“The Good Death,” a play about euthanasia, has brought the issue of “mercy killing” to Dutch theatres at a time when such deaths are falling. They dropped to 2,325, or 1.7 percent of all deaths in 2005, from 2.6 percent in 2001. Playing to packed houses throughout the Netherlands, which legalised euthanasia in 2002, the play shows the law has not removed the moral dilemma for many involved.

In fact, part of the reason for the drop in euthanasia deaths could be that agonised doctors are opting to give patients heavy sedation until they die, rather than putting an end to their lives. Even some patients who have asked for euthanasia are given continuous deep sedation instead. This feature by our Netherlands chief correspondent Emma Thomasson looks at the issues involved.

This raises the question of whether deep sedation, while being presented as palliative care that is ethically acceptable for many faiths, is not in fact “euthanasia lite.” Or at least whether it is being used as such. The British Medical Journal has suggested this in a report that prompted an editorial and a lively reader discussion. “Although the exact cause of this trend is unclear, there are indications that continuous deep sedation may in some cases be being used as a substitute for euthanasia,” a report in Science Daily said.

The fall in Dutch euthanasia deaths is sometimes cited by “death in dignity” campaigners in other European countries as a sign that legalisation is not a slippery slope towards the easy disposal of ailing patients. This suggests it might lead in another direction that could undermine the palliative care option often presented as the alternative to legalised euthanasia.

Where do you think the line should be drawn in end-of-life care?

Obituaries on TV? Satellite broadcasts of cemetery visits? It may sound morbid, but a German television producer plans to launch a satellite TV channel dedicated to obituary videocasts, features on famous graveyards and practical advice for those nearing death. And he thinks he’s got a huge target audience that can only get bigger in coming years.

Etos TV had planned a launch this year but put it back to early 2008 because of all the interest shown in the project in Germany and abroad, its founder Wolf Tilmann Schneider told the German media magazine DWDL.de. That will give it time to integrate suggestions from new business partners, he said. “Every country has a different (funeral) culture, but all have the same problem — the decline of this culture,” he said.

“There are 485,000 obituaries published in (German) newspapers every year, but there’s nothing about the people in them,” Schneider told the Financial Times Deutschland. “With our service, people will be able to contribute obituaries for anyone who dies, with pictures and texts that are professionally produced.”

Schneider says the channel, which is backed by the German Funeral Trade Publishing House, won’t show actual burials. It plans three main features — obituary videocasts, reports on cemeteries and advice services. “People are interested in cemeteries, they go strolling there on Sundays or go visit them on vacation,” he explained. “Just think about famous graveyards like Montmartre in Paris or the one in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf.”

The website of Etos TV — etos means “year” in Greek — has three “demo obits” to show just how these videocasts could look. Backed by tastefully melancholy piano music, one commemorates “the best grandma children could ever want,” another tells a friend “you had to leave us too early” and a third pays tribute to a respected colleague (”your company was your second home”). Pictures of the deceased and loved ones blend into shots of sunsets, mountains and clouds. God is mentioned only in one, but users would be free to express religious views as they wish.

Schneider has clearly done his market research. “Our target audience is simply anyone over 50 — one doesn’t normally die at this age, but one asks questions that weren’t there before,” he said. “Our channel’s target audience is gigantic and is getting ever larger thanks to demographic changes. We already have more than two million people in long-term care and by 2010 it will be three million. If every one of them has four relatives, we’re over 10 million people!”

Funeral practices have certainly changed in recent decades, with mixed results. What do you think about putting a person’s obituary on satellite TV? Have people lost respect for the dead? Or is this simply a modern — and maybe better — way to celebrate someone’s life?

October 31 was Reformation Day, the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther issued his famous 95 Theses, and as such a fitting occasion for Lutherans around the world to reflect on the reforms he brought to Christianity. It was probably inevitable that a Lutheran cleric somewhere would comment on the relevance of the Reformation to a major issue in today’s religious world — the future of Islam. Margot Kässmann, the Lutheran bishop of Hannover in Germany, told the local newspaper: “Something like a Reformation would also be good for Islam.”

Bishop Kässmann is one of the most prominent religious leaders in Germany, an effective preacher and a popular talk show guest. It’s clear that she means Muslims should question their traditions and shed abuses, much like Luther did in Christianity. That’s a view that Muslim reformers can also support in principle. It leads to the question, though, of how far the paradigm of the Reformation is applicable to Islam. Has the term “Islamic Reformation” become a soundbite that brings more confusion than clarity?

The Reformation in 16th-century Europe ended the Catholic Church’s monopoly of religious authority and led to a multitude of Protestant denominations. One of the driving forces was the liberating effect of questioning traditions, Kässmann said in her interview. The result was the de-centralisation of Western Christianity. By contrast, Islam already has a multitude of different schools and interpretations. Islamist radicals such as Osama bin Laden are not religious scholars, but they issue fatwas on their own that reinterpret traditional views of Islam. So part of the religion’s problem today, some Islam experts argue, is that there is no central authority that can settle disputed issues. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest — and only partly in jest — that Islam actually needs a Luther or a pope to bring about the reforms Kässmann refers to.

The idea of an “Islamic Reformation” has been discussed at least since 9/11. For example, British author Salman Rushdie made just such a proposal after the London bombings in 2005. “The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities,” he wrote.

Another term that sometimes pops up in the media is “Muslim Martin Luther” to describe the person who could inspire such a Reformation. One man who sometimes gets that label is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born intellectual popular among young Muslims in Europe. He preaches an Islam that stays loyal to its traditions while adapting to life as a minority religion in Europe. When the online magazine Salon asked him what list of demands he would nail to a church door, he first said he didn’t have a list. He then argued for more rather than less agreement in reading Scriptures. “This is the problem we have today in the Muslim world,” he said. “We repeat slogans, but we don’t know exactly what they mean.”

Another discussion, on the website of the Brookings Institution, asked “Is Osama bin Laden the Martin Luther of Islam?” The link made here is that both Luther and the founder of al Qaeda preached that every believer could understand Scripture without needing clerics to interpret it.

In a recent seven-part series on the reform of Islam, a young U.S. Muslim blogger named Ali Eteraz says “The Islamic reformation has already happened.” The “Muslim Martin Luther” in this interpretation was Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi school of Islam in the 18th century. By contrast, the conservative U.S. author Dinesh D’Souza places the “Islamic Reformation” in the present time: “Islam is in the middle of a reformation. What is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism if not a sign of the Islamic Reformation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Eteraz argues that we should actually speak of an “Islamic Counter-Reformation.” A few years ago, Paul Marshall from Freedom House in Washington used the same phrase and described it as “something akin to a ‘Catholicisation‘ of Islam.”

Is it confusing enough now, or should we go on? The Iranian historian Hashem Aghajari has called for an “Islamic Protestantism” — an appeal that earned him a death sentence, which was later commuted. Others call for an Islamic Enlightenment. Eteraz looks forward to Post-Islamism (at least that’s getting away from the Reformation paradigm).

This is not to say that anyone using Christian terms to advocate change in Islam has nothing useful to say. Kässmann followed up her Reformation comment with the warning that change in Islam “cannot be imposed from outside” — something not all non-Muslim observers recognise. But as well-intentioned as these comparisons are, they seem to ask more questions than they answer and confuse the argument the authors are trying to make.

What do you think? Does it help non-Muslims to have issues explained with Christian terms? Do Muslims think these Christian precedents are helpful?