[A] It was reported that in a certain country in Asia, prisoners were being executed in order to harvest their organs and then sold to wealthy foreigners in need of organ transplants. The timing and manner of executions are varied to suit the needs of the purchasers. Do you have a problem with this?
[B] During World War II, Nazi doctors carried out various experiments on Jews, Gypsies and other prisoners-of-war. Some were forced to drink seawater to find out how long a person can survive without fresh water. Some were exposed to extreme cold or immersed in freezing water to see at what temperature death would occur. Some would have poisons injected into them to see how quickly certain elements moved through the circulatory system. The ultimate aim of some of these experiments was to gain knowledge so as to preserve human life and alleviate suffering. Do you have a problem with this?
[C] Today, scientist carried out somatic cell nuclear transplantation to produce stem cells. What’s that? Somatic cell nuclear transplant is the long name for cloning! In simple words, we are talking about cloning an embryo and then destroying it so as to obtain the stem cells. [While we all know the value of stem cells, we need to remember that human embryos are human beings — human life at the earliest stage]. Do you have a problem with this?
The practice in [A] is wrong because we must never turn human organs into commodities, even if they belong to death-row prisoners.
The practice in [B] is wrong because we must never carry out any experiments on any humans that will harm them, even if it brings good to other humans.
The practice in [C] is wrong because we must never destroy a fellow human (especially when he/she is without any self-defence ability) just to gain personal benefit.
Not only must we see those practices as wrong, we must also beware of a certain attitude that can easily lead us down this wrong path.
Have you ever asked why the Nazis can do such cruel things? The Nazis came to power only in the 1930s but in 1920, a book entitled The Permission To Destroy Life Unworthy of Life was published by two German professors. They put forward the view that the incurably ill, the mentally ill, the feeble-minded, the retarded and the deformed were all “lives unworthy of life”. The idea that some are “undesirables” and “genetically inferior”, it slowly but surely became entrenched in the thinking of people. Those people don’t deserve to live. If we allow them to exist, their purpose is to serve us. So no qualms exploiting them, carrying out experiments on them, and extracting what we want from their bodies!
So what’s the attitude that we need to guard against? That that person is inferior to me, that he/she exists only to serve me! I’ve seen such attitude manifesting itself in the way waiter/waitress are treated in restaurants, in the way domestic helpers are treated by their sirs/madams and their children, in the way foreign workers are treated by some Singaporeans.
Many years ago, I was driving the church van to fetch some children to the Shalom Holiday School. As they were rather rowdy, I had to tell them to please be quiet. One of the children turned to another and remarked, “Who does he think he is! He is just the driver!!”
We need to ask ourselves, “How do we view and treat others, especially the stranger among us, the weak, the supposedly inferior ones? Will we see them as non-human and non-persons? Will we use and exploit them? Will we say, ‘Why not? They exist just to serve us!’ Or do we recognize that every person, never mind at what stage of development, never mind how inferior she looks or superior he looks outwardly, is stamped with the very image of God?
Frankly, I fear that the day will come when we will have no qualms, no problems, no issues with [A], [B] and [C] because we have started to condition ourselves today by holding an attitude that is nothing short of sinful.
By the way, concerning the attitude outlined above, do you have a problem with it?
WEI En Yi