The second irony remains a puzzle to me. A number of studies suggest that religious believers, as one would expect, tend to express greater resistance than the secular public to the idea of legalizing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. However, many religious persons also tend to insist on life-sustaining treatment, even past the point of any plausible benefits. Their vitalism here, however, is not supported by most traditional religious arguments. The Roman Catholic tradition, for example, has long distinguished between treatments that are ordinary and those that, because of their burdensomeness or their low probability of success, are deemed extraordinary.
Believers speak, after all, of their confidence in an afterlife.
I do not have an explanation. But I do find this second irony profound, and puzzling.