On the Coming Collision Between-
Human Dignity & Technology
By
Jay B Gaskill
This article is
available as a PDF file download at this link: http://jaygaskill.com/ReflectionsOnHumanDignity.pdf
As a
culture, we have been disarmed.
Grave ethical and moral challenges are now
confronting us and the generations that are queued up to follow us; we face
radical social changes propelled by radical new technologies; but we are
without the tools to cope. Many of our
leaders and their followers have discarded the tools of wisdom, moral courage and
faith, not realizing that these are our weapons of
self-defense.
Major secular research and technology institutions
are hiring “ethicists” to provide them with cover. It seems that morality now
so abstruse and alien for them that moral experts need to be sought out
by bureaucrats. Just how well cared for is our future when these same
bureaucrats aren’t quite sure which experts to hire or what to do with
them?
Morality and ethics are far too important
to be left to our “official” moralists and ethicists, let alone to the leaders,
movers and shakers who probably won’t heed them. It is not too late to
recapture and retool our weapons. We’re going to need wisdom, moral courage
and faith sooner than anyone realizes.
--
THE
GREAT RETREAT FROM MORALITY
From Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
--
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Technology
enhances and extends life. But technology
also has other uses:
Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of
the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be
the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without scruples about
their activities. (Albert Speer,)
From Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, Hitler’s Reichminister of Defense - and favorite
architect
--
From 1943 to 1944 the infamous doctor Mengele experimented on about fifteen hundred sets of imprisoned twins at
Auschwitz. The twins, who were held in custody throughout, suffered horrific
invasions of human dignity - the injection of different dyes into their eyes to
see whether it would change their color; some twins were even sewn together in
a bizarre attempt to make them conjoined twins. There
were three thousand individual human beings. About a hundred got out alive.
From September 1942 to December 1943 human
experiments were conducted at the infamous Ravensbrück
camp.
Whole sections of bones, muscles, and nerves were surgically excised from people
without anesthetics – inflicting intense agony, mutilation, and disability, all
in the interests of “rational” Nazi scientific inquiry. A “humane” Nazi
scientist might have used an anesthetic.
But the casual disregard of human dignity would have been the same.
There is much more of this dreary and sickening
catalogue, but you get the idea.
For
Speer’s technicians we can substitute the terms, scientist, engineers,
researchers and even physicians.
As
I write this, hundreds of brilliant technicians are pursuing their assigned
tasks with the same enthusiasm, and the same blind devotion to task. Most of us are sublimely confident that
nothing but good things for humanity will result. This is an unreasonable act of faith.
Consider
a scene from somewhere in 12th century Catholic Europe. A young Lord, in full kit, full of himself
and angry, his blood running high, stands over a cowering commoner, intending
imminent mayhem. A priest approaches, gets the hot blooded young Lord’s
attention and says, “Strike that boy and I will deny you absolution.” The sword is stayed. This scene was repeated in various forms
during the medieval period. For the period, this was an act of reasonable
faith.
Then,
in 1882, a young philosopher wrote –
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have
killed him. Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Six years after Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche declared that God is dead, Dostoevsky tells
another audience, in effect, that “Without god, everything is permitted.”
In the 21st
century, the scene with the thuggish lord and the priest cannot be repeated
without killing the priest.
When, in 1931, Aldus
Huxley wrote the dystopian novel, Brave
New World, his dystopia was a stretch for some.
A partial summary
…everyone
is happy. Natural reproduction has been done away with and children are
created, 'decanted' and raised in Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres, where they are divided into five castes (which are
further split into 'Plus' and 'Minus' members) and designed to fulfill
predetermined positions within the social and economic strata of the World
State. People of these castes make up the majority of human society, and the
production of such specialized children bolsters the efficiency and harmony of
society, since these people are deliberately limited in their cognitive and
physical abilities, as well as the scope of their ambitions and the complexity
of their desires, thus rendering them easier to control.
It is no longer a stretch. Our brave new technologies are fully capable
of changing human nature (how much closer we are to Brave New World technology
than in the 1930’s). Worse, some of these technological trends threaten to
swamp ordinary human decision making processes.
Here is a partial list of the pending, deeply
problematic developments that are being presented by new technologies. A more complete list would be much longer.
