Charles Foster > Quotes

“All four gospel writers were no doubt enthusiastic members of their local churches. They went there every Sunday; sometimes they preached themselves; sometimes they listened to the sermon and nodded when the tradition was repeated accurately. And eventually they were prevailed on to write down their own or their sources’ recollections of the facts that had generated the tradition. This is why it is silly for X to say: “Mark wasn’t written until the 50s at the earliest. That’s a good twenty years after Jesus died. Mark couldn’t be expected to remember things clearly after all that time.” Mark didn’t hibernate between the death of Jesus and the time he wrote his gospel, then take out his pen, scratch his head, and say: “It was a long time ago, and I’m trying to remember this for the first time, but so far as I remember it went something like this.”31”
― Charles Foster, The Jesus Inquest: The Case For and Against the Resurrection of the Christ

“Promiscuous animals, by and large, have smaller brains, for relationship demands a good deal of processing power, and promiscuity is a denial of relationship. Monogamy, as many of us know, is costly and hard: it demands work, though the pay-off can be profound. The work is often emotional work: give and take; forgiveness and forbearance.”
― Charles Foster, The Screaming Sky

“Whether Jesus rose or not isn’t affected by the brutality, chauvinism, or downright tediousness of his followers through the ages. It’s a matter of mere history: the fact or fallacy of the resurrection is in the same class of alleged facts as the contention that the battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, or that I caught the 0856 train this morning. And so it is subject to the same sort of historical inquiry.”
― Charles Foster, The Jesus Inquest: The Case For and Against the Resurrection of the Christ

“All humans are Scheherazades: we die each morning if we don't have a good story to tell.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

“If an advance decision has complied with any relevant formalities, was appropriately informed at the time it was made, applies to the relevant clinical circumstances, and if there is no indication that the patient might have decided differently were she to be able to make the decision himself as of now, the advance decision will be honoured, and quite right too. But there are many ‘buts’ here.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“We tend to look at these problems through exclusively western, or at least narrowly national, eyes. About 40,000 children died today of hunger. Tens of thousands more died of malaria, and tens of thousands more of waterborne infectious diseases. Almost all of these were preventable. The money spent on a few heart transplants in elderly westerners would have saved almost all those lives.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“If doctors as a whole aren’t bound by a duty of confidentiality, patients generally will be less forthcoming, and the general confidence that the public reposes in the medical profession will be reduced.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Women have more Theory of Mind than men, which makes them nicer people – less prone to start wars or engage in egocentric monologues at the dinner table. There’s no reason to restrict Theory of Mind to an ability to put oneself into another’s shoes. It involves too an ability to put oneself into another’s hoofs, pads or fins. Broadly, it is the ability to appreciate the interconnectedness of things –”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast

“An incapacitous patient who becomes pregnant may be forced, against her will, to have an abortion. The judgment will typically be expressed in the language of the best interests both of the mother and of the welfare (were it to be born) of the child. What’s happening here? The maternal best interests part of the analysis is fairly straightforward. This isn’t really an abortion against the mother’s will. She’s got no (rightly directed) will. But what about the interests of the putative child? A couple of points. First: it is given a voice in the debate (although for other purposes it has no legal existence) because it is convenient for it to have it. It will obligingly deliver a speech saying that it doesn’t want to exist, and will then shut up. It’s allowed no other speech. Second: in the law of the UK and in many other jurisdictions a child cannot bring a claim based on the assertion ‘It were better that my mother had not borne me.’ It’s regarded as offensive to public policy: see, for instance, McKay v Essex AHA (1982).”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The notion that Jesus, three days after his death, would arise alone—the firstfruits of the dead—was completely unprecedented in Jewish thought. It would never have occurred in the wildest dreams of the most eccentric first-century Jew. The only rational way to explain its appearance in the New Testament is that it actually happened.”
― Charles Foster, The Jesus Inquest: The Case For and Against the Resurrection of the Christ

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that countries with liberal abortion laws are blithe about the status of the embryo. On the contrary, their jurisprudential rhetoric often indicates a thoughtfulness sometimes lacking in the more stridently anti-abortion states. It’s just (they’d say) that, having considered the matter carefully and painfully, they’ve decided that the plainly identifiable rights of a solid, adult mother should prevail over the misty, conditional rights (if any) of the mysterious embryo.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“That sort of calculus is easy enough if the potential good is to unidentified people. It’s easy to dismiss a faceless abstraction. It’s much harder to look a real person in the eye and say: ‘For my belief in the inviolability of the eight-cell embryo you must die.’ That’s often what the ‘saviour sibling’ cases boil down to.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“It doesn’t take much legal sleight of hand to transform an act into an omission and vice versa. If I starve a child to death by refusing to feed it, I should expect a frosty reception to my submission at my murder trial that I was only omitting to do something. And there are various thought experiments devised by philosophers that seek to indicate that there is no distinction of substance between acts and omissions.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There was a blackbird in our garden whose yellow and black eye looked knowing. It maddened me. He flaunted his knowledge, and hence my ignorance. The winking of that eye was like a glimpse of a pirate’s crumpled treasure map.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide

