelical Christians surveyed is 4.1 percent and rises to 5.5 percent for those between the ages of 18 and 29.

(Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jim Bourg, Sept 26, 2008, USA. Combination images of Senators McCain and Obama speaking at first presidential debate at the University of Mississippi)

Pope Benedict originally wanted to become a house painter. That comes from someone who should know — his older brother Georg. The other priest in the Ratzinger family told Andrea Tornielli, the vaticanista for the Italian daily Il Giornale, that he remembered his brother Joseph saying this after being confirmed by the cardinal who later ordained both brothers:

“Joseph was confirmed by Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, in Tittmoning. He was very impressed and said he would like to become a cardinal too. But only a few days after that meeting, while watching the painter who was painting the walls of our house, he said he would like to become a house painter when he grew up …”

Tornielli’s interview with Fr. Georg Ratzinger is entitled “My brother, the pope (who wanted to become a house painter)”. There’s a papal touch in the original Italian — the word for house painter is l’imbianchino, literally “the whitener.” Now as pope, he always wears white.

A rabbi, a Mennonite and a Zoroastrian priest were having dinner with the president of Iran — sounds like the start of a joke, but it happened in New York this week.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had dinner with around 200 people of various faiths including Mennonites, Quakers, United Methodists, Jews and Zoroastrians who said they wanted to promote peace by meeting such a prominent foe of the United States.  You can read our story about the meeting here.

Those who attended the Iftar meal in a Manhattan hotel ballroom had to brave a line of protesters outside who accused them of sitting down with a man little better than Hitler. Major Jewish groups had urged the cancellation of the event.

It was billed as a panel discussion titled: “What does my faith tradition bring to the struggle to eliminate poverty, injustice, global warming and war?”

Speakers included U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, who is a Catholic priest, and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell-Magne Bondevik, who is a Lutheran, as well as Ahmadinejad.

“I stand here today, even when many of my co-religionists are dismissing, demeaning or boycotting this important conversation,” Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb said in her speech, arguing that it was her obligation to engage in dialogue in order to seek peace.

Arli Klassen, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said she welcomed the presence of the protesters outside. “I respect their right to have their opinion. It’s especially important where we’re talking to a country where these rights (to protest) are not met in the same way,” she told Reuters.

“I respectfully disagree (with them) because I believe it’s important to dialogue, especially when there are differences,” she said. “The consequences of not dialoguing are very severe.”

John Brademas, a former Democratic congressman and trustee of a group called Religions for Peace, told the audience religious cooperation could build bridges.

“As people of faith, we want to advocate our respective governments, including the governments of Iran and the United States, to resolve their conflicts through dialogue.”

The previous day, Ahmadinejad had met rabbis from a fringe group of ultra-religious Jews who seek the dismantling of the state of Israel.

The rabbis from Neturei Karta International, or Jews United Against Zionism, had showered Ahmadinejad with praise and presented him with a gift of an ornate silver cup.

The church representatives at Thursday’s dinner were less friendly, taking the Iranian leader to task over his comments minimizing the Holocaust and urging him to tone down his rhetoric about Israel. Only a few dozen of the 200 or so at the dinner stood to applaud at the end of his speech, and many of them were from the Iranian mission.

Rohinton Dadina, a Zoroastrian priest who said a prayer at the dinner, said if Ahmadinejad’s views were changed even 1 percent by what he heard, it was worth holding such events.

“The main reason I wanted to come is I’m hoping that this event would have some influence on President Ahmadinejad in terms of him toning down his rhetoric, him looking towards peace,” Dadina told Reuters.

Earlier this week, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel urged the United Nations to indict Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide rather than allow him to speak at the U.N. General Assembly. His speech there on Tuesday was denounced by Western leaders, human rights groups and Jewish organizations as anti-Semitic.

Tell us what you think — should people of faith talk to Ahmadinejad? Or should the world shun him as an outcast? Is religion fomenting tension or can it help solve the problems between Iran and the United States?

PICTURE: REUTERS/Claudia Parsons and Lucas Jackson (Ahmadinejad greets religious leaders as he arrives at the dinner (top), listens as Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb speaks, and speaks at the U.N. General Assembly)

DALLAS - Talk about a swing vote in a swing state -- or is it a battleground faith in a battleground state?

The Great Schlep is an online campaign urging young U.S. Jews to urge their grandparents in Florida to vote for the Democratic presidential ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the Nov. 4 election against Republican John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin.

To do so it has enlisted the aid of comedian Sarah Silverman who does a sometimes foul-mouthed plea for Jews to fly to Florida to visit grandma and grandpa and sell the idea of Obama in the White House to them.

"If Barack Obama doesn't become the next president of the United States, I'm going to blame the Jews," she says.

Florida is seen as one of about 10 closely contested states where the most exciting White House race in a long time will be ultimately decided.  The state has a sizable Jewish population -- about five percent of the state's population by some estimates -- and also has a large elderly retiree population.

The U.S. Jewish vote often leans heavily Democratic but McCain's tough stance on terrorism issues is seen a winner among many elderly voters. Plus, there have been some questions raised about Obama's support of Israel despite his efforts to affirm his strong support.

According to a survey released on Thursday by the American Jewish Committee, 57 percent of U.S. Jewish voters back Obama and 30 percent support McCain. It was based on interviews with over 900 Jewish voters between Sept. 8 - 21 and had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The Great Schlep is part of JewsVote.org and the Jewish Council for Education & Research, a federal political action committee.

See the video here (warning: the language in here may be offensive to some people). 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni (Silverman at Emmy awards earlier this month)

Japan installed its first ever Roman Catholic prime minister this week, a milestone that has attracted media attention around the world — but hardly a word in his home country. It is doubtful whether most Japanese citizens are even aware that their flamboyant, manga-cartoon reading new leader, Taro Aso, has any particular religious beliefs.

Mainstream Japanese media have not touched on the fact that Aso is a member of a tiny religious minority — about 0.4% of the population — in a country where both Buddhism and Shinto rituals are a part of every day life for many. Aso himself rarely mentions his Catholicism, except when speaking to foreign audiences.

One of the foreign audiences that noticed was the Vatican daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which enthused: “The nomination of a Catholic as prime minister is a turning point in Japanese politics, where religion has never had a real influence on public life, but the respect for traditions is shared by all sides. Recently, breaking with the proverbial reserve that Japanese politicians have on religious issues, the new prime minister said that his family has been Catholic for four generations.”

Christian-founded schools and universities are commonplace in Japan, and many brides dream of a white wedding in a church. But converts are few.

Aso was born on the southern island of Kyushu, where Catholic missionaries gained a foothold in the 16th century, before being suppressed by a government that feared the conflicting loyalties religious faith might bring. He is the grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, prime minister during the U.S. occupation after World War Two, who is said to have converted on his deathbed, under the influence of his Catholic wife.

Though the first Catholic, Aso is the third Christian to serve as prime minister, following Tetsu Katayama and Masayoshi Ohira. Like Ohira, Aso has attended ceremonies at Yasukuni , a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that honours Japan’s war dead but is seen as by Asian critics as a symbol of the country’s past militarism.