1. Using technology to aid in the
political control of human populations
2. Replacing biological human
reproduction with genetic engineering
3. Cloning humans for body parts
4. Uploading the minds of
immortality-seekers into supercomputers
5. Remaking the human being into …
X
6. Achieving functional
immortality by endless organ replacement and prosthesis – including the brain /
mind
7. Allowing the human control
technologies (see 1) to control us
8. Allowing artificial intelligent
beings to replace us
If you doubt that computers (actually algorithms)
will be thinking for us any time soon, consider the stock market and credit
crash of 2008 as an early warning. Clever
algorithms were used to construct credit instruments, bundling underwater
mortgages in a way the ordinarily intelligent people could not readily
penetrate the fog to learn that these packages were actually hiding and
marketing assets with negative value.
Usually when you bundle a package of toxic waste, coating it with silk
with gold thread and sell it for 50 times its real value you are guilty of
fraud. But algorithms can seem to create
their own reality. The AI (artificial
intelligence) problem is already with us.
Can morality be sustained without a credible appeal to an
ultimate authority that implies some measure of ultimate accountability?
Do we already possess a sufficient reservoir of moral wisdom
to straightforwardly address the kinds of issues I’ve just listed above?
In the Appendix
to The
Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis assembled a multi-cultural and
multi-millennial compendium of moral precepts; these moral nuggets form part of
a commonly held moral system, what some of us still call the Natural (moral)
Law. Regrettably, the postmodern ethos rejects the very idea that there could
be a natural moral law. Yet a few major moral principles and injunctions have
arrived in the current culture more or less intact, where they are recognized
by the secular set as “important” and “valuable” though not binding in any
ultimate sense. Two of these come
immediately to mind:
(a) The principle of reciprocity, as in “Do to others as you
would have them do to you” (from Leviticus and the discourses of Jesus) or
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to another” (Hillel the Elder);
(b) The principle of greater good, as in “The greatest good for
the greatest number is the best guide of all policy and morality” (Jeremy Bentham).
On reflection, we notice that (a) can come in
conflict with (b); and that each of these presents unresolved questions of
definition, as in – What do we mean by others?
What do we mean by the good?
ENTER HUMAN DIGNITY
These pending
challenges invite us to explore the reach and power of an ancient but somehow new
moral paradigm, the moral obligation to honor human dignity.
Cro-Magnon graves have
been uncovered where the deceased persons were interred with carvings and
flowers. These date from 40 BCE. And a grave in the Shanindar
Cave in Kurdistan-Iraq (excavated 1957-1961) showed similar care, even residual
pollen suggesting burial flowers – a burial by Neanderthals 60-80 BCE.
Anthropologists
call this patterned mortuary behavior. I call it the first
evidence of respect for human dignity.
Human dignity is one of those major ethical precepts
that somehow remained implicit, undeveloped and unarticulated for a long, long
time. Such hiddenness is not
unprecedented. Even the Christian doctrine of the Trinity did not emerge until long
after the Gospels had been in general circulation. Like the Trinity, human
dignity is an emergent value- development with both secular and
religious iterations.
Human
dignity emerged full blown as a major moral precept in the late 18th
century and led to a number of important, history changing developments, as we
will see. Because this value was
prefigured in our own religious tradition, we might ask ourselves – Why did it take so long?
A Definition
Human dignity comprises the entire set of views in
which the very recognition of one’s human status intrinsically confers and/or
reveals an irreducible, fundamental value.
Like
many crossover ideas, the religious and biblical aspects of human dignity are often
neglected, even when they confer more depth and authority.
Ancient Dignity
In
ancient times, there was no recognized universal status of human dignity, but
there were instances of a limited status that resembled it. The prime example
of human dignity was Roman Citizenship, a set of rights that were conferred by
the Imperium. It was a hierarchical arrangement at the apex of which was the
Emperor who enjoyed maximum dignity.
In ancient Rome, residents of the Roman
state could roughly be divided into several classes: A male Roman
citizen enjoyed the widest range of privileges and protections. Female Roman citizens were not allowed to
vote or seek elected positions, but had the right to own property, to engage in
business, and to obtain a divorce. Citizens of a client state and allies could
enjoy Latin Rights, a form of limited citizenship.
Those with Latin Rights were protected
by Roman law and were allowed within Latin cities to own land and to make
legally enforceable contracts with their citizens, to make a lawful marriage
with a resident of any other Latin city, and enjoyed the capacity to acquire
citizenship of another Latin state simply by taking up permanent residence
there.