“But ask: ‘Whose autonomy?’ Consider a person who is faced with a decision about whether to have life-prolonging treatment for cancer. The biological man may want to cling onto life with the help of any available technology. The sentimental family man might want to see his children for those extra few months. The considerate family man might want to die early so as ‘not to be a burden’ to his family. The man who has read John Stuart Mill and drafted a ‘life-plan’ might want to die as he has lived, with a proud independence unfettered by morphine and incontinence. The religious man might think that sophisticated therapy frustrates the will of God. And so on.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There is an infinite amount of suffering in the world. There is a distinctly finite amount of resources to deal with it. How do we decide who gets what? The dilemmas are agonizing. One man’s treatment is another man’s denial of treatment. To save X is to condemn Y.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“When we walk into a wood, we share its sensory outputs (light, colour, smell, sound and so on) with all the other creatures there. But would any of them recognise our description of the wood? Every organism creates a different world in its brain. It lives in that world.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast

“There’s nothing offensive about this pragmatism. The relationship between money and voluntariness is too complex to be summarized in one or even many paragraphs of a code. Most people wouldn’t go to work if they weren’t paid, and yet rarely is it suggested that there should be laws to stop them working. Workers in dangerous occupations tend to get paid more: again it is rarely suggested that compensation for risks is contrary to public policy.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Competency or capacity in relation to a particular decision is the ability to receive, weigh, process, and retain the relevant information. It also implies an ability to communicate the decision made once the information is processed. The words ‘in relation to a particular decision’ are crucial. Capacity is not an all-or-nothing thing. One might well have capacity for one decision but not for another.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“[ Jesus] was probably crucified on a short Tau-cross, and died within 6 hours (probably even within 3 hours). This is not an exceptionally short period of time, and there is no reason to postulate unusual causes for his death. He probably died from the classical progressive asphyxia syndrome and hypovolaemic shock typical of the crucifixion process, finally ending in cardiac arrest as result of a vaso-vagal reflex. The latter could have been elicited by intense pain due to various causes, although hypoxaemia per se or various other less common conditions could also have pertained. The wound in Christ’s side from the spear which probably pierced his heart, was certainly inflicted after his death. The appearance of blood and water as an expected postmortem phenomenon is discussed. There is no reason to consider this as proof of a functioning blood circulation indicating apparent rather than true death.30”
― Charles Foster, The Jesus Inquest: The Case For and Against the Resurrection of the Christ

“Those procedures might include certification by independent practitioners that the patient was terminally ill within the meaning of the relevant law; that the patient had voluntarily requested euthanasia, having been fully informed of the prognostic and palliative facts; that there was no undue influence on the patient from relatives or carers; that there had been a ‘cooling-off’ period since the request for euthanasia; that the request was signed and duly witnessed; and so on.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Should the parents know what’s going on? In England the court has said that it should be assumed that parental involvement will be helpful (which means that it is in the girl’s best interests) (R (Axon) v Secretary of State for Health (2006)), but that this assumption can be displaced. The American Medical Association has given more or less identical advice: see Opinion 5.055: Confidential Care for Minors: 1996. It’s easy to understand why the assumption of disclosure is readily displaced: girls would often be discouraged from seeking medical help if they thought that their parents would be told.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“am not decrying the profession of accountancy, only its appropriation of competence in every field. And if, as it looms, we are entering on a period biased toward materialism at the expense of progress, then we are in the hands of the accountant, a spiritual Ice Age, where all will be frozen and there will be no risk, and without risk, no movement, and without movement, no seeking, and without seeking, no future. Darkness will be upon the face of the deep.’ Alan Garner, ‘Aback of Beyond”
― Charles Foster, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

“In the case of Christianity, though, there was no resurrection expectation to dash. The disciples had lived with a rabbi they believed was mortal. And, if you end the story with the crucifixion scene, he indeed proved to be mortal. If the story had ended there, it would have coincided with the disciples’ expectation. There was no reason to stop the ministry of the Jesus movement. Jesus had said some very worthwhile things. After his death, teach his message by all means. Circulate the poetry of the Sermon on the Mount. Publish the kingdom parables. Tell the world that Jesus had been a great teacher. But that is precisely what the disciples did not do. They went to their deaths saying that they had been completely surprised by the next phase of the story. They said they had been completely wrong in their expectation. They said that Jesus had risen. And that was the core of their preaching. Excise the resurrection from the teaching of the early church and you have no teaching and no early church at all.”
― Charles Foster, The Jesus Inquest: The Case For and Against the Resurrection of the Christ

“The doctor must disclose all ‘material risks’. A risk is material when ‘a reasonable person, in what the physician knows or should know to be the patient’s position, would be likely to attach significance to the risk or cluster of risks in deciding whether or not to forgo the proposed therapy’. Only where disclosure of the risks would pose ‘a serious threat of psychological detriment to the patient’ could non-disclosure be justified.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things – a sort of scientific advaita: feel it as well as know it. Feel it to know it properly. What’s an animal? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What’s a human? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists – but a more stilted, stuttering conversation than that of most wild animals. The conversations can become stories and acquire the shape and taste of personality. Then they become the sort of animals we celebrate, and the sort of people we want to sit next to at dinner.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast

“First, they contend that compassion makes euthanasia morally mandatory. We wouldn’t let our dog continue to scream for years with uncontrolled pain: we’d take it to the vet to be put down. Why should we deny to humans what basic decency makes us do to our dogs? And second, they emphasize autonomy. Our lives are our own, they say. We can decide what to do with them. If we choose to end them, that’s our business.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction