Repository of DUTH

Βιοηθική του πόνου και θεολογία (Master thesis)

Γεωργάτη, Χριστίνα

Pain is an unpleasant feeling, a universal, timeless phenomenon, which is inherent in each person’s whole life, regardless of gender, age, social and economical situation, cultural values or priorities. People have tried to explain it using logic or religion. By logic: pain is the most important defense mechanism that nature gave us, because it functions as an “alarm system”. Approaching pain through logic, medical science has shown great advances: there have been developed many ways of approaching, understanding and analyzing pain, using different tech-nics, methods, scales, instruments but also creating medicines, therapies and surgeries to treat differently each kind of pain - from the simplest to the most complicated and persistent/chronic pain. Bioethics of pain - since pain is a subject of research in the Bioethics field - goes through the medical science and is connected with the theological science as well. Using each religious ideology, people try to give meaning to the purpose of pain’s existence and through that, to their own existence, to the way their afterlife could be effected - here lies the difference be¬tween science and religion, since science serves people only until their death, but religion gets to the physical death and mainly continues even after that. Each religion explains pain with different ways - from “punishment” to “gift” - and certainly has various ways of dealing with it. That became abundantly clear, while analyzing in this study the five biggest religions-the- ologies of the world: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Bubbhism and Judaism. In all the religions, the main corridor is the existence of pain and the absolute purpose is the salvation of each person’s soul and the reception from the pain. That can be achieved - according to the religious ideologies - either by following and completely obeying the laws, in order to please the God and not be punished with pain/challenges (Islam, Judaism), either by reaching “nirvana”, that means the end of torture/pain and consequently escape from a circle of torture with rebirth (Buddhism), either by achieving “moxa”/freedom, using the pain (Hinduism), or facing pain as a gift, aiming spiritual growth, blessing and finally theosis (Christianity).