Slaves were property. Killing someone else’s
slaves was actionable, but killing your own slave was your own business.
The first century apostle Paul was a
Roman citizen, an advantage that afforded him protection from the non-Roman
mobs, but did not prevent his incarceration.
In ancient times, dignity was a tribal or Imperial status, not a status that was enjoyed by virtue of
merely being a human being.
The Process of
Universalization
Enter
the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804) whose
insights gave a universal status to human dignity, elevating the idea that “merely”
being human confers moral worth.
In Kant’s
Groundwork
of the Metaphysic of Morals (1985), he developed the notion that
utility is trumped by what he called dignity. In Kant’s schema, everything has either
a price (meaning a utilitarian value, as in an economic measure) or
a dignity, meaning an inherent,
irreducible value, in and itself. You might remember the cynical assertion that
“Everything has its price.” Kant’s view disputes this. Quote-
“Whatever
has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other
hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a
dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something
can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an
intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity”.
(p. 53)
…Kant
also wrote…
“Morality and humanity as capable of it,
is that which alone has dignity.” [Groundwork
of the Metaphysic of Morals]
Enter
John Locke (1632-1784),
and his Second Treatise on Government (1690):
“Being all equal
and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or
possessions.”
“This freedom
from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a
man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his
preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own
life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor
put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his
life, when he pleases. Nobody can give more power than he has himself; and he
that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it. Indeed,
having by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death;
he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his power) delay to
take it, and make use of him to his own service, and he does him no injury by
it: for, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of
his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw on
himself the death he desires.”
Human
dignity is one of those ideas with the power to change history. The major 18th Century Enlightenment thinkers
(among them Locke and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) agreed that the essential
humanness of each person trumps tribe, royalty status and other arbitrary,
“irrational” categories.
---
It was no
accident that the Enlightenment simultaneously generated the American
Revolution (1776) the French Revolution (1789), and the slavery abolition
movement (1676-1860).
Christianity
(which In my personal theology is a branch of Judaism)
escaped the early 1st century tribal boundaries of traditional Judaism
and, as a consequence, brought the essential message of the Torah to the world
at large. But that universalizing
tendency was effectively stalled on the slavery question until the
impetus of the Enlightenment (roughly 1660-1860).
The detached
rhetoric of the 18th century secular philosophers awakened a latent moral
awareness, and ignited a sleeping moral fervor in 19th century
religious communities; the Enlightenment supplied the first spark that became
the fire of fierce moral outrage among the American abolitionists of the mid-1800
period, particularly in the USA.
Kant
was not a particularly cuddly or social man.
His philosophy was – like most philosophy - somewhat arid and disconnected
in tone. Contrast the vivid, earthy language of the bible, or of the inspiring,
flesh and blood orators and leaders.
Surely,
it’s a stretch to move from language like, “the condition under which alone
something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e.,
price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity,” to this legendary
eloquence -
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil,
tears and sweat. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of
suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea,
land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give
us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and
lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim?
I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of
all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without
victory, there is no survival.”
Winston
Churchill
at the beginning of WWII
This
was the voice of a champion of human dignity resolutely facing down
a grave peril.
The Need for
More
This
is why I believe that the postmodern defense of human dignity fails. Human
dignity needed Ultimate support in the 19th century struggle against
slavery and it needs Ultimate support now, ever more urgently, in a culture saturated
with moral ambivalence and skepticism, whose reigning intelligentsia is filled
with the condescending dismissal of religion.
From
the classic biblical perspective, the very existence of human dignity
originates in the status of God as the Creator of all humanity. The divine love
of humanity confers a God-derived status for human dignity, uniquely and
absolutely important, yet subordinate to the supreme status of the Creator.
o
The
human-God relationship marks a bright line boundary against the temptation to
idolize mere human institutions, or to deify humanity, qua humanity.
o
That
same boundary operates as a bulwark against the ultimately nihilistic claim
that humanity can unilaterally create and redefine all value, for and against
itself.
o
The
“have no other gods before me” injunction of Judeo-Christian monotheism is a
bulwark against the worship of human constructs, ideologies, leaders, races, robots, states or systems, as if these
could ever be deities in themselves.
o
To
this we can add an essential Judeo-Christian qualification. Human dignity
applies and is owed to the individual human person. This forms a second bulwark against the
back-door deification of human institutions like the state, and of the faux
scientific utopias like racial purity and Marxist reengineered human nature.
Ideas
do change the course of history. One
single idea - that of human dignity as a divine engendered attribute of the human
individual, a universal that recognizes no race, gender or imposed status - became
the engine of our liberation from all oppressive human institutions, starting
with slavery.
The Problem of Definition
The
literature of science fiction has provided us with a set of thought experiments
that have portrayed intelligent alien beings, sometimes malevolent, sometimes
not; alien machines, sometimes malevolent, sometimes not; manufactured humans,
cloned humans, and so on. Almost every
current ethical issue that technology is now presenting to us,
was prefigured somewhere in our literature. The secular humanist consensus, an
amalgam of utilitarian ethics, the golden rule and a vague sense of compassion,
has not proved adequate to the challenge. The idea human dignity has suddenly
become the indispensable ethical tool. But technology is now raising the threshold
definitional element inherent in human dignity. Who or what is truly human? Thus
we are called to address the question of the “other”, whether “what” or “who”
and if “who” to decide where and how the notion of human dignity operates.
A
related set of definitional issues arise from the biological sciences, especially
from the capacity to dissect, assemble, reassemble, replicate and maintain
living tissue and organs. Consider a
tissue that biological science has already manipulated or is about to
manipulate: Are we addressing a “what”, a “who”? Even if it is something that defies easy
classification, are there consequential ethical implications? How and by what ethical criteria are they to
be addressed? The work of bio-ethicists
like Leon Kass describes some of the ethical concerns
that are now being confronted in connection with the market in human body
parts, the use of cloned or “harvested” embryos for experiments, and the
prospect of crossing seemingly innocuous moral boundaries only to discover that
they pose grave implications for future horrific abuses. All this comes in the
context of what Albert Speer described as the “moral
neutrality” of the enthusiastic technicians and the overriding amoral pressures
of money, power and political pandering.
A
rapidly emerging set of problematic examples were prefigured in the science
fiction literature about robots and thinking machines, and these issues will
become real within the future of at least one living generation of humans[1].
Among
the new questions all of us must face, armed with whatever moral intelligence
and insight we can bring to bear on the issue:
Ø Can (and should)
technology create any computer or software entity as a
living, conscious machine being?
Ø If that machine
being is made, will it be entitled to the protection afforded by virtue of human
dignity?
Ø If that machine
being is made, will it represent an essential or existential threat to our own
human dignity?
Ø What should we
do and why?
My personal
response to these questions in the order they are posed, is:
·
No;
·
No;
·
Yes; and
·
Prepare for a
long and difficult moral struggle.
--
HUMAN DIGNITY REFERENCES & SOURCES
To
Kant, we should add the modern
humanist, Martin Buber (1878-1965).
His iconic work, “I and Thou” made us aware of the
demeaning “I and it” relationship when it takes place between individual people
or (as in Nazi Germany) between a dominant people and oppressed victims.
Secular
thinkers who have not studied Buber closely tend to miss a key point: Martin Buber
contemplated a Trinitarian relationship, “I and thou (lower case) and I
and Thou (upper case), in effect two human persons are in relationship with
each other and with the divine person.
BIBLICAL SOURCES
From Genesis
1:27
“So
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and
female he created them. Psalm 8: 5-7 … you have made him a little lower than
the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him
dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field…”
From Psalm 139
“O LORD,
You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my
rising up; You understand my thought afar off. You
comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O LORD,
You know it altogether.
“You
have hedged me behind and before, and laid Your hand
upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high, I
cannot attain it. Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can
I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold,
You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in
the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand
shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness
shall fall on me,’ even the night shall be light about me; indeed,
the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; the
darkness and the light are both alike to You.
“For
You formed my inward parts You covered me in my
mother’s womb….”
HUMAN DIGNITY AS A BIBILICAL THEME
Among
the biblical themes and elements to unpack and examine as providing ancient
support for the idea that honoring human dignity is among the most central of
our moral obligations are these–
·
In
several biblical accounts, Jesus engages in healings in the form of exorcisms
and casting out demons. Moderns dismiss these accounts and therefore miss the
deeper message. Anyone who is still paying attention to the degraded and
anti-human behavior exhibited by some of our fellow humans is compelled to
agree that we still encounter the demonic
even in this sophisticated, “modern” age.
One can easily experience the disgust that some of these modern horrors
evoke and even (as I often have) indulge the desire to see some of these
demonic miscreants quickly destroyed. But what Jesus sought to rescue and
preserve was the inherent human - as opposed to demonic – dignity in the
afflicted, which is why these stories are worth retelling and reexamining.
·
The
interpersonal edicts of the Decalogue
- as in do not kill; do hoonor one’s parents are variations on the
same theme: Protect human dignity in this
way.
·
The
Shema
(Deuteronomy 6:4-7)… “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God,
the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all
your heart and with all your soul, and with all you might. And these
words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach
them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your
house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
·
The
“No idols” commandment…
·
Jesus’s
parables about the lost ones (as in
the lost sheep and the lost coin, see Luke below) are - I personally believe-
intended to convey that the ultimate value expressed by human dignity means,
profoundly and simply, the human dignity of the individual.
WHERE ARE WE GOING AND WITH WHAT TOOLS?
Reason
is essential but not sufficient. I cannot
escape the strong sense that if humanity is to survive the new millennium we will
need to address the profound need for deeper foundations and deeper motivations
than the purely secular views can provide.
Humanity may actually need a religious
perspective that strongly supports human
dignity just to survive just the current century.
Consider
these three elements at play-
[1]
Without God, all values are preferential, and what is preferential is optional.
[2]
Traditional religious perspectives are profoundly bio centric.
[3]
Not every secular view is as strongly pro-human as Genesis.
Science
fiction has portrayed apocalyptic struggles of humanity against machine beings
and aliens. From a shallowly humanistic point
of view, we are rooting for the home team in these stories, but I can now
detect an occasional postmodern undercurrent theme of surrender that would have
been almost unthinkable two generations ago.
The current climate of moral ambivalence makes these three questions
more and more plausible:
·
Why
fight for the good and oppose the evil when you are comfortable and the
struggle is inconvenient?
·
Why
struggle at all, when the outcome will only affect a later generation, long after
you are gone?
·
Why
struggle at all when maybe those aliens/machines are just the next wave after
humanity?
Why, indeed?
Because if God did form my inward parts and
God did cover me in my mother’s womb, then God formed you…her…him…and them as
well.
JBG
[] ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
[]
Why
the Future Doesn’t Need Us, by Bill Joy. This is
a cautionary, prophetic article by the technologist and scientist who invented
some of the basic programs on which the internet depends. It is still available
on-line from WIRED Magazine where it first ran in the year 2000. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel
Kant (H J Patton Trans. Harper 1964)
Excerpt from “The Elements of Moral Philosophy”,
pp. 114-17,122-23.
Copyright ©
1986 by Random House by James Rachels, PHD.
http://public.callutheran.edu/~chenxi/phil345_022.pdf
“Kant
believed that morality can be summed up in ~on one ultimate principle from
which all our duties and obligations are derived. He called this principle “The
Categorical Imperative”. In “The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
he expressed it like this: ‘Act only
according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law’. However, Kant
also gave another formulation of The
Categorical Imperative. Later in the same book, he said that the ultimate
moral principle may be understood as saying: ‘Act so that you treat humanity,
whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as
a means only.’”
Kant’s Moral
Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/
“Most
philosophers who find Kant's views attractive find them so because of the
Humanity formulation of the CI (Categorical Imperative). This formulation
states that we should never act in such a way that we treat Humanity, whether
in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. This
is often seen as introducing the idea of “respect” for persons, for whatever it
is that is essential to our Humanity. Kant was clearly right that this and the
other formulations bring the CI ‘closer to intuition’ than the Universal Law
formula. Intuitively, there seems something wrong with treating human beings as
mere instruments with no value beyond this.’
The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis
(Touchstone 1944, 1947 / 1972, 1975)
“For the power of Man to make himself
what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men
what they please. (p 70)
Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, The Challenge of Bioethics by Leon R. Kass, M. D. Encounter Books 2002.
“Paradoxically,
worries about dehumanization are sometimes expressed in the fear of
super-humanization. That is that man will be “playing God.” This complaint is
too facilely dismissed by scientists and non-believers. This concern has
meaning, God or no God.”
The Parables of the Lost Sheep and Coin
Luke
15: 3-10
“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep
and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and
go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully
puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and
neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost
sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing
in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons
who do not need to repent.
“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Human dignity is
an evolving topic. Send your thoughts
and suggestions to JBG via email – jgaskill@yahoo.